Don't Eat The Rich, Tax Them

The rich aren't like you and I. They're stupid, self-absorbed, petty, and desperately looking for meaning in their otherwise empty lives.

Okay, they're a little like you and I. But you get the point.

I'm reading today, courtesy of a hijacked NYTimes digital subscription, the story of Cordelia Scaife May. A Pittsburgh-born heiress to a massive fortune, Ms. May was, shall we say, quite the fucking piece of work. Here's a link. It's worth using one of your six free monthly articles or whatever it is to read it (plus it's really long, which makes it a bargain).

The point of this post isn't how Ms. May's dedication to reproductive rights slid ever so gradually into a hatred of immigrants, especially the dark immigrants. It's not the story of her miserable-ass empty life either. Though the part where her new husband, a Pittsburgh DA facing corruption charges, killed himself on the day he was formally indicted, and May blamed her brother for turning on the DA guy, and severed their relationship, losing in one quick swoop the only two people she was close to on the planet, and then secluded herself in an Arizona cabin where a year or two later she emerged as a full-blown bigot dedicated to giving her fortune to hate groups, I mean anti-immigration groups--that part was pretty incredible, as a kind of 19th century novel kind of thing.

No, the point of all this is talking about the cycle of grifting and suck that warps our society. The other NYT article that caught my eye was the story of Stephen Miller, trump advisor and full-blown anti-immigration con man. Miller was born into a SoCal life of private school privilege, but his wealth wasn't anything compared to Cordelia Scaife May (Miller only had two names, for example). But he did figure out the quickest way to an adult life of leisure and comfort--embracing an extremist ideology under the cloak of patriotism or whatever, and getting people to give him money for it.

Because what we call the right-wing information complex, or the Fox News company picnic, or the extremist propaganda punditocracy, isn't anything more than a way to fleece rich people from their money. So much so that it doesn't matter whether Hannity, Carlson, Miller, Jones, whoever, believe the shit they're selling. They found the shortest, quickest way to a life of power for an underachieving dipshit--good enough to get into any Ivy League caliber college, but not nearly good enough to excel once they get there--is to stake out a wealth-friendly ideological position that is in opposition to the dominant (informed, humane, liberal) position that pervades on campus. Rich people will throw fucking yacht-loads of money at you. Set yourself up a non-profit and watch those tax-deductible dollars flow in. Call it Turning Point USA or the Leadership Institute.You'll never have to worry about money ever again.

Because wealthy people--and we're talking REAL wealthy, like generational billions--hate two things in this world: paying taxes, and their empty aimless drift through their 80-ish years on the planet. They are naive, stupid, and looking for something to spend their money on. They are easy marks for hustlers and con artists (or con content providers, if you prefer). The whole thing would be funny and adorable if it didn't result in the unconscionable suffering of millions. Stephen Miller couldn't run a fucking Burger King morning shift if you gave him three years to try, but he knew how to suck up to the powerfully-stupid powerful (his first D.C. job was working for Michele Bachmann, whose first three auto-fill suggestions on my google are, in order: corn dog, bikini, and young--should we all kill ourselves together or take turns?). And that's why I type transcriptions of notes called in by financial advisors and insurance agents for $10 an hour while Stephen Miller lives a life of financial comfort and figures out how to profit from his ugly ideologies. But at least I don't look like a semi-sentient bowl of pudding that hasn't slept in a week, and whose ejaculate is made up of (I imagine) a hastily thrown-together mix of saliva, mosquitos and paste.

One solution, what we in the rich-guillotine business call a good start, would involve a Wealth Tax.

Cantos For David Berman: Part None

Excerpt from a poem in D. Berman's Actual Air, a book I've owned since 1999:

There were long days of bad ideas
when he felt his book was ineffective
like a watercolor of a fire engine
or a statue of the fastest man alive,

and he would go to the window
and watch the fireflies
criss cross wihout insight,
then turning around
sometimes notice his wife Asterisk
lifting dinner to the table.

One night, up considering dead realms,
he heard the sustained woof of a dog.
It drew him up and propelled him outside
to walk cowed under the fierce starlight.

Some brief, stray unconnected thoughts:

It is not easy to live a life so deeply; it's not easy to live any kind of life, really.

I processed his death with a grimace, a sigh, and a "well what else would you expecting" shrug. That's part coping mechanism (defense mechanism?), part tragedy fatigue, and part a calloused something or other inside of me which may or may not be a good thing. Perspective can be healthy, but it's worth keeping in mind that distance facilitates that perspective. And distance is a thing that is lonely and cold.

A person in pain who exits this world (and I am aware that there are all kinds of way to exit the world--shove that needle far enough in, and you are no longer here) may no longer be in pain, but that pain is then diffused out among the living to take up residence in their hearts.

Hipster Transient

Just gotta say, about this Guardian article about people in California living out of their cars, that I was doing this back in 1993 before it was cool. And I'm sure this trend (like most things Californian) will soon be spreading across the country, what with rents rapidly spiraling upwards and all. Did you know real estate is a good investment? You, the person with the money, put a down payment on a house, and then you charge other people to live there. You have these people--people who make less money than you--pay more in rent than you pay for your mortgage, and then you just get to sit back and earn "passive income." It's amazing! It's way more reliable than the stock market! Because while markets can fluctuate, and are subject to unpredictable volatility, people are always going to need a place to live!

It's not so much that humanity is living through the end of capitalism. It's that capitalism is living through the end of humanity.

We now resume our irregularly scheduled deprogramming...

Though who knows how long it will last. School starts tomorrow here in the more collegiate areas of northeast georgia, in a town where the local university so dominates our town that even the public K-12 system adheres to the same Aug-May schedule. Nothing quite like kids playing outside in 90-plus temps to get that education flowing, I guess. Anyway, the schedules have been cleared for a more-or-less daily writing routine. Though that's subject to change b/c the other income-producing member of our household just saw her planned income stream dry up when the UGA professor she was going to be working for starting next week asked her to forego another month of pay while continuing to work on the project. The nature of this project involved our cohabitant securing funding through grants and donation for the professor's annual conference to promote STEM learning among young women. Turns out the conference is basically a neoliberal grift masquerading as a charity (please secure us over $20,000 in very small, barely detectable donations in order to send 10 lucky high school girls to attend my conference). In return for my cohabitant's participation--the location and securing of said money--my cohabitant would be paid somewhere from $2,000 to $2,500 for six, or maybe five months. It was all quite vague. And so after the meeting where the cohabitant was told she wouldn't be getting paid until next month, but in the meantime keep working on the project, and also please sign this NDA for me, my cohabitant--being no fool, and having recently completed her PhD--bailed on the project and alerted university officials. Ah messy life. So out plan of scraping by for a few months on a couple grand a month while she worked 20 hrs, and we completed our legitimate contracted work on our book about a prominent music group--manuscript due Nov. 1st--was uh...what's the word...totally fucked.

We have options. We are planning. One of us will probably be working full-time. The other will be working full-time on the book (the research is all completed, and most chapters exist in a sort of vomitous rough draft state). Or we'll both be working part-time, and juggling the writing. But that manuscript will be delivered, and it will be great. And until I'm hired, I'll be occasionally typing here to get my writing skills and speed more up to, uh, speed.

Oh yeah. This blog supports Elizabeth Warren for president, but it would vote for a semi-sentient ferret at this point provided it wasn't a white-supremacist swill merchant huckster.

The only optimism I can muster about anything is that this government--its policies, its laws, the way it conducts itself--in no way represents the will or the desire of the people who live here. Maybe one day that will change. The only solution is voting out republicans, voting in democrats, and then holding their feet to the fire and forcing them to do the right thing.