Look around, and be amazed. So much, so many. The thigamajigs and whatzits. Big Boxes full of goodies. The “stuff”, to have and to hold, and to want. So go ahead, be a glutton, and please don’t fog up. It’s all good.
Careful though. You may find yourself so dazzled as to miss the marvel of life itself. It can all be so distracting as to make one forget certain whys and wheres. A dilution and perhaps dissipation of wonder, if not wander.
Alas, the spoils of capitalism. An “economy” constitutes a unique legacy of a world’s history of life itself, no less, and the great collage and mosaic of the grand diversity of the race. What was once a concept of barter and trade, value for clear value, has morphed, albeit over time, into this macabre game where there is but exactly one goal: to obtain currency.
So, by hook, by crook, by luck, or even by work, to play this game you need bucks, one way or another. The “bottom line”, if you will. In our flavor of such economy we call it “the dollar”, a note that represents a certain amount of gold (GASP!), and, well, even though it’s a little green on the back, it, uh, resists the oxide pretty well. Just like gold.
In WWII, American productiveness, and productivity, based in capitalism and free markets, turned the tide in the global conflict between subjugation and dictatorship on the one hand, and the power of the cohesiveness of the free on the other. Once the gargantuan “machine” of the US aimed at whatever it decided to aim at, it consistently ensured the extinction of bad conceptualism. Hence, the freedom of freedom itself to spread about the globe has been, certainly, the greatest spoil of its capitalism.
And yet, the results are so mixed. Aside from the reduction in morbidities and a fantastic increase in comforts for the creature, there clearly seems to be a toxic component to the system the “older” it gets. “Morality” is not the long suit for capitalism. So when the dice get to rolling, we see and live the emergence of problems that are unforseen, of fractals gone unchecked, and butterfly effects encouraged so unwittingly. We add them to the spoils of capitalism, a euphemism and homonym of a close relative of the word “spoilage”. Rotten, gross.
So just try not to mind the leaky nuke drums, and broken supertankers. And don’t weep at clear-cut forests. And extinctified species. And fished-out oceans, and depleted farmlands. Don’t choke on the blanded diet you eat, or gag on the dirtying of your liver by the fancy chemicals of capitalism. You’re getting what you’re paying for, the main cruel rule of a cruel capitalism. And when disaster strikes, we’ll hope to not find out it was the result of some cost-cutting maneuver, or unpaid bill. Or a help too cheap, or a wrong corner cut in an effort to maximize profit for some needy pocket.
Enshrined in the US Constitution is the clause which mandates that congress “shall control commerce”, and it has been so unspeakably inept at this responsibility that it has generated over 30 trillion dollars of debt. Pretty obvious what controlled what. The Roberts court, with the “Citizens United” ruling effectively spoiled politics in America, which was a kind and naive thing just a few billion dollars ago. And paving the way for the greenbacks to soil out and spoil our college athletics, the student-athlete model has found its way to the scrap heap of once great ideas, now wrought by the great young players capitalism spoils league.
We see the negative impact on the thing by lawyerism, which one could argue created capitalism to begin with. We note the drag of the government it hath sustained, and the ironic threat to the vitality of the system by these same professions. Invention, begetting necessity, begets lawyerism. Hence the fee. We feel the tug of the madnesses of our reality, the drain on our energies, the grinding of the wheels cranking out the din of the spoiling capitalism.
We rue the continuous invasion of our privacy by the tentacles of the imperialistic machine, in the mailbox, the e-mail inbox, and that little ring box that creases the silence to say, ‘Hello, this is so-and-so calling, and I want some of your money’. To enjoy our pass times we get splashed by so much advertisingism that, well, it literally hurts. The glare of logos, in Parks named “.com”. Bowl games with a first name, effectively assimilating them into “the fam”, the sell-out sellouts. And if you’re on the web and there are no products being pushed, then you’re the product. And that speaker’s listening.
Golf, they say, is a good walk spoiled. Capitalism, for many, is a good spoil spoiled. Lotteries? Gaming? The track? The dark side of a money-grub-based society reaches happily into the pockets of vulnerable people, who are “just havin’ a little fun” throwing a fistful of dollars into the glitz of this sublimating vacuous negative vibration. Heck, for only six or so percent of them will a major psycho-social condition result. For the rest, a little, subtle stumble in the boots of the day-tripper. A small ache in the legs wrought by the wear and tear and overuse, on the capitalism exertional.
Blinded by the blast of modern capitalism, the helpless and hopeless everyman ponders his future like the old sot on the riverbank. He holds the canister that had once held such promise, and so many answers, now spent. Staring on into its empty recesses, he recognizes that needy face in the reflection. He rubs his eyes and discards it, knowing full well that getting another one is going to be an adventure.
*Updated from the “Understanding Humans” version circa 2000.