RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #101 (5/25/2014): Gabriel Diaz
aired May 24, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/YJud7dG3Qs0
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of May 25th, 2014.
Is there such a thing as a person so stupid and retarded, you can’t get angry at them, no matter what they do? Either they don’t have the brain capacity to distinguish right from wrong, or they’re just so hilariously deluded, you can’t help but laugh at them?
No, I’m not talking about me. And I’m not even talking about Marco Rubio; I’m talking about a cabdriver in New York. There’s a hack in Manhattan who doesn’t believe in keeping his political opinions to himself. As he Travis Bickles his way across the avenues, he wears his affiliation on his sleeve – literally. Tourists hailing a cab photographed him wearing a Nazi swastika patch on his arm.
Turns out the guy’s a National Socialist and believes in the cause – although not so much that he’ll wear the patch where passengers can see it. I guess he doesn’t want to get garroted at a red light. But pedestrians outside the car can see it and have taken numerous photos of this idiot’s arm. They’ve also spat on his windshield, kicked his bumper, flipped him the bird and basically made clear that they don’t like taking a ride with Joseph Goebbels.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission agreed, and they’ve suspended this fascist fuckwad for 30 days, citing a TLC rule that prohibits drivers from acting against the best interests of the public. The fact that most cabbies smell like farts and sandalwood, and they go from Astor Place to the East River via the West Side Highway, somehow isn’t against the public interest. But yes, the swastika thing is a deal breaker. I’m glad this Nutzy is off the road, if only for a month. He does have the right to express his opinions in a free society, but getting stuck in a vehicle with a crazy person who embraces evil is just as bad as being on a subway with wild teenagers, or on an airplane with one of those pilots who thinks he’s a stand-up comedian. And he’s not gonna land the plane until you’ve heard his best joke – which is usually so bad, you hope you crash before the punchline.
I’m not saying we should emulate Germany and legally ban any display of Nazi regalia. Shooting on sight is probably a better idea. But if the National Basketball Association can expel John Sterling for telling his half-black girlfriend, in private, that he doesn’t like her all-black friends, certainly the TLC can do more to Hitler Junior than send him on a month’s unpaid vacation.
I do give props to the fella – much as I despise and wish death upon him – for sticking to his guns and not offering some half-hearted, lawyer-penned apology to get him off the hook. Interviewed by the press, this Holocaust denier said, quote, “We’ve been told lies about Hitler. We believe in racial separation and racial differences.” He’s like the late Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church; if you’re gonna play delusional poker, double down every time. This cab guy has agreed to take off the armband when he drives, but only to keep his job and appease, quote, “liberal crybabies,” rather than undergoing some Dickensian change of heart. He says he doesn’t hate Jews; he’s just critical of them and that just because he’s a Nazi doesn’t make him anti-Semitic. Okay. Hey, just because I’m breathing doesn’t make me alive. No, wait… it does.
The guy also equates his plight with that of homosexuals. If they can wave a rainbow banner in a parade devoted to equality and freedom, he has a right to wear the symbol of a nation that murdered 12,000,000 innocent people on the grounds of racial purity. It’s the same thing!
But I confess, I’ve been a naughty Rabbi. I’ve been holding back one piece of information. One climactic fact that launches this story from some run-of-the-mill reminder that prejudice is still potent, to the realm of the incandescently insane. It’s time to reveal the name of this cab driver. Are you ready? Gabriel Diaz. Gabriel Diaz. You would be right in assuming this guy’s ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower. And no, he doesn’t have a Spanish last name because his grampa escaped from Berlin to hide in Argentina. No, Gabriel Diaz has an ethnic name because he’s ethnic, Dominican and…wait for it…black. Let me repeat that for those of you choking on your watermelons at home. Gabriel Diaz is a National Socialist, yet his skin is pretty much the same shade as Urkel. I don’t know if he’s the world’s only schvartze Nazi. If he’s not, I imagine they’re real easy to spot in a Klan rally.
Diaz’s parents say he’s naïve and disturbed, and he only became enamored of the swastika from watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” A movie, by the way, made by a Jew, starring a half-Jew, and released by Paramount Pictures – a studio founded by three immigrant Yids in 1912. I guess the irony is that nowadays, times being what they are, immigrants wouldn’t get the opportunity to run film studios. They’d be lucky to get jobs as…cab drivers. Which is no profession to be ashamed of… until now.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
(c) 2014 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.