Billionaires vs. Bastille Day: Discuss
If you have a billion dollars there are billions of reasons to want you dead. So why is the current crop of oligarchs, in light of the possibility of rollings tumbrels, so bad at being billionaires?
The gas sloshed around the innards of the gas can, even if calling it a gas can was a stretch. It was a gallon jug requisitioned from the same gas station where I got the gas, and I strapped it to the back of my motorcycle and made my way back to whence I had come.
The occasion, and explanation of the whence I had arrived from, you’ll be spared, but it had everything to do with an errant and borrowed amount of $300. I had already asked to be let in. And was denied. I had been promised the money. And was subsequently denied. So the way forward was clear.
“I don’t think you’re being reasonable,” he was now trying to reason from behind a wrought iron security screen door.
Unscrewing the cap on the gallon jug I started summarily sloshing its innards against the aforementioned screen door. Against the wall around the door. And finally, as much as would be allowed, under the door.
“It’s just $300 man,” he yelped now, very possibly, given that there was no exit outside of the one that I had just gasolined, in the grips of some sort of real panic.
The “they” in question were presumably Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Bill Clinton and the party facilitator Jobs, herself. Bonafide billionaires playing for stakes that can only be guessed at.
“You will pay me what you owe me. OR I will pay you what you owe me.” I moved back to my bike, fished out a cigarette lighter from my bag and walked back to his door front just in time to see wrinkled bills being pushed under the door and through the pooling gas.
“This is fucked, man,” he said, keening from the shadow of his death trap. “I can’t do business like this with you anymore.”
“It’s not business if you don’t pay me as part of our business arrangement,” I said while pocketing the bills. I guess this is what that ex of mine meant when she called me “crazy” but in reality this was just what underlay the real face of commerce in America I thought. Money changes how you understand the law.
“They were playing poker at her house!” My erstwhile boss, the now-convicted fraudster Carlos Watson was talking about our company’s former investor Laurene Powell Jobs. Widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The “they” in question were presumably Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Bill Clinton and the party facilitator Jobs, herself. Bonafide billionaires playing for stakes that can only be guessed at.
The image, designed to impress I’d guess, chilled me to the bone instead. There were enough billions at that kitchen table that if it wasn’t clear, it should have been, that we had gone straight through the fucking looking glass.
Do you have to even spend a minute doing the dull and commonplace with that kind of economic heft in not just your back pocket but all of your pockets? Wouldn’t you even for a minute start to think that the “old” laws didn’t really apply to you? Maybe so much so that repeated visits to the Isle of Pedophilia seems like it weren’t no thang?
And even that, laden as it is with all kinds of moral turpitude, doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that the vast majority of us, heretofore known as “the fucked” are done so without the kind of recompense that was almost normal in the grander generation that first saw people able to singularly amass huge fortunes of unbelievable cash.
Peter Thiel. Elon Musk. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos…An enduring record of shit laid out by shitty people for the shittiest of reasons with no ready sign of ever letting up.
Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Mellon. John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty. Noted antisemite Henry Ford. Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon, Rockefeller Center, the Getty Museum, the Ford Foundation. While not philanthropy’s holy writ, comes pretty damn close. Much more than close it clowns in total the contributions of our present day plutocrats.
Peter Thiel. Elon Musk. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos.
Thiel no longer believes that, as he explained in a 2009 essay, “freedom and democracy are compatible” and has done everything since then to fashion a “new” type of “freedom.” He is also making plans to live forever.
Musk? His constant and continual douchitude is the stuff that legend is made of.
Gates? Has he stopped malaria yet? Or just underage sex workers?
And Bezos, hedging his bets in light of election outcomes, has lost more than 10 percent of the staff of the newspaper that he bought, because of his refusal to endorse Kamala Harris, as his staff wanted, for president. Well, that and an anti-labor stance that guarantees that I can get low-priced lawn furniture whenever I want as soon as humanly possible.
An enduring record of shit laid out by shitty people for the shittiest of reasons with no ready sign of ever letting up. This despite the fact that at least some of their ex-wives — Melinda Gates, Bezos’ MacKenzie Scott — are giving away hundreds of millions as counterweights to their ex’s overall and general poopiness.
And let’s not get confused and start to think that there’s a gender divide here. Trump supporting Gina Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate is as shitty as they come, having suggested as she has, that we sterilize the poor via the water supply, and despite having made almost $38 billion last year uses a minuscule portion of that to “help” swim teams.
It’s not so much the intense greed that gets me, you see, it’s the stunning lack of imagination that underlies it. With more money than G-d at your ready disposal this is the best you can do? Is it any wonder, as I do every day, that the tumbrels haven’t started rolling.
But maybe it’s just that we’re bought off too easily. And when I say “we” I really mean “we”. My lasting memories of Laurene Powell Jobs have everything to do with the ice cream sandwiches she once bought me (along with the entire staff). I hate to say this but they were absolutely wonderful. Fit for royalty. Which I guess she is.
So, in a Freudian sense, while an ice cream sandwich for her is just an ice cream sandwich, for me it was a life-defining moment. And it was just a fucking ice cream sandwich. The memory of which softened me enough that when I took my youngest daughter trick or treating this past week and we strolled by her tony Palo Alto house tumbrels were really the last thing I was thinking of.
The first? “Man…I wish I had another one of those ice cream sandwiches.”
G-ddamn it. I’m both cheap and easy. And for this I am well ashamed. But…you know…it really was a great sandwich. Probably the best money could buy. And I got my hands on it with nary a gas can in sight.,
“What’s with you and all the Damage Girls?” Steve Von Till asked me one night when I told him that Jarboe would be singing on An Evil Heat. “They’re the only ones I can even SEE,” I told him and so it is and remains.
Get your tickets now. And don’t say you weren’t warned.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
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And FINALLY the new BUNUEL is creeping out….be about it. ON SALE DATE, for digital, is OCTOBER 25, 2024. For three-sided double album, CD or cassette, ON SALE DATE is now November 22, 2024.
And here? Here’s the THIRD, and NEWEST, single…
Was this the same guy that owed you money for Oxbow records you fronted him or another guy? You talked about that on Knuckle Up and said you used the big fireplace matches so the gas fumes didn’t explode. I remember because I thought it was a reasonable response as well as finding it absolutely hilarious.