I finally couldn't take it anymore and I defriended a few Brit socialist Corbynistas - a few of which were genuinely eminent intellectuals - after being dared in his facebook feed by one of them for anyone to do it if I had anything at all nice to say about Jonathan Sacks. I guarantee the dude doesn't know a single other person who might have something nice to say about Rabbi Sacks, so I had no reason to wonder whom he could have ever been speaking. At least I had a few Corbynistas cramming up my feed to whom I occasionally addressed in recent days. I don't even like a lot which Sacks stands for, but Sacks is pretty much the exact locus point of modern Judaism. If a person isn't an antisemite before he says that he can't be friends with a person who has anything nice at all to say about Rabbi Sacks, he's definitely an antisemite afterward. I really unloaded on the dude and I blocked him before I could get any response. I'm sure the response I got was as blisteringly personal as I gave. I'm not sorry to have done it. It never stops being amazing how smart people can be such idiots and it wouldn't matter that the guy is a maniac but he is beginning to accumulate real prestige and power in music, much more than I ever will. I'm just a pygmy whose name shows no signs of getting any bigger, so I don't know how somebody that eminent could feel so provoked by me. I was quite fascinated by him, not just because his writing on music is better written than just about anybody's who had saner beliefs, but because he really does love classical music even if his love can be as warped as Klingsor's ( look him up...), and that's extremely rare in my generation. When you're an American of our generation, living among so many classical musicians, experts even, who seem to have such little love for it, see no value in what they do, and want to gleefully slam the door on the entire classical tradition, it's incredibly refreshing to talk to the few knowledgeable people of my generation who don't seem like they think the whole thing is completely useless. And furthermore, in spite of his Marxism he lives a kind of glamorous jet set European lifestyle full of bildung and kultur that a pointy egghead like me always dreamed of having, not filled with sailboats or paragliding, but concerts and museums and books. The hypocrisy was both kind of hilarious, and also quite reassuring that somebody, anybody in the world at all, could still do it on an academic's salary.
But what a fucking price to pay for it. The inability to relate at all to anyone not exactly like him, the surrender of every independence of mind because everybody's intimidated to voice thoughts outside the party line. As jealous as this clearly enormous ego of mine is, I also pity these people. They have more privileges than anyone would ever know what to do with, and it's never enough. They have to live with so much repression that even just a few negative words about what they believe drive them to such enormous rage that they can't even be friends with people who disagree. And for guys like that, all their outrage is purely abstract. It's not like they are ever personally affected by all the newspeak they spout; one way or the other, their position at the top of world society is completely unassailable. At least I put up with reading their crap about Corbyn for a period of years. How fragile can people be?
I'm sure I have more to say about this or related topics later, this will do for now...
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