Understanding the world
Things appear irrational. Why on earth, for example, would people celebrate the death of a father of two children who, by all accounts, worked extraordinarily hard and achieved (at least from the outside) to achieve the American Dream? I’m writing, of course, about Brian Thompson, the former CEO of the UnitedHealth Group.
His death was tragic. His killer was a Unabomber-type, with his own manifesto, who has become somewhat lionized. Even worse, there are now people claiming that “the left” are the ones lionizing him, as though this is a political issue. As if the first criteria to responding to something is one’s political views, rather than an impulsive reaction to a thing.
Talk about despair. Here’s how fucked up everything is: The inequality is so gross in America that people who cannot afford or obtain health care are celebrating the death of a man who, well, I’m going to hand this over to someone else to better explain:
But, com’on, this is dumb, right? We aren’t that big of fools, are we? Inequality is so great that the doors to opportunity are closed to nearly everyone. In fact, Brian’s story reinforces this idea. He worked incredibly hard, he got ahead, he was within the top 0.1% of high achievers his whole life, and, ironically, he wasn’t even the CEO of the entire company, just one of its divisions.
What about the other 99.9% of Americans? Are they all a bunch of “losers” who are entitled and should be forgotten about?
When Jesse James was alive, he routinely robbed from train barons and bankers, and he was celebrated! He was viewed as a hero by many, who saw the excess wealth in America at the time as a great evil. This is not new. Jesse James killed people. He didn’t kill JP Morgan, he didn’t kill Andrew Carnegie or JD Rockefeller, but he killed honest people who went to work. What he did, too, was wrong.
The celebration of it was an indictment on the inequality at the time, which we can see clearly because it’s so far in the past. But, the same thing is happening now. It’s not a partisan issue, it’s the fact that inequality in America is now similar to pre-revolution France.
Wealth Distribution in America today
Yes, revolution did happen next in france
But are we going to instantly shout out communism for even suggesting inequality? Are we that stupid? I don’t know, but our political debate surely acts like we are.
Look around you — look at the stories of excess with P. Diddy or Jeffrey Epstein. Wealth will buy you anything in America. And I do mean, anything, including a lack of morality, it seems. Epstein had a private island for his crimes, where girls as young as 14 were brought to commit sexual acts with powerful men.
R Kelly, the famous rapper, married a 15 year old girl and was accused of having a sex “cult” with six women.
Meanwhile, the average American male can’t get a date. Seventy-five percent of Americans are obese. Nearly everyone is taking a GLP inhibitor. The majority are recommended to take a GLP inhibitor. Anti-depressants are rampant. People are increasingly throwing themselves into major distractions like porn (look at the revenues of OnlyFans! Holy shit!), video games, drugs (illegal and legal) and exercise.
And to even hint that all of this has to do with a highly unequal society with a deep lack of opportunities for people — to offer up that our traditional institutions are broken, like education or policing (due in no small part to their unions, btw), is tantamount to being implicitly or explicitly anti-american.
The people who benefited most from the government’s actions in 2008 during the bank bailouts or in 2020 with the various pandemic-fueled stimuluses were the most wealthy. They were the people with the assets. They made absurd amounts of money, owning the buildings that were getting rents from the government or the credit card debt or whatever. And with that money, they bought more assets. They purchased new buildings. They bought your debt to get more money.
It’s a deepening cycle, and the place we would turn for it, politics, is so busted and absurdist that the Democratic Party were paying celebrities millions of dollars for endorsements. The Republican Party had the world’s richest man as its biggest cheerleader, and he bought an entire new media apparatus to use as a megaphone to hundreds of millions of followers every day prognostications about how this election would be the last one, if we didn’t elect Donald Trump.
Ho.Ly.Shit.