Somebody Tell the Engineer...

Who’s steering this train, and where is it headed?

First off, nobody steers a train —that was a trick question. Trains run on predetermined tracks of continuous steel, called ‘rail’. You can’t ‘steer’ a train. Because of this fact, trains are actually safer than cars. For the most part, as long as dispatchers are doing their job and sorting out the traffic and the switching, the rail and the engine do everything but adjust the speed for the engineer. Apart from the speed of the engine’s travel, the only foreseeable problems would have to do with the train’s condition or the track conditions —say, for instance, an unpredictable outage of the track.

 Like, if the rails just stopped going on, at some point.

Did you know that Wall Street has been active since before the world’s first Railroad? May 1792 is the date my Google search cited as the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange. The Penydarren Ironworks Tramway is cited as the world’s first Railroad, founded in February 1804. The population of the United States back in 1800 was apparently just over 5,000,000. Now, its over 300,000,000.

And as the industrial revolution itself became an empire, the number of total people in the world surged. Humanity totalled just under 1 billion in 1800, but in 2020 we are approaching 8 Billion people on this rock. For further context, that’s doubled from 4 billion since the mid-70s, when I was born. 8 Billion people, consuming the resources required for the market to expand —which is only necessary because of the intrinsic feature in the design of the market, which creates opportunity for individuals to make a profit off of the commerce taking place. Apparently, to some extent anyway, there’s a bit of siphoning and inflation created by the speculative trading on concrete goods and services. According to expert analysis widely available online, though, the real drain on the economy happens in the Financial sector. Apparently it earns nearly half of all domestic corporate profits, while employing a sliver of actual human employees —many of whom do very little in terms of labor aimed towards the accumulation of said wealth.

And I know it’s all really clever, and it’s really sexy to think of an elite club of attractive people with clean, straight teeth, rolling around naked in piles of money and cocaine. But it’s ultimately all a vampiric gesture towards the workers who fuel the economy’s aspirations, and the value we are able to generate for ourselves with our labor. Especially when the companies are competing with each other to integrate policies of austerity, say, in the payroll budgets allocated for labor —how else are they going to pay for all those vaults full of cash and blow? So, in the religion of the Free Market Economy, that is our tithe to the Financial Sector —we are all toiling to inordinate degrees, undercompensated, so that a handful of doomed motherfuckers can laugh at us from atop their piles of gold.

I say ‘doomed’ because we simply have to be approaching that point of critical mass, or terminal velocity, wherein the denial on which we’ve sustained our hopes for so long can no longer endure. The Breadlines of the 21st century feel like they’re not far away at all and, if the global recession of 2008 is any indicator, it doesn’t seem like they would be confined to one set of borders. If and when we do see that sort of radically negative transformation in our lifestyle, Americans are going to enjoy the least sympathy out of any of the developed nations, when the enraged masses across the globe begin to demonstrate their ire.

We need to face the facts —we’ve absolutely fucked things up, for everybody.

And all you smart Economickal sciencey-types out there, with your high and mighty book-learnin’ and your big brain-thinking-type powers; I’ve got just one question: have you ever considered that a perpetual expansion of the market is physically fucking impossible, in an environment with a fixed and limited base of resources?

Of course you have, but you’ve kept ignoring the fact anyway. It’s beginning to look as if everything we’ve done abroad since the Gulf War has been in the interest of leveraging a strategic position of greater advantage, in the resource war which our government has apparently seen as inevitable, for decades now.

They’re all fucking dumbfucks, you guys —it doesn’t matter that they came from the head of the class. I literally read a tweet from Elon Musk the other day, that the future of humanity lies in the colonization of Mars. It’s like they’re unashamed now, to admit the gigantic lie they’ve been building up about our way of life all these years. They’ve conned us into going faster and faster, to generate more and more wealth for a tiny subfaction of hyper-privileged elites, even though they’ve known —likely, since the First or Second World War— that eventually we’re going to reach a cliff. One without a bridge.

The Economy of the world simply cannot go on in this way, into an eternal horizon of excess and waste. The planet can no longer sustain it! If you constantly have to find new ways to squeeze profits out of every dollar of revenue, in order to satisfy the inflating greed of investors and money-handlers, then you’re always siphoning the actual value generated by the economy —simply put, just so that the fat cat may grow fatter.

We’re approaching the moment that was past the far horizon, when the people who originally came up with this shit started doing it. 1792, people. Before the first Railroad. And, just like a railroad, we can’t turn left or right. We’re moving on a fixed path, towards the limits of the Industrial Revolution’s promise. And our leaders are too busy selling off shares of the railroad to even bother themselves about the train’s ultimate destination. The only way to change the course of the track we’re on, before we ride the train off the edge, is to figure out how to stop it long enough to reroute the tracks before we reach that cliff.

It’s kinda what’s happened during the Coronavirus, really. A stoppage; A moment to reflect. For, like, the first time in the modern era, life has been shut down to a massive degree, somewhat indefinitely. I remember in March, when we first got laid off at the 5th Avenue Theatre, in Seattle, it felt so weird —everything halting, everybody going inside. At least, if you weren’t forced to stay out and be the sacrificial service lamb, for the sakes of everybody lucky enough to suddenly be on Super-unemployment for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those fortunate souls. I feel like I’ve gotten reparations, for all my years as a starving artist. But I’m not thankful enough for all the people who have had to risk their health on the other side of a checkout line, so that I might buy food while on this extended paid leave. None of us are. I mean, really, it’s such an unfair situation. ‘Essential Workers’. They should get hazard pay from the government. At least five an hour more than their normal rate. It’s simply not fair, and I feel bad that I’ve not had to worry about it except when I’m going through their line in a grocery store.

I kept running into people in those first weeks of face-covering, though, for whom it seemed like they were discovering a new way of life. Freedom! Imagine it. And we all kept thinking, I know we all did, how weird it was to suddenly have time on our hands to think about things. How strange, to contemplate all these Americans staying home, bored out of their minds for days on end with nothing to do but think.

Or less cerebral activities. From all the stories on the news about black men being murdered senselessly by police, or hunted down and shot on camera by former police, or lynched by anonymous race-terrorists (who —let’s face it— probably also have connections to the police), or any of the random crazy shit that keeps coming up about people doing violence on other people over mask-wearing restrictions at public spaces —it’s become more obvious than ever, there’s a simmering ill will in the hearts of many Americans, aching to express itself.

But for everyone that doesn’t secretly yearn to murder other human beings, there’s been this sense throughout the whole quarantine, like, “Imagine what we could do with all this time we suddenly have…” I myself wrote, edited and self-published my first novel. And I’m halfway through the next, already! But I’m sort of like that to begin with, pathologically creating with my free time (I must admit, if I hadn’t cut out drinking a year back, the pandemic would have had a different flavor entirely).

But it was a lot more of a tangible feeling in the first weeks after I was laid off, like just a remarkable sense that life could take on such a different feel so suddenly —and yet still continue to function. Like, maybe the institutions that govern our lives have been lying to us. Like, for a really long fucking time. Maybe the only reason we don’t have any time for ourselves or our family is because we’ve consented to give it to the Money-Lenders. The Masters of Transaction. The bloated Mosquito of the Financial Sector. Just so —what?— so we can keep on mass-producing ourselves into economic oblivion?

The consumers who have gone back to listening to their music on vinyl understand, maybe better than anybody —there was a point at which things were good enough. There was a point when we didn’t plan for the obsolescence of an object we produced for sale. There was a point where we didn’t have to purchase new shit every couple years. There was a point at which the Marketplace actually addressed the needs of consumers. Now it’s treating the consumer body like a cash crop —harvesting us across boom & bust cycles, sifting the value out of our pension accounts and into the cocaine-dusted piles of cash in the Financial Sector’s inner circle sanctum. The hippies bought the lies of the Neolibs and Neocons alike, in the 70s and 80s. They’d burned out from too much drugs and free-living, and they suddenly had kids and didn’t know what the fuck to do. So they looked to their Daddies for answers, once again.

The problem is that Daddy knows how to drive, but only this train. Only on this set of tracks. Even Bernie Sanders, as visionary as he is in comparison to most of his colleagues, is locked in the context of ‘the system’. Bernie doesn’t want a new system, he wants a version of this one that works better for the people who live in it. I guess that would be fine, were the System at all amenable to the idea. I see hope in the new wave of progressives, too. Occasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Bush, Morse (Hopefully he wins his race) —these and others are all great wins for progressives, but they all seem to be stuck playing within the camp of the Democratic Party —whether you’re a Bernie supporter or not, it’s clear to all by now what the Democratic Establishment thought of Sanders’ run. Sure they toned down their direct gestures in that spirit for the 2020 primary, but only because of what had come out about 2016. It might be that we can slowly take control of the left hemisphere of the Bipolar American Political Establishment, but I think the chances are greater that some great manufactured tragedy will magically appear, that will interrupt our ability to do so. Probably something to do with the Russians, or the Chinese. Honestly, probably both. I’m really frightened right now, about the all-bets-are-off atmosphere of current American Foreign Military Policy, and it didn’t just start with Trump.

Meanwhile, every time a tragedy strikes our country, something knocks America to the ground, and these motherfuckers in the Financial sector come along and kick us in the teeth; then take our money. Then they tell us it’s for the sake of the collective, as the billionaire class rakes in more and more billions. I mean, are we watching the same story play out here, or what? This is a fucked up train we’re riding on. It’s like the sultan’s palace, at the front of the train, and only a few people to fill it. Meanwhile, on the back, we’re packed like livestock, merely there because of the potential wealth opportunities we represent.

Perhaps it’s not the system itself, but the way it’s been utilized. But it’s insulting to one’s intelligence, the way Washington works now. No laws get passed that aren’t diluted and compromised, and tainted by ryders having nothing to do with the legislation at hand. These assholes (most of them, anyway) get paid handsome salaries —essentially, to ensure that practically nothing happens that would be of use to the public they’re elected to go and serve, in the first place. They closed up shop and went on fucking Vacation —Democrats and Republicans alike— in the middle of the greatest crisis we’ve faced in maybe a century or more; when citizens’ lives are falling apart all over the country.

It seems to me that we would be better off than we currently are, if we just randomly elected every federal official into office. Like, a national jury duty, or something —but for offices of Federal Government. The process could be engineered so as to weed out obvious incompetency or conflict-of-interest; it wouldn’t have to be a total crap shoot. And if you think about it, Congress doesn’t really accomplish all that much anymore, anyway. We can’t rely on that institution, in its current state. It all comes down to which party’s in which seat, and we can’t trust either party because they’re both run by assclown sycophants wearing electric shock buttplugs —penalizing and negating the movement of either party in a direction contrary to the interests of Big Pharma, Gordon Gecko, the Lords of War, et cetera. I don’t even know how many lobby groups there are that game our democracy, in a gravely serious manner, on a regular basis. They’ve been selling us out to these fucks for so long, most of them seem to earnestly believe that’s what we’ve elected them to do! And most of the country just watches the bullshit and thinks, “I guess that’s just how democracy works when you have so many people to manage.”

Our Democratic Institution is a fucking mess, guys. I mean, can you imagine if auto manufacturers had followed the example of the American governmental system as they improved the designs of their vehicles, over the years? It would be, like, a chassis that was a Model A, with the wheels of an old Studebaker, the fenders from a 57 Chevy, and on and on and on. Just a stack of compensating countermeasures.

That’s what American democracy is —a Rube Goldberg machine, for rubes.

The dominant paradigms of our present era are leading us quickly to a point from which we simply can’t keep going on like we have. It has become physically impossible, to sustain the way of life we’ve developed. Our leaders have all this evidence, and these impressive educational backgrounds, which in conjunction should be causing them to make radical attempts to reassess the efficiency of our living systems; to begin the process of building a new foundation —if for no other reason, than to save the Planet before it dries up from Global Warming. But they aren’t trained or empowered, by any means, to recognize or declare the point at which our democracy is simply no longer functioning in a way that should be permitted to continue. We’re never going to hear any of them say it. That’s outside of the system; beyond the far horizon.

Or at least it was.

And that’s the problem, at the current moment. We’re as dumbfounded and mystified as these dumbfucks, who we keep electing to rule us —these intellectual simpletons; these walking, talking Encyclopedia CocaColicas— neither they nor we know how to deal with this problem our lifestyle has created. Nobody knows what to do about the corporate lobbyists infiltrating our living systems —literally, sapping the potential quality of life available to us as a collective. Like any good Dom they’ve convinced us that it simply had to be this way; that this was actually what we’d wanted, in the first place.

Every exponential degree of imbalance in the wealth distribution across our planet’s economy, like a ring in a tree, is an outwardly expanding testament to the enduring impact of the dominating force of will these fucking greasy-souled leeches have applied to our civilization —across generations upon generations, but in recent years to an exponential degree— as we’ve deceived ourselves into believing that the comfort and convenience we purchased with our labors were the same things as freedom and liberty.

We need to stop running our world’s economy like it was still the year 1800. We need to stop trusting cowboys and gamblers with all the fruits our labors produce. We need to swat the overgrown mosquito of the Financial Sector, once and for all. We need to stop electing charlatans and snake oil salesmen into our political bodies. We need to figure out how to reroute this train we’re all riding on.

Because it should be clear to all of us now —the tracks are out, ahead.