Trump throws a Gatsby Party

The theme was “a little party never killed nobody”

“A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” is a 2013 song recorded by Fergie, Q-Tip and GoonRock for the soundtrack to the Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby.

That quote, like Baz Luhrmann, seemed to miss the whole point of the novel, in which the American Dream proved to be a nightmare, and a little party killed three people, including the Great One himself.

Gatsby himself never cared for his superficial soirees where “in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” He was not truly a vainglorious man. He just did it to impress a chick. (In case you haven’t read the story, I did not make that up.)

The narrator’s last words to Gatsby were “They (the rich party set) are a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Jimmy Kimmel called Trump The Great Fatsby, but the rotund orange fellow is not like Gatsby at all. He does resemble Gatsby’s romantic rival, Tom Buchanan, a rich businessman who says “If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.”

By the way, that F. Scott guy could write a bit. Hemingway found Fitzgerald to be a bit of a superficial twit who wrote for approval rather than to get at truth, but even ol’ Papa himself envied Scott Fitzgerald’s ability to create effortless, lyrical prose, which he called Fitzgerald’s “golden, wasted talent.” The final paragraphs of Gatsby are some of the best writing in the history of American literature, not fancy and flowery and empty like Thomas Wolfe’s lyrical passages, but eloquent and to the point, like Churchill’s.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.