Dear Donald: Greed is Not Good
A whole bunch of the world seeped into my not-quite-so-hermitically sealed bubble today, even though I tried to keep it out. I saw that Trump is once again hawking hydroxychloroquine sulfate and buying up ventilators and PPE like it’s cool to hoard shit in a pandemic. Which, as my buddy Mudcat points out is probably because he’s got stock in the damn companies that produce the shit. I also saw that Cuomo is still trying to build the proper supplies from stone knives and bear skins, just to keep another few New Yorkers alive. And as I compare those two ways of being, I remember what damage one half of my generation did to the historical / ethical dialectic.
In America and around the world, there’s always been a tug-o-war between selfish assholes and decent human beings. There have always been neighbors who will look at a little bit of side meat in their pot, and look at your hungry kid, and the result will be that nobody goes to bed full, but nobody goes to bed empty either. And there have always been criminally amoral assholes who would kick over the stewpot so that they might sell their own patented shoe-leather to boil. It’s just the nature of things. And for most of human history, the good guys — at least at the local level — won in the end. Maybe the ladrones in masks and the gonefs in suits could hustle and steal in the halls of power, but down in the alleyways were we all live and struggle, that shit would be dealt with firmly and fast.
But my generation did something new. They fucked with that basic line of good behavior and shit behavior. As noted above, they scotched the historical dialectic battle, by introducing a wholly new concept — the notion that greed is good.
There had long been an idea that, yeah, maybe you get a little something for yourself by being good to your neighbor — because who knows when it’s going to be your kid that needs the neighbor’s help. That’s “enlightened self-interest,” and it’s not a bad way to parse the world if you’re still stuck in ethical middle school. But one half of my generation inverted the whole thing and started arguing that self-interest alone — just looking out for yourself — was the most efficient way to make the world a better place. Even if it did pretty obviously NOT do that.
It’s the whole Gordon Gekko nonsense that Oliver Stone displayed in Wall Street. And it’s what was taught in the Chicago School of Neoliberal Nonsense under Milton Friedman. And it is what Margaret Thatcher believed when she actually said that “there’s no such thing as society,” but rather that human beings were just resource processing machines that would magically fall into the best of all possible piles (with her on top, of course) by shiving the regulators, letting industry shit where you eat, and “shrinking government to the a size where you could drown it in the tub,” according to Republican Obergruppenführer Grover Norquist.
It is, at its root, Violent Self-Aggrandizement and Sociopathic Self-Interest as a Governing Philosophy. And it sees itself as the kindest, bestest, most promising way to promote harmony in the world. And it is insane.
More than that, it is disgusting. But that is it — the whole horrible thing — laid bare. And it is what every single one of those Republican motherfuckers actually believes. Rand Paul got a dose of this nonsense when he was taking Bong Hits at Baylor. Paul Ryan mainlined it in Minnesota, likely with a whole bunch of shame at how his family was on Social Security while the Reagan Revolution was pouring out that Mediocre Morningstar’s gashole. It’s what drove Coal Company Mitch into governance long before he sold his soul and his ass to Moscow. It is what Lindsey believes in almost as much as he believes in buggering children. It’s what gave Rush cancer. It is the rock upon which Mitt Romney built his real church — you know, the one that thinks it is actually GOOD to have a car elevator in your sixth house.
They have all convinced themselves not just that it is okay to out-hustle your neighbor in the quest for daily bread, but that it is GOOD to do that, as it will encourage the starving waifs to get up earlier tomorrow and find their own garbage cans to pick through. Hey, you’ve gotta start somewhere, and feeding those runny-nosed whelps will just encourage their Welfare Mamma’s to breed, anywho.
So . . . yeah . . . I’m not at all surprised that NONE of those catastrophes are calling out the President or his dimwit son-in-law for INTENTIONALLY creating chaos in the quest for life-saving medical supplies. All of them — ALLLLLLL OF THEM — on some level believe that it is the right thing to do. Hey, the market is the market is the market and smart money will move to the best opportunity for the realization of capital growth in a time of scarcity. Just like Money Jesus wanted.
So, before I push these assholes out of my mind again for the night, I just wanted to say — with ever single fiber of my being — FUCK YOU.
Fuck you for buying into such an obviously engarbaged philosophy. Fuck you for staying silent when tens of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are fighting for their lives. Fuck you for embracing these reprehensible, pig-moral, leprous postulates of ill-reason.
And STILL, when this chaos comes to your state in a few weeks, and YOUR parents are dying, I’ll argue not to punish them for your sins, but rather to share what little comfort we have before the long night comes to silence us all.
But you were counting on that, weren’t you? Weren’t you? Weren’t you?
Someday we’re all going to leave you behind. All of us. All of us who still care about our neighbors and who don’t believe that greed is good. We won’t leave you out of the food line, but we will toss you out of the halls of power and into the streets on your asses. And we will keep you from ever again having access to power over other people’s lives.
I just hope I live long enough to see it.
And if you want to prove me wrong, then right now is the perfect opportunity: Call out President Trump for making this calamity worse. Call him out for hoarding ventilators in a crisis. Call him out for running up the prices on drugs made by companies he likely invests in. Call out your colleagues Senator Richard Burr and Senator Kelly Loeffler for their insider trading horrorshows in this time of unspeakable darkness. Make clear that you’ll punish all Pandemic Profiteers, and that you see now that we’re all in this together.
Call them all out. Prove that you’re not a moral black hole.
.
.
.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Fuck you.
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And to the rest of you, I send love and hopefully a peaceful sleep after that purge of righteous anger. We ARE in this together, me and you. And You. And you. And you…..
Good night and love to you all.
