Another reminder of the cost of homophobia (4/9/16)

The Revenge of Roy Cohn on Everyone

by Primo Encarnación

Let’s say you’re a young, wealthy dilettante who has been trying to win the approval of domineering male figures throughout your lifetime.  Raised to privilege, your formative years were spent in a military academy, where physical abuse, mental cruelty and social humiliation were served before breakfast, and if you didn’t want to take it, you’d better be dishing it out.  Despite being a star athlete in a military academy, somehow “heel spurs” kept you out of Viet Nam.  Instead, you went into business with Daddy, whose approval you never could earn, and ended up being sued right alongside him by the US government, for racist housing practices in New York.
Then, you meet another domineering figure who, on the surface, seems to be the exact opposite of you.  You attend the trendy me-first church run by Norman Vincent Peale.  He’s a Jew.  You cut a wide swath through the young ladies.  He cuts a wide swath through the young men.  You’re young, tall and a catch.  He’s old, short and not-so.
BUT…
He’s a legal shark, who never backs down, preferring to counter-attack, and to continue to attack, no matter the truth of a situation.  He’s an anti-Semitic Semite and a homophobic homosexual.  He is plugged in to every level of power in New York: political, religious, criminal and social.  He’s also plugged into the gossip in all those realms, and loves to prove how plugged-in he is by sharing that gossip.  And he’s an expert at slaying a person’s character through innuendo, insinuation, bending of the truth and outright lies, as he displayed to the world during the McCarthy Hearings, back in the Fifties, when he was Drunken Joe McCarthy’s consiglieri and hatchet man.
Right when he needed to, Donald Trump fell in love with Roy Cohn.
Although they eventually lost the federal suit, Cohn so obfuscated the issue with counter-suits and bullshit that the Trumps claimed it as a win.  Cohn then became Donald’s entre into Manhattan power, and brokered many of Trump’s signature early deals, including his first iron-clad pre-nup and his first deals with construction-industry mobsters.
Finally, Donald Trump no longer had to seek the approval of the domineering men in his life.  With Cohn, he had the respect of one of the most domineering, Machiavellian evil trolls ever to galumph across the American political landscape – and Cohn worked for HIM!   If a particular negotiation was not going Donald’s way, he could – and did –  pull out a picture of Roy Cohn and threaten, “You could deal with me, or you could deal with him.”
In 1986, after being disbarred for unethical conduct, Cohn died from AIDS.  Although he maintained until the end that it was liver cancer, his protégé, Donald, was now as deeply ensconced in NYC gossip as anyone, and the truth was an open secret.  So Donald offered the greatest homage to Cohn’s mentorship he ever could:  he coldly dumped the dying man as a liability.   The student had surpassed the master.
More than anyone in the dysfunctional dystopia Donald Trump has bought, built and stolen to support his addiction to attention, Roy Cohn is responsible for the man we see as the front-runner for the Republican Nomination for President of the United States, who is ascending to his highest eminence ever, while simultaneously being mocked and reviled in a way his mentor would remember well.  Wearing a Roy-Cohn-design suit of dynamite, Trump has marched into Republican Valhalla and Götterdämmerunged the place in a political murder-suicide.
If there is a Hell, Roy Cohn is there now… chuckling.