St. Patrick’s Day 2025
Recently, I watched a video of a podcast interview of Howard Lutnick, the 41st Secretary of Commerce of the United States. The clip ran about twenty five minutes, during which Mr. Lutnick made his case for being human, despite his wealth.
It’s a hard sell, but I think that he hit upon the most important points: love of family, loyalty among co-workers, dedication to the common goal (which nowadays is all too uncommon a goal) — of doing the right thing, even if it costs you plenty.
I empathize with Mr. Lutnick. One of the more truthful statements told to me by my mother, a person who vastly preferred the thrill of deception to the simple thrust of honesty, was:
“Dress nicely, Debra, and people will think highly of you.”
Being poor, and living on a shoestring salary, forced — or motivated — me to choose my wardrobe wisely. The classics never go out of style! Only I knew if the fabrication wasn’t what we shall call natural fibers! And I enjoyed meeting, even surpassing, the challenge of putting together a look, quickly, on a stringent budget.
I was highly thought of by the individuals who hired me for typically low-paying jobs. I was not prepared, however, for the palpable hostility shoved at me by an entirely new breed of American: spoiled-brat welfare recipients who thought The Rich owed them everything.
I was viewed as Rich, and despised for it. I did not possess the wealth of Mr. Lutnick to comfort me — not even a mansion to which I could return from the savage attacks of the malice-filled ignorami in Office-World America! A steam-heat apartment wasn’t offering me much heat!
The fact that Mr. Lutnick would even feel compelled to state his case for the love of humanity over the love of money: it’s a dire sign that class warfare, especially in America where we do not have a social class structure (in the true English tradition) — persists. The gargantuan animosities, ill-will and resentments that The Very Rich receive from the Non-Rich: They’re the bedrock upon which the Democrat Party was built.
That political party has nearly completely crumbled to the ground, largely through its own venomous hatred, vulgar fraud and sinister deceit. It has become terribly difficult for the Party of the Working Man, the Advocate of the Little Guy, the Protector of the Average Joe and Josephine, and the Friends of Hard-Hat America to keep up its cock-and-bull charade when its so-called leaders have become filthy rich through insider trading and kick-backs from those obscene moneyed interests the Democrats are supposed to hate.
But the Propaganda Media have performed their miserable, miserly, hate-monger parts, not well I might add, but well enough to keep an utterly fake image limping along from one election to the next. Phoney ballots have been on-hand, or on-the-pallets, to help pull the miscreant over the finish-line.
Mr. Lutnick became swiftly orphaned during adolescence and early adulthood through the death of his mother from cancer, and, then, the death of his father through an overdose of a treatment drug for cancer. His extended family abandoned him and his siblings, and Howard learned one of the hardest lessons that any grieving person must learn: to count on himself.
He also came to count on the people he trusted. I imagine the people whom he trusted came and went, with his fortunes and misfortunes. An individual can consequently become galvanized to succeed in life, and in business; or he carries grudges with him that can be, and often are, back-breaking. Life either makes you, or breaks you. It is the making of this large-hearted survivor of tragedy that Mr. Lutnick displays, to this very day.
Journalists, or the media, being what they are, or were — build-and-destroy personalities — have cast Lutnick and others like him — The Very Rich — in the most heinous of lights. The Talking Heads perhaps do not realize that their own dullness of mind, and smallness of heart, have been revealed through their bigotry toward the GOP guy with the big bucks.
I found his soft-spoken admissions of his experiences on 9/11 to be profoundly comforting, because I experienced that day in Newcastle, California in a very different way than did the native Californians within my personal sphere, three of them being my husband, son, and daughter. That unforgettable morning, I spoke on the phone with my beloved teaching colleague, Roy, to find out if the home-schooling classes had been cancelled for that day.
It was about 9;30 a.m. The County Supt. of Ed. hadn’t yet made up his indecisive mind. I requested Roy to relay this message to him:
I’m not taking my children to any class, or to anywhere today. We’re witnessing an act of war.
My teaching colleague fully agreed with me, and the Placer County Office of Education did not open that day. As for quite a few of my neighbors and acquaintances, they didn’t consider 9/11 an act of war. Their lack of patriotism horrified me, to the point where, within weeks after 9/11, I called into the local radio talk-show, hosted by A Moderate.
I stated that the Dems will lay low for a while, put on an act about needing to Protect and Defend the USA, then figure out a way to con the American people with a public show-of-support, while, behind-the-scenes, they’ll sell out, or sell short!
A leopard doesn’t change his spots, and the Libs in this nation aren’t about to suddenly love America.
The Moderate Moderator was aghast!
Typical Baby Boomer that he was, he could not abide the possibility that We the People are not all united — in one big group-hug to help our nation. I was very derisive of his need for the illusion of peace and unity. It’s only as I write this essay that I understand how much of THE DAWN began forming, in my creative mind, within those statements that I made to a basically cowardly person.
It didn’t dawn on me that the GOP had mutated into the green-eyeshade-snob-wing of the Uniparty. Nor could I conceive of the betrayals of public trust that are still being discovered, daily, hourly, while our Hero-President saves America.
Class warfare in the non-class society of America has always been a tortured and hypocritical assault upon our liberties, and then, on our wallets. Power is craved so much by people who have no talent, intelligence or scruples that the FDR Coalition held together for a very long time past its shelf life: until 2020 for the Dems who knew that if Trump wins again, they’re toast.
Well, he did win again; and then he won yet again in 2024. The Democrats are not merely toast: they’re the fossilized, black charred remains of burnt toast. The Socialists of Prog-ville inherit the mantle of blind hatred and rage against all this is good, decent, wise and fair in the USA.
It’s been phenomenal for this Jersey Girl to watch those sacred shibboleths of the Class-Warfare Libs get shredded by a billionaire whose greatest crime is loving his homeland. Back in the day, when I observed the sass, style, and real estate success of DT, in NYC, my initials were also DT. Later, as DM, I read his book, The Art of the Deal, shortly after its initial publication, cause I wanted to improve my negotiating skills for contract technical writing for engineers and geologists.
The 1990s came and went. It was a decade of upheaval and momentous decisions for me; I didn’t pay much attention to The Donald. On 9/11, I did.
My media blackout of the Obama Years started in 2006, and didn’t fully end until sometime in mid-2014. I’d been busily moving, like a fictional freight train, composing THE DAWN. I did keep track of the Big Zero’s Reign of Error, and I kept track of the editorials written by Donald J. Trump. I bugged the heck out of a few friends by copying-and-pasting, and then e-mailing to them the entire text. They didn’t understand my enthusiasm for this guy who was just a brash billionaire New Yorker.
Twas then I recalled, yet again, the extreme regional bias of Native Californians toward the Outsider.
I felt just like I did in 1979, when I first came to the Golden State; and was rudely treated as a North-easterner, who’d come West, just to horn in on their horn-of-plenty. That’s warm, sunny California for you, xenophobic to its seismic core!
By 2015, I felt certain that the patriots of my nation were deeply yearning for the audacity, honesty, patriotism, and straight talk of Donald J. Trump. I bought the campaign tee-shirt, and proceeded with my fictional writing, not realizing how very much truth is stranger than fiction.
It’s been a wild ride for the MAGA mission of patriots in America. I’m not truly part of that movement, although I profoundly hold their truths to be self-evident. I’ve been ahead of this civilizational curve, in the way that I’m usually ahead of many consequential curves. Being the unplugged person that I am, I wasn’t even aware of the scintillating televisual run of The Apprentice!
I’ve never watched an episode, and probably never will. Being unplugged has its plusses and its minuses. For me, it sometimes means having to catch up on some U.S. history, becoming history!
I end this St. Patrick’s Day essay with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, a true Irishman. I’ve admired the writing of this gifted novelist since my own adolescence taught me some of the harrowing lessons that Mr. Lutnick mastered during his younger days.
These statements are often cited as part of an exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, although this conversation never occurred. Hemingway enjoyed mocking F. Scott; and it seems that the romantic but emotionally immature Fitzgerald needed a cut-throat rivalry between himself and this equally self-destructive journalist-writer.
Artists make use of whatever they need to please their Muse. For me, it’s organizing a makeup drawer, baking a cake, or sewing a quilt. For Fitzgerald, it was the verbal barbed wire of Hemingway against which to rub his overly sensitive skin, and, then, somehow, try to heal, through fictional writing.
One condition that F. Scott couldn’t heal was his profound sense of inferiority from a childhood that had known financial failure. Those feelings of inadequacy never left this man. They contributed to both his art and his alcoholism. Life can either make you, or break you. For Fitzgerald, though, life wrought both forces upon him. The poetic Irish can always come up with an alternate route for anything!
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
If I may be so bold as to disagree with the literary brilliance of the author of The Great Gatsby, I shall tell you about the very rich who count themselves as patriots of America:
They are different from you and me in that they put their money where their mouth is, where it can do some good. They grow up with ease, but they do not wallow in sloth, or become soft from laziness. They are not the cynics of the trust-fund-baby sort, where life must conform to their faint-hearted illusions, or they will destroy that life, and they very often do.
They know that money handles many things, but not the matters of the heart. Where love and sentiment are concerned, the very rich of the present day comprehend that love cannot be bought. This somber awareness can harden them to the sorrows of others, but, somehow, it doesn’t. They do not place themselves above us, the poor, because they have seen how money can destroy the pure-in-heart, but also annihilate the putrid-in-heart.
They enter deep into our world, the domain of the do-it-yourself American, and they marvel at our ability to survive the relentless assaults upon our liberties by the socialists-in-disguise: the filthy rich who plead poor-mouth, who claim to be “dead-broke” even as they sneakily create debt and death and destruction among the citizenry, to make sure that they, the Liberal Overlords, will never be without power, riches, servants, and lackeys in Congress to do their bidding.
Yes, Mr. Fitzgerald, the very rich, they are different from you and me. They’ve taken their fortunes, just like the Founding Fathers did, and they acted boldly to put an end to the treasonous enemy within. They dedicated their wealth to saving America from the phony class-warfare warriors who thrive in rust-belt pits like your home-state, Minnesota.
And the most noble among the very rich is a guy from Long Island who dreamed big, and who never gave up on anything, great or small, that was worth dreaming about.
My hero, the French aristocrat, Guillaume de Vallon, in THE DAWN, most heartedly agrees!