People are running around and screaming about the widening gap between the rich and poor, as if the country is about to fall into that gap and disappear.
What they’re not taking into account is that life has gotten too complicated — even as it has proportionately gotten too meaningless. In the old days, people had to worry about being eaten by wolves, or whether to treat flu by drinking urine or getting a hog bile enema. Maybe it wasn’t an ideal existence, but it was simple, and it was intense.
So what if the gap widens? At least then we can fall back on two basic, trusted categories: You can either be rich, or you can be poor. You can either have fondue with truffle flakes or you can have no teeth.
It will take the pressure off most millennials in a big way. There is something straightforward about manorial work and dying by the age of 40. When you don’t know your place in life, you feel lost. You know who never felt lost? Serfs, because they were bound to the land.
Lower life expectancy introduces the added bonus of less people — women especially — aging out of hotness. And it means less people moving slowly on the sidewalk.
But we can’t get back to basics if we continue to tax rich people, i.e. pretend as though we live in a society as opposed to a howling abyss slowly feeding itself into the gaping mouths of the Old Ones.
This is why the GOP is sort of right when it proposes tax breaks for the rich, it just happens to not be radical enough in its approach. Cancel taxes for the rich. They’re already dodging them anyway and will continue to do so — probably because they were fed more nutritious food as children and are therefore more advanced. Think about the extra sugar babies they’ll be able to afford. Think about the extra iPhone Xs the sugar babies will be able to buy. You want egalitarianism and a way to further stimulate the economy? You got it.
The student debt crisis, underemployment, a broken healthcare system — these are just all signs of people failing to adjust to objective reality. If nobody thinks they’re entitled to an education, a job, and emergency room visits, then so many embarrassing problems, not to mention embarrassing people, can simply go away.
Do you like Joyce? I like Joyce. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” You know what this beautiful prose is about? Discarding your illusions about life and death. Joyce was a badass and we can be badasses too — if we just accept the fact that it’s time to stop taxing the rich.
I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking, “Hey Natalia, did an insane rich guy pay you to write this? You majored in English, didn’t you? You, like, write poetry and shit? You’re probably broke right now? Natalia is someone paying you to poetically justify the destruction of even the pretense of meritocracy? Is this a subtle brainwashing campaign by the Koch brothers?”
And to that I say: Hey asshole, who the hell are you to imply that shit about my noble self. And I also say: Are you an insane rich guy reading this? Are you noticing my superior rhetorical skills right now? If you’re not, you should be.
Everybody has a price. Mine happens to be accommodating. Of course it’s not too accommodating — helping you cover all the lands in a second darkness is going to be strenuous work and I need to be able to treat myself. I’ve always wanted to go to Galapagos. Swim with the turtles before climate change wipes them out or turns them into mutants. I want a bathroom with artisanal tiles. I want my appliances to be randomly encrusted with Austrian crystals.
Anyway, I’m just saying. We’re all doomed anyway and taxing the rich just creates extra paperwork that eats into the time that we could spend contemplating the fact that we are all walking apocalypses and the apocalypse therefore is not a linear event.
I’ve said my piece. Somebody hand me a goddamn drink already.
Photo: 401(k) Calculator/Creative Commons
Cheers! 🙂