Al Sharpton, Posh Populist
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE JULY 19, 2013 12:00 AM
Living large among the 1 percenters.
By Jonah Goldberg
If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the
Vanities today, he’d need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York
City. It’s an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called the “Masters of the
Universe” — the super-rich gods of finance who today go by the name “the 1
percent.” Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana
Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through
its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about
like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny
Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.
Named by Business Insider as one of
the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana
Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in
one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.
Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment
and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could
afford it, I’d join.
The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al
Sharpton’s membership?
“The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club.
After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other
Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he
broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to
show his solidarity with the 99-percenters.
The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is
that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he
claimed he didn't have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he
lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn't own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access”
to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. In our overly
therapeutic culture, we talk a lot about “enabling” pathologies, self-destructive
behavior, etc. Well, Sharpton is a pathology enabled by the very system he
loathes.
In a healthy society, Sharpton might be on parole
now — not the must-get guest for Meet the Press and Today on
issues of racial justice. He was a ringleader in perpetuating the evil Tawana
Brawley hoax, in which he and two corrupt lawyers (now disbarred) falsely
accused assistant district attorney Steven Pagones and others of gang-raping a
15-year-old girl in a racist attack (Brawley claimed that she’d been smeared
with feces and had had racist epithets written on her body). No person of any
ideological stripe could doubt it was a fraud — except, that is, for the
unrepentant Sharpton, who recently insisted “something happened.”
If he’d been locked up for that, he might not have
helped incite the Crown Heights riots in 1991. After a tragic car accident in
the New York neighborhood in which a Jewish driver accidentally struck and
killed a black child named Gavin Cato, Sharpton stoked anti-Semitic rage. At
the funeral for Cato, amid shouts from the crowd of “Heil Hitler!” (one banner
read, “Hitler did not do the job”), Sharpton didn’t call for reconciliation; he
inveighed against “diamond dealers.” During the riots Jews were beaten in the
street, and eventually a Hasidic tourist from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, was
stabbed to death.
Perhaps if Sharpton had been shunned for his role in
that, he might not have encouraged yet more violence in 1995, when he led
protests against the eviction of a black-owned record store. Sharpton fueled
rage on his radio show and at rallies to the point where one of the protesters
ran into a Jewish-owned store whose owner was wrongly blamed for the eviction,
shot several people, and then burned the place down, killing seven (mostly Hispanic)
occupants. [And his own damned self.]
But he was shunned for none of it. Nor was he
shunned for his sometimes cavalier compliance with tax laws or his shabby
shakedowns of corporations for donations. In fact, in a culture that
increasingly rewards shamelessness, Sharpton got in on the ground floor and has
been cashing in on his access ever since. The attorney general himself
celebrates his “partnership” with Sharpton.
Sharpton is even hailed as an expert on racial
tensions, which in a funny way is true. The establishment he constantly seeks
to “speak truth” to has enabled him in every conceivable way. He doesn’t just
have access to his suits, he’s been given access to just about everything the 1
percent has to offer, including the very best cigars.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of
the The
Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can
write to him at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com,
or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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