The Intifada has been Globalized...

...And I'm gonna say it now.

I recently hired the son of a friend to do a bit of cleanup of the mess that is my CD collection. In so doing, a double disk I hadn’t heard, let alone thought of, in years, popped into my line of sight.

I saw Phil Ochs at Carnegie Hall, on Thanksgiving, 1966. I had just recently turned sixteen, my date was, with all due respect should she or someone she knows read this, a substitute for my real crush, that redheaded bewitcher with whom I finally got to all the bases, and with whom I fathered an illegitimate child, maintaining my own family’s tradition of bastardy.

Those details are neither here nor there, just typical of my incessant digression, for which, typically, I beg your pardon and forbearance.

That said, that double disk was a recording of a concert on that tour, in Montreal about a month earlier, so it was likely pretty close to the same set, give or take a song or two. It’s nearly sixty years ago, so forgive my memory for the lost recollection of any specific song choices Ochs made that night, but again, likely the same, and, as usual, bear with me here.

This was at the cusp of Ochs’ disenchantment with his own overweening expectations of society at large, the beginning of his shift from the Sis Cunningham Broadside All the News That’s Fit to Sing stuff to his attempts at obscurantist, desperately attempting to compete with Bob Dylan on his own terms poetics, and ultimately the off the deep end gold lame Elvis suit Gunfight at Carnegie Hall mischegas.

A few of those new songs, which made up the first A& M album when he made the significant jump from Elektra were performed, but the bulk were the barn burning rabble-rousers he’d been delivering for years…THE BELLS, POWER AND THE GLORY, I AIN’T MARCHING ANYMORE…

…But it was I’M GONNA SAY IT NOW that had my ears pricked in this listen. This song is a response to the repression of university students, by campus administrations objecting to, as per Ochs’ first inspiration for the lyric, Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. The lyrics are a litany of resentful youthful frustration, filled with unveiled threat, but buried there in the middle of the song, is the verse that made me sit up and take even more notice than usual.

… And you're supporting Chang Kai-Shek
While I'm supporting Mao
So when I've got something to say, sir
I'm gonna say it now.

Talk about your not aging well.

This isn’t just a little retrospectively, all is forgiven, tone deaf—this is Jane Fonda pre-twerking in the bucket seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun level of misguided tomfoolery.

Of course, at sixteen, I recall very clearly being stirred by the song, as I was by all of that angsty agitprop agitpop, and it took years to get over it. That redhead I finally hooked up with, who had more common sense, certainly at that time more than I ever did, suggested that if I didn’t listen to such fucking depressing music, I might not be such a fucking downer.

I might add she dumped my fucking ass the minute the baby was born and immediately adopted, which demonstrated once again that common sense I wistfully mention.

I briefly met Ochs about a year later, after a Moratorium March for Peace up Fifth Avenue that began at the arch in Washington Square and ended at Grand Army Plaza. For reasons which are lost to memory, CHEETAH, a West Side night club and proto-discotheque, opened its doors to the marchers.

In typical inept fashion, I did nothing but bore him. It might have been that he was already drunk, and undiagnosed as bipolar as of then, but I don’t think it would have gone any differently had he been sober.

Eight years later, he was dead by his own hand, hanged from his sister’s shower curtain bar, a nearly forgotten figure of a time that was already in the process of being misremembered, misunderstood, and misrepresented.

Well before that, I had left the movement, disillusioned by witnessing my first flag burning. I hadn’t heard his quote back then, but Norman Thomas’ line, and I paraphrase, “Don’t burn the flag, wash it,” would have been a perfect descriptor for my reaction.

Anecdotally, it’s worth mentioning, to support my point at the very least, that the two feckless mooks who burned that flag in my presence eventually ended up as advertising copywriters, and ultimately eager and active Reagan Republicans. So, to be clear, performance of virtue in the name of achieving social coup is no new thing, despite all those members of my generation defensively insisting otherwise.

My red diaper baby heart remained intact, but my suspicions of the motives of too many of those movers and shakers in the antiwar movement kept me at what became a permanent remove. So, even then, I come to finally understand now, I was already a disaffected leftist.

As the years, the decades, passed, I came to understand that the media perception, the marketing, the understanding of those countercultural years had no more basis in reality than, say, the Hollywood western in its depiction of everything short of the presence of horses.

What I have come to understand is that a mostly vocal, predominantly performative minority of my generation has come to represent an era that was far more conservative, at least in a sociopolitical sense, than too many believe.

All this brought to mind the fact that, we, you should pardon the expression, as a culture, are on what seems to be the other side of a cusp, as well.

One side of the national divide, if we are to believe anything from a discredited and functionally dysfunctional mass media, is sleepily awakening to and drearily dealing with its own occasionally befuddled puzzlement at having colluded as henchmen in its own financial, political, and social unmaking, or, at the very least, trying to justify so personally ruinous a debacle with a smile and a shoeshine.

The other cabal seems to have moved on from the “That’s Offensive,” “Trigger Warnings,” “Safe Spaces,” and “Microaggressions” whiners playbook of recent days to a new cosplay franchise, one with a convenient retrofit in support of a belief system, unverbalized but ready to go, that’s been simmering below the surface, just burbling along, long overdue for a masscult comeback.

That franchise, is of course, the universal loathing of Jews, a despising in which everyone on the political spectrum can find a commonality, making enemies of enemies into, if not friends, then co-conspirators. This, despite the weepy eyed Keane painting level of quasi-inclusive intersectional diversity nonsense, and further despite the sleazily nonsensical, rapture based phony baloney philosemitism of the Evangelical Christo-Fascist theocrats.

Jew hate has always been the default of society, at home and abroad, maintained in mostly private conversations, with occasional, hardly frequent, lapses into indifference, often tempered by societal bemusement/amusement at the various cliches imposed on me and mine, banalities which, too often, we unfortunately collude in propagating.

We’ve always mistrusted the far right, of course—that old Bolshevik canard, naturally—but felt comfortable on the left, despite the rapacious, secretly manipulating everything all along from behind-the-scenes Capitalist bullshit, which libel, in recent times, seems well maintained by a significant part of the Hip Hop performing population.

All that said, it was Jews who traditionally represented so much of what progressive politics stood for, from the time in which such behavior can be measured, until, of course, Stalin and his purges, pogroms by any other name, drove those Jews possessed of common sense away into an anticommunist leftism, to find, what seemed, you should as ever pardon the expression, a safe space, a home among progressives.

Then, over what seems to me at least to be remarkably little time, the left metastasized from its blue collar, red diapered roots into an elitism of purgative guilt, of condemnatory shame, leaving disputes over class behind, and embracing identity as its chosen politics.

So now those onetime hyper-sensitives, that delicate bunch so easily triggered by microaggressions, have put aside their weaponized fragility to go to war, bravely aligning themselves with a murderous, misogynist, and colonialist/fascist theocracy in some misbegotten presumption that these miserable motherfuckers are somehow heroes of idealism.

First the Nazis, then the Soviet Union, maintained a steady stream of anti-Jewish propaganda into the Middle East…and now, of course, the oil rich emirates are continuing the tradition.

Where German and Russian money got the Jew hating ball rolling among the Arab population in the twentieth century, Iraq, Qatar, and their allies are dumping the same propaganda and a fuckload more cash into the Western world since the beginning of the twenty first, with disappointing but hardly unexpected results.

The timing is perfect, as Western self-hatred on the part of progressive elites makes useful idiots of an academically educated class that doesn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground—or a fascist from a freedom fighter, for that matter.

CHARLIE HEBDO, anyone? Salmon Rushdie, anybody? Just to say that it isn’t just Jews.

Just for the most part.

Given the opportunity, these religio-fascist fanatics will do to their Western allies what ICE and the courts seem intent on doing to an awful lot of those Latino and Latina Republican voters—with a potential, if not likely, lagniappe of defenestrations and beheadings in the future for the cosplayers—certainly for all those Queers lining up in support of homophobic terrorism.

Just roll that around in your head again for a moment—queers preferring to align themselves with avowed murderers of queers at the expense of Jews. That’s some Olympic level identification with aggressor shit—and confirmation, as if such a confirmation were needed, that Jews don’t count—and likely had it coming, if you catch my drift.

6MWE applications accepted. Confidentiality assured by Keffiyeh bandanas, and burqas, of course.

Let us not forget, that it was only yesterday that the current left was insisting that words are violence, insisting their personally hurt feelings actually represented universal moral acuity. This particular aspect of progressive culture has apparently been filed and forgotten, now that these once fragile shitstains are shouting “Globalize the Intifada!”, or, as it used to be called, “Perish Judah.”

Another thing that both rings of the shithead circus share, of course, is the unequivocal belief that “It’s okay when we do it.”

Not to mention, but mention I will, all those Jews so consumed by self-loathing, and the need to be a part of the glory, guiltily participating in their own potential demise. Thus, for fuck’s sake, inadvertently I would hope, confirming all those cliches about us—and giving the lie to how smart we’re all supposed to be in the bargain.

Like all that Chiang Kai-Shek/Mao business of poor dead Phil, I can only assume all this will not age at all well. All will be forgiven, all will be forgotten, just like all those wild and crazy counterculturalists in their Che t-shirts and faux Warhol Mao silkscreens have long ago revealed this stuff to be, all too often, no more than decorative lifestyle choices, as simply weekend warrior fashion.

And, in ways tangential to those flag burners of my youth turned corporate conservatives of my middle age, whose performance on the protest line got them glows and likely laid, I have come to understand that all that “I’m offended…!” bullshit was simply a modern, maybe even postmodern, means of selling one’s sensitivity to the world at large.

This, of course, not being anything actually identifiable as actual sensitivity, mind, but rather simple garden variety narcissism pretending it gives a fuck about anything but itself.

The coup and attention achieved by this presentation might be altogether different—Likes instead of Laid, for this all too often puritanical posse of performative virtue—but the motivation remains identifiable and identical.

The adverse, on the other side of the tent, of course, is equally ridiculous in its own crude and callous denial of anyone or anything not a part of their own specific circle—which, in its own way, is a match for those easily offended narcissists in their narcissism.

So yes, the TikTok influencers will move on to offering another pile of insipid directives for the performatively fragile crowd, easily shepherded to take on as their own thoughts, and the podcast bromosexuals will continue to just ask questions for the other pack of dogs, not service animals, just to be clear, to barely articulate as theirs.

But, all this notwithstanding, the can of worms that is Jew hate is open, and glistening, and squirming but good.

I lost a number of friends in regard to my dismissal of the charges of genocide aimed at Israel after it defended itself. As noted, then, nothing gets the international community to insist on a ceasefire quite like Jews defending themselves, particularly against a surprise terrorist attack on men women and children, in which rape is a weapon.

Now that the murders of Jews, separate and distinct from the Hamas instigated war in the Middle East, continue to proceed in the West, and the true meaning of that on your feet, crowd pleasing slogan has been confirmed, rather than any acknowledgment of that truth that drove them away, I expect just another bullshit song and dance from those onetime friends, justifying what seems to be an incipient lethal attack on Jews.

And once the dust has settled, I remain convinced that Dara Horn has it right.

People Love Dead Jews.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…still a Prince after all these years.