The Money-System: A Highly Crude Criticism

 The Money-System:

A Highly Crude Criticism

14,000 words

There comes a time when every individual has to evaluate themselves.  If they don’t they are not living an examined life.  If they do live an examined life, they are examining the people in their life, their role in that community, and their role in the larger globalized society.  They may think of themselves as any which way.  But at least they are examining things, and in doing so, are aware of these things around them.  They will place a value on their life and those around or they may not.  They may try to find meaning.  And this is the pursuit that so many people have, to examine the world around them and to find meaning.   They will ask questions and seek out answers.  However which way they go about this, there will always be a concern for morality, which is a very preachy word, but ultimately they will have some view of the word that satisfies their modus operandi, in which they will be able to go about what they normally do.  This is my moral.

I will not name anyone else, no giants upon which these thoughts have come from.  But they certainly aren’t original by any means, and are practically plagiarized and stolen.  How can I say I am going to tell a stolen morality?  Well, I hate to break the news, but there hasn’t been an original morality since some long-haired, disheveled prophet was on a mountain, saying kindergarten type ideas, in a very foreign land, practically an alien world, as ancient as it was.

I will describe myself before I go into any of these morals, because I want you to understand that this morality is very much shared by many who have examined their lives.  I am 31, white, with dark hair (and a few gray hairs), glasses, and a curious face that has deep lines of worry and suffering, and also, usually, an almost physical need to smile and laugh.  But right now, I’m not really in a humorous mood.

Normally, I write poetry and would consider myself a poet.  I don’t consider myself a scholar, journalist, or even a prose writer.  But I am throwing poetry out the window for this moral.  I only want to speak about what I think we all intangibly can understand, and am not too concerned with an aesthetical view of the writing.  I would much rather be clear, in other words.  And there are a lot of people who value clarity over the sake of art.  In fact, they may appreciate clear language more than any higher order view of art and what comprises art.  If there is any beauty to these thoughts, then let that be mere side effect of clarity.  From one examining person to another.

So any trained reader may ask what is the thesis of your nonscholarly work?  And cut the jibberjabber. What I have in mind is a weird conviction to try to criticize all the factors that I see that cause problems.  Which is nutjob and crazy.  But this writer has no other recourse than to simply find the truth behind problems.  And if you haven’t stopped reading, then I appreciate your concern for my well-being.

You see, first you have to acknowledge there are problems. Both with yourself and outside yourself.  And you have to be aware of your own types of particular views, and absolutely understand that very few others may share them.  In fact, I’ve all but resigned to simple statements that are, well, insane.  As in the type of sanity outside the community-type of insanity.   I understand that to say, well, I am going to diagnose problems about the world, borders on some kind of psychiatric disorder.  And you may wonder, how’s this cat even going to do this?  Well, the organizing principles will not be of the scholarly vein, who will be the very first to note.  Because ultimately that is not my audience.   My audience is someone who has come to that edge and said why is life like this?  A really desperate soul who has looked around and examined life and said either I’m crazy or they are.

Sanity aside, you do look out on the world and see the problems, and you go to the big books, and you ask lots of questions.  But what happens?  Maybe you change, but the world does not.  Why is this?  Because, like you, I am in a complex modern life.  And that’s the reality.  In fact, it is so complex that to even ask a really smart question or read a really good book, I can assure you that, just like me, you have a privilege that may actually be rare in other parts of the world.  I assume that if you have stayed with me and recognized some of the thoughts that I have said, you can tell that I have a lot of time and don’t need to worry about money as much, like many do.

Let’s regroup.  How can I, who do not have to worry about money as much, like many do, have some kind of knowledge or information to impart that would be considered a moral?  Well, I thought that was the idea of civilization, that enterprise in which ideally all people are educated in a wealth of money, power, and knowledge, and ultimately are here to speak some kind of truth.  It’s really kinda sounding unfair and arrogant, in a way.  But there are many, many people out there, like me, who have been able to afford the time to read, think, experience, and write.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate my position.  But as someone who also has experienced the fact that there are many above me as well, who don’t have to worry about truth or money as much, and live day to day on the souls of others, I have to say that my privilege to read and think and ask big questions also compels me to try to change the world around me, for the better, and not worse.  And so the best way I could think of this was to state the problems.

I have already shown my cards, as you see.  For just about every problem out there is somehow an economic one.  And this is becoming more obvious to you and me as we advance in civilization.  But let’s take a look at civilization at 2011, and let’s get more focused.

I live on Miami Beach.  Which for anyone who knows about Miami Beach, it is a particularly curious place.  In order to reach some kind of moral, know, however, that this will not be solely about any location, but the good old globe and mother earth.  I have been out of the country before and I’m not from here.  But I live here at this very moment. 

One lesson that’s very valuable about living in the culture of Miami Beach is that you can see a large discrepancy between those who have and those who have not.  I wouldn’t necessarily place myself in the former category, because when you live in a place that’s abundantly wealthy and prides itself on having stuff, you see who the people are that really do have things.   And, they have a happier appearance.  Can I say if they are truly happy?  As I see it, these people who really have things are not happy.  The power that they have affords them much more happier experiences than the guy who can’t buy one happy experience at all, but generally speaking, they are not truly Happy.  They are enjoying the pursuit of happiness, which is supposedly given to all US citizens.  They can afford that pursuit in a lot of ways, so they generally have the kind of lifestyle that we would all hope for.

I would say I’m more in the have-not department store.  Although I can afford to live and do not worry about money so much, per se, I don’t own property other than my car.  I rent.  And just one place.  A very ugly bachelor pad, if you want to know the truth.  So again my authority is called to the witness stand.  This guy claims he’s white, single, able to subsist, and he’s going to tell me how to live?  No.  I am not here to tell you how to live.  I am here to reach some kind of virtue or moral, a very general one, at that.  I am here to witness the problems.

So, you see, these wealthy people have the happier lifestyle, but aren’t necessarily happy.  Literature is filled to the brim with this concept, so it certainly isn’t original.  Yet I would like to make an assertion that this is true of all wealthy people.  That you don’t know for sure what psychological problems they have, but that you know they seem to enjoy that Jet Ski so much or that free Vodka.  And I’m not even here to criticize their values.  I think that it’s safe to say that if anyone walked up to you and handed you millions of dollars, I think even if you were the most charitable person in the whole world, you would still take the money and see what good you could do with it.  Some examining individuals may not be charitable, at all.  But whoever you are, if you knew it was a legitimate and legal transaction of some sort, you would take that money.  All value systems see no problem with that transaction, because the individual who receives the money sees that that money can afford a lot of power.  However you choose to use that power is where your own conscience lay.

Note here that money is power.  The more money you have, the more power you have.  And the more power you have, the more you can assert your presence into the global economy and power structure.  For the economist reading, I am aware I am no economist.  But the fact remains that I have seen what money can do.  We all have.  Your wallet is in your pocket with it right now.  Your purse is somewhere with some in it.  And there are a lot of reasons we have it in our wallets and purses.  It isn’t  just lying around on the front porch where we go to get it.  People will take it, so we have to hide it from them.  We have to keep it on our person.  We have to be careful with money.  It is literally valuable.  And while I know it is an abstract currency based on many, many principles and calculations, and the people who know about the “science of money” are usually more mathematically inclined, I confess, I am terrible with the stuff, and am basically on the level of addition and subtraction with accounting for it.

You have people who know how to “use” money. They can save it in banks, do their taxes for the government, and, as they say, “use their money to make money”.  These are very economically savvy people.  And not all of them have much money.  In fact, confronted with money and cash and credit cards and all the various ways that money has a form of currency, they saw that knowing how to use money was a skill that would, at the very least, prevent them from worrying about the park bench becoming their home.

So why do we worry about money?  It’s a rather naïve looking question, but I do not know anyone who doesn’t.  Even the people who have and are really wealthy worry about money.  In fact, that’s part of the reason they aren’t solely in Blissville 24/7.  In order for them to be wealthy, they have to at least be concerned about either keeping the money they have and/or making more of it, to keep doing the charitable things that they do.  Or the not so charitable.

I want you to think about this, please.  That what I am trying to show is that wealthy people or at least money-savvy people aren’t necessarily wicked and aren’t happy all the time.  Which I think are two main class misnomers.  And, boy, are they ever!  Because, in my view, these misnomers are exactly the reasons for major comparisons between classes.

It is the God-given assumption that the upper-class is wickedly happy all the time.  And that for anyone in the lower classes than the 10-20% of the population, we would trade places and be not-so wicked, would just be happy, graceful and charitable, and wouldn’t have a selfish bone in our body.  We would simply be engineering the next way to save the people below us.  That’s sarcasm, as you can tell.

No, I guarantee that the more money you have, the more power you have, and the more concern you would have with keeping said currency.  In some way, shape, or form, even for tax write-offs.  This is not, in my opinion, morally wrong.  Wanting to keep your wealth is precisely what everyone is taught.  Even a gentleman who has worked up from the park bench to the top penthouse, and has earned every single penny, will try to keep that wealth, if not to try to prevent from ending up where that stain from the bird was he slept on a long time ago.

This is just the fact of wealth.  You try to maintain it.  And since we aren’t ancient Egyptians right now, we don’t carry the belief that money goes with us wherever we go when we leave this planet.  So this is why we have wills, and give money to our children upon death.  And this is all very ordinary.  On the legal books.  And the wealthy guy will take pride in how he earned his money and wonder why his rebellious son or daughter isn’t following in his footsteps.  But that’s more drama than reality.  Really wealthy kids end up in Ivy League and back in the family business, to continue the very charitable works of maintaining the wealth.

I want to present this picture of the upper class.  I want to show that money is very much a concern for them.

So now this is the goal, this is the ultimate goal of civilization, to gain a high income, profit off it, and maintain it.  And all of this takes time.  Which is why the wealthy are always talking about time is money and money is time, etc., because, in the figurative sense, it is true.  If you are Mr. or Miss Wealthy, the time you “spend” buying a cup of coffee is subtracting and not adding to or maintaining the wealth.  You have someone else spend that time for you, so you can work and earn and maintain.  A lot of films are slightly misleading, and this helps reinforce the dream/comparison.  You know, at the end, the guy wins the lotto or has somehow won zillions of dollars.  What does he do, typically?  The cliché ending shows him on the personal yacht with the love of his life, floating near some island.  And if the movie wants to provide realism, he’s working from that yacht with a big goofy smile and a Hawaiian shirt and a cell phone.  As if, in other words, the Escape is complete.  He has suddenly broken through the class systems and is living happily ever after.

However, the reality is, that eventually that vacation’s over, and he’s going to have to figure out a way to make sure that the gold doesn’t run out.  Because that boat takes fuel, and the love of his life will probably have kids, and all this will cost something.  And unless he wants to go back to the life without the yacht and wife, he’s going to have to figure out a way to maintain.

These are very light examples, by the way, of the upper class and the pursuit of wealth and happiness.  We all know that things get complicated.  Perhaps, if the guy who reached upper classdom did so, in a major way, by discovering oil or somehow became CEO of a Fortune 500 company, then there is a lot more at play, in his mind, than simply maintaining dollars and cents.  As we all know that the reason money is so powerful is because it buys things.  And whatever is chosen to buy takes attention as well.  Perhaps it’s property of the business or a second home, on that isle.  Well, he may be wealthy enough to have people clean up and do different things to maintain that second home, but he is going to be interested in being a homeowner and seeing to the property, etc.   So being wealthy isn’t just maintaining the cash flow, it’s maintaining just about everything the money is buying.

That’s why in certain films, you have Uber-Billionaires satirically so attending to their Business that they are cleaning their own pools, because they have pride in what they have bought and see that the pool guy doesn’t do a good job.  In fact, tangentially speaking, there’s so much humor portrayed around the Wealthy Guy who attends to lawns in some kind of meditative Oriental philosophical way or something.  That he is so concerned with details and doing a job right that he has made a philosophy of it, that he’ll do what is humorously portrayed as lower class work, because, in this pride with which you do work and earn money and maintain money philosophy, it’s ironing out the details yourself.

And who can blame the billionaire for wanting a job well done so badly that he will do it himself?  If his business started out from scratch, then he’s really had to rely on himself to do many different jobs.

But the dream is not being the Oriental Philosopher Rich Guy.  The dream is to be so unfathomably rich that you have other people read oriental philosophy for you, so that your children don’t have to be Oriental Philosophizing so hard as you did.  Essentially, this is the dream, to be so rich that we can do whatever we want, any time we want, and, usually, during the times we are doing are regular grind work, the dream is to not have to do grind work, at all, whatsoever.  Total Escape.

That’s the theory of retirement. The people who are ready to retire and who can afford to retire generally go nuts with boredom.  It’s because they’ve been the Hard Work Ethic Guru for so long, that when they live the dream of no-grind-work at all, there is a vacuum.  This is not true of all retirees.  Some love having the ability to do nothing at all or choosing the hobbies to fill their time.  And this is where it gets interesting in my book.

Why does the person love having all this wealth for their golden years AND not being bored all the time?  And these people generally have families and other people who run their businesses and all of that life has moved on.  Well, I bet you a dollar that this particular Wealthy retiree who is golfing all the time and eating at restaurants was not your Guru Hard Working Wealthy Guy.  I bet you he hated his job or whatever work amassed him enough to live by the sea and do the things not work-related.

Just as average Joe lower class hates his constant worry about scraping by, so too did the Big Guy hate worrying about maintaining the business and subsequent properties that amassed him money.

So what we have here is a major example of two unhappy people in two very different stratified classes.  They both hate their jobs.  For different reasons, of course.  One does not supply enough money to be comfortable with even minor bills.  The other supplies so much, that to maintain it and the life it leads him, he will gladly withdraw from the maintaining process, and do whatever, live the “dream”.  So with these rough character sketches, I will assert that money is not the escape.  Sure, they both put up with their jobs to make the money to survive and one actually gets to putt till his dying days or play tennis or “escape”.  But he paid the price for it for the last 40 years.

There are other ways we can view our orientation with money.  There are people who don’t scale the ladder without what they like doing day-to-day.  In other words, it’s the love-job mentality.  It is the most inviting model within a capitalist system.  It echoes the Guru Billionaire.  This love-job mentality does not exclude being unfathomably rich, but it says that certain jobs can’t go into the Dream Escape of mass millions.  The love-job mentality may take on the form of being a teacher, or doctor, or interior designer, and generally falls into the middle class and upper middle class.  The love-job accepts its place, so long as they love their work as much as anybody can on a day-to-day basis.  And it’s true of countless individuals who don’t need to assert that kind of Uberrichness in their lives.  The love-job can feel the importance of their work and feel how it contributes to the society at large.

And usually, with this love-job mentality, there is a sense of fairness about the worth of their job.  They want to be paid with money according to the value of their work.  And this is by-and-large how people live and get by.  It’s interesting, because in the love-job mentality, there is a sense that money is only a necessity.  That, for example, if I went to an interior designer and said, my crappy bachelor pad needs a new look, it’s such and such square feet, I will pay you 5,000,000,000 dollars per square foot—this would absurdly be out of the ballpark of value of the interior designer.  And for the most part, this would appear so absurd to them, that they would actually convince me of its absurdity.  And if I agreed with them, they would give me their fair price, usually obtained by quality and competition and prestige.

Note here, though, that my example of simply giving millions of dollars anybody would take, but in a business setting, when there is already some field of price-value, it makes sense to stick to that price.  Despite the fact this is very hypothetical, I think it shows many different orientations with money.  It shows that anyone would take massive amounts of legal money, but that in a fair-deal setting, it would go against some value systems.  Some interior designers of course would encourage the delusion and take the deal.  But this situation rarely happens in the love-job setting.  It is a resignation to a certain class.  The love-job person, however, has truly the capitalist spirit, like the Guru Billionaire.   The harder he works at teaching, the more hours spent, the more he would like fair compensation.  Time is still money, here.   There are a few love-jobs that do go platinum though: major sports athletes, actors and actresses, artists, directors, and any job that appears fun, as well as raking in the dough and fame.  And there are strong lovers out there in their jobs.  Their parents will have the child already trained to love their skill.  Because, generally, but not always, there is only one skill that’s needed to love.  A basketball player has one skill, and he loves it, and will use that skill to great effect.  A strong identity becomes apparent with the skill and job.  It can define them.

                I myself subscribe to the love-job mentality to a certain extent.   Because if I have a skill and I love it and I can make money off it, where’s the problem?  Well, the problem is that anyone who loves their job has truly mixed reviews of said love and passion.  That it isn’t Blissville 24/7.  That there are a lot of things around the skill and job that can be despised.  That pure devotion to one skill, whether it’s Basketball or writing, can, for the examining person, come to actually despise the skill.  That it may not always make enough money, so that you are scraping by.  And in those moments you hate your one skill that your livelihood depends on, you look out the window and Total Escape Billionaire (a projection, of course) is just smiling so much on that Jet Ski.  And there can be some strong comparisons going on, between why interior designing isn’t worth zillions of dollars, and why the guy on the Jet Ski is just having the time of his life.  Why I am doing the love-job mentality 5 days a week and I can’t buy anything I want, any time I want.  So that dream is there for the love-jobber as well.

                No one can escape the Total Escape Billionaire projection.  Everyone has it.  It’s right there on front page news: Total Escape Billionaire Just Made a Deal with Other Total Escape Billionaire.  Obviously they haven’t totally escaped because they are conducting some kind of business.  But who says I would have made that deal?  I would have made that deal with a personal yacht and a Hawaiian shirt and a big goofy sun setting happily ever after.

                I really don’t want to go into the dark side of all this, but I’ll say some things.  All these characters I’m trying to show in a very honest light.  Which in many circumstances, there are a lot of people out there, very honest and very honestly making riches or wanting to make riches.  It happens all the time and is the reason that I’m going to argue that greed is not the cause of some problems, but a side effect.  Just as lust is not the real issue, but a side of effect.  Or addiction.  Or most problems at all.  And if you don’t see what the cause of all the problems in complex daily life, then you haven’t been observing or examining daily life to notice trends, themes, and motifs, or you have stopped reading this altogether.  Money is about the cause of all our problems, not the greed for it.

                Now do you see why this is crazy?  Or did you see why it was crazy about 10 pages ago?  Whether it is crazy to you or not, the explicit fact is, and everyone knows this, is that money makes the world go round.  And that a system defined by currency will always have not only the very worst elements of human nature, such as major crimes, but it will also suck the life out of you.   And this cannot be escaped by money.  It is the very fabric of the straitjacket around our souls.  And there are so many ways, in which we don’t want it to be that.  And we believe that if we accumulate more of it, we will escape the straightjacket.  We can construct so many things out of this fabric too.  In fact, we can create elaborate theories on why it is necessary.  I am no scholar, by any means.  And I am not going to rigidly go through all of economic theory and show why each and every theory is wrong.  I will point to everyday experience.   And the world around.  And show that this blood of power is everywhere, in art, in movies, in the media, in government, in science.  Anywhere a human has to be, there has to be a dollar or a yen of some sort.  And religions abide by the cash flow just as much as the atheistic sciences.

                Everyone is worrying so much about money all the time, either by making it or maintaining it, that even the simple day-to-day class struggles are so patently ignored.  My waiter will pretend to like me to sell me food.  My banker will pretend to like me for my business.  Everywhere O everywhere the service industry kowtows to their business and the Guru Millionaire.  The exchange of money for goods and services is so trivial and yet so complexly layered that if you really step back and you say, is this it?  you’ll be hard pressed to say you’re a fan of this thing.  And if you speak up and say something like I’m saying, in a real way, you are positively go-back-to-hugging-a-tree.

                No even, all the irony in fictional portrayals of modern day life do not come out and say this directly.  But it is the biggest elephant in the room in any household.  Because essentially, someone who casts a stone at Economy, and they are a part of that Economy, is considered some kind of hypocrite and, perhaps, preachy.  And soon the daggers are sure to follow.  Soon the questions of solutions, and that’s how life is.  That there is no escaping the currency system.   And then once you break down the Idealism or Communism of the person who is not a fan of money, then you can have them schlepping for you in a job they are supposed to love.

                This is not original, in any way, shape, or form.  Money is the root of all evil.  Technically, it’s the love of money is the root of all evil.  But I will say the former misquote is the real pith of the statement.  And no matter how you get around this, in my weary mind, no one can stop worrying about money in some capacity.

                I haven’t even shown some of the major problems with money.  Crime.  Most crime is in the realm of economic thinking.  Whether it is from stealing someone’s property that was bought and thereby owned by them, or it was murder and then stealing.  And guess where most crimes are?  On a black market.  Crime too has its own supply and demand.  Drugs, Prostitution, Gambling, etc.  And this is where the really bad type of currency exchange is, because essentially there are no laws or governances or price values or anything.  The deals here are done with somebody big and mean, making sure the deal is secure.  And here, on the black market, the idea of money is at its realest.  If you want to buy drugs, then sex, then gamble, all in one night, if you have the money to do so, then you are in the Total Escape mode of money.  And perhaps there are very obvious reasons why these things are illegal, but countless times and again, the black market mirrors many of the same legal goods and services.

                For the sake of legal reasons, and I’m no lawyer either, but Pornography is legal.  This was made legal on the grounds of this analogy: that if I can’t fight on the street, why should boxing in front of the whole world be legal?  If prostitution is illegal, like fighting on the street, why can’t, like boxing, Pornography be legal?  Or something like that.  Mass Media stepped in and said, well Prostitution can be a form of entertainment (Not literally, of course).  And so it was a First Amendment decision.  It was a loop-hole in the business and money-system.  It had taken something patently illegal and said, this is legal because there’s a camera in the room. 

                I mean drinking was illegal because the community demanded it, but the black market was just too large.  Why can’t drugs be legal? Etc.  All the black market has its “white” market counterparts, and it’s obvious.  But we choose to assimilate, and rather nicely, the white counterparts.  The racial terms are intentionally ironic.

                And I don’t want to even develop too many thoughts on just what the real “white counterpart” to prostitution really is.  It is the enslaving of money totally, to the sexual disclosure.  And that ultimately, you don’t want to be one of these people who “sell out,” as in sell out your values for money, because then you’re considered “a whore.”  There is a large black market on enslaving women and gay men and really what does this mean: to “enslave”?  While, in many instances, it can literally be a gun to the head, but anybody who knows anything about prostitution knows that prostitutes are clearly choosing their own trafficking.  Do you see what I’m driving at here?  Not that an honest day’s work is the same as prostitution, but that prostitution is the oldest profession.  That is the very far, far in the extreme, in how the individual chooses to make their money.  The prostitute is the ultimate money maker and drives on the same capitalist spirit as any other business person.  But it happens all the time.  That’s life.

                And so now you see more of my loony tunes thesis.  That essentially money is the primary motivator on just about every decision and that, as its motivation, it will motivate anything.  I guarantee that with the right amount of money I could buy the President or a dictator.  Money will buy any political party.  It will buy any law, any and everything.  With the right amount of money you have power.  You could buy the words that would describe anything and everything in newspapers and on TV.  You could select programming.  

                And what songs and movies unabashedly claim is that money can buy happiness and love.  But this is downright false.  Yet it’s touted as gospel.  The reality is that the internal climate of any individual, like the weather outside, cannot be bought.  Otherwise, if I went down the street and I said to the girl at the bar, get me a drink, and make it snappy, and be a real dick and think I’m the coolest guy ever because I’m going to tip her well.  But that tip is expected.  Let’s say for argument that I tip her real, real good-like.  She’s not going to be happy inside and look at me as a good friend all of sudden.  I’ll be the dick that tips generously.  Her interior sunshine will be bought by me, but only in the time that she sees me, even if that.

                It is well worth noting that I am a male writer talking about feelings.  I’ve brought up women in several examples.  I will bring up an eerie example about women.   And that’s the example of the gold-digging wife.  And for any feminist who doesn’t believe they exist, they exist.  And it happens all the time.  But in the example of the gold-digging wife, I see more of the enslavement than your regular streetwalker, because these women are committing their life to their husband solely for money.  Now how would your interior weather forecast day in, day out?  How would you look at yourself in the mirror? 

                But that is actually a more favored way of commitment.  Marriage has its origins, as we know, in the dowry system.  So the father would pay for his daughter to marry a man in the next village.  It’s traditional.  And the marriage contract is in a way lending some credence to gold-digging.  Not that marriage itself is like this, now.  But that sharing the wealth in a family is a very natural thing, and that the gold-digging wife (and the husband sometimes) is choosing a life to have children and love those children in a house with a husband she doesn’t love, and the husband can get his sexual or even intimate needs elsewhere.  And vice versa, for the rare example of the gold-digging husband.  This happens all the time, and it’s totally legit for a lot of people.

                But let’s not solely discuss women on these problems, what about the Johns who either buy sex or buy a wife.  They too are slaves to prostitution.  For the obvious question is, why would anyone need to buy sex?  Why can’t we just go around and pluck sex off cherry trees.  I would say, for the exact same reason you usually buy your cherries at the grocery store and not grow a cherry tree.  A highly complex psycho-drama goes on here, but the fact remains: what’s going on?  A transfer of cash for services, cold.       

                Ok, so we see an example of a primacy with money.  That is, one’s illegal idea of making it is transferring a service that smacks in the face of some dignity we have with sex and our own personal body.  Few last remarks on prostitution and pornography.  That, for example, the latter is one of the largest industries, and a secret cousin of Hollywood mainstream film and media, I ask you, why do we find this idea of paying for sex to be hideous?  I mean we place a dignity on sex and the people involved.  We acknowledge that sex has consequences of children and diseases and intimacy.  And we have a lot of religious and moral literature that tells us these things, aside from our own practices and experiences.  I am going to argue that it is our identity with money that creates a system, in which one cannot pay legally and legitimately for sex, but can go to a computer and be thoroughly entertained by a legalized prostitution.

                In fact, if you look at that distinction of prostitution (a black market) and the highly controversial, yet highly ordinary porn (white market), you can see a very interesting identity with money.  Because the dignity of sex is not in either cases.  It is thrown way the fuck out the window.  And yet, this is our reason for illegalizing prostitution.  Yet it’s artistic and stylized cohort is literally flaunted and viral online.  One would think that for a society that values freedom of choice, if prostitution were in the media—and it is everywhere, even in very high art—then it would probably follow that it would be legalized like in some areas of our country and in other countries.  Not so.  And this is one way which money works: by thoroughly compartmentalizing.

               

                Let’s see if there are other ways in which we can rightly show compartmentalizing at work.  In some basic ways, that is what advertising is.   Anybody who believes an ad on TV or in a magazine is naïve.  Because we all know that an advertisement is to sell a product, and it will say anything to do so.  We could go into the ways in which the marketing and advertising industry has tried to ethically have standards or show how it doesn’t.  But it is thoroughly rhetorical what marketers and advertisers do, so that if someone came on TV and said this brand of soap will make me a millionaire, it will have to work pretty hard at trying to convince me of this necessity of product and its promises.  Any kind of advertising claim that is logically impossible (this soap will literally get me onto a NASA space shuttle and take me into space) ultimately would not be approved and hence some kind of fraudulent claim. 

                But ads nowadays have figured out ways to make the illogical and absurd claims into an art of selling.  So that the basic factual information about a product is not really there, and usually the viewer is assumed to know all the important basic facts about a product.  The advertisers can then spin and peddle in many different ways.  And this is all dreadfully ordinary, and long satirically unfunny.

                And the rate of, say, advertising on TV is at a brainwashing effect.  It is brainwashing like anything that is shown on TV and has an audience.  It purports at times to be a form of entertainment itself.  But while the art of a commercial can be thoroughly described, in many different ways, the fact remains is that it’s there to sell you a product.  And that it is there solely for money.  There are complex webs in which people study its effect, to see if the rhetoric is making money, so much so that it is practically a science behind the art. 

                In effect, it purports to be a form of art and entertainment just as film or book does, but ultimately the poetics of soap cannot be gotten around, and there is for five minute intervals highly complex psycho-dramas with their sole intent to make you aware of a product and to spin some argument as to why you should buy this product.  That’s its function.  Everyone knows this.  And why do our eyes accept to watch these lies and these insincere things?  Because like the people who are spinning the conversation before us in a commercial, we know that ultimately we are like them.  We may act high and mighty, with beliefs in God and a moral conviction to no end—even heroism of saving lives in burning buildings—but even a firefighter will accept the lies on TV, because he understands that advertisers have to make money too.  That perhaps they lie, but it is for some overall good of Commerce.  That there is a contribution the advertisers are making for the simple exchange of goods and services.

                We could spend the rest of our lives trying to understand how marketing and advertising play a heavy role on the development of children, and that yours truly has watched just as many commercials as the next TV viewer; since I was a kid thrown into an entertainment/marketing TV, Film, and Mass Media society, like most Americans.  So these are all rather 101-type ideas of marketing and their effects.  And while I don’t hold any degrees in advertising, marketing, and mass media, I can tell you just the same as your average skeptical loon, that it is manipulative and brainwashing.  And my claim that is brainwashing is not a straightforward kind.  Not that I am going to watch any commercial and be naïve to believe, or that the cumulative effect of advertising will lead to audiences into complete mindless control.  But that the brainwashing effect is a reinforcing of political agendas and identities, and completely complex, but more than anything, it reinforces the idea of money and its value in our lives. 

That advertising is a major player in every kind of entertainment, business venture, political candidacy, and anything and everything thoroughly Capitalistic and Democratic goes to show just how important advertising is.  And the next time you watch a commercial, on which a guy farts or something, really think about how those same people who have designed that commercial are probably working on some business deal with your favorite high art director, your favorite football coach, and/or your favorite politician.  And that all of them together make up the Mass Media.  And so we live in a very complex society, which advertising is very much important to it.

                Yet why do we need advertising?  Why does it work?  Well, there are a lot of theories on why, but the fact remains is that it does.  Otherwise, why has the experience of the commercial and advertising been with us since day 1?  This is not a logically sound argument I’m making.  I really don’t want to get into all the theory and technical side of Mass Media.  But simple observation shows that the insincere and rhetorical craftiness of advertising is plain as day part of our society and globalization.  That a lot of businesses go to great lengths to slap a brand on to a football game, a charity event, a presidential candidacy, and anything that will get their brand name out and viewable to the masses.  So from my lay view, it’s probably a simple awareness that succeeds more than anything, despite the complex ways in which they rhetorically try to show how great and necessary a product is.  And we all compartmentalize this, and go about our day doing what we have to do.  And reason in many ways, on the ethicality of advertising and its role in a currency based system.

                 Now hypothetically and rhetorically speaking, why do I not go pay my own money to watch a 120 minute commercial?  Why do I pay to see what I consider to be entertainment, not commercialism?  Why when I make choices I avoid commercials and that, in actuality, it has to be forced on me?  Why would a business go to great lengths to make me aware of it and its products, so much so that as a skeptical examining individual I have to figure out ways to select my forms of entertainment among the vast ads that try to corrupt them?  Because genuinely, I don’t like the way I feel when I see the complex-psycho drama of a commercial; that I don’t like the idea that football or a charity marathon or a presidential candidacy is married to a lying organization.  And there is sound reason why, when I open up a book in the library, some ad doesn’t fall out, inviting me to buy a brand of soap.  Sound reasoning why that if I opened up some scholarly journal on Mathematics or even on Mass Media Marketing, there is no picture of some celebrity  endorsing this scholarly journal on Infinite Variables, or whatever.

                It is because all credibility and integrity and authority would be lost with that journal.  And while this is an absurd notion to think about, we can show that this type of view of credibility, authority, and integrity isn’t shared in most mass mediums.  And it is promoted and endorsed in the public sphere, big time, all the time.  And we all know this, and it is all so not funny to me.

                But businesses have to make money aside from the actual selling of their products.  They have to make people aware of these products somehow.  And if they are going to make me aware of a product, then they can at least entertain me in some way.  These are honest ways in which we rationalize a very dishonest industry.  And so the ad for the department store gets compartmentalized somewhere in my brain.  That brand name written next to the Sugar Bowl is overlooked.  And that just as I may go to great lengths to avoid visual contact with ads, so much more are the advertisers going to great lengths to make me aware of their products and their value.  And this kind of silly business that seems ugly and dishonest to me can be for some people their bread and butter, their life’s calling.  Because the reward of money positively says, it’s how you have to survive and be successful and do a job well done, etc.  And so there is a great part of the marketing world, which sees no problem with what they do.  That the marketing world can be the subject of comedies and have their own culture.  That it can be the subject of scholars and theorists and have its own major in Universities.  But the bottom line, as they say, is that it all comes down to selling a product via highly complex messages.

                And there are writers and authors and readers who go about very educated ways, to discern this phenomenon and culture.  And fictional ironic allusions to name brands are as old as the ad industry itself, and take on postmodern significance in the experiences of all our lives.  When you read a highly examining writer’s view of this culture, there is always an acknowledgment of its importance in manipulating its viewers and readers.  It takes on epic forms too.  Almost to absurd conclusions with some critics.  Advertising may be the very root of all evil. 

               

                But advertising is only a compartmentalizing of the truth that money makes the world go round. 

                And that the marketing world’s insincerity and genuflection of the soul to different ideas to sell a product is really an endorsement of itself.  And while I may sound ludicrous in all this, the day I walk into a courtroom and the judge has a brand name visibly on his attire or on the gavel or wherever, is the day I would truly climb the tree and start working on a tree-hugging-type tree house, and squeeze till I pass out.  And if you have followed me this far, I really do appreciate your time. 

                Because, here is one of the reasons that the scholarly journal or judge is not branded by some Fortune 500 company: that the examining reader and viewer has to go to great lengths to compartmentalize where the brand name of said business should go or not go.  I defy the theorist to spin an argument as to why I shouldn’t see on my judge a brand name for a soda.  But, in fact, there are brand names on the judge’s or psychiatrist’s walls.  They are big fat names of educational systems, with letters and very erudite Latin words.  And the said judge may wear the T-shirt of his law school around jogging.  And while there is no cash-exchange, this is same endorsement principle that is behind why a celebrity touts a certain feminine hygiene product.  Or that I may select a certain brand over that, and they put the logo on my shirt. 

                And make no mistake, Academia is a business, first and foremost, and they have to be concerned with money just as the individual does.  They have to be concerned with who their alumni are and how prestigious they are.  And so degrees are a wee bit of advertising for the successful professional and for the University.

                                                                                ***

                That when you are sitting in a classroom and you hear outside the lawn blower and the construction crew that’s working on the library and football stadium and adding progress to the Academic Enterprise, and your professor is a brilliant person going over Marxist theory in words you don’t know and have to use the dictionary to find out what they mean, and that there is an undercurrent of beliefs as to why my professor wouldn’t have a brand of soap he endorses, and does not take five minutes to sell me a line of clothing, we understand that, at the very least, that this is not that kind of business.  But again it is business.

                And anyone who is an Academic administrator knows this.  That it is a complex system of allocating resources to pay my professor to show me why some film is pretty and has a lot to say, or why some book can instruct me on complex math or evolution or any of the glorious subjects that can be taken, in the “Academic Setting.”   But my Marxist scholar who is teaching me right now, and may have a lot to say about these lay thoughts, is getting paid to tell me about this particular theory.  And that in the case of a professor, one of the love-job mentalities, somewhere deep inside, he knows that he has to jump through a hoop to get his students to read the books, give them his intellectual discourse, and keep their attention away from wanting to have sex with each other. 

                And so you see the irony I’m spinning here.  The very real matter-of-fact business of being a professor and loving his job and enlightening.   He too has to have a car to get to work, a roof over his head, and money to buy the books, all showing that money is a necessary evil for him to get people to think about things.  To provoke thought, as it were.

                So even in the highest integrity of a capitalist society, one that is day in, day out, examining on levels that I even don’t, the Marxist scholar has to face the fact that he can’t simply grow his own food, create his own energy to supply fuel for his car and house.  Because, at the end of the day, what that Marxist scholar has to do is not be a fan of money, but has to live with it, in order to teach why money causes so many problems.  And so he can observe all these things around him, in absurd postmodern ways, just like we all can, and he can resign on the very things he believes, to chip away at a money system, just like I am, at this moment.

                However, let me examine what I’m doing as opposed to a very scholarly work.  I am claiming that money is the problem and that all around me, in daily quaint observations, I see this to be so.  And I am not going to footnote a zillion different scholars as some kind of proof.  I am going to, however, try something radically different, and simply appeal to people’s sense.  And this is ultimately why I am no scholar or poet right now.  Because your average reader hates big words and big ideas, not because they are not intelligent or not examining their lives and the Global Market.  But because, well, the hopelessness of it is far more reaching, and any of the ideas I’ve brought to you are not my own, and have big grand capital letters in the University Biz.  And are thoroughly studied all the time.

                However, also take note.  My simple claim that “money is the root of all evil” is biblical and a sweeping generalization.  And that if I were to be a scholar, I would be laughed at for making a thesis so rudimentary, so utterly simple and stupid.  That I would have to engage every scholar in the University, in a chess match of wits on his own turf.  And that on his or her own turf, he or she is supreme and is prestigious for having come to my simple conclusion and dismissing it, for any number of polysyllabic reasons.  So that there is a highly specialized “trade” on both criticizing respective authors and scholars and that this is one way in which we can compartmentalize. 

                And ultimately I am trying to reason and argue in a very crude, unspecialized way.  A vulgar way, I dare say.  Because just like any business that models itself on integrity and enlightenment, it says there’s a division of labor.  You are an authority on soap and I am an authority on money.  Let’s know these things.  I learn from you on how soap works, and I’ll show you how money works.  Don’t fuck with my territory, man.  But if someone comes along and wants to point out something, and they are not an authority on the subject, then everybody’s whiskers are astir.  And in the business of being a professor, if his or her authority and prestige are threatened, you better damn well have a degree that’s higher, or a language skill, or some other kind of knowledge-based skill that gets you prestige and the job you are looking for. 

                And so while in the highly great walls of Academia, a lot of enlightening is going on, and skills are being learned, and ideas about postmodernism are being batted around in a highly evolved game, the Real World is outside the window right that minute adding progress to the buildings for which the intellectual games are being played.  And we see, at the bottom line, that money is providing the intellectual games.

                The fact that education needs tuition is a heart-twister to anyone in Academia.  Because in the very integrity-minded scholar, education should be free and given to all, and that Business should stay out of the business of teaching Literature or Science or whatever.  Students are a rare breed, indeed, on this angle, because at once a student has some power and say, that he may or may not like his professor or she must have a say on pedagogical concerns.  She is given some kind of license in the division of labor of learning and retaining information.  But as the professor stands before these students, and these students have a multiplicity of ideas as to why they are shelling out dough to learn, the fact remains that this puts the professor directly in the field of rhetorical persuasion.  If he does not have enough prestige not to care about what these people before him really think about him, his ideas, and what his enlightenment-espousing ways are, he really does have to do some rhetorical work to engage their minds. 

                And the list of reasons why a student is there, paying a fortune to have him talk and choose readings for him or her, is vast and confusing in itself.  This is because the student may look at it is a business where he can get knowledge-based skills in order to make money once the designated four or five years are up.  Because he or she is concerned about a very practical and utilitarian view of Academia.  Or there may be students who value the knowledge in itself and the ideas behind it.  May relish in the aesthetics of a well-written argument or thought; or may be there for a different kind of noble idea: to cure cancer. 

                As you see, these make up only a few reasons why the student may be there.  He or she may be there, because they may recognize that it is about the status of having a degree.  That there are trends and figures that show certain people can be on par with certain class structures. 

                That ultimately the ability to read can prevent you from sleeping on the park bench. 

                So there are a whole host and myriad of ways in which the student approaches the University.  But if you take any practical view of the business of enlightening people, there are a number of factors as to why this just appears ugly and crude.  That it devalues the very ideas you read about.  We don’t want to look at book and think of its cost and the printmaking and think of it is as a business.  We want to read literature with a capital L.  Or a very critical view of some scholar.  Or something that will give us knowledge to progress in many good ways.  So that, when we sit in a classroom we can compartmentalize and complain about the price of textbooks, and sacrifice ourselves to crowning achievements of Civilization.

                So at the end of the day, after all the intellectual stimulating ideas have given us the buzz of knowledge and hard work and earning our wage and adding progress to our respective fields, we can forget and spend money on food and entertainment and everything that the Real World is really like.  We can compartmentalize the business of being a student or professor and have a drink that costs money and escape just like a factory worker is clichéd in the films and books.  And we can rest assure ourselves on the noble principles and ideas that are floating in our heads and in the books, and just be real people and hang out and do work and live with overwhelming problems that get analyzed to death.  And shrug it off to some human condition we all are aware of.

                I mean there are some people who are really enthused about their particular specialized field and have a wide range of knowledge on it.  And limit their ideas in the good philosophical way of knowing just how ignorant they are of some other field of knowledge.  I won’t presume to go into any astronomy or calculus or anything of the sort.  Because I respect that I don’t know hardly anything at all about certain fields.  I won’t even assert that I’m really a scholar of Poetry, which I highly value out of interest as a creative writer.  I have read many, many books of poetry and know the names and the ideas of why the poet wrote a certain way or what not.  But the fact remains there are poets and there are poetry scholars and one doesn’t mess in the field of the other, all that often.  Some do.  And they persuade the scholars of their knowledge.  Others are wacko artists like me, who wouldn’t dream of trying to communicate with a scholar in his field. 

                And here’s a very real example of the division of labor and specialized knowledge of the scholar and the doer.  And I have a whole lot of thoughts on that.  But one of the major reasons I don’t write a scholarly paper on some famous poet is because I disagree with the language.  You have to get trained in certain terms and signifiers for the scholar.  Only certain poets who come out and have prestige and actually show some effect, will then the scholars go to the table and construct very scholarly arguments on what this poet had said.  It is a very detached form of writing, just the way that the poetic language isn’t interesting to a lot of people.  They both are esoteric and have rules and organizations that fundamentally govern their speech.  On very linguistic levels too.  However, I would say that the scholar is not concerned with the same types of modes of discourse as the creative writer, and so get the fuck off my turf, man.  You write the poetry.  I review and criticize it.

                As you can tell I have been in Academia as a creative writer.  I never taught, but I did tutor English composition, and I was woefully bad at tutoring.  And here’s why, because some things were never clear in my mind.  I had an hour with a student and, in that hour, I saw papers from every subject known to University settings.  And as a reader, I’m not the most critical.  If someone presents something and they are clear about it and they followed the certified rules of any form of research writing, then what the fuck is the critical problem?  So I felt I was lacking as a tutor the whole time. 

                Not all papers followed simple basic grammatical rules and had typos and weren’t clear at times.  So I would focus on these basic things.  But I was never the final word on these papers.  There was some instructor who had way more demands of the student than I would have wanted.  That professors and instructors were demanding so much critical reading, that yes, if I had to live with the paper, maybe I would see.  But it was my job to be a tutor and I separated it just like any other job, because of time constraints.  I had an hour to read someone’s thesis or dissertation.  And I was severely lacking in what appeared in the Writing Center to be so easy for the other tutors.  They would just look at the papers and diagnose all the problems and show How it was supposed to be written.  Or how this subject Ought to be treated.  And so consequently it was anxiety provoking. This was a very severe problem.  I was even assured that I didn’t have to know about business or astronomy or psychology.  That I wasn’t there for information or insight into that knowledge.  And yet, I was there to be very critical of the writing and to help the student. 

What’s more, since I was a creative writer and I had to take courses in very scholarly Literature courses.  And write academic papers.  And this was all very new to me, this mode of discussion.  I mean I had been in undergraduate programs in the same field of English, but on the advanced level, it is a different game.  And I had a weird experience.  Because here I am, I got into the University just like the next person, but I really didn’t feel on the level as these scholars.  And I really wasn’t.  Because the idea of the student in the upper tiers of the educational system model is one who, every time there is a word or term or idea that is unfamiliar, is expected to read about it till the cows come home.  Is, in other words, supposed to follow up like a scholar.  And I was still just trying to comprehend the unfamiliar setting and people and community of Higher Education.  I was average in that respect.  Because when a stranger comes to town, he doesn’t automatically know people around him and what they are saying.  He tries to learn about them and understand his role in the community. 

So, as you can see, my argument is crude and rudimentary and breaks so many scholarly rules that one may think that it is simply a poor way of rebelling against Academia.  But as I got to understand how Higher Education worked, I look back and see that it is business just like anything else, and governed by money.

                And so I look back on those days as I was rhetorically selling ideas on things like clarity and typos and doing my job and all the anxiety that came with it.  I do however see very real power now with writing and the written word, but I am left still trying to understand why these professors were making their students jump through hoops in order to gain knowledge and write better.  Well, my outright dismissal of scholarly work is only founded on the idea that language is fundamentally a form of communication and that there is a lot of confusion on this issue.  And this opens a whole other window of discourse that really isn’t germane to what I’m saying.  Because as you see, that’s a highly specialized field and takes a certain amount of knowledge and reading and referring to to really explore. 

                Why I have chosen this rhetorical strategy of X-ing out the scholars and going on my good privileged view is because they are not the ones whom I want to talk to on this matter.  Because even in the air of Academia, it is stifling to just say what you think and try to be clear about it.  And this is what separates the Ivory Tower of so many enlightened readers, to your neighbor who, when he uses so many ethnic slurs to tell a joke that you wince, is that there’s a fundamental evasion of just saying what you think.   You have to write it.  And show it to whomever.  Otherwise, if I said what I thought in Academia and I didn’t try to reason the way they wanted me to, I was just like the neighbor who slurs every other word, and that is the last thing you want to look like, in a community of so many eloquent individuals.  Who can really teach you a lot of good things in this world!  Don’t get me completely wrong. I’m not here to do away with education, in any way.  I’m not that loony tunes.  But the elephant of looking like you’re ignorant when you talk and write can positively drive you bonkers. 

                What I really was, wasn’t stupid, but thoroughly understanding of my ignorance on a wide range of ideas and things, and was more of a slacker in the scholarly department.  That’s because if I wanted to be an Ideal student who could gain some knowledge on something, I would have spent a lot more time in the library reading.   And that’s the god-awful truth about my role in Higher Education.  And if I am going to say why the Academic Enterprise is a business and make ironic jokes about it, then I better damn well tell you the truth from a human perspective.  And if you want to disregard all this on grounds that I was a slacker and not an authority on anything, then that’s your right and your privilege to do so.  Because I would hope that even the most snobby scholar can realize that what I’m pointing out over and over again is much more simple, yet so great and hopeless, that it’s overwhelming.

               

                Ironically, when the deadlines of reading and writing for a professor were off the table, I began to really enjoy it way more, out here in the Real World.  I began to see much more into the implications of a good author’s ideas who reasoned with me and how those implications were playing out in real life. And I didn’t presume anything about him or her.  I solely went on his or her word and let him or her say what he or she was going to say.  And this is how I think a good author always writes, in whatever style he or she is going to write with.   That I will glean truth off him or her and move on.  And that while it’s nice to have an intelligent conversation to discuss the ideas behind a good author, the fact remains that an intellectual discussion, while is a very good learning endeavor, just as reading a book is, is, ultimately, put on the shelf or forgotten about, all to go get good old money.   

                But I have to tell you that it was out of desperation that I resorted to this essay, because I have so often wondered whether it was an I-Them sort of rebellion, was it psychological driven, that the levels of so many internally aware ideas were in crises mode that I did the cliché walk around the block, Miami Beach circa 2011.  And I talked with friends and family, other writers, and people in my life, that it hit me in the most profound of ways.  It was everywhere.   It was on the street.  It was the passerby.  It was the restaurants and businesses and establishments.  It was getting ice cream.  It was all before me, and a resounding why is modern life so complexly like this?  Why do I have to have money to eat?

                And, note, I really had thought this way back when, as a teenager.  On a very intuitive level.  And I’m not even the most moral person you’d meet.  I have strong issues of selfishness and vanity and 7 Deadly Sins and Fall From Grace-type ideas, and the complex psycho-dramas of your mild mannered examiner.  And you do a nutjob piecing things together and, really, when it comes to it, maybe it isn’t me?  Maybe it is the System.  But the System is not really to blame.  Because there are a lot of people who are way more happy and way more integrity-minded than I am, in the System.  So what fuels the system?  Money.  Anyone and everyone will tell you that.  And a long time ago, I was intuitively aware of all these things, but now I thought I would take to pen, as they say.  But I’m working from a laptop, and get my info from books and online.  And I still admire the logic of philosophers in togas.  And their idea of being unwisely wise and not asserting to know everything.  But when the fact of money is so blatantly running the world and is naïve to not know this or examine this, and that perhaps you don’t bog yourself down with solutions before you have even gotten there, then you can really see this Truth.

               

                You can see the awe in the power of money everywhere. 

Journalism is run by money and time.  And while a lot of journalists want truth, demand truth, and seek ways of exploring and watchdogging the society around it.  The fact remains, they have deadlines and money to contend with, just like any other job.  Because they too are a part of the Mass Media Experiment.    That any anger you direct at a journalist can be explained away by the demands of the job.  But the thing I wonder about is this curiosity to always have information before its reader.  Or news before its TV viewer.  The Beast, as they call it.  And every journalist feeds the Beast.  Why micromanage an article in such a short time?  Are things so complex that people need status updates on everything going on in the world, with no thought behind it?  No thought behind the words it uses. 

That the journalist could base his argument on facts and facts alone is, well, I will point out that there is so much literature on why this is not so, why even the choice of which fact to make has ideological repercussions.  That people choose the facts that fit their view of the world.  That the whole spinning of rhetoric and facts appears to have agendas to some.  And so one group writes something they consider Fact.  And someone comes along says, that’s Your Fact.  The real Fact is x.  And so on and forever, in the culture of Journalism.  And here I am not a scholar. I won’t prove to you with various scholarly journalistic articles, etc.  It’s right there on everyone’s lips.  When they read the news.  This article looks like it favors some idea.  And some people look at this Public Discourse of what one news organization says is true, while another one says it’s not, as a crowning achievement of some kind of debate in the public sphere. 

And I guess that’s really the best way to look at.  You have to compartmentalize your real feelings about these things, otherwise you will be insane and a nutjob.  But when I read a good thorough analysis of something really relevant to me and the global society, it usually takes about a book length or at least a day to read.  Am I slow reader?  Maybe.  The point is, there is an insatiable Beast that is the Journalistic world that we depend on for news.  And that beast, you guessed it, has the same blood as any business, money.  And so is it any surprise that most news is Byte-size to take along the way as you do your job?  No.  Because if the collective journalism field and mass media were to sit down and write thorough analyses of life all around them, the business would cease.  Readers and their own time constraints—really wanting to not know too much about the terrible things that go on—prevent thorough analyses.  And if audiences want to read a book, send them to the department of Academia for that.  Readers need to know what’s going on like yesterday.  And books and analysis take time and thought and really searching for clues and answers and things.  But there are a whole lot of things out there that are happening that we call “news” and it needs to be shared right now. 

And the idea of editorial observation is actually deterred.  Because, the assumption is that, if I can pretend to not be there, as a journalist, and not show my truth, then I can blend into the Beast of Mass Media.  I can report just the facts and be an objective observer.  But again, go to the Academia department on this Fact, because even the mere looking at something has an effect on it and that there are no objective observers, whatsoever.

                I won’t even stand some losing battle and say that this Truth is the objective truth, because I am an objective observer. Not at all.  Any writer knows that you come in with some sort of agenda or ethnic background.  The reason why I tell you upfront is because I’m all too aware of these things.  That a White Privileged Male is Speaking The Truth.  There are schools designed against me.  A rigorous sketch will show that I am different, my ideas are different. But I kinda thought that was the point.  To have a different idea.   Which if you will notice this idea isn’t all that different.  It is exhorted by everyone, who have thrown their hands up in the air in the powerless world of currency.  

                Even the mere fact that I say, as a white guy, who has some money, that I’m not a fan of money or capitalism will get every gender and ethnicity and class, in some kind of death match.  Like it’s hypocritical or something.  Like because I didn’t grow up (and I really haven’t grown up completely) scraping by: somehow I’m the guy with a tacky sweater tied around his neck on the ad of some ski cabin, fire place and all, with a very beautiful happy white family.  Frozen, eternally in the ad for Supreme White Male Power.  And I’m not going to go for sympathy in my rhetoric, because by-and-large, I love my family and had a very good childhood.  Does this counter any more intuitions?  That a once happy white boy with a lot of stuff should come knocking on your door and say, guess what, I really kinda am not a fan of this whole money system. You bet it does.  It counters every intuition under the sun.  So am I an “objective observer” who can give you the skinny on why problem after problem can be shown to revolve around one of the simplest thing we all share?  I don’t think I’m objective at all.  And being white and male and having privileges automatically excludes me from the mind of some individuals out there.

                However, like I said from the beginning, that this whole idea of being some authority is intimately woven with money.  And that if I truly were a bazillionaire, a Guru of Total Escape, with massive prestige and people kowtowing before me everywhere, you better believe that the fact that I am white and male would not bother some souls.  They would lap up everything I say, because, that White Male Guru Billionaire is conducting business deals and what he says, goes, as they say.  His words are put into the papers and he is shown on TV.  And this gives him an infinite amount of prestige and say, in the power structure.  Because he is truly adept in our eyes.  He’s the one to learn from.  His worrying about his own markets and finances, in a weird way, is worrying about the global market and political structures around him. 

                And so what is a writer to do?  If he comes and says, sure he had a lot of Nintendo games and had an allowance and went to school that was private, yet he doesn’t have the prestige as Guru Billionaire White Guy.  Well, you can dismiss him in so many ways, it’s not even funny.  But you can’t dismiss him on the grounds that he is more powerful than you, more happy than you, or anything you ascribe to the upper class white people out there.   And you may also want to take a look at how things really are, because White Guys who are around now are just about as powerful as the next schlep. And that minorities have made great strides in becoming Presidents, politicians, athletes, stars, academicians, and professionals everywhere.  So the fact that I may or may not be the same as you does not qualify to dismiss me just yet.

               

                And let’s turn things around on my reader.  That if you have followed me thus far, whether you were critical of me at every point or not, that the figurative fact remains that time is money, and that the time you are noticing my subtle references (or not) is time that could be spent working on something productive and making money out of it somehow.  And this is the real clincher for any reader: that they really do have to appreciate the fact that they have time to read.  That puts you in a class above others who would eat paper if it nourished them.  And this we all know.  But any kind of class argument will lose, because if you are educated in any way, you have some hypocritical voice somewhere.  Because even the ability to read shows your class.  So while I may not be likeable at the moment, these are just plain realizations living in the complex world.  And that’s life.  So throw your hands up in the air and get back to writing news or selling a product or teaching the finer shades of philosophers and politics and laws.  Because we the educated, by definition, are supposed to impart some knowledge, some idea, some truth, some moral, in how to live in this world.  I just have nothing else that really satisfies my truth, other than to sort of maniacally point out the obvious.  

                Not even my art.  Because that’s a business just like any other.  And it all sort of is echoing in a weird way at the moment.  That no matter what I do, when I open up the newspapers to look for truth or read a book by a great author, or watch a really artistic film, and really think about the business behind it all, and think about, really, in a super aesthetic book or poem or film, one that shines the most noble sentiments, or not even noble, shines all the flaws of society or the individual in the human experience, I can’t wrap my head around such a subtle thing that is everywhere, and that as my point is money.  Perhaps some of the greatest dramatists who showed the interior climate of some of the greatest characters had understood this concept, but hadn’t taken it Far enough.  Hadn’t said perhaps the individual in some state without a currency or money driving their lives is essentially a good moral being (I’m crying right now, by the way), that any kind of clinical disorders or purely villainous behaviors is due to the demands of having a very complex system of cash and credit cards and checks and all these ways in which money really motivates people to extremes.  And this is an essentially unknowable idea, because all I’ve ever known is Global Market 1980-2011.  So I’m not here to be an authority of the Utopia that I can’t promise, that I can’t assure and place bets on, or even work up some kind of mathematical logic into the semantics of the type of morality that would be in place, in a world without money. 

                And I’m not even here to be a downer of a guy and say, O money is wicked, so give it to people who need it.  Because that’s not the point.  You give anybody enough money and they are just the same as the next person.  All I can really say is that there is something alarmingly wrong here, and that it has to do with money and currency.

                The value or the moral is the simple old “money is the root of all evil” and that anyone who would assert, in some form of writing, this sentiment, straightforwardly, is just the same as a slave to money, like we all are.  And that this isn’t about the words capitalism or communism or socialism or any kind of theoretical discourse on the finer shades of different governments on paper.  Because, we’ve gone global.  This is the practice of dictators and prime ministers as well as presidents of the good old US.  That a dictator professes a communist agenda only serves his capitalist needs, only oppresses more so, because of the laws of his government, and the kids on the playgrounds carrying their Russian grade weaponry are woefully trying to survive, in an even more oppressive environment.  One that does not have a First Amendment that let’s scholars discuss things and Pro Wrestlers have their say as well.  And so, I’m going to think long and hard about this System, and though it feels hopeless, from my view, I just cannot help but ask the old what if?  What if there was a way without a money-system?