SAVING PVT ENTERPRISE--ABOUT THE $2T INFUSION OF FED PLAY DOUGH

Remember Terry Southern's "The Magic Christian" and the misanthropic billionaire Guy Grand? Remember when he buys a vacant lot, fills it with manure, dumps tons of cash into it, then forces well-attired businessmen to wade through the shit to fetch what is otherwise free money? Terry Southern gave the most graphic and literal meaning to the phrase "filthy lucre" with that plot invention. Well, the magic Judeo-Christians of corporate America are at it again--only this time the free money has been "laundered" by your government. They have to pay a small price of $2 Trillion to jump-start consumption if they hope to avoid paying a far larger price.  

Don't cross your fingers. And don't hold your breath--unless you are an Olympic yogi who can wait a decade to exhale. This is capitalism's alternative to the "Green New Deal." It ain't green or fair. Just remember, the dealer always wins--or thinks he does. 

Another flashback: I remember a downtown bank installing a window tableau when Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" became a national sensation. There you saw mannequins of Bonnie and Clyde pointing a gun at the bank manager with a bundle of money in his hand. A balloon over his head bore the following inscription: "There's no need to rob us. We're giving money away." 

So it would seem.  

Look, I'm no prophet. I never expected a 'Magic Christian' redux, but here it is. And here's what I'm thinking about it. 

Norman Mailer defined money as "authority imprinted on nothingness," and now authority must be spelled "a-u-t-h-o-r-i-t-a-r-i-a-n-i-s-m" as we wait for checks to arrive from our government because the plague has forced its citizens into mass dereliction of their main civic duty: to consume. As someone who was almost eaten alive by debt and the inability to "service" it due both to job-obsolescence and usurious credit-card interest rates, I know more about the "nothingness" of money and the slavery of debt than most people. Sadly, the $2T "rescue" will only postpone further general knowledge by the populace. I understand this federal potlatch. But I also understand I would stand to get gobs more stimulation from this stimulus if I were an LLC. But, alas, I'm just a private citizen whose wife has become very adept at making "moonshine" sanitizers. So I'll just take a one-time higher Social Security payment. 

But while waiting for the Fed's play dough, look at what mass idleness is showing us. Yes, citizens are willing to observe patriotic paralysis of activity. That's laudable. But there's a kind of fecal undercoating to this scene of sacrifice. The idea of America as a "service economy" was always ludicrous. So was the oligarchic idea of a "global" spending pyramid with third-world countries producing the things first-world countries once did before deindustrialization. We went from a Main Street to a mall economy, creating a geography linked by hubs of consumption. I long ago defined malls as "museums of conspicuous consumption." And now Amazon and the other corporate raiders have turned America into a giant virtual mall--further centralizing us into one screen-gazing nation. Alas, virtual is not actual. Most goods are not really for our good. Or, as I heard someone outside gasp today, dying for lack of the greater good, "My country for a ventilator." 

Only kidding.  

My brother sent me the following column by Jim Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation. This is the verbal equivalent of 90-proof isopropyl alcohol. But it is an antiseptic you need to apply to your minds and thinking. How I wish my brother hadn't been right about economic basics all these years. But I can't find any grounds for objection to what he sent and what I'm forwarding to you. This is an apocalypse after all. Please read this. It won't take long, but it will take a lot out of you. As hard as this is to read and take, I must thank my brother for "exposure" to the truth. 

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forced-liquidation/#more-12043'