I’ve always looked at wealth as simply something to be attained for practical purposes. It’s part of the material world and has no personality on its own. For some, the purpose of wealth is to give the wealthy power to have whatever they want and that includes the world. It’s one acre or it’s symbolically a gazillion. Desire is infinite. Plants desire minerals, sunlight and water. With animals, God must have thought the next step was to make the animals a more adaptive and mobile idea. It became more visceral. Cooperation with others increased survival. Disagreement with others could also bring war. We built up the ego to help us survive and explore our individuality. What a colossal step. One wonders if nature on other planets took this great a risk. Did God have any regrets? We’re the masters of a process we can control for good or ill. Or with no control at all.
Elon Musk understands that some point in evolution has absolved him of accepting other peoples’ limits. He’s supposed to be super smart. It all becomes a semi-ridiculous, self-satiric charade which frees him to regard boundaries as perhaps the simple illusions they are, and of no matter. Whatever rules existed to trace a route can be redrawn to suit the moment or the future. But this government of the one can be pernicious, quixotic, magnanimous, both foolish and wise. One cannot retain title of visionary in today’s world except through action. Vision without action becomes hindsight. Musk knows that.
Time to buy Twitter. You can hear the little bird singing: “such a long year- we had dumped the Trump thumpers, and now there’s the raiders with nets and swamp waders.” Having little sense of all proportion would force us to know that things become more tenuous the less we actually control them. Elon wants the bird to fly free like a Walt Disney movie. De Santis on the other hand wants Disney to bow to his Puritan political amorality. Now Elon sees that cozying up to Trump defines his fan base. Disney is DeSantis’s bete noir. Musk imagines himself as a Disney character. He’s overcome any boyishness that gave him a benefit of the doubt or excuse. Everest is in view. The Oscar of business success.
The statue of tremendous wealth makes us look up and then rationalize our own choices or feel we must review our choices just to be sure we remember the turns we took. Or do the right thing and laugh at it. We don’t have to accept regret based on anything as arbitrary as the fate of one versus another. But we know there is nothing arbitrary about fate. In any case when you the average person exists in a systemic world of personal accomplishment and choice, one must recognize it’s hard to think about others if your needs aren’t met.
My surrogates George and Mary Farquar were as usual combing over the Times article exposing the role a hedgehog like Tucker Carlson has perfected in sculpting our acceptance of re-engineered fact for the now fully fantasized public feeding on grievance politics. George took a sip of coffee. “Hell … We’re now wallowing in the digital revolution, co-opted by the corrupted, twisted by the metaverse, exploited by the billionaires, inflated by factoids, threatened by megalomaniacs with atomic bombs, and laughed at by grifting viruses. Think of it. “It’s a good thing we love each other.” Mary added, “Will we always be able to?”
Tenuous as the present may seem, it’s reported that the last 70 years or so have been the longest reign of “relative” peace perhaps in history since the end of World War II. The nation state replaced empires: Teddy Roosevelt’s Spanish War the last U.S. war of acquisition. As a pacifist, it’s hard to imagine real solutions coming from combat. Combat is the failure of cooperation to attain a better, more just and humane outcome. Force becomes the recourse.
Republicans (Trumpists) successfully redesigned a playing board that permits them to justify any fantasy they can imagine. Old news. The lies seem to be winning. What will happen with a potential Republican congress in ’23? Will the next raft of House committee hearings force Merritt Garland to get off his a– and prosecute Trump? Will the Ukrainian army succeed in stopping the Russian bear? Is the U.S. headed inevitably into war with Russia? Where’s my car keys? What do I need to store for back up? I feel too old for all this. I want out, yet I want justice to prevail. It’s really all just a play now: We take our seats, the curtain rises, and we re-enter a world we think we know but don’t wish to recognize. And we can’t leave our seats till the final curtain falls. Elon? What does he care? He gives his tickets away.
Alan Harris lives with wife Jane in Shelburne Falls and pursues publishing his first novel, being an ex-chef (Noble Feast), lover of nature, music, theater and all things ironic and paradoxical.