New Lockdown, Week 3, Thursday
Was it really six months ago that I had my last dental treatment? I know that the perception of time has been different during the various periods of various types of lockdown, but still! Six months from November going backwards would take us back to May. What that when one of my teeth broke? Time really is tricky nowadays; normal life is like participating in an episode of The Twilight Zone where some clever Sci-Fi writer plays around with the temporal concepts that we take for granted. Or you could assume that my reaction is one which is quite normal when anyone thinks about going to the dentist.
Talking of which, I managed not to miss the last part of Hostel III. Try as I undoubtedly did, by ostentatiously ignoring the screen and reading my mobile phone instead, I was drawn to look at the passing action – and was drawn in by the violence porn that makes up the franchise.
The premiss is that there are very rich people who will pay vast sums of money to spectate at what are live snuff spectacles where, while being served drinks by fetishly clad waitresses (looking, I have to admit like live versions of something from the soft-porn imagination of artist Allen Jones) they place bets on how and how long the death-throws of the unfortunate victims, safely separated from the rich voyeurs by floor to ceiling plate glass – no blood splatters on them!
Amid the bloodletting, the gratuitous bloodletting, I might add – I did begin to wonder about the attraction of this sort of slasher movie, and especially the elite group with the money to pay to watch such things.
It reminded me of The Purge where the bloodletting there was to secure the regime of another wealthy (white) group dedicated to the ritual destruction of those deemed surplus to requirements. It was the emphasis of a wealthy elite travelling in darkened windowed limos, that made me link it to the ‘customers’ in Hostel III, another wealthy elite, rich and depraved. And that brings us to QAnon, the ultimate absurdity of conspiracy theories with the same emphasis on a seemingly untouchable elite doing unspeakably nasty things. These films and this conspiracy theory obviously touch some sort of emotional dark fairy tale need in some people who believe that the horrors of the world must be linked to some directed malevolent force.
Perhaps in previous times this belief could have been directed towards the Devil and Hell – but even there you could say that the creation of the devil and hell were part of the ways in which the previous religious elite cemented their hold over the fearful imaginations of the paying customers in their churches and their religious wealth allowed them to do unspeakable things – one only has to look at the history of the papacy to see corruption and depravity at its hypocritical worst.
Financial inequality in the world means that real wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very, very few – and that minority has and will always try and behave with the impunity that they believe their money entitles them to. During the Covid crisis the super-rich have become richer and the inequality is getting gallopingly worse.
The poster boy for wealth without responsibility or concern is of course Trump. He clearly thinks that laws, the constitution and social norms are, as Leona Helmsley said in 1989, “only for the little people.” And then she was convicted of income tax evasion. Helmsley’s comeuppance was over thirty years ago, and since then we have had more of the super-rich brought down by sex scandals than by their everyday theft. Trump paid 750 dollars in taxes last year in the USA and he boasted about sexual molestation. When is he going to get his comeuppance? Losing the election is not enough, he must lose money as well, and a prison term would do him no harm!
QAnon is ridiculous and intellectually insulting, but there is a tiny elite manipulating the levers of government for their own advantage, but they do it in full sight. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” but stuffed his cabinet with the super-rich and made them richer by his tax ‘reforms’. He put wildly inappropriate people in government agencies and encouraged them to foster big business, fossil fuels, banks and all the other agencies of everyday life and profit for the few.
Charles Wilson said in a senate hearing when Eisenhower wanted him to be Secretary of Defense, “What is good for General Motors is good for the country” – and he had millions of dollars in stock in the company. It is perhaps unfair that that quotation is the only thing that most people remember about Wilson, and it has come to represent a particular view of capitalism in society. But Trump has tried his best to make the ethos of that disturbing belief true in his so-called government.
70 odd million Americans voted for Trump, the second largest pool of any presidential candidate – but Trump has never governed for the American people, only for those who are rich, no, only for the very rich.
QAnon is the ‘bread and circuses’ distraction for those who believe that they are being manipulated by a tiny minority of perverts, so they do not see the Big Money that really does the dirty work.
The sooner the obscenity of Trump and his shameless supporters are consigned to history the better. Whatever Biden may be, he has shown himself to be a fundamentally decent sort of human – and I will settle for that for the next four years as a way of recovering from the disaster of the last four years.
