Tom Wolfe, some decades ago, popularized the idea of “radical chic”, that it was cool to have a Black Panther, or Fidel Castro, or member of the Weather Underground at tony parties in some affluent part of Manhattan. It was all a game, played by banal, bored and boring people, whose lives revolved around lazy thrills.
Can we speak now of “Lockdown Chic”? The notion that the cool people embrace this whole thing, that it is cool, and that only uncool people–most of them probably execrable Trump supporters–would not relish this terrific break in our collective bourgeois normalcy?
What this overlooks is–nearly everything and everyone. It overlooks the terribly poor in Africa, and Latin America, and Asia, who were on the edge of hunger to begin with, and already shitting in the street and sleeping on the floor.
It overlooks our own poor, both the rural poor, and the urban poor. It overlooks specifically–and I call them out since much seemingly benign rhetoric is being wafted in their general direction–the poor black people who live in violent urban ghettos.
How are they doing? How the fuck do you think they are doing? How can this be a serious question? Many of them were improving in the Trump economy, but its effects were just beginning to be felt. A great many of them were still struggling to make ends meet.
And ponder the Single Mother, whose nerves were already frayed, and who is now most likely going into clinical depression, at risk of suicide–her responsibilities notwithstanding–and who if she does make it through this will carry permanent emotional scars that will affect her the rest of her life?
This poor woman is not even allowed to know if her kids will be allowed to go back to school. What the fuck is she supposed to do if she can’t earn a living without working, and can’t work if she has nowhere safe to send her kids during the day? Is anyone thinking about her? Sure as fuck not Dr. Fauci, the fucking idiot and probable crook.
Look at all the people the Chic crowd forgets. They themselves live comfortable, boring lives, because they are unimaginative, dull people. Thrills are their only sustaining adventure, and drugs and sex the easiest route to those. But lunatic politics is a useful add to this mix.
And some of these people embrace what I would term a faux spirituality. They are the ones who fill $4,000 week long seminars at Kripalu with Gregg Braden, or perhaps Marianne Williamson. They can afford these things. They don’t understand that such things will never, ever, be a possibility for the mass of Americans, and that blissful pieties about love and compassion mean little to nothing where hard nosed intelligence and accurate understandings are the only remedy, and only honest pathways forward.
These are the people who fund people like AOC. They are the ones who want a rapist imbecile (he is cunning, though, when his brain is working, in the way those of skillful criminals are, and don’t forget it) suffering from Alzheimers winning the race for President.
And these are the people who COULD NOT CARE LESS about ordinary working men and women in this or any other country. They don’t care. Those people are not in their lives, and if they object to being used, then they are also objecting to their raison d’etre, and thereby disposable and immediately forgettable.
The poor are suffering? Let them eat cake.
Now where was that champagne?