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The imperative to survive is confronting us more than at any other time in human history. There are very many more people; a haunting vulnerability pervades the air. An unmatched surge in the world’s population is guesstimated to propel humanity to the inconceivable head-count of 8,000,000,000 in 2025 and 10,000,000,000 in 2050. There is the never-ending desire for decent lodging, prosperous employment, low-cost mobility and lifelong wellbeing. Nevertheless, it has been by now substantiated that the Earth’s resources cannot gratify, even partially, the unrelenting yearnings of all of us. Multiplying social, political and economic disproportions are certain to instigate further discontent that in turn will egg on more conflicts and more dislocations upsetting whatever hopes of tranquility we may have aspired to.
Not all people care to survive. Many others care only that they themselves should survive. Individuals might concern themselves about living on and that others belonging to the very same global community of which they are a part will also live on. Although not necessarily infirm, people who are not particularly interested in enduring will do little to allow themselves to endure and generally are not vexed about the continuation of their fellows. They might not look properly after their health, they might “vegetate” their lives away in a slothful passivity, and they are baffling not only in their intimate social circles, they cause difficulties for their superiors and co-workers where they are engaged. They do not have to be criminals. These someones have no zest for life, sound off frequently, and are miserable and apathetic. They merely exist and at length become burdens on society which has to ante up for their untrustworthiness and refusal to exist for the betterment of their confrères. Most people who hate others first loathed themselves.
Then there are those whose individual self-interest is the actual motive of all conscious action, the valid end of their human activity. These types might dominate a close-knit grouping or even an establishment, and they must hold control of the system they superintend manipulating the network's subordinates to satisfy their cravings for power. Their sphere of activity is often constrictive and it is of course based on experience, tradition and more often than not family linkups. These swellheads thrive on what is determinate, and theirs is the exclusive mode to perform during whatever exigence that might emerge. Superficially, these egocentrics induce us to believe that their often sadistic modi operandi serve in fact the methodicalness of the governing body they and their underlings are ranked under, and so doing, their “beneficial” actions come to serve all, are for everyone's gain. They are not.
The third category is that to which this essay is directed, and it is the one from which we may derive a sense of hope—hopefully, too, the means to attain the expectations we are seeking. There are those causal agents to whom we may ascribe attributes unbeknown to the majority of society at large. These subjects need to make a contribution on behalf of others by caring for themselves foremost and subsequently reaching out to assist those with whom they subsist. All sound, forward-looking societies have had these characters to set the stage to set in motion an epoch of progress. These members of society are at the ready to take part, to contribute to the welfare of themselves and those in their company. They understand what it means to survive.
I am a survivor—so far! I have outlasted three 122mm Chinese rocket attacks, three or four mortar blasts, four months with an infantry company in the jungles bordering Laos and Cambodia, a plane crash, two robberies at gunpoint.... Still, I do not consider myself an expert. But I do recognize that I had something to do with my endurance. I have followed definite precepts that were taught to me. Notwithstanding, I have always been gifted with the will to enjoy life. Scito te ipsum!
My introduction to the theory of survival happed upon me when I entered the US Army on active duty as an artillery lieutenant in September 1966. Until that time I had drifted along in life not even thinking I might have to come through one day. In the artillery I was made to make myself self-sufficient and more important, careful. Discipline and anticipation of events were emphasized over and over and over in my training. In Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, our 105mm howitzer artillery batteries could be hoisted into the air by Chinook helicopters, and then planted into some different point many kilometers distant. The routine for us was identical after each and every insertion. We followed the same rules, we erected the indistinguishable battery emplacement, we checked our instruments, secured the area, and were ready to shoot and communicate after being dropped into an often unknown, unfriendly environment. Above all, we could think that we might be transferred again in a matter of hours, or remain fixed in our new location for weeks or months. Maintenance was obligatory although not much appreciated, but it kept disgruntled unit members alert.
Parenthetically, the US Army was not up to sustaining itself in Vietnam, nor did it give its soldiers the motive, and the means, to create a new, propitious set of events. Soldiers were ill-equipped. Undisciplined. Apathetic. Many of them, lacking any hint of patriotism, shot themselves in the calf (The Million Dollar Wound), neglected to take their anti-malaria medication and then winded up in bathtubs filled with chunks of ice, and some even sought to kill themselves by volunteering—deriving pleasure or death from undergoing pain, abuse and cruelty—for hazardous missions: “Lieutenant, I'm not returning home.” The US Army accentuated, very stridently, that they had prepared us to fight in combat. This is not so. Most soldiers refused to trust anyone ranked above them. Disobedience was the norm in Vietnam where I had to hold up against both the “enemy,” whoever and whatever that was, and my own fellow combatants! In Vietnam, the US Army was a contradiction of its own terms and consequently doomed to failure.
My military experience, however insufferable, did inculcate in me a respect for life—my life! It made me appreciate the gift of being alive. That life had almost been taken away from me. Today, I am content to be alive. And I continue to follow the basic rules for survival many of which I learned in the US Army and employ even when I write this essay.
If you have set your heart on surviving, please listen to me. You cannot remain alive more than your family members, friends and colleagues by just wishing to. You must do your utmost to make it become a reality. Above all, you have to respect yourself before you can go on to esteem others. In fact, you are obliged to study, contemplate and seek responses to the uncertainties, about yourself and others, which haunt you.
One of the actions of great consequence to be taken is that one we are already familiar with: anticipation. Think before you act, and reflect habitually. Plan your days, weeks, months.... Set an endpoint you are inclined towards. Understand that victory comes hesitantly and has to be tracked down unswervingly and with adroitness. Do routine tasks as soon as possible to get them out of the way. With the time left over, concentrate on the various more pressing undertakings before you. Always endeavor to judge what is coming next. When you exit a bus, look to the left/right for oncoming vehicles. (I remember when the plane I was in was about to crash about an hour's flight from Caracas, I grabbed to my chest the four-year-old next to me, and realized that in four seconds we might be dead. My body was shaking with fear but I knew we all had to escape immediately when the twin-engine hit the water. In Vietnam, when 122mm rockets were incoming, my body shook convulsively but my voice was steady as a rock on my telephone operator's PRC-9 radio.) Do not go very fast—speed kills and not just on the highway. Sleep enough to be efficient. Eat correctly and be healthy. Without exception imagine that by not doing what is right for yourself and your body and mind, future complications will be caused by your negligence and stupidity.
It is accurate to say that preparedness is crucial to the prolongation of life or existence. In Vietnam, for every soldier on the battlefield, seven were backing him up. Helicopters had to be serviced, admin clerks typed reports, cooks prepared meals, doctors cared for the sick and wounded.... In our ordinary daily lives we must wash, clean our teeth, water the lawn and plants, iron our clothes for work on Monday.... We hold responsibilities that require us to react, and the realization of their success depends on our efficiency and enthusiasm. Being primed in advance is an enormous asset for achieving prosperity and living longer than most others.
To accomplish our mission (survival) we must cultivate the skill of self-discipline. To be in a state of readiness for whatever which might turn up, our attitude has to be set to change state to suit the challenge at hand. Repetition is an ugly word. So is routine. But these two sober-minded “axioms” must be complied with. We cannot secure anything worthwhile without being zealous and steadfast while doing our best to substantiate the meaning of our lives. If we fail to discipline ourselves when we forge ahead on the way to our last stop, we will ripen into very discomfited and discontented individuals.
Learn the meaning of the words “hard” and “strong.” We cannot be hard on ourselves unremittingly while being fervent about getting to our target. This is not clever. A person is strong when he or she knows when to be tenacious and when to be toned down. You ease up to be fit for the next bothersome occasion.
Authored by Anthony St. John
1 May 2009
Calenzano, Italia
www.anthonystjohn.blogspot.com
* * *
Showing posts with label social criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social criticism. Show all posts
Monday, May 4, 2009
Monday, December 8, 2008
The Affluent Are Preposterously Stupid--I Have the Evidence!
The revolution has been fired up! When I showed to Northamerican friends my article, Incontrovertible Proof That Citizens of the DisUnited States of Northamerica Are So Sorrowfully, So Sanctimoniously Stupid (www.anthonystjohn.blogspot.com), I was somewhat disillusioned: they all agreed with me! Northamericans, and their other gang members, have all along known, “subconsciously,” for decades, that they have been doing something wrong, bloody iniquitous, and that one day their stokes of luck would fag out. Their fingers are no longer crossed. Are we approaching some sort of day of reckoning? I doubt it, but there is certainly going to be a considerable measure of “restructuring” to tend with as we are obliged to conform to an entirely new set of criterion. At least à la manière socialiste! The sooner we begin to stop encoding our misfortunes in purely financially viable terminology with spectacular pleas to some Lord Above, the better it will be for all of us. The once powerful DUS, forever the “abroad protectionist,” runs the risk of becoming the “at home isolationist.” Does this mean war?
This “divine revelation” might be attributed to many causes not the least of which is the intense, rather hostile, competitive pressures that are being set against the DUS from the outside world and which are confounding the DUS’s religious belief in itself that it is the globe’s economic and political King of the Mountain. The DUS’s penchant for arrogance has not improved its chances. Northamericans are in for a vulgar testing of their mettle. They, international interlopers and so much akin to such-and-suches such as the DisUnited Kingdom and France, have hardly any global friends. The world’s industrial nations have been living off the sweat and blood of the weak, the disadvantaged—and for far too long to now expect that handouts will win fifs (funny inside feelings) on their behalf. This is not an exclusively ethical issue. It is straightforwardly a matter of being intelligent or imprudent. The DUS and its chums have consistently chosen to be ludicrously obtuse. It is deplorable that during the 2008 DUS presidential campaign, all candidates made diminutive mention of the DUS’s position in the world, and they scarcely made note of other nations, besides their own, presenting the perception that the DUS is unique and omnipotent when most know it is not.
It is important, at this crucial juncture in humankind’s story, to try to identify clearly and distinctly the reasons why we have arrived at this stage of disgusting foolhardiness, and then with some cloudless way of thinking seek to rectify the mess we have created. My fingers are crossed. There are innumerable motives to which we may allude, but in this article I prefer to attack one that is on everyone’s mind, everyday: the wealthy, the elite, the corporatists.
Because the affluent are in the minority, they kindle in us a curiosity and, often, a deviant craving to imitate them for what we think we should have what they possess. The well-heeled have an unjust and extravagant hold on financial power, and they solidify their bases vis-à-vis potent media and communications outlets. Poor people, who Oscar Wilde said were more attached to money than the prosperous because that is all—if very little—they have to hold on to, will even go into debt on occasion to mime the well-off! Therefore, in this essay using deductive reasoning, going from the general to the particular, the line of reasoning will proceed from the very moneyed and then work down, and further, demonstrate that those rolling in it have even distorted those underprivileged below them. I have in mind to make the comfortable look incredibly dim-witted—even wicked, even unwell. It will be easy for you to figure out what I think. And I will bet there are billions in this world now cheering me on!
There are four considerations one should be aware of in the exploration of the topic at hand:
· The rich might be divided into two sweeping categories: those who have inherited their lucre; and, those who have generated (stolen!) it on their own. (These two categories will not be delved into to any great extent in this essay.)
· In this treatise we will deal with “the very rich” and not “the rich.” The Big Rich. Not The Little Rich. I have known personally, even intimately, some fabulously rich individuals—some of them recognized all over the world for their material goods. In Venezuela, I was in the thick of the economic and political corruption, but in Italy I am away from Rome and out of the center of Italy’s self-defeating political “naughtinesses.” Only once did I befriend, in Florence, an Italian political person later to be transferred to Rome to serve as a director of the Italian secret service! Nevertheless, in Tuscany, the headquarters of the world’s first bank, I have encountered many silly Little Rich characters ever on the hunt to be better off and still better off.
· I am not Big Rich or Little Rich. I pride myself in that and consider it an attestation to my intelligence that I am not. I have about €7000 in an Italian bank (I hope!), and I do not possess health insurance or a pension. Nonetheless, I am terribly curious to know that if I were Big Rich, even Little Rich, would I be as stupid as the moneyed “stupids” I have been on familiar terms with…. (Maybe I should sell THE RICH ARE STUPID! T-shirts and become a multi-millionaire!)
· I am a legal citizen of the DisUnited States of America even though I renounced my citizenship and prefer not to return ever again to my birthplace. Wherever I have resided outside the DUS (principally in Venezuela and Italy), I have been considered an ”American.” And that means I have been frequently taken, automatically, for being abounding. A burden I have had to support for decades. The fact that I was a first lieutenant in the DUS Army and am a Vietnam “War” veteran, it is assumed by most people that I possess some kind of stipend for life designated for my DUS military service. I do not.
I would like now, to get started, to refer to John Ruskin and his lecture, The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy, delivered at Tunbridge Wells, England, 16 February 1858. JR is known for his defence of individual artistic freedom, and his disgust for the mass-production of art as it was cloned vulgarly all through the Victorian era. He was a stern, extremely moralistic individual, and a brief sampling of his thoughts will now give you an inkling into his meditative processes:
“You must either make a tool of the creature,
or a man of him. You cannot make both…
A happy nation may be defined as one in which
the husband’s hand is on the plough, and the
housewife’s on the needle…
We look with so much indifference upon dishonesty
and cruelty in the pursuit of wealth…
The definite result of all our modern haste to be
rich is assuredly, and constantly, the murder of
a certain number of persons by our hands every year.”
JR lived in another period marked by a distinctive character or reckoned from a fixed point or event. His “first principles” are not those which we adhere to in our own epoch. They belong to a particular set of circumstances just as, for example, Iosif Stalin’s coined first principle about his time declared that “one man’s death is a tragedy, but the death of a million people is history”—a maxim which fit the ethical destitution of his era. Another case in point is Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought-up first principle: “Hell is other people.” J-PS also suffered that horrible stage in the world’s expansion.
There is no way JR could have envisaged, for 2009, that the planet’s population would be coming within reach of 7,000,000,000 people. Just too many ploughs and needles. Today it is astonishing for us to connect JR’s parochial vision of his life with our own. And if we recognize his convictions for what they really are, we are further staggered by the fact that in 1860 there were no more than an estimated 1,300,000,000 individuals living on his orb. JR’s generation was not as complex as ours. Ruskin would be stymied if he could witness how we have survived—for almost 150 years after—with so many people inhabiting the Earth and in such close electronic and physical acquaintance.
Apart from JR’s fanatical religious pretentiousness, we find in him certain confidences which abide even today in our own inner selves. JR is a meat and potatoes fellow. He does not mix his Scotch with water, seltzer, milk or even iced cubes. He shaves with cold water. He takes the bus. If he smokes, he snaps off the filters of his cigarettes. Puts half a teaspoon of sugar in his tea or coffee. Walks a lot. Never puts whipped cream on his strawberries. Turns off the water when he cleans his teeth. Returns his metal coat-hangers to the dry cleaners. Breaks down his packing materials before he places them in rubbish bins. In short, JR is a minimalist. He is seeking to preserve what he possesses. He is not possessed to consume. He does not wish to waste. His feet are on the ground. Ours are not. For these qualities we may admire JR’s enthusiasms.
The first broadside I long to pile into The Big Rich, more than anyone else, is their propensity to accumulate useless items, lots of them, and waste the natural resources we might think, in a civilized society, pertain to all of mankind and not just a finicky cream of the crop. Whether it be land, water, petroleum, electricity, food, precious jewels, et alia, the well-to-do ones are quick to hoard their supplies of these reserves forever in excess of what more often than not a normal individual would require and/or acquire, and they do so outrageously without worry for the requirements of others whether they be deprived or not. They dig extra wells on their land fearful of drought. They illegally hide away currency in foreign banks “just in case.” They give their wives and lovers expensive diamonds and gold “just in case.” They buy three or four cars “just in case.” Everything in glut. Just in case. Sustine et abstine are negative concepts for these pathetic characters. I do not know of any other group that lacks so much conviction in the method that has offered them so much turnover! They advance no loyalty to the money-spinning arrangement that tenders them their cornucopia of material benefits! Confidence is more precious than gold say the Chinese. And even donkeys know they cannot chew on bullion. But not The Big Rich and their confreres, The Little Rich, who often go very far out of their ways to ape The Big Rich. Monkeys see, monkeys do! The Big Rich, The Little Rich and those who emulate them are “running against the walls of their cages,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say!
I would think, my dear reader, that “…the murder of a certain number of persons by our hands every year” is still ringing in your head! And it is accurate to agree with that reflection. I could write a book on the injustices that I have caught sight of and which have caused the death—both physical and emotional—of untold unfortunate individuals slaving for the dog-eat-dog economic hierarchy set so overenthusiastically in place in the DUS, Vietnam, Venezuela and Italy—locations I have frequented. I ask myself: What is the purpose of this master-slave routine, this “delicately-distributed suffering” ( JR ) that nowadays is sugar-coated with perks, bonuses, and tie-less Fridays…all cheap gimmicks to keep workers hanging on until the next slowdown, the next massacre of layoffs? Were all of these “scallywags,” these made-redundant-ones under some supernatural illusion when they threw their lives at their corporation’s buoyant promise of an eternity of sustaining profit?
It would not take Charles Dickens very long today to cut through the bogus mesmerising that innocent victims have had to endure especially during, at least, the last fifty years. Only a simpleton—Winston Churchill was not an imbecile, he just might have been drunk or his brain fogged up with Cuban cigar smoke—would have the pluck to unabashedly pronounce that the lesser of two evils we are welded with, Judeo-Christian Democratic Capitalism, is the best at our disposal!
Look at The Big Rich and The Little Rich quoting outrageous minds such as Milton Friedman and the “old” Jeffrey Sachs! They parrot these money-making lords of a funny money plumbing industry, and under their armpits, they carry the notebooks and case histories of University of Chicago and Harvard Business School’s sacred, doctrinaire tenets which have caused more havoc the past century than any other time in the history of this “better than nothing” fraud, this Tyranny of a Minority which benefits the few at the expense of the majority. Are people ever going to wake up and trade in their illusions for some hard facts? Are people ever going to become gutsy? Are people ever going to stand up for their privileges? Why are we feigning to be content with a technique that causes so many so much injustice? Indeed, we are a strange lot!
Oh, I must be crazy! Out of my mind. Rich? How could I have used that word? There are no rich in this world! I swear to it now that I have lost my insanity. I have never known one person who ever called himself or herself rich. They will tell you that what they are worth is only paper! Yes, cash, stocks, bonds, savings accounts and treasury notes! All sheets of nothing! I knew one multi-millionaire who told me he had to borrow $100 from his wife one morning to buy his lunch! Get it? They are just like you and me! They have no money. Just paper. And who is going to buy the titles (paper!) to the lands they own if an economic downturn forces them to become like the rest of us—unfortunate?
I should have qualified more before my definition of The Big Rich. Please excuse me? The Big Rich have armed bodyguards and bullet-proofed and armoured limousines to chauffeur them around. Can you think of anything more repugnant than that? They do not even have the courage to walk alone on a crowded street. Their yachts are manoeuvred and serviced by people they wish they can trust and who are usually lousy cooks. Their airplanes are piloted by who knows who, and when they embark to fly off to some business meeting or rendezvous, they hope the navigator is not drunk or high on cocaine. Their bodyguards usually have not even finished high school, and being thick as mud, they wonder if they will be quick enough to be at the ready to protect their precious assignments. And maids and butlers? You should hear them talk about those humble souls! Behind their backs, they gossip about them as if they were some inferior race. And, woe to him or her who forgot to shine His or Her Majesty’s shoes properly, or missed dusting the bedroom lamp table, or, worse, was late delivering their breakfasts in bed! Life imprisonment!
This “divine revelation” might be attributed to many causes not the least of which is the intense, rather hostile, competitive pressures that are being set against the DUS from the outside world and which are confounding the DUS’s religious belief in itself that it is the globe’s economic and political King of the Mountain. The DUS’s penchant for arrogance has not improved its chances. Northamericans are in for a vulgar testing of their mettle. They, international interlopers and so much akin to such-and-suches such as the DisUnited Kingdom and France, have hardly any global friends. The world’s industrial nations have been living off the sweat and blood of the weak, the disadvantaged—and for far too long to now expect that handouts will win fifs (funny inside feelings) on their behalf. This is not an exclusively ethical issue. It is straightforwardly a matter of being intelligent or imprudent. The DUS and its chums have consistently chosen to be ludicrously obtuse. It is deplorable that during the 2008 DUS presidential campaign, all candidates made diminutive mention of the DUS’s position in the world, and they scarcely made note of other nations, besides their own, presenting the perception that the DUS is unique and omnipotent when most know it is not.
It is important, at this crucial juncture in humankind’s story, to try to identify clearly and distinctly the reasons why we have arrived at this stage of disgusting foolhardiness, and then with some cloudless way of thinking seek to rectify the mess we have created. My fingers are crossed. There are innumerable motives to which we may allude, but in this article I prefer to attack one that is on everyone’s mind, everyday: the wealthy, the elite, the corporatists.
Because the affluent are in the minority, they kindle in us a curiosity and, often, a deviant craving to imitate them for what we think we should have what they possess. The well-heeled have an unjust and extravagant hold on financial power, and they solidify their bases vis-à-vis potent media and communications outlets. Poor people, who Oscar Wilde said were more attached to money than the prosperous because that is all—if very little—they have to hold on to, will even go into debt on occasion to mime the well-off! Therefore, in this essay using deductive reasoning, going from the general to the particular, the line of reasoning will proceed from the very moneyed and then work down, and further, demonstrate that those rolling in it have even distorted those underprivileged below them. I have in mind to make the comfortable look incredibly dim-witted—even wicked, even unwell. It will be easy for you to figure out what I think. And I will bet there are billions in this world now cheering me on!
There are four considerations one should be aware of in the exploration of the topic at hand:
· The rich might be divided into two sweeping categories: those who have inherited their lucre; and, those who have generated (stolen!) it on their own. (These two categories will not be delved into to any great extent in this essay.)
· In this treatise we will deal with “the very rich” and not “the rich.” The Big Rich. Not The Little Rich. I have known personally, even intimately, some fabulously rich individuals—some of them recognized all over the world for their material goods. In Venezuela, I was in the thick of the economic and political corruption, but in Italy I am away from Rome and out of the center of Italy’s self-defeating political “naughtinesses.” Only once did I befriend, in Florence, an Italian political person later to be transferred to Rome to serve as a director of the Italian secret service! Nevertheless, in Tuscany, the headquarters of the world’s first bank, I have encountered many silly Little Rich characters ever on the hunt to be better off and still better off.
· I am not Big Rich or Little Rich. I pride myself in that and consider it an attestation to my intelligence that I am not. I have about €7000 in an Italian bank (I hope!), and I do not possess health insurance or a pension. Nonetheless, I am terribly curious to know that if I were Big Rich, even Little Rich, would I be as stupid as the moneyed “stupids” I have been on familiar terms with…. (Maybe I should sell THE RICH ARE STUPID! T-shirts and become a multi-millionaire!)
· I am a legal citizen of the DisUnited States of America even though I renounced my citizenship and prefer not to return ever again to my birthplace. Wherever I have resided outside the DUS (principally in Venezuela and Italy), I have been considered an ”American.” And that means I have been frequently taken, automatically, for being abounding. A burden I have had to support for decades. The fact that I was a first lieutenant in the DUS Army and am a Vietnam “War” veteran, it is assumed by most people that I possess some kind of stipend for life designated for my DUS military service. I do not.
I would like now, to get started, to refer to John Ruskin and his lecture, The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy, delivered at Tunbridge Wells, England, 16 February 1858. JR is known for his defence of individual artistic freedom, and his disgust for the mass-production of art as it was cloned vulgarly all through the Victorian era. He was a stern, extremely moralistic individual, and a brief sampling of his thoughts will now give you an inkling into his meditative processes:
“You must either make a tool of the creature,
or a man of him. You cannot make both…
A happy nation may be defined as one in which
the husband’s hand is on the plough, and the
housewife’s on the needle…
We look with so much indifference upon dishonesty
and cruelty in the pursuit of wealth…
The definite result of all our modern haste to be
rich is assuredly, and constantly, the murder of
a certain number of persons by our hands every year.”
JR lived in another period marked by a distinctive character or reckoned from a fixed point or event. His “first principles” are not those which we adhere to in our own epoch. They belong to a particular set of circumstances just as, for example, Iosif Stalin’s coined first principle about his time declared that “one man’s death is a tragedy, but the death of a million people is history”—a maxim which fit the ethical destitution of his era. Another case in point is Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought-up first principle: “Hell is other people.” J-PS also suffered that horrible stage in the world’s expansion.
There is no way JR could have envisaged, for 2009, that the planet’s population would be coming within reach of 7,000,000,000 people. Just too many ploughs and needles. Today it is astonishing for us to connect JR’s parochial vision of his life with our own. And if we recognize his convictions for what they really are, we are further staggered by the fact that in 1860 there were no more than an estimated 1,300,000,000 individuals living on his orb. JR’s generation was not as complex as ours. Ruskin would be stymied if he could witness how we have survived—for almost 150 years after—with so many people inhabiting the Earth and in such close electronic and physical acquaintance.
Apart from JR’s fanatical religious pretentiousness, we find in him certain confidences which abide even today in our own inner selves. JR is a meat and potatoes fellow. He does not mix his Scotch with water, seltzer, milk or even iced cubes. He shaves with cold water. He takes the bus. If he smokes, he snaps off the filters of his cigarettes. Puts half a teaspoon of sugar in his tea or coffee. Walks a lot. Never puts whipped cream on his strawberries. Turns off the water when he cleans his teeth. Returns his metal coat-hangers to the dry cleaners. Breaks down his packing materials before he places them in rubbish bins. In short, JR is a minimalist. He is seeking to preserve what he possesses. He is not possessed to consume. He does not wish to waste. His feet are on the ground. Ours are not. For these qualities we may admire JR’s enthusiasms.
The first broadside I long to pile into The Big Rich, more than anyone else, is their propensity to accumulate useless items, lots of them, and waste the natural resources we might think, in a civilized society, pertain to all of mankind and not just a finicky cream of the crop. Whether it be land, water, petroleum, electricity, food, precious jewels, et alia, the well-to-do ones are quick to hoard their supplies of these reserves forever in excess of what more often than not a normal individual would require and/or acquire, and they do so outrageously without worry for the requirements of others whether they be deprived or not. They dig extra wells on their land fearful of drought. They illegally hide away currency in foreign banks “just in case.” They give their wives and lovers expensive diamonds and gold “just in case.” They buy three or four cars “just in case.” Everything in glut. Just in case. Sustine et abstine are negative concepts for these pathetic characters. I do not know of any other group that lacks so much conviction in the method that has offered them so much turnover! They advance no loyalty to the money-spinning arrangement that tenders them their cornucopia of material benefits! Confidence is more precious than gold say the Chinese. And even donkeys know they cannot chew on bullion. But not The Big Rich and their confreres, The Little Rich, who often go very far out of their ways to ape The Big Rich. Monkeys see, monkeys do! The Big Rich, The Little Rich and those who emulate them are “running against the walls of their cages,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say!
I would think, my dear reader, that “…the murder of a certain number of persons by our hands every year” is still ringing in your head! And it is accurate to agree with that reflection. I could write a book on the injustices that I have caught sight of and which have caused the death—both physical and emotional—of untold unfortunate individuals slaving for the dog-eat-dog economic hierarchy set so overenthusiastically in place in the DUS, Vietnam, Venezuela and Italy—locations I have frequented. I ask myself: What is the purpose of this master-slave routine, this “delicately-distributed suffering” ( JR ) that nowadays is sugar-coated with perks, bonuses, and tie-less Fridays…all cheap gimmicks to keep workers hanging on until the next slowdown, the next massacre of layoffs? Were all of these “scallywags,” these made-redundant-ones under some supernatural illusion when they threw their lives at their corporation’s buoyant promise of an eternity of sustaining profit?
It would not take Charles Dickens very long today to cut through the bogus mesmerising that innocent victims have had to endure especially during, at least, the last fifty years. Only a simpleton—Winston Churchill was not an imbecile, he just might have been drunk or his brain fogged up with Cuban cigar smoke—would have the pluck to unabashedly pronounce that the lesser of two evils we are welded with, Judeo-Christian Democratic Capitalism, is the best at our disposal!
Look at The Big Rich and The Little Rich quoting outrageous minds such as Milton Friedman and the “old” Jeffrey Sachs! They parrot these money-making lords of a funny money plumbing industry, and under their armpits, they carry the notebooks and case histories of University of Chicago and Harvard Business School’s sacred, doctrinaire tenets which have caused more havoc the past century than any other time in the history of this “better than nothing” fraud, this Tyranny of a Minority which benefits the few at the expense of the majority. Are people ever going to wake up and trade in their illusions for some hard facts? Are people ever going to become gutsy? Are people ever going to stand up for their privileges? Why are we feigning to be content with a technique that causes so many so much injustice? Indeed, we are a strange lot!
Oh, I must be crazy! Out of my mind. Rich? How could I have used that word? There are no rich in this world! I swear to it now that I have lost my insanity. I have never known one person who ever called himself or herself rich. They will tell you that what they are worth is only paper! Yes, cash, stocks, bonds, savings accounts and treasury notes! All sheets of nothing! I knew one multi-millionaire who told me he had to borrow $100 from his wife one morning to buy his lunch! Get it? They are just like you and me! They have no money. Just paper. And who is going to buy the titles (paper!) to the lands they own if an economic downturn forces them to become like the rest of us—unfortunate?
I should have qualified more before my definition of The Big Rich. Please excuse me? The Big Rich have armed bodyguards and bullet-proofed and armoured limousines to chauffeur them around. Can you think of anything more repugnant than that? They do not even have the courage to walk alone on a crowded street. Their yachts are manoeuvred and serviced by people they wish they can trust and who are usually lousy cooks. Their airplanes are piloted by who knows who, and when they embark to fly off to some business meeting or rendezvous, they hope the navigator is not drunk or high on cocaine. Their bodyguards usually have not even finished high school, and being thick as mud, they wonder if they will be quick enough to be at the ready to protect their precious assignments. And maids and butlers? You should hear them talk about those humble souls! Behind their backs, they gossip about them as if they were some inferior race. And, woe to him or her who forgot to shine His or Her Majesty’s shoes properly, or missed dusting the bedroom lamp table, or, worse, was late delivering their breakfasts in bed! Life imprisonment!
There is one thing good I can say about the affluent. They change their clothes abnormally, and because the have money to buy expensive perfumes and colognes, they usually smell nice!
Authored by Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38 50041 CALENZANO FI Italia
5 January 2009
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Authored by Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38 50041 CALENZANO FI Italia
5 January 2009
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