Friday, March 8, 2024

 

Role Play

Credit: Commons Wikimedia.org Filming of Top Gun Movie 1985

I laid still on a cheap, hard mattress while cameras, microphone booms, and the studio’s crew and a few investors swarmed the room.

“Just play dead,” Al Brenson, the director instructed.

Anyone who has ever tried to play dead with the buzz of fourteen people around your allegedly dead, dying body knows the iron willpower required. The slightest tic can ruin the shot. Even breathing must be controlled so that it is undetectable on screen.

“Quiet. Shooting,” someone shouted, and the room fell silent.

“Action!”

Deborah Cheznik, the love interest, cried real tears over me. I kept my face slack, inert- a feature augmented by the makeup department.

This was the third time we’ve shot this scene. The first was scrapped for the flutter of an eyelid. The second was when the sound team picked up a suppressed cough.

“Think dead,” Al said as the clapboard came down.

Acting has been good to me. I’m no matinee idol, but the work in bit parts and secondary characters keeps me in food and rent and a few guilty pleasures. I know how to prepare for a role, and moviemakers love me for it.

Early in my career, it took me a full day or more to get into character. Now, I can do it in the time it takes to sit quietly for a moment to think about my connection to the character.

I saw myself in a vast black nothingness. No, not nothing; my mind still occupied the emptiness. I suppressed all bodily sensations, but my thoughts were still there. I silenced the voice in my head, a talent I developed from years of yoga meditation. A low hum filled my space, not a sound but a feeling in the gut. I floated in the infinite nothing, wondering if my awareness of my situation would continue to exist in the passing of my awareness. Can nothing exist? If it can, then isn’t it something?

Ms. Cheznik wailed at the injustice of my untimely death. The camera lowered to hold my still profile in the scene between her and the camera. It takes tremendous discipline to still the mind and body in a long camera shoot like that.

“Cut!”

Life returned to the room. Everyone congratulated Deborah on her heartfelt performance of grief over my death. I stood and offered my hand and my congratulations.

“That’s a wrap,” Al said. Just in time. Another studio on the lot is auditioning with script reading for the role of a psychopathic killer.

“Please take a seat and fill out this form,” the receptionist at Studio D said.

I completed the form and waited.

Psychopathic killer. Get into the role, Sam. What’s your connection?

Oh, this is an easy one.

I remembered the evening I rode my bicycle with my beloved dog Ernie running along behind me. His short legs beat a staccato rhyme, his slipstream pinned his ears back He ran with joyous abandon. Our bicycle time was his favorite part of the day.

Anyone who has loved and been loved by a dog can understand the relationship between me and Ernie. We watched TV together and slept together with his head resting on my arm. His buggy eyes looked at me, and took me in, with uncompromising adoration. Ernie was my connection to a life beyond the boredom of bachelorhood. Every moment with him was a moment lived.

A vehicle came up behind us, headlights illuminated the road ahead of me. I signaled for Ernie to get over to the sidewalk. The headlights swerved to my right. I knew in an instant what was happening. The son of a bitch was running down my dog. I heard the “thunk” of impact. Headlights swung back onto the road and a white van drove past me. I got a few digits of the license plate and rushed back to find Ernie huffing in short panting breaths, his bug eyes pleaded with me to answer: Why? He had the look of finality. He knew what was happening to him, and the expression he showed to me was forgiveness.

I don’t blame you, it said.

Rage swept over me. I ranted against the evil that haunts this world. I cursed the God who would permit his kind of barbarous cruelty in His creation. I wrapped Ernie in my windbreaker and took him home to bury him in an unmarked grave in the backyard of my rented house. I knew that someday I would leave this house and leave Ernie in the ground there. I wept over that.

It took three years to track down Ernie’s killers from those scraps of license plate digits — I learned there were two men in the van that evening. They were returning from a freelance painting job and were angry that the client was not happy with the job, though he paid for it, anyway. They took their anger out on Ernie.

I acquired some illegal weaponry, a ski mask, and gloves, and found the accomplice at a run-down rental house in my neighborhood. I silently thanked him for making it easy for me.

Three days passed before the opportunity presented itself. He wheeled trash cans into the alley where I waited. I stepped out of the shrubbery and pointed the gun with its deadly-looking silencer at his midsection.

“What the fuck,” he said.

“You don’t know me. I’m the guy on the bicycle when you and your low-life buddy killed my dog.” I didn’t wait for an answer. I shot out his kneecaps. Both of them. I crammed a filthy rag in his mouth and explained in detail what was going to happen to him. “You’re going to die here, tonight,” I said. “But first, I want to see you suffer.”

And suffer he did.

The driver took even more patience to isolate. His house was a party center. Every night a group of men gathered there with the occasional girlfriend, wife, or prostitute in attendance. Every night, beer and whiskey bottles and the refuse of drug use accumulated in his overflowing trash cans. Weeks passed.

Finally, one day in the early spring, he cleaned up the mess in his backyard in preparation for a weekend party. A banged-up barbeque grill and beer coolers came out of the garage. He threw a tarp over a picnic table and mowed the lawn. I watched from the cover of shrubbery in the alley.

When he took the trash cans to the alley, I stuffed his body parts in them and went home to bury the gun, silencer, mask, and machete next to Ernie’s grave.

The receptionist entered the waiting room.

“Mr. Reynolds will now see all of you who are waiting to read for movie parts,” she said.

Psycho killer? Yeah, I was made for this part.

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Wednesday, February 14, 2024

A Righteous Man

 

Photo by john crozier on Unsplash


Mary Koch studied the pregnancy test strip for the long minute that it took to process its consequences.

Pregnant. But how?

This was the third time. The first had given birth to Marla, her four-year-old daughter. The second one ended with an abortion.

Why aren’t the God damned pills working? She wondered.

She sunk into a depression. She would have to travel to New Mexico for an abortion that she could not afford. Trying to raise another child on the pay of a server in a bowling alley cocktail lounge was not an option.

She took a mental inventory: time off work, travel, the gynecologist’s fee. The cost was overwhelming. Her depression deepened.

During her second pregnancy, she had complained to the pharmacist who sold her birth control pills. The pharmacist assured her that the Food and Drug Administration evaluated and certified the pill under conditions required by the US government.

“Some women have a genetic resistance to the drug’s ingredients, but if you feel something is wrong with the pills, here are some people you can contact about the problem,” he said.

He handed to her brochures from the US Food and Drug Administration and the Pharmaceutical company. Both said the same thing: her complaint about the effectiveness of the pill was one of the pill’s failures against millions of successes. Sorry.

She turned to one of the Highway Bowl Lounge’s regular customers. Leon Marshall was known as a streetwise homeboy with a hand in everything from drugs to gambling to the sale of illicit firearms. Leon gave her a number for a back-street midwife who performed illegal abortions in one of the fiercest anti-abortion states in the country. Mary borrowed money from Robert, the bar manager, and met the midwife, who three days later performed the procedure in Mary’s apartment.

Minor complications set in — bleeding and a low-level infection. She missed days off work. Leon gave her a loan to help her get through the ordeal, and she was soon back to work and able to pay Leon, then Marla’s babysitter, then Robert, the bar manager. Leo first because of his reputation as an underworld figure.

An investigation into the midwife’s activities had turned up a list of women she had served. The state rounded up and jailed all of them pending trial.

People from the state’s attorney general entered the cocktail lounge, put Mary in handcuffs, and took her to the county jail.

Mary had no money for bail. A state judge found her guilty of securing an abortion in defiance of state law and with the aid of an unlicensed midwife. The court turned her daughter over to state custody and Mary went to prison in a remote part of the state, where she committed suicide by sawing through a vein in her wrist with a plastic butter knife.

Evan Leland, the pharmacist, read about the event in the Morning News and for a moment felt pity for the poor woman. He took no pleasure in knowing she was in hell, though he knew his role in the affair guaranteed his place in heaven.

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Thursday, February 1, 2024

Soft Hands

 

Photo by Redicul Pict on Unsplash

Trinh Hua was an elderly and frail Vietnamese woman from a village north of Saigon. She wore a nón lá, a conical straw hat, to protect her from the fierce Texas sun and a Mao-style jacket to warm her in the winter. She longed for her home country. She wanted to be buried there, in the land of her husband and son, but her doctor had forbidden her to travel. To return to her village would mean thirteen hours of blood-clotting time in the air, and more hours of bouncing her frail body over rutted roads. She will die, sadly, in her adopted country. She did not want to be buried here in this dry dusty soil, but in the damp earth of home.

Each day, she walked to her job as cook in a Vietnamese restaurant a mile distant from what she called her “little American House” deep in a Dallas barrio. On arriving home on a hot August day, she saw a burly man pace the sidewalk in front of her home. He scowled at her as she approached him. He had a two-day beard and wore a baseball hat and a t-shirt that displayed a Military-style rifle over an American flag. When she came abreast of him, he glared at her.

“Asian bitch,” he said.

The remark stunned her. What did he say? She looked at him in expectation of an elaboration on the comment that would reveal her ancient ears had misheard him. As she met his eyes the world exploded in a sea of flashing lights. Pain exploded from a punch to her face that broke teeth. She fell onto the hot sidewalk. The man knelt over her. He hit her again. Again. And again. He kicked her, breaking a couple of ribs. Then he walked away.

The brain could not handle the agonizing pain. She passed out.

Roberto Salazar stepped out onto his porch to retrieve the daily mail. Glancing up the street he saw a woman lying on the sidewalk and a man with a thick middle and a baseball hat walk briskly away. Roberto stepped down to ground level and rushed to the street.

“Hey!” he called to the retreating figure.

The man ignored him, got into a car at the end of the block and sped away. Roberto called the police. An ambulance arrived a few minutes after the arrival of four police squad cars. A young officer questioned Roberto and the occupants of houses on both sides of the street. Only Roberto had seen any of the event. The Texas heat had driven the street’s residents into the depths of their homes. The ambulance sped away. The young officer passed out calling cards to nearby residents. “Call this number if you think of anything you might have seen or heard,” he said, repeating the line like a mantra.at each doorway.

Then, the police departed, leaving nothing but blood stains on the sidewalk to tell the story of Trinh Hua’s ordeal.

Trinh Hua fled her village more than half-a-century earlier, after the Americans had destroyed it with their helicopters and artillery and the villagers lived among the crumbling walls of their homes, sleeping under tarps and cooking over open fires. When the Yankees left, the Viet Cong came in to kill those who had cooperated with the Americans. Her husband was implicated in an anti-Communist plot by a jealous neighbor and taken away. Trinh did not hear from him again.

With her only son, she escaped to Saigon and the protection of the Americans. That protection did not last, though. The Americans left and the army of the north swept into the city with their automatic weapons and their political officers to interrogate the inhabitants for confessions of anti-socialist behavior. A military officer rounded up a group of men and paraded them to a square, where she was forced to watch as her beautiful son was pressed down to his knees and was sent to his death by a bullet behind his ear for no better reason than that he wore glasses and had soft hands.

“There is no room,” the officer said, “in the new Vietnam for intellectual parasites. Labor will be honored. Those who do not labor will die.” Her son collapsed to the ground as the sound of the shot reached her. She wailed, broken by the brutality of it as he fell.

After the murders of her family, she gave all the money she had and all she could borrow to a smuggler and escaped in a leaky boat, sailing across a vast ocean, unlikely to survive, to America. She learned the strange language spoken in her adopted country. She adapted to her new homeland, living at the edge of a Mexican barrio in the Southwest, and grew old there. The government in Vietnam loosened its authoritarian hold on its people, but Trinh did not trust them. She remained in the barrio, among alien people who spoke an alien language. She did not like the dry heat, the traffic, the Yankees with their fine clothes and their big cars, and the haste of life in their sprawling cities, but there was freedom there in the barrio.

Roberto visited Trinh at the hospital whenever he could take the time. “The poor woman has no one,” he said to his wife when she complained about his time away from home. “I hope that, if some gringo thug attacks any one of the lonely abuelas on our street, someone will show her care.” He paused. “Would you want to know la anciana lies in her hospital bed with no visitor, no one to care?”

“All right,” she said. “Go care for her, but don’t stay long. The gringo that tried to kill her might have a similar opinion about Latina women whose husbands are away.”

On her release from the sprawling medical complex nearby, Roberto drove her to her “little American house.” Scarred, limping, and short of breath, she called her employer to report that she had chosen to retire. The beating, the pain, and the long recuperation had made her fearful of the streets, of strangers, and above all, cowardly men who beat old women for no better reason than that they looked “different.”

Following her return home, Roberto drove her to her medical appointments and to buy groceries and pharmaceuticals. He walked down the street, past the blood-stained sidewalk, to visit her once or twice weekly to look in on her and let her know someone cared. Latinos, even those who have adapted to the customs of another land, honor their abuelas — their grandmothers. He sometimes takes spicy quesadillas or menudo to her. She laughs at the richness of it and offers a dish of Pho to him.

When he leaves at the end of the day, Trinh stands in the front yard of her house to admire her little American home, for just a moment. “Home is not in the land that abandons you, but in the one that shelters you,” she says to her long-dead husband and son. Then, she goes inside, into the cool air, and locks the door behind her.

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Saturday, November 25, 2023

Illiteracy in the Marble Halls

 


Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” ― Eugene Victor Debs

 

In defiance of the U.S. Constitution, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Lauren Boebert, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano[1], and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have declared their support for a state religion based on Christian nationalist and Christian dominion dogma[2].

The First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Read that first part again. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

Lauren Boebert, among others of the far-right authoritarian political spectrum didn’t read that part. I can only wonder if they have read the rest of the Constitution.

In a Sunday, June 28th, 2023, speech at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., Lauren Boebert argued, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church,” Boebert told the crowd, which applauded. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia hard-liner, adding her support to the idea of a Christian Nationalist government declared: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.”

Reflecting the views of Boebert’s and Green’s soulmate Michele Bachmann who once said, “If you want take away my religious liberties,” she once said in a radio interview with Lars Larson, “you can advocate for that but you do it through the constitutional process and you don’t intimidate and no politician should give away my religious liberties or yours.” Somehow, in that muddled brain, she equated the call for gay rights as a move to take away her religious rights, and then assures us that her religious rights are ensconced in the Constitution; that human rights are a violation of her interpretation of the Constitution. Can she perceive why the term “batshittery” was invented to describe her incoherent ramblings?

The more conservative elements within the Christian religion have translated Bible verses in any manner that they feel promotes their views. It doesn’t matter what the scripture in question says, it only matters how it can be twisted, spun, bent, and mangled. That same thinking drives those Christians into reinterpreting the Constitution, our history, the words of the Founders, and the pronouncements of political figures. Anything can mean anything to the semi-literate.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, among a legion of others — thrive on fear and hate, the two-sided coin that drives the reactionary right.

A wise man once told me, “Do not ever- ever — make a crucial decision when you are in the throes of fear or hate. Nothing good can come of it. Wait until your senses return, and then decide.”

It’s unfortunate for our country that many of our politicians have not had a wise man or woman in their lives.

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[1] Mastriano came to national prominence by leading protests against COVID protocols, and became one of the leading voices in attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He literally brought bus-loads of supporters to the Jan. 6 insurrection and appeared to cross police barricades during the riot. He has spread Islamophobic conspiracy theories and tweeted out QAnon content. He pals around with white militias and prays to God to protect Confederate monuments. He once said women who have abortions should be charged with murder.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/doug-mastriano-christian-nationalism-dominionism-nar.html


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Monday, November 13, 2023

Dress Code

 

Photo by Elin Tabitha on Unsplash

 

I wasn’t expecting entertainment with my burger, but an argument at the next table left me with a sense of hope for American humanity that the hamburgers do not provide. A couple began a conversation in which the man offered a scathing comment on women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and on the requirement in Afghanistan that women wear the mobile tent known as the burqa.

“Forget the Burqa, Chris. To hell with women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and Iran.” The woman said. “The way you think of women rights here in your own country is a difference only of degree. You are little different than some insane imam in some backwater fundamentalist country. We send our military to Afghanistan to fight against Islamic Terrorism and the Islamic need to force their beliefs on others, while we Christians do the same thing in our own country.”

“Debra, I can give you a dozen reasons just off the top of my head for keeping our military in those so-called ‘backwaters,” Chris said. “January sixth was a wake-up call. We can fight terrorism on their turf, or on ours. I prefer to see them on the defensive. We must give the women of Islam the rights due any human.”

Debra was an attractive blond that commanded my attention when I entered the restaurant. She, and Chris were dressed in business attire, and what man doesn’t love a woman in a pencil skirt?

“We, and they, use any opportunity- all opportunities- to keep women subservient, docile, and submissive,” Debra said. “There is a pill called Plan B that takes care of unwanted pregnancy. Do you know what the major objections to the pill in this country were before its FDA approval?”

“It’s abortion and it’s pro-choice, both currently out of favor among the misogynist element, which seems to mean a LOT of our politicians.”

“That, too, but I was thinking in terms of the pill’s history. Before it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the largest body of complaints received by the FDA was that the availability of the drug would promote promiscuity. The self-righteous are not concerned about the health and welfare of women who use the pill, of its side effects, or even of moral issues surrounding abortion and pregnancy prevention. No, the freaks are concerned about behavior. A woman who can make decisions about pregnancy without a man is out of the man’s control, and that cannot be tolerated in this culture.”

“You’re out of touch,” Chris answered. “We’re trying to advance women’s rights, not deny them.”

“If this were a culture promoting women’s rights, the term ‘glass ceiling’ would be a quaint, archaic idea that passed through the culture for a week and was then forgotten. That phrase was coined in 1978 and it is still relevant almost half-a century later. Your alleged desire to advance women’s rights seems to be a tedious process. For all the lip service you pay, you are nevertheless threatened by assertive and independent women. All the holier-than-thou religious jargon you wrap around the abortion issue is nothing more than your constant reminder to women that if you can’t control your women, your society and your laws can. It always comes back to control.”

Debra glared at her partner, who sat in apparent stunned silence. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. She picked up her purse, laid some currency on the table, and walked out. Chris followed her.

I enjoyed a brief fantasy involving Debra in that form-fitting skirt: together, we fought for bodily autonomy and destroyed the glass ceiling. She was my romantic partner and my crusading associate. I imagined our sex life and our shared experiences. I pictured her in jeans, shorts, and negligee. I saw us dining at our intimate, candle-lit table.

And the fantasy crashed. With my luck, she can’t cook.

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Monday, August 14, 2023

Celebrating Slaughter

 


Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/docmonstereyes/
Photo originally posted at https://www.flickr.com/photos/72538882@N00/5507547759
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AR-15_Build_IMG_9439_(5507547759).jpg

Facebook, Twitter (!?) and social media in general, do not offer a forum for robust debate on contentious subjects, making it necessary to keep discussions focused narrowly on select topics. Nowhere is that more evident than in arguments over “Gun Rights” vs. “Gun Control.” In those discussions, pro-gun advocates (and gun control people) have learned to derail arguments with questions and statements unrelated to the opening argument or comment. In a recent example, a statement saying that states with strict gun laws experience more gun violence was met with acounterclaim: immediately, a response claimed that the counterclaim did not explain Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit.

Notice that the response did not affirm nor deny the accuracy of the comment that a correlation exists between looser gun laws and higher gun violence, but instead chose to change and expand the subject by bringing in an exception to the rule, by raising questions of gun trafficking and gang violence, and thereby increasing the complexity of the discussion and veering it away from a debunked comment while simultaneously forcing that complexity into the narrow confines of social media.

We see the same tactics used by Congress, such as the July 2022 response to the Uvalde, Texas massacre: Missouri Representative Billy Long blamed the mass murders of school children on Roe v. Wade- a non-sequitur. Abortion and the slaughter of children in schoolrooms are two entirely different topics, necessarily addressed by different laws and social standards. One addresses bodily autonomy and religion, the other concerns the protection of viable life.

Again, in June 2022 a Fox News host Jesse Waters blamed the Buffalo NY slaughter at a supermarket on the wearing of medical face masks. Really, Jesse? Ten blacks murdered by a white supremacist and you want me to believe he did it because he wore a mask? How do these circus performers and carnival barkers get voted into high office and well-paid roles as journalists?

Remember when the title, “World’s Dumbest Congressperson” passed from Louie Gohmert to conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene when, in May 2028 and prior to her election a Georgia’s representative, she claimed the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was actually a “false flag” planned event?

And then there is the propaganda device known as The Big Lie. Texas Senator John Cornyn got educated by California Governor Gavin Newsom when Cornyn claimed that California gun laws do not stop gun crimes, Newsom offered statistics showing that Cornyn’s Texas had a higher rate of gun offences than California. Why don’t our government officials check the facts before they make their fallacious claims? Could it be because we are led by dim-witted anti-intellectualists?

Gun control advocates sometimes use the same tactic, but from my experience, generally when they show a lack of firm grasp of the facts.

In early February 2023, members of Congress began celebrating mass shootings by wearing AR-15 pins, further encouraging strident militia types and wannabees to engage in Gish galloping non-sequiturs against those who seek a solution to the slaughter.

Could it be that those who seek to distract and derail a debate are those that know they have lost the debate, but rather than withdraw, try to force the thread into an endless pursuit of ever-changing topics?

Give up? The answer is “Yes.”

Welcome to ‘Murika, y’all.”

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Thursday, August 3, 2023

Injustice Served

 


"There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain — do something to make more money yourself.”

“They say that if you give your children too much, they don’t get the joy out of work. They just want the unearned things to keep falling from the sky.” Gina Rinehart (BrainyQuotes.com)

(That, from a woman for whom $18 billion fell from the sky.) [1]

The world’s richest woman and the universe’s worst poet [2], Australian mining heiress Gina Rinehart, in 2012 told the Sydney Mining Club that Australian miners were “too expensive.” She thinks they should work for two dollars a day, like African workers. Notice that she wants to bring everyone’s wages down to those of African miners, and not to help elevate those African miners to the realm of her Australian workers. You might remember Ms. Rinehart from an earlier statement, in which she wrote, “If you’re jealous of those with more money… spend less time drinking or smoking and socializing and more time working.” Similar to her reluctance to assist in a more equal economy, she wants workers to spend more hours at their labors, thus increasing the profits of the parasitic Plunderbund.

She claims superpowers by pointing to her 24/7 work hours as an example for all of us. She calls upon us common folk to work hard, invest and reinvest our meager wages, to find our own way to pleonexia — the greed that knows no limits. The lady does not, however, explain how we are to save funds for that investment on the wages she would like the rich to pay. Neither does she enlighten us as to what we are to do about the loss of retirement and investment funds, by those of us who did work 24/7, to pay executive bonuses to people who drove their companies into near-bankruptcy and caused a worldwide recession.

I’ve seen a pattern in the attitudes among the uber-rich toward the working class: the more money they inherit, the more they claim to have made their fortunes through hard work. Isn’t it interesting that most of those who actually — you know — worked for their money share an empathy for the plight of the working class?

Of course, there exist parasites at both ends of the economic spectrum. I once provided an acquaintance with a key to my apartment and the use of my computer and printer to aid him in his job search. His unemployment compensation neared an end and he had fallen on his savings to survive. Food stamps and the kindness of friends and associates saved him from homelessness. He spent his time while I worked to print out Drudge Reports, listen to Rush Limbaugh rants, and write letters to the editor in which he lambasted liberals for their welfare mentality. The only evidence I saw of a job search lay in a stream of letters to his former employer, in which he pleaded for his old job. The very wealthy are not alone in their willingness to leech from those who provide them. But the very wealthy possess the resources to persuade millions of workers to invest in the fallacy of trickle-down economics with their labors and their votes.

A Facebook friend and fellow blogger writes that we should refrain from name-calling when we discuss the crimes of right-wing extremists and their effective propaganda machine, but I disagree. I only regret that the legions of lawyers available to the right-wing rich render me unable to call the greediest of them and the sheer stupidity of their ditto heads by appropriate names. That, and the fact that the English language does not provide words worthy of their lack of common morality.

Ethan Couch, a Tarrant County, Texas teen got drunk, killed four people in an auto accident and was sentenced to ten years of probation after the teen’s lawyers pleaded that his father’s wealth instilled in him a lack of personal responsibility and a psychological condition called “Affluenza.” [1] The boy will spend time in a $450,000 per year luxury rehabilitation center in Southern California. [2]

Shaun Goodman also got drunk and led police in a high-speed chase through the streets of Olympia, Washington. He wrecked his $70,000 Ferrari by smashing it into two cars and a house. Yes, a house. While he waited for the trial for his seventh DUI arrest, a judge signed an order permitting Goodman to attend the 2013 Super Bowl game in New York. He is now serving a one-year work-release sentence, leaving behind a simple and unanswered question: has justice been served? [3]

Those two cases might lead one to wonder whether we have a two-tiered justice system, or if an exchange of money in plain, brown envelopes might have aided the decisions. I am working hard to quiet the cynical voice that urges me to opine the latter.

While the American inheritance-class wealthy deny they are engaged in class warfare, Ms. Rinehart and her fellow plunderers encourage it [6]. They have the the power, but the working class the numbers. The Story is in how that balance affects the future

Citations:

[1] https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/18b-cash-pile-lets-rinehart-play-both-sides-of-energy-transition-20221205-p5c3tq
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-is-laughing-at-australias-richest-persons-ode-to-mining-2012-2
[3] https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/ethan-couch-affluenza-10-years-since-deadly-drunk-driving-crash/287-a8ea72a1-592e-49dd-a097-fd1bb80e237e
[4] https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-teen-drunk-driving-probation-affluenza-20131212-story.html
[5] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/man-arrested-on-suspicion-of-eighth-dui-after-seattle-hit-and-run/
[6] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-05/rinehart-says-aussie-workers-overpaid-unproductive/4243866

Suggested Reading:

Shipley, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Bregman, Rutger. Utopia for Realists. Back Bay Books, 2016.
Correspondents of the New York Times, Class Matters. Times Books, 2005.
Desmond, Matthew, Poverty By America. Crown, 2023

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