Will They Buy It?
Will They Buy It?
American runs on those four words.We’ve ripened to the point where Plato said a democratic nation seeks a dictator: too much freedom. Freedom from want steals initiative, said Plato; the indolent seek discipline.
Our anthropological age went from alluvial plains and bronze age bazaars to supermarkets. Walmarts. Consumption epitomized; anything our appetites desired in any season. Then, its hyperbolic 24/7/365 form came with a literal touch of a button. Give it a fever name: Amazon. Give its inventor all your dosh.
People get one thing wrong about capitalism: the assignment of predator and prey. Who’s in charge? The guys with all the dosh, of course.
Wrong, it’s their predators——the avaricious, insatiable consumers. Seeing this, the desperation of the rich becomes evident. Their supposed freedom from want is exposed. They can never have enough to protect them from the relentless onslaught of masses beyond number and their ceaseless want. The rich labor tirelessly to feed that maw’s appetite. They lay awake nights inventing shiny new allurements to preoccupy the hordes. They compete desperately with one another to secure the merest fractions of popular esteem and trickle-up sustenance.
Always, the rich are burdened with the question:
Will They Buy It?
A patient observer recognizes this pattern and plans. Into his scheme falls the epitomized prey; a prominent pretender to wealth; an Uber Consumer, rife with debt and thus gifted with a desperation that the masses instinctively respond to. A product spokesman of late-stage capitalist grandiloquence void of content yet vivid with need and urgency like fearless cereal box slogans. He struts and boasts like a comic tyrant; exactly the savior needed for weary, lost consumer-sinners. The patient observer adopts this cartoon carrot, pumps funds into it, feeds its ego and waves it on a stick to amuse his wonder:
Will They Buy It?
They bought it. In four short years, a nascent dictatorship now holds thrall as thrillingly as the slim chance of independence did at the nation’s founding 250 years before. Its Uber Consumer In Chief is again beholden to foreign finance and influence to prop up the enterprise. This trajectory is unimpeded by justice; that hoary institution holds no thrall; its spokesmen can’t sell anything. Neither Robert Mueller nor the House Judiciary had marketing clout; facts don’t move product. Evidence is as irrelevant as Mitch McConnell made it— by merely refusing to buy, case closed. The show proceeds, the spectacle advances.
But insatiable appetites always need something new. Punishment, sacrifices, snack food. America’s possibly last election looms. For shits and giggles, the patient observer throws a few bucks to the opposition selling “unity” or “equality.” Or something.
Will They Buy It?
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