Leonard Bernstein: The Rake’s Regress

by Douglas Mercer

SOMETIMES THINGS WORK by inadvertence, and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, his new much-ballyhooed film biography of Leonard Bernstein, is surely one of them. Meant to be a tribute to a passionate “artist” who nevertheless had a “complicated” private life, to anyone with two good eyes (rarer and rarer these days) it has to seem nothing of the sort. Indeed, from the perspective of anyone who cares about the White race, a film like this is a godsend. For what you see up on screen is the Jew at his slimiest and most reptilian and reprehensible, a Jew in all of his moral and physical squalor, the Jew as the Jew sine qua non, the Jew in his unnatural element, a louche Lothario and reprobate, with faux talent but scads of promotion, the bubble reputation that will bust at the first harsh ray of truth.

For months the Jewish press have been obsessed and screaming about the oversized prosthetic nose Cooper has chosen, blanching and bellyaching that it “plays into” all of the “worst stereotypes” of the Jewish phenotype. But the filmic portrayal of this jumped-up lounge lizard as a greasy (and unjustified) egomaniac with the smarmy smile and the atrocious manners, the morals of an alley cat, and the ersatz sophistication is the Jew stereotype par excellence — precisely because it rings so true.

Infamous for his radically “progressive” politics and his lustful embrace of the Black Panthers (being sodomized by them would be the grand Jewish dream, don’t you know) and “radical chic,” he is one of those quintessentially mid-twentieth century American figures which from hindsight appear so risible and overblown. It was a time when the Jew was coming culturally into his own, dominating comedy, the novel, music, the movies, and was foisting an alien ideology on an altogether too-unsuspecting nation.

It was a new world they were creating, one “without confession or guilt” and one in which a sham patriarch with a sham marriage and fast on his way to becoming a lonely aging emphysema-ridden queen could thrust himself into the limelight on the back of rank and naked publicity — a man who set himself up as an altar and had buzzing minions and worshipful acolytes orbiting about him and feeding the beast of his rampant megalomania. That there was absolutely nothing at the bottom but a fatuous vanity didn’t matter: He was a “world star” and had to be taken seriously.

And lo these many years later, Hollywood takes a crack at the cracking legend, his perversions and peccadilloes shunted into the timeworn groove of “it’s just the price of genius” — when in reality he was little more than a perverted rutting beast who vaulted to fame, fortune, and adulation on the back of journalistic and newspaper hacks sunk in puffery and advertising glitz who shoehorned him into the coveted and necessary yet trumped-up role as the “first great American conductor.” (Noted too is that he is the one who skyrocketed the maudlin Mahler into the canon, made him the Jew who became the musical heartthrob of the Jews, but one does not have to have read Wagner to know that no Jew could ever make the sublime White music of the spheres, but only a pale knock-off version of the real thing, the specialty of the Jews who are not culture-bearers but culture-imitators and, in the final analysis culture-parodists, culture-pasticheists — and culture destroyers.

In the movie you get a sordid glimpse into the Manhattan demi-monde of the time, so free of shibboleths in their delusional self-styling, so artistic, creative, and free — mainlining nostalgie de la boue like their rancid and rotting mother’s milk, but really simply a revolting and decaying society bent on “high living” in grand old homes in bucolic splendor and bed-hopping among the socialites, with the wicked stink of decomposition hovering over it all like the death of true taste, grace, and sensibility.

As for the man himself, he is a sexual glutton and glandular pig-like ogre posing as a sophisticate, but in reality hollow and empty like the culture he embodied. The movie is being touted in all the Jewish press as a rendition of a life of a “great but flawed man,” and as a “love letter to life and art,” an “epic portrayal of family and love” — when what it really is is a revealing glimpse of Jewish self-conception. That it was a White man who created it is wholly incidental — no doubt Cooper has been marinating in the Jewish stew his whole life and like the fish who doesn’t know he’s swimming he doesn’t know that he is just regurgitating and transmitting the paint by numbers Jewish party line on culture and the man. An icon, an artiste, and luminary, impresario and genius, a towering culture figure — but the unavoidable sheen of verisimilitude after the idol has been outed shows the truth, at least to those with those previously mentioned two good eyes.

An ugly and repulsive aged roué, rake, and lecher, he’s the cinematic equivalent of the proverbial guy in the trench coat hanging around the school grounds hoping to catch a glimpse of the young stuff — casting googly eyes at the young and worshipful male acolyte, squeezing his hand “meaningfully” while his startled wife looks on in horror, smiling greasily at everything with a pulse and a penis, he has eyes only for the degraded and the sick, his appetite whetted by the inhalation of the putrid stench of death.

Turn on any screen or any talk show for the next few weeks and you will see the director and the dutiful camp followers in the press blazon it as panegyric to the man, and to his enduring myth and meaning, supposedly when giants still roamed the earth, all of it cast in a sumptuous and luxuriating visual style that is said to be the objective correlative of the virtuoso himself. But the clearer-eyed can see through it in a trice for what it really is, a documentary of squalor, a testament to decline, and a cinéma vérité rendition and recitation of a culture, a country, and civilization in the mortal throes of complete degradation and total moral collapse.

* * *

Source: Author