I don’t consider myself a controversialist. I’m not trolling for a fight for page views. Many people have written me to tell me they like visiting my page because it’s not as angry as the Intertunnel often is. Glad to hear it.
People send me things all the time, for this blog and my other blogs, or simply because they want to share something with their Intertunnel friends. It makes my life more interesting.
You learn about all sorts of subcultures and memes and movements and pockets of resistance and shrines and cachement areas if you browse the Intertunnel as I do, but all people, me included of course, have a tendency to drift into: This is how I go when I go like this. I like getting stuff from all over from all kinds of people because it gets me out of my stale OODA loop and into an Immelman turn.
If it wasn’t for reader Charles Schneider, how would I know that there’s a little cottage industry on YouTube of pasting oddly chosen musical selections over a clip of Laurel and Hardy dancing? There’s dozens of them, all charming in their own way.
Kids today make their own fun out of the crap they find lying around, same as it always was. The crap changes a bit, that’s all.
“Poverty” has become a meaningless term in the United States. My family is living in poverty, bigtime, if you go by the numbers, but what we’re not living in is squalor. America suffers from a surfeit of squalor now, not an epidemic of poverty. Fifty years ago, America had a multi-tiered middle class, including a tier both sides of my family emerged from that would give your average favela a run for its money, but there wasn’t a true caste system. Now I see an iron-clad two-caste system being assembled for the wreckage of the middle class by the government and their handmaidens in big business, especially the big media business: High-budget squalor, or low-budget squalor.
Low-budget squalor is financed, generally, by signing up for all the help the government provides, which requires you to forswear any attempt at a dignified and meaningful life, as this approach makes you ineligible for all the “goodies.” High-budget squalor is attained by being a hero to the low-budget squalor contingent. That’s about it. It’s exceedingly difficult to avoid rubbing elbows with the squalid culture, because it is literally everywhere, and is reinforced and sometimes made mandatory by the force of the government. If the guy at around one minute in the video lit that cigarette most anywhere now, he’d have a hundred scolds in his face, but if he popped an oxycontin and a Paxil and washed it down with four Red Bulls no one would bat an eye.
If you appear on a reality show, you can afford high-budget squalor; if you watch it you can emulate what you see and assemble a low-budget squalid lifestyle for yourself. If you play in the Stones, you can afford high-budget squalor, or you can use the Stones as a soundtrack for your low-budget squalor. Same sort of thing.
In 1960, you could move up or down the middle class ladder, depending on lots of details within your control; you weren’t born into a static society. If you desired it, lack of money was not a bar to dignity. No one in this video is wealthy, but they don’t lack the dignity of even your average Charlie Sheen. The children and grandchildren of the people in the video are in a casino in Atlantic City now, covered with orange spray-on tans and misspelled tattoos, hoping to get a glimpse of the latest Snooki at the tables, while their illegitimate babies slumber in the back seat of their soon to be repossessed Escalades in the parking lots.
Poverty is no fun, trust me; but it’s miles better than even high-budget squalor.
How many times have you heard someone say
“If I had his money, I could do things my way?”
Little they know that it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.
Once I was winning in fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for to get a start in life’s game
Suddenly it happened, I lost every dime
But I’m richer by far with a satisfied mind
Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when you’re lonely, or a love that’s grown cold
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
Compared to the man with a satisfied mind
When my life is ended, my time has run out
My trials and my loved ones, I’ll leave them no doubt
But one thing’s for certain, when it comes my time
I’ll leave this old world with a satisfied mind
I’ll leave this old world with a satisfied mind
My older brother used to say: “Happy won’t make you money.”
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