It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; — but when a beginning is made — when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt — it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.
–Jane Austin, in Emma
The Age I’m thinking of is the Golden Age of The Gazillionaire Delusion that anything can be bought.
What I’m reading and sensing is, Citizens United and subsequent decisions gave gazillionaires (heretofore abbreviated as GZs because my fingers are balking at typing the full word) a sort of weird permission to pour heaps of money gleefully into our elections, rather than spending those heaps on, say, bigger boats and bigger planes and bigger properties to travel to on those boats and planes, and whatever else bigger GZs spend all that money on.
All that spending on selfish good-time stuff without the thrill of provoking mass protest marches must have gotten boring so the rich bunch paid the Court for a new toy to play with, American elections. How exciting it must have been for them! Suddenly all that power to spend massive amounts of money on their brand-new video game called…well, I don’t play video games so I can’t invent a name for it. (Thank the gods for conspiracy lunatics: one of them will come up with a name.)
So, the GZs played and played and kept on playing over the last decade or so. And what have they bought for their money? Nothing much. A couple of justices on our high court maybe, but they were cheap. No fun in cheap.
They did buy tons of unflattering news about how they were spending heaps of money buying elections, and how they got visits to the Oval Office, and how certain candidates got heaps of money from them. But did not necessarily win. I mean, if you’re going to spend tons of money, you should want proof of purchase, right?
I’m hoping these upcoming elections will support my thought from years ago that it’s sort of impossible for around 1000 Gzs to “buy” elections in the United States, this huge crazy quilt of a country. Except maybe in a blood red state like…oh, wait, Texas? Kansas? What on this American soil is going on?
Voters. Voters, 210 million registered voters, that’s what’s going on.
Money doesn’t come into it.
Almost immediately, I thought of Saruman wrecking the beautiful gardens of Isengard. And then I thought, Ents. The Ents will come.
What a wayward, destructive bad seed Trump is! His only monuments will be these photos of deliberate physical damage to our country and hideous holes like the one where the East Wing used to be.
Ents.
