The world is a mess. The world is a messed up mess. The world is like a writer drunk on mescal; the poetry is morbid; the prose is full of murder, rape, dominance, full of disillusionment; the plays are plays of couples murdering each other over ideas, over wealth—the world as a living being is being murdered by rich people and despotic power brokers. To a corporate executive making 400 million dollars a year, the world is his (mostly men) oyster—all the spoils of War—the easiest spoils there are. No records are kept of the stealing of spoils. No accounting is asked for. A question in my gut has always bothered me; why aren’t the American taxpayers sent a detailed accounting from the government of what happens with their money? I mean American citizens have to be precise down to their bottom penny with the IRS or their lives are ruined; the government on the other hand blows money so fastly and so without records and never has to show where all of its pennies go—oh hell no! Only individuals are responsible for their fraud or their honest mistakes.
The World Is a Mess
I was just noticing that the poorest countries in the Caribbean area—Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua—are poor because of their relationship both historically and currently with the United States. Haiti we’ve kept poor—we have spent enough billions of dollars in keeping these countries poor to have made all three of them paradises.
Wealth is destructive. It’s like these imaginary gods we’ve invented to solve all the natural problems in living on this planet that must be solved by mankind itself. Wealth, like those gods, is supposed to solve our problems when we acquire it. Wealth, though, like those gods, needs worship, worship in terms of constant tribute to it. A rich man becomes a priest to his wealth. He (and most wealth is controlled by a few men) must test the strength of his wealth in combat with wealthy others—the playing field is not very large—the wealthiest men in the world all know each other—they consider themselves as great individualists and are generally aloof of each other which makes the recent good ole boy Billy Gates and junk-bond write-off crook Warren Buffett becoming such asshole buddies, pooling several billion of their combined gagging billions to help educate the world so unprecedented—to a cynic like me, this is just two rich dudes cutting their losses by combining some of their wealth into a partnership foundation—I mean these guys are so rich….
Did you ever ask yourself what would happen if Bill Gates ever decided to cash out? You know what I mean, just suddenly go to his banks and say “Give me all the money I have in your banks—screw company charters and licenses and legal bullcrap, just give me what’s mine—I’m cashing out—oh, and, by the way, my new asshole buddy here, WARren the Junk Bond King, is cashing out right behind me—I’m cashing out first ‘cause I’m the richest god-damn silly son of a bitch to ever luck into the luckiest god-damn, money-making business on earth—do you realize how many of my operating systems are in place around the world? how many of my Microsoft products are running industries?—why even the US of A government is behoven to my Microsoft products and systems—but, I’m a tired little boy now—you know, I’m tired of these toys—I’m ready to chunk ‘em out my Windows—oh, I’m such a silly goose sometimes, right Melinda honey?—oh isn’t she the perfect nerd babe?—god I love her—and she loves my ass, too, you bet your assets—anyway, so give me my money in cash on the barrelhead and then give ole Warren his bales in cash also.” Could it be done? What bank in the world could cash these petty individuals out? How much are they worth in terms of cash?
My ex-wife once charmed billionaires—her last boss being a wild-ass Lebanese dude in New York City who had connections through the richest man in the world at that time (1970s)—who loved my wife like a daughter, by the way—and this Lebanese dude was moving to move himself from a Lebanese immigrant kid through this world's richest man's connection to Prince Feisal in Saudi Arabia, the world's richest man's home country to a big-time world player in all the financial games he could cover the antes on. He was playing alright. My wife told me how one of her top priorities with him was keeping creditors off his personal ass because she said, “You know, all these rich cowboys I’ve managed—the architectural firm in New Orleans; the rich architect in New Mexico; and then this rich Lebanese immigrant in New York City—they are all rich only on paper—none of them have any cash.”
The world’s richest man once offered my wife and I a house-sitting job essentially, you know, going to his various homes around the world and opening them up, hiring a staff; it meant we would live in his villa in Beirut for awhile, then move to his Tokyo penthouse apartments for a season, then maybe his Bel Air mansion in L.A., but mostly we’d have to live in Riyadh, his home base, in the American compound there and keep an eye on business transactions that took place in his palace. That’s what turned me off to the whole deal and her, too; we couldn’t imagine living in Riyadh, especially after we saw photos of it, though the world’s richest man had a breathtaking home in Riyadh where my wife would work—she was going to manage some aspect of his affairs—she was a genius with handling multimillion dollar transactions from the legal aspects down to the capital venture worth of these deals—a young kid is all she was, in her early twenties when she started attracting these rich bastards with her extremely practical outlook on life. She was a practical psychic when it came to keeping books balanced.
I hated rich bastards; I’ve hated rich people since I was a kid; and I didn’t grow up pisspot poor now, not at all, but I still hated rich people from before I could intellectualize the matter later in college when I was deciding between becoming a Communist or a Socialist, though I secretly loved some aspects of Libertarianism, too, though their Calvinistic leanings in terms of some of their fiduciary foundations turned me off—like work hard on your own property—your property is your most worth and what you produce on that property is yours to deal, trade, sell, or burn if that’s what you wish. As long as you’re on your property minding your own business you should be allowed to go about your business waiting for your end—I loved the individual liberties the Libertarians talked about but I couldn’t agree with their economic or political ideas. I eventually became a semi-socialist, and again secretly, and this is because of my Libertarian readings, too, I became fascinated by the writings of Anarchists. Oh boy, was I in trouble, except—and here’s the irony in this tale—I became fascinated by Anarchy because of this wife, who in her deepest desires favored Chinese Communism, at least that practiced Chairman Mao--I mean my wife loved Mao—she made me read Mao’s writings—some of the deepest bullshit I’ve ever tried to comprehend—Mao wrote long, long letters to his people to encourage them—like after he had swam in the Yantze River--a long philosophical paper mostly criticizing the horrors of imperialism, as practiced by, of course, the good ole US of A. Mao was a military officer who had led an amazing campaign against and had beaten out the Republican Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-shak and his US-backed government—and my wife openly despised Capitalism, though she used it and her charm over rich men to make herself wealthy—and I’m sure she died a very wealthy woman.
And all of this to say I’ve lived in a world of rich people since I was old enough to remember—as a two-year-old boy playing in a sandbox with two older girls in Enid, Oklahoma, a town of vast wealth in those days from oil, gas, and wheat—a rich area of northern Oklahoma that was stolen from Native Americans back in the late 1880s on the Cherokee Strip—and a bunch of money-maddened crazy white trash lined up their wagons and ponies and whatever and on signal raced out into Oklahoma Indian Territory and set down stakes all over that lush land—claiming it as theirs under rights granted them by what was called the Homestead Act.
Then I was moved to Abilene, Texas, a small town of 20,000 on the Texas & Pacific Railroad 180 miles due west on Highway 80, the Bankhead Highway, of Dallas-Fort Worth—Highway 80, by the way, ran from New York City to Los Angeles, though no song was ever written about “Route 80”—and some of Route 80 used to run right alongside Route 66 in some places, like in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. There’s still a Route 80—I see it all the time over in New Jersey. There is no longer a Route 80 in Abilene, Texas, long ago bypassed by the 50s Interstate Highway program set up to make General Motors rich—this Interstate Highway system eventually killed our railroads—and we had one of the greatest railroad systems in the world up and running fine until the highways came along bypassing the rail centers, don’t you see, and bringing trucks into the picture as then the cheapest way to ship goods and mail (the railroads made a lot of money off carrying the US mails) back and forth across this land.
All because of General Motors, which ironically now is a bankrupt company. Isn’t that amazing! Just twenty years or so back and General Motors was the world’s largest corporation.
I am sometimes curious as to what happened to companies I remember as a kid driving with my dad along a strip that ran from Dallas over to Fort Worth through Grand Prairie and Arlington, an area just after WWII thriving with an aircraft industry and several new innovative electronics industries that made their founders rich overnight. Fort Worth had Bell Helicopter—they made all the helicopters used by the armed forces and the Bell plant was located just outside Carswell Air Force Base.
Along that industrial stretch between Dallas and Fort Worth there was Chance-Voight, North American Aviation, Republic Aviation, there was Grumman Aviation—in Dallas there was Texas Instruments (started in Dallas by ex-GI electronics specialists) and in Fort Worth there was Radio Shack (started in Fort Worth by an ex-GI communications specialist)—and then Chance-Voight became Ling-Temco-Voight, merged by Jim Ling a Dallas millionaire, and Ling-Temco-Voight became LTV industries—which I think eventually became Litton Industries. Litton—remember how huge they used to be? And there emerged International Business Machines, too. And International Telephone and Telegraph—IT&T and then just ITT. Huge corporations at one time. Where are they now?
Also, can you believe, the original inventors of the assembly line, the Ford Motor Company is bankrupt, too. Isn’t that a sign that this country is bankrupt?
All because of rich men. You hear me? Rich men have bankrupted this country. Where’s all our once world’s-largest industries? What happened to them? Yes, I know what happened to them, I’m just having a problem thinking this shit out. History just keeps on repeating itself and I’m pissed. Another rich boy, Johnny Boy Kennedy, had us young folks convinced he had opened up a New Frontier to us—and then the big Bullshitter, Lyndon Bullshit Johnson flim-flammed us with the Great Society, an end to poverty, and the rights of all Amuricans to be equal under the Law of the Land—even those Americans the Constitution said were only ¼ human beings were gonna be accepted as whole humans by this new breed of altruistic white rich men…. And then VietNam came along and put an end to the Great Society.
See what I mean? I’m becoming a fatalist like Henry Miller was a fatalist in seeing that we subconsciously are worshipping the god Chaos—where we are headed—the Third Law of Thermodynamics, folks. See, we’ve all forgotten the Third Law of Thermodynamics—but the old Wolfman hasn’t. The Third Law of Thermodynamics is Entropy—which is Chaos’s kingdom to come. And it’s happenin’, too. Study up on entropy and see how it’s bound to happen.
That’s the way the world turns—and, yes, this all may just be an afternoon soap opera.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Election Returns: Who gives a shit. It's the same old politicians. Like we said, Connecticut stayed loyal to home boy George W. Dumbass by sticking with old Uncle Joe Lieberman. How do they justify it?
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