CHILLIN’ IN BIGLY PARK
“The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.”
— Jean Baudrillard
It was never gonna be a democracy for everyone. The rich white guys in charge—the founding fathers—wrote it out as such, but really they only wanted a one man, one vote deal for themselves. For everyone else—the not rich, not male or not white people—it was an an aristocracy like it has always been.
There has and always will be an elite class, wealth aggregates no matter what the government is called. Those elites abuse the rest of us by confusing and amusing us with a mix of faux optimism with real xenophobia. More circus than bread for us these days.
It was that or anarchy—they said—the USA would have become a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The elites claimed noblesse oblige was gonna fix it, but it was droit du seigneur and that’s made it worse.
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It’s the year 1 PT (post trump) the rich are richer and the poor are more numerous. The world did not end, just norms and common decency. Everyone can afford a smart phone but little else. Luxuries are available—for a price—essentials are not. So here we are just screen junkies in downtown Donaldgrad, the capital of Trumpistan, chillin’ in Bigly Park.
Chillin’ and following the ups and downs of friends and celebrities is what we do. We don’t care much about our increasing relative poverty because that is hidden from us by our absolutely wealthy leaders by creating faux optimism. But they play up our relative wealth as something that absolutely poor envy, inciting real xenophobia.
Chillin’ and not careerin’ or even jobbin’ because there’s nothing now that mere humans can do cheaper than machines, so even if we wanted to work we couldn’t. First building and driving, then nursing and teaching eventually even doctoring and lawyering the only people safe from unemployment are people who don’t work, people who’s wealth works for them.
But luckily those people still need us, while they don’t need us to make or do stuff, they still need us as mechanisms to generate more money. Instead just profiting from paying us as little as they can while charging us as much as they can, they now profit as much or more from selling information about us to each other. No, I don’t really understand the mechanics of that, but given the wealth this creates for some elites, it must be working.
So as long as we keep tweeting, and Instagraming, taking polls and quizzes, clicking, downloading and sharing we continue to grow the elites wealth. They don’t want us to do anything else, like vote, demonstrate, organize or (the horror!) strike, that would cut the upward mobility of wealth. As long as we keep movin’ the money on up, they will trickle down the essentials they normally kept to themselves but only just enough to keep us alive.
“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.” — Milton Friedman
