Ode to Money: A Poem About America

a poetic rant by Karl Wenclas

GIVE US your gold cards, your five-million-dollars to immigrate payments, global billionaires yearning to own five hundred-foot-long yachts in Miami or sixty-thousand square-foot mansions at Mar-a-Lago, bolstered by taxpayer-funded crypto.

GIVE US your rich, your schemers and grifters, your bitcoins and gold-plated tributes to greed and acquisitiveness.

KEEP OUT the poor but let in South African apartheid fans of spaceships and brain implants, tech bro money grabs, a once-great nation now consisting of posturing plutocrats and a bloviating orange-colored President eating carnival peanuts, front man for the circus show, busy capitulating to dictators while placing political puppets in positions of influence, issuing edicts halting any regulation of the money-making madness.

Meme coin bubbles masquerading as investments, pushed by armies of CON MEN, hucksters hawking exploding electric-powered Cybertrucks and accelerationist AI robots.

BOOK your ticket to Mars! You'll be abandoned on the red planet like thousands have been abandoned on this one, legions of homeless left on the streets consuming drugs leftover from oligarchs counting their profits.

This used to be a country-- a land of honor and integrity, a nation of citizens, united, We the People looking out for everybody, no one left behind, but the safety nets have been shredded, cut by chainsaws, gaping holes in them, the circus is closing, sideshow hustlers sneaking out the back door with all proceeds. 

Those still on the high wire, or flying above it all on the ketamine adderall trapeze, LOOK OUT, or you'll come crashing back to earth, to the ground, the dirt, the raw-wound skin-bruised muck of reality, with the rest of us.

The Trump-Musk Blitzkrieg

 

IT'S OBVIOUS what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing-- old-fashioned 1940-style blitzkrieg, like when Germany invaded France, moving swiftly and gobbling up territory. Merely a variation of the tech bros mantra of "move fast and break things," only this time applied to politics.

The idea being to move faster than your set-in-its-ways opponent can think. For Trump and Musk, it's been a scandalous break-the-rules, outrage-the-Democrats every day, from dismantling federal agencies to raising tariffs on friendly nations to insulting allies. Democrats are stunned. What happened to their clubby world? Like the French general staff in 1940 (young Charles De Gaulle excepted), they're fighting the last war, not this one. What they feel they need is time to discuss the matter before moving. Before doing anything. Maybe this and maybe that. Maybe if they do nothing and cross their fingers, Trump will collapse. Yet his entire movement and his 45-day second administration thrives on action, including change or at least the appearance of change.

In 1940, while most of the French army froze or fled, De Gaulle kept his head and organized his own tank-based assault-- against the blitzkrieg. It worked on a limited scale, only enough to serve as a lesson of how to respond. For the left, now, in the United States, the response should be: Attack! Against Trump-Musk weak points.

I'll mention one: the wildly overvalued Tesla Motors stock price, upon which much of the richest-man-on-the-planet's wealth-- and myth-- is based. Indeed, keeping that stock-price bubble inflated is a large motivation for Musk's entry into the federal government, to gut federal agencies that investigate and regulate companies like his.

Needed: report upon report revealing safety problems with his cars, and about the endless broken promises from Musk about everything from potential sales to the benefits and possibilities of so-called Full Self Driving. That's his weak point. The stock price will plummet at some date in the future, and reveal him for the huckster he is, or has become. But why wait?

An Awkward Alliance

 Strange bedfellows indeed.

America's conservatives have thrown in with a coalition that includes Nietzscheans, libertarians, and tech accelerationists, with a scattering of angry Christians (which should be an oxymoron) thrown in.

Moreover, the movement is currently led by two of the most UNconservative individuals who could be found, namely billionaire Donald Trump and mega-billionaire Elon Musk. That is, if conservative still means, at its core A.) control of one's appetites, and B.) moral consistency.

What the two men are is not conservative. They are, instead, opportunistic salesmen, for whom nothing is more important than making the sale-- for their own personal benefit.

(photo c/o flipboard)

 

Both men, after all, have been masters at cronyistically benefitting from government largesse over the years. For most of their careers they weren't Republicans. Most of their wheeling-and-dealing was with the political party on the other side of the aisle. Trump, for his real estate projects in New York. Elon Musk, with the federal government, beginning with his relationship with Barack Obama.

(photo c/o Obama Library)

Elon, needless to say, has never had scruples about doing business with anybody. Tesla's largest and most profitable factory is in China.

(photo c/o financialounge)

Donald Trump of late has also shown a preference for dictators. . . .

Which part of the Awkward Alliance will get burned?

Guesses are welcomed.

Art Seen Through Layers of Prisms

 

ONE KEY to keeping the arts human and vital is to embrace the idea of not creating art through layers of prisms of other artworks. (Which is what A.I. does.) For instance, older movies-- of the 1920's, 30's, 40's, 50's-- have a freshness and originality to them missing in later cinema, especially from the film school crowd or certain watched-too-many-movies directors, where everything becomes an homage or recycling or reference to this "auteur" film or that one. Examples range from an alien watching a clip from a John Ford movie in "E.T." to various Coen Brothers offerings to almost every minute of a Quentin Tarantino film. 

The best art is taken from experience and from life.

The Two Forms of Censorship

 WHAT MANY don't realize is there are two kinds of censorship: the old-fashioned kind and the current version.

In the past, censorship meant removing writings and other kinds of media from any and every platform-- blocking access to every avenue of expression. While the situation was difficult, if you somehow did get your or your group's words and ideas out there, they could spread quickly and cause a sensation. This happened in 1917 during the Great War when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik colleagues distributed their broadsides to Russian troops on the frontlines-- to an audience hungry to read alternatives and explanations. The simple printings were widely circulated.

Today, anyone can say and print anything, somewhere. Good luck getting it noticed! We are in the midst of a bombardment of Too Much Information coming at us from all sides-- a situation exacerbated by the onset of AI, which gives individuals and entities the ability to flood already-saturated markets at ten-to-100 times the previous level. Instead of new ideas or words of truth standing out against a barren landscape, they're buried beneath an avalanche of nonsense.

THE NOTION that technocratic billionaires like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen can be censored, as they claim, or denied free speech, is ludicrous. They have gigantic megaphones, given their wealth and standing, to start with. As we see with Musk's purchase of Twitter, or his enormous monetary contribution to the Trump 2024 campaign, they retain the ability to steadily and exponentially increase the size of their speech.

We retain the right to scream like lunatics at the air, heard by nobody.

The Populist Moment

 What IS authentic populism?

Authentic populism is not on the right or the left. It involves downsizing our institutions, our culture, and our minds-- moving away from top down Big Box monopolistic thinking. Instead, returning to our roots as a people and a society. Back to our humanity. Right now we live in a fake world, experienced via electronic devices and their artificial digital worlds, created by gigantic trillion-dollar tech companies owned by a handful of hyper-rich individuals. That is today's unfortunate reality, and holds true whatever party of bought-and-paid for politicians is officially in power.

We as a people, a nation, can do way better. But it will involve recapturing the original populist American vision, which existed at least since Lincoln, and can again.

Fiction 2025

 

THE QUESTION is whether fiction-- our literature-- will ever change, or stay stuck in a rut like a car in a ditch, in the mud, tires no longer even spinning-- our literary mandarins press the accelerator but nothing happens, maybe it's broken. Or their foot presses too gently.

Literature isn't moving. It's marginalized. Trapped behind walls. The elite still attend parties-- in Brooklyn, mostly-- while going through the motions of being important, but they all sound tired. It's all been done. Their book education in a stuffy house, too large, with stuffy, usually absent parents. Big armchairs to hide in, resting on plush burgundy carpeting, with heavy green drapes covering windows to keep the world outside. So they can hide. They've been hiding their entire lives-- still are, frankly-- with books full of long corridors they can hide within. Intellectual-- the facade of intellectualism anyway-- not exciting. Don't give them anything exciting, or emotional, or political-- they've been conditioned to ignore anything of relevance in this chaotic society-- that which SHOULD be addressed by these writers and their acolytes.

Instead they're lost on a Virginia Woolf island searching for an elusive lighthouse. They're not moving, and they're not leaving.

Which leaves us: what? 

It leaves opportunity for change.

A tumultuous new year requires all-new ideas.

(Among my new is a new novella, The Loud Boys, available at Kindle, Kobo and Nook Books.