My confusion at this moment treads on a razor thin string overlooking the drop to oblivion - there may be nothing that separates hopelessness and utopian fantasies. The powers of creation don't give a flying fuck whether or not you choose to curl up in fetal withdrawal or exult over something squeezed out of your imagination. Your dreams drift across the vacuum of cosmic indifference. Objectively, no one offers an explanation for a repulsive, floridly stupid creature like Donald Trump being chosen by god to babysit the universe.
I am fucking out of this shithole said Jehovah - it speaks to me personally. But why Trump? I ask the creator of all things. There are seven billion other choices. God never likes when you ask it "why." It gives me a Curly Howard look of incomprehension, sputters uselessly with fat floppy cheeks, and abandons me in a puff of vapor.
So I call Trump, but I make the mistake of measuring my thoughts too slowly and he fills the space - no one could ever have gotten a plane like the one Qatar gave me. Just gave it to me like no one else had ever gotten. No strings either....no cost, no favors, I love Qatar. No one knows how much oil they have. The plane has a simulated golf course, women like you wouldn't believe. Not even Jesus ever had so much luxury.
But I don't hear a word Trump says. It has suddenly become clear that we live in an eternal "Black Friday," punching each other for the last toaster, the last towel rack, the last yoga matt. Trump is the Moses of extra stuff, and even some communists follow him through the gap in the Red Sea - a gap that has Pharaoh on one side and Walmart on the other.
Think of Aaron Bastani who once wrote a book called "Fully Automated Luxury Communism," or something like that. I have never read it, but it seems like a hoot. The idea, I am guessing, is that the "good life" is where its at, and the problem isn't that materialism sucks, but that most people have no access to it. Give everyone a $400 million dollar Qatar-gifted airplane and we can all fly through the sky in a dopamine infused reverie of servile whores and simulated golf. After all, if production can be decoupled from environmental constraints, why the fuck not.
I am probably misrepresenting Aaron Bastani big time, or maybe not, but there is no time to fact check. I haven't posted anything on Substack for over a week, and the act of writing aspires to fill up empty space before time runs out.
I suspect that Bastani might be ceding reality to Elon Musk. Maybe the war between the working class and the billionaires is not one of battling to re-divide limited stuff among the infinite masses with infinite desires - but a battle to separate billionaire values from the collective unconscious. It isn't just that these fuckwits steal everything and murder for profit and sport, but that they own our dreams.
There is no luxury communism, Aaron Bastani. Communism is freedom from Qatar's planes and simulated golf. It is a world of small, simple houses and lentil stew. It is a town where doctors and trash collectors live next door to one another, and everyone can walk to the same park.
There is no boundary that stops Trump. There is no humanity in people who worship money and power. I agree that all of this is hard to comprehend. The sky is falling.
Thanks, Phil. Intellectually & often politically, I have been a socialist (and a Marxist economist). But, in this current culture, it seems like it's a pipe dream. Mostly what I mean by that is the abominable state of education, i.e., the preponderant, systemic absence of it in the US. Without better education, there is unlikely to be widespread support for socialism. Chicken & egg problem -- better education, better social system? And, for sure, the expectation of environmental destruction with continuing population & economic growth, without ameliorating policies & practices, is a real, palpable threat -- especially with the TruthSocialDent's denial of it & romping speedily toward the denigration of our physical surroundings and human health. Keep smiling....