Yes, They Were Born On April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s Day is nearly here. No man can control the date of his birth, ditto no woman, but some people seem to do their best to live up to it. Take Terry Nichols, he was born in 1955. In 1994, he conspired with the younger Timothy McVeigh to punish the American Government for acts of domestic terrorism against its own citizens. And this punishment was…to commit what was then the greatest single peacetime atrocity in the land. In April the following year, McVeigh bombed a Government complex in Oklahoma City. Nineteen kids in daycare were among the over one hundred and sixty dead. What was that about combating terror?

McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001, three months to the day exactly before a multiple pronged terror attack that would dwarf even his evil. Nichols escaped the death penalty, but he will have from now until the end of his miserable life to sit in his prison cell and contemplate his folly.

Fortunately, most idiots aren’t murderous, some are just idiots. Richard D. Wolff was born in 1942. Like his hero Karl Marx, he professes to be an economist. And like Marx, capitalism has treated him very well; it continues to do so. He is a regular commentator on sundry media outlets, and he doesn’t always talk rubbish, but like the man said, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

For those who haven’t read The Communist Manifesto, ignoring the preamble from the various editions, its first sentence reads: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

That very first sentence is wrong. The history of Mankind is the history of COOPERATION. True, there has been a lot of struggle, conflict, pain and suffering on the way, but without cooperation there would be nothing. We are seeing this cooperation on a grand scale at the very moment as the governments of the world seek to protect their citizens against an unseen enemy that has the potential to cause death on an enormous scale. True, there are people who are intent on taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, either by scamming people or exploiting it to extend legislation that will enslave us, but without the large scale cooperation we have seen and are continuing to experience, who knows where we would be?

The Communist Manifesto was written at a time when the toiling and exploited masses lived in far worse conditions than most of us today, so Marx and his wealthy patron Engels can perhaps be forgiven for painting such a bleak picture of things, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Richard D. Wolff has wasted his life.

If Professor Wolff has made a comfortable living out of talking rubbish, Rachel Maddow has made a fortune out of it. She is said to earn $7 million a year and to be worth nearly three times that. Remember that before you laugh at her. Having said that, it is difficult not to at times. Maddow was born in 1973, and like Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. She started her working life in radio, and moved seamlessly into television.

It has to be said that for most of her career, Maddow was a tolerable or even enjoyable talking head, but enter Donald Trump, and she became the most severe case of Trump derangement syndrome in the entire American media. While most of those plugging the Trump-Russia collusion hoax didn’t really believe it, Maddow was an obsessive true believer. Some of her attacks on Russia and its charismatic leader were so far off the chart that one was entitled to question her sanity. What if Russia attacked the power grid on the coldest day of the year, she asked? What indeed? It would be freezing cold in her rubber room.

Finally, what might be called the joker in the pack is Susan Boyle. Born 1961, she entered a UK national talent contest in 2009. Looking and sounding like a frumpy spinster, she was cringe worthy in front of the judges when she explained how she wanted to emulate Elaine Paige. They and the audience were taken aback. People laughed at her, and one sensed that after her performance they would be laughing even louder while she would be reduced to tears. Then the music played, and she sang. This clip showing the moment a star was born has currently been viewed over 240 million times. As the man said, never judge a book by its cover.