Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not writing for your mother-in-law. I’m writing for you.
Your
mother-in-law is still deciding whether to vote for Jimmy Carter or
Ronald Reagan. She thinks J Edgar Hoover is Herbert Hoover.
A few readers have suggested I should make several adjustments, so my work is more “accessible” to the general public.
The
general public is a collectivist cheeseball which has been sitting in a
frying pan, with the flame set on low, for a very long time.
I published my first article in 1982. I’ve never made any adjustments.
Since
then, I’ve only worked one change. I stopped taking assignments from
editors. I don’t like them. I’ve always had the crazy notion that if
editors want writers to carve away THIS and add THAT, they should write
the pieces themselves. There are three reasons they don’t: they can’t
write; they’re filled with self-importance; they’re lazy bureaucrats.
For
me, writing has ebbs and flows. They depend on me finding a tag-end I
like, which I then pull on. The article then takes shape. The tag-end
might be a headline I read. It might be some absurd insane sentence
uttered by a news anchor. It might be a scene in a dream. It might be an
answer to the question, “What would be crazier than the last tag-end I
found?”
If
I can’t think of a tag, I sit here and stare at the wall and keep
thinking. Or I watch a cooking show. Or I go over the five or six
pretentious scuzzy reasons doctors deploy when they assure readers the
virus exists. Or I fly my Gulfstream to London, where I dine with the
Queen, and discuss how non-existent climate change will force us to eat
insects for protein. Or I find a medical review admitting that, in 2001,
only 18 flu deaths in the US could be traced to a flu virus. Actually,
the number is zero. Or I reread the NY Times opinion piece which
revealed the three major clinical trials of the COVID vaccines were
designed to show the injection could prevent nothing more serious than
cough, chills, and fever---after which the Times never mentioned the
subject again. Or I consider how fear of the virus and love of the virus
and the conviction the virus exists merge like a subconscious nursery
rhyme. Or I imagine a time when men and women would have laughed off
orders to lock down and would have gone about their lives without a
second thought. And THAT’S a tag-end:
JULY
20, 2020. Look at what happened to a great city, to the people of that
city, who over several decades were subjected to forms of cultural mind
control…and who then became DIFFERENT.
…People
turning into caricatures of themselves. In the process, they were
ripened for takeover---which is what happened when the fake pandemic was
declared.
New York. Once upon a time, I was married to it. No more. But it’s still my city.
I
was born there. One of my early memories was looking across 2nd Avenue
at a candy store. This was 1943. The candy store no longer sold Fleer’s
bubble gum---the best bubble gum---because the latex was needed for the
War effort. But the rumor was, they peddled it under the counter for an
exorbitant two cents a chunk, with the cartoon inside the wrapper.
When
I was 22, after growing up in the suburbs, I moved back to NY and for
several years lived among some of the smartest asymmetric people in the
world. You could have an argument with the dumbest person in the city
and it would be a smart argument. Everyone had opinions, and they could
back them up. There was no such thing as political correctness, believe
me. If you had uttered the phrase, no one would have known what you were
talking about.
New
York was a great city. The thing was, no one was proud to BE a New
Yorker. That false synthetic layer of goo came much later. In the old
days, there was no pose, no artificial front. People had ideas, they had
talent, they had survival instincts.
The
best jazz musicians in the world lived and played in New York. When a
giant like Bud Powell was playing at Birdland, you could get in for a
dollar and sit in a hard wooden chair and listen to him until two in the
morning. A buck for the greatest pianist in the world.
And now, the city is wrecked and boarded up, and the people are locked in.
Out on the street, the few aimless glazed pedestrians wear masks. They’re not the same people. They’re replacements. Pods.
OVERNIGHT,
the people of New York could throw off the whole phony pandemic, not
only for themselves, but the world. They could come out of their
apartments and go back to work, defying the petty little lunatics like
Cuomo and De Blasio. They could open up their restaurants and bars and
stack in the customers. They could start building again. They could open
wide the libraries and museums and fill the concert halls. They could
open up the little groceries to all comers. They could laugh in the face
of the public health authorities.
And it would be OVER.
In
1960, that’s exactly what would have happened. And not for some
cause. Not for the chance to do a little virtue signaling. Not for the
sake of “being a New Yorker.” For survival. For continuing to live their
lives, people would have shaken off that slimy fraud Fauci like a
five-minute bad dream. A joke played by an idiot.
They
would have looked at the screaming lockdown headlines in the newspapers
on the corner stand and shrugged and gone on their way. “You’re telling
me I can’t walk down the street and listen to John Coltrane at the Jazz
Gallery on a summer night? You’re out of your mind.” And the Termini
brothers, who owned the club, would have packed the place even tighter
than usual, just to thumb their noses at the mayor and his con
artists. They would have put in a call to their contact at Democratic
Machine headquarters. And it would have been OVER.
No
one would have obeyed. Independent scholars would have walked into the
42nd St. library, as they did every day, and gone to the reference desk
and asked for manuscripts on ancient Roman law and the Walt Whitman
papers and the early maps of the city. The quiet upstairs macrobiotic
restaurant on 2nd Avenue would have served supper as usual. The Cedar
Bar on University Place would have turned in another raucous night. The
Irish bars would have been jammed. A chamber orchestra in Washington
Square Park would have performed Vivaldi, with the sounds of traffic
from 6th Avenue in the background. Miles Davis would have played two
sets at the Apollo. If Ravi Shankar was in town, he would have laid out a
few stunning hours of ragas at the Asia Society and adjourned to an
East Side apartment to continue on until dawn. No one and nothing would
have obeyed a lockdown.
Pandemic? Virus? Get serious.
That
New York…where is it? Who are all these flat minds swearing allegiance
to medical fakery? Are they passively waiting for gold stars on the
blackboard from the teacher?
In
the old days, New York had DISDAIN. You didn’t get by with
platitudes. You didn’t blithely mouth Left or Right and get away with
it. The city was plugged into its own non-stop bullshit detector. What
did you have to OFFER? Aimless blabbermouths were consigned to a special
circle of Hell.
There
was no political PROGRAM. Today’s “New Yorkers” would apparently be
afraid to live in a landscape like that. They wouldn’t know which way to
turn. They have a desperate need to become slaves to an IDEA. In this
case, an idea about a virus.
In
the 1960s, concealed by the Vietnam War, the city was undergoing a
transformation into a cartoon of itself. That’s when the synthetic
notion of “being a New Yorker”---based on nothing---started to take
hold.
There
were many reasons. The shrinking value of the dollar. Crippling street
drugs. Mind numbing leveling television. The raising of children to be
targets of advertising and fetish objects in a consumer society. The new
New Yorkers were taught that liberal politics were a necessary adjunct
of their status. Liberal equaled big government. Messaging from every
possible quarter was aimed at turning the people of the city into
servants of share and care as defined by government…
Going
to doctors and acquiring serial diagnoses of physical and mental
conditions was starting to take off as a social trend. The medicines and
the vaccines were, of course, toxic. The city was taking in more
immigrants than it could handle. There weren’t enough jobs. Desultory
schools were steamrollered. Literacy was being destroyed. Even
skyscraper architecture was moving away from unique structures like the
Chrysler and the Empire State, into functional steel and glass
boxes. Signs of the minds.
With people dumbed down enough, they would fall for any con. Any piece of shiny gloss. And it was eventually provided:
New
York media covered the rise of New Money in the city as if it were a
perfumed cultural signal of a dawning utopia. By the 1970s, envious
intellectuals in the city were reading and admiring hyped chronicles of
the emerging $$ stars of Manhattan: painters, fashioneers, stock
speculators. And yes, Trump. The content of these celebs’ characters was
entirely irrelevant. All that mattered was that their hustles were
ringing up extraordinary sales in inflated dollars.
And
finally, to view how thin and vulnerable new New York had become, and
how brainless---when, in 2020, the fake pandemic hit, and lockdowns were
announced, the population promptly folded, stayed indoors, went into
mask and social distance mode without a whisper of protest.
In short order, the city was made over into abject wreckage, shuttered, obedient, loyal to a psychotic delusion.
In a silly song he recorded long after its internal demise, Frank Sinatra said New York was the city that never sleeps.
Now that’s all it does.
CODA:
If the September 11th attacks had happened in 1960, there would have
been no need for Billy Joel or the Yankees to rally “all New
Yorkers.” The people of the city would have looked at the firemen and
cops as human heroes risking everything for other humans. Period. That
would have been enough. More than enough. That would have gone deep into
souls and minds. Where it counts.
---Entraining minds. The job of the Super-State. Reworking independence into devotion to a synthetic pose of altruism.
But in this phony pandemic, it’s good to be BAD…
I’m
not talking about looting and burning. I’m talking about a different
type of BAD. Think it through. Figure it out. It’s always there, like a
tag-end. You just have to pull on it…
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Substack, Twitter, and Gab at @jonrappoport)
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