Well at least Trump is poised to make America Great Again.
Who is 'he" there?
It’s a quote from the video game Disco Elysium. If I remember correctly, it’s the inner monologue of the game’s protagonist.
I see thanks. I guess it would make sense to people who’ve played that game.
As usual, J. Michael Straczynski saw the future coming… and I wish I could say he was wrong. But I can’t, because goddamn it, this accurately describes everything that’s been going on in a way I can’t refute or deny any longer:
THE RULES OF THE NEW ARISTOCRACY
It doesn’t matter how much food costs increase. doesn’t matter if vou can only afford fast food. we will always be able to buy steak. And we will invest heavily in fast food stocks to ensure we make
money off this. Doesn’t maker how much gas costs, we will always be able to afford it.In addition to poor food choices and health coverage, your kids will grow up without proper nutrition which will cause them problems on every level, from physical to educational difficulties. Our kids will grow up straight and true and healthy.
It doesn’t matter how much an education costs, doesn’t matter if your kids can’t afford to go to college or come out with massive debt, we will always be able to send our kids to university. And
because a lot of our income is derived from tax incentives and taxpayer-fundeded bailouts your taxes are sending our kids to school. But you do not have the right to any of our money to send
your kid to school.If you or your kids want to start a business, you will find that because we’ve sucked all the money out of the economy, there is simply no available cash around to help you finance your startup.
(Unless you want to go to your friends online at sites like Indiegogo, and isn’t that just cute?) We just cut our kids a check and tell them to go have fun.Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are bom with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.
If you accidentally provide incorrect information on your tax retum, you could lose your house, your possessions, and your livelihood. We lie all the the time on our tax information and none of us
ever have to deal with this. We squirrel away billions of dollars in overseas accounts and do all we can to ensure that your money never leaves our control because we’ll doubtless need to scoop
out more of it soon.You live in a Company Town; we pay you to work for us, while making sure that we own all the stores in town that sell our goods, the doctors offices where you go in town, the restaurants where
you eat, and that we charge you just enough to make sure that at the end of the week you don’t have any leftover money to squirrel away, so you can never leave the company town, can never get
ahead, and can never risk criticizing the company town. You work for us. We own the town where you live. We own you.If one of you takes a hundred dollar bill from the cash register, you will go to jail. If we take billions out of the savings of ordinary people then crash the economy, costing thousands of jobs, not one of us will ever be prosecuted. Because the New Aristocracy is above such things. So we’ll just keep on doing it. Enjoy the ride.
Your local police belong to us now. We’ve militarized them into soldiers who treat you like terrorists. If you speak against us, we will ensure that you are tear gassed and beaten and handcuffed and caged into “free speech zones” designed to make you forget that the whole country was supposed to be a free speech zone. But now you have free speech only when and where we say you can have it. Meanwhile, we can say and do pretty much anything we want, to you or anyone else, and get away with it.
If you happen to figure out our game and talk about it, we will accuse you of Class Warfare, in order to distract anyone from realizing that yes, there was a class war, that it was against you, that the war is over, and we won.
Yes, you get a chance to vote for congresspeople and senators and presidents. But only after we’ve decided, Iong before the first ballot is ever cast, which candidate we will finance. Those we like, those who will give us what we want first and foremost, we will finance and you will get to vote on one of the two pre-screened candidates we have given you. If we don’t like them, if we think they will challenge us, we will not finance them and you will never have the chance to vote on them. Because you don’t get a real vote in the New Aristocracy.
We own the White House. We own Congress. They pass the bills we write for them. They make the laws we want them to make, and make sure that they only limit you, never us. We own the courts. We own the lawyers. They are the club we use to beat you into submission.
There are no Democratic or Republican Senators, or Congresspeople or Presidents. Those parties have not existed for decades. There is only the Party of the New Aristocrat. The rest is
Kabuki theater. It is Mexican Wrestling. It is the illusion of choice, of difference, of democracy. This is not a democracy. It is a monarchy of money. In that monarchy, we are the Aristocracy, the royalty, and what we say, goes.If you dump trash illegally, you will be fined and potentially arrested. If we dump hundreds of tons of toxic waste into rivers and streams, none of us will ever be arrested and if we are fined, we will simply raise our prices so that you are the one to actually pay for what we did.
We are the New Aristocracy, and we do not pay fines.
We are the New Aristocracy, and we are immune from prosecution.
We are the New Aristocracy, and we find your poverty and your powerlessness and your struggles disgusting. You are beneath us.
Understand something: we don’t want you to succeed. We don’t want someone coming along to slice the pie into smaller pieces. We want to ovn all of it. If we really wanted more of you where
we are, do you think we would Inve spent the last thirty years consolidating every major company into smaller and smaller groups owned by fewer and fewer people?We are the New Aristocracy because we were born into it. We got our money the old fashioned, Medieval way: our parents gave it to us. We were born into the wealth that we stole from you and
your family over the last fifty years. You were not born into anything other than poverty and struggle. You will never be us. You will never have our our advantages. And we like it that way.We like that you peer through the bars of your cage to all that we have. We like that you think you can have it yourself one day. Because that illusion keeps you on our side. But you wiil never
have those things. We’ve made sure of that. Because what you’re looking at is ours, and we do not share.The world we have carefully constructed for you is like one of those boardwalk games of chance where if you knock down the big pins with a baseball, you win a huge prize. But the pins are
weighted and positioned so that you will never, ever knock them down. Yet you’ll keep paying anyway, and keep throwing, until you exhaust yourself and your wallet. And we like it that way.We don’t want you to have opportunities, we don’t want you to have an education, we don’t want you to have a voice in what happens to you, we don’t want you healthy, we don’t want you to do anything but be frightened, helpless, docile consumers who will eat and watch and buy what we tell you to eat and watch and buy while we keep all the good stuff to ourselves.
Because you’re not in our club.
Because we are the New Aristocracy.
And you are the New Peasants.
And we very, very, very much like it that way.
–J. Michael Straczynski
(Any errors remaining in the quoted text are probably mine; I think I caught them all, but Extract Text is a joke and introduced a ton of weird formatting stuff. It was still probably faster than typing it all out myself, but not by as much as you’d think. I reproduced the text because some accounts are set not to show if the viewer isn’t logged in, I’m not sure if his is one if them, and the whole thing should be seen by as many people as possible.)
Yes, including as assigned reading in classrooms, starting at maybe, age 12?
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but oh so true, and of course in the 10 years since, it’s all only gotten worse.
How do we maintain the hope that could somehow fuel some kind of effort to fight back? (Not a question for you, more a bleat of despair.)
I don’t know how to fuel our hope; I’ve been fighting against despair for a very long time myself, and I have no answers.
But I don’t think change is impossible. If it was, The Powers That Be wouldn’t be fighting so hard to maintain their advantages, or pressing their thumbs so heavily on the scales. It’s more obvious now… but in a way, it works against them, because it makes everything that much harder to ignore or deny, and just maybe it will awaken enough people to fight back and stop it.
(Some of you folks might remember Cowicide back at TOP. Their posts were a small but important part of my own political awakening… until they got frustrated and angry enough to speak out recklessly and get themselves banned. I think of them every once in a while… and in the past few years I feel like I’m starting to understand why they exploded. I’m trying very hard not to follow their example, but yeah… I get it more now.)
Edited to add:
It’s like going down a checklist, isn’t it? If anything, Mr. Straczynski was being optimistic.
Having seen Babylon 5 numerous times, I’m not surprised at all that he saw it so clearly. Between the corrupt President Clark of Earth and his Nightwatch, the mad Centauri emperor Cartagia, and the Narn struggle for freedom, JMS showed he had a good great eye for sociopolitics and history.
Crossing that from there to here.
