My woman turned to me tonight, rapt in attention in the horrid blue light of the screen, and told me the New York Times real estate section was making her feel jealous, alienated, alone, and worthless.
We were holed up in our apartment in the Catskills on another of those miserable spring-will-never-be-here nights of bitter March. Outside the waxing moon hung over our village like a scythe, and inside we were drinking bourbon and wine – never a good combination.
The article concerned one or another meritocrat couple, and how in the predicament of being well-dressed, hyper-educated, suburb-born, and money-making from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or the like, they agonized whether they should go for the two-bedroom bespoke apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for $2 million or the careworn but somehow chic four-bedroom $3.5 million half-brownstone in gentrifying Bed Stuy in Brooklyn.
In the latter case, they’d have to spend uncomfortable moments around the last of the n*****s in the hood. The New York Times writer, in not so many words, assured these undesirables would be driven out within the decade.
Oh, the sorrows, the suffering. It really is too much to bear.
My girlfriend is affected by this nonsense, and I understand why. See, the couple, corporate prostitutes both, were easy and unthinking, in their early thirties, same age as her, and she felt bad for not tracking the same course of taking a big corporate cock in her mouth. I suggested to her that there was a system in place for making her feel bad. It’s the vast and all-encompassing cultural system of invidious comparison, of envy-production, of causing mental pain and suffering purposely in a social order where we are supposed to feel low if we don’t have the right looks, clothes, cars, houses, zip codes, etc.
I told her that if anything turns out right in coming years those same ruling class gentry apartment hunters will have their heads chopped off, their bodies splayed on Broadway, ravens eating their eyeballs and genitalia, rats conniving for their Rolexes – for rats, like rich people, love shiny objects.
She told me I should stop drinking bourbon so late into the night and that she wanted nothing to do with me if I talked like that.
(Anyway it probably wouldn’t turn out so great if we killed the yupsters, because there will be replacements galore: see Trostky and Lenin et al., 1917 and thereafter: thugs, murderers, gangsters, liars, lovers of material wealth, all cheap-ass imitators of the bourgeoisie but psychopathic and armed.)
I think that in our time – in this generation – there’s almost zero chance of a genuinely just comeuppance for the rich. They own businesses, real property, the courts, the lawmakers. They run the system and the system runs them, mutually benefitting. What to do?
How to make it so that folks like my woman see not their own wretchedness in the mass display of affluence but instead say I want no more of this, you people are sick, and I’ve had enough?
I don’t know. The system of propaganda and effective mind control is terribly powerful. The screens, the mind pollutants, are everywhere. The advertising agencies know what matters, and what matters is to warp the eye and brain with an astonishing volume of lies. I’d say kill all the advertisers…but then, eternal sigh, replacements arrive, like mold spores, no helping it…and we’re back to square one, on a treadmill, and no hope.
A cabin of a friend was taken over by mold. The only thing to do, we concluded, was to burn it to the ground. He sold it instead to a yupster from Brooklyn who had money to throw away and thought it was a deal.
Right. Cue evil laughter. Mold sickens and ultimately kills yupster!
No. Here’s how the story really ends: yupster hires at great expense a mold remediation company, the spores are wiped out, house is refurbished, it’s now one of the loveliest properties in the village of H************, and the rich shithead now hosts parties of his/her/its fellow travelers from Brooklyn, who look upon the residents of the Catskills as servant classes – whose rents skyrocket as the influx of richesse artificially drives up the land values.
What do the servant classes do in response?
Do they erect guillotines for the bastards from Brooklyn?
Nope.
They do nothing. They serve.