Privilege

Did the work blitz thang, so the November RTT rent $$$ will be compiled by payout tonight.

It was brutal, though.

Now I wish I had a reliable heroin connection because, you know, if you’re gonna waste your life doing boring repetitive things, you enjoy it more when you’re blasted.

Anyway, the next week at least is mine, mine, mine, so I have to make sure I don’t waste it.

The problem with doing boring repetitive work is that it totally depletes the imagination. It’s not hard in any real sense. It just sucks the juice from your blood, the marrow from your bones. I’m a paper cutout just about now. I flutter on every breeze.

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I’ve been having a kind of bizarre ongoing email correspondence with Max about privilege. This is the current buzzword among twenty-somethings. I have no idea what it means except that Max apparently now wishes I hadn’t sent him to that overpriced prep school and that he’d graduated from a community college instead of Stanford.

I wish he’d told me that 15 years ago.

I could have bought a lot of diamonds and cocaine with that tuition money. And trips to Thailand.

I don’t think these are the “end times” in any classic religious apocalyptic sense, but I do think an important transition is in the making right now for possibly the first time since the human species’ diaspora and dispersion out of Africa 100,000 years ago or so.

We know more about each other than we ever did before.

That knowledge is sparking massive unrest, pushing human homeostasis toward a very different end point, which will be a new equilibrium in which resources will be distributed differently.

Ben’s old joke was that the 9/11 bombings were actually Osama bin Laden’s revenge for The Real Housewives franchise.

There’s some truth to that.

I don’t see ISIS and unrest in the Middle East as religious wars at all. I see them as economic wars. Over the next 50 years or so, there will be a massive redistribution of resources. Remember that high school class where they made you eat a lunch that was comprised of three pieces of kelp and 100 grams of brown rice, and the social studies teacher told you smugly, “If the earth’s resources were distributed fairly, this is all you’d have to eat for the day”?

Well, the future for most people will be something like that.

I brought Max up to be politically conscious, of course. To be a feminist! To want to loan his voice to those who have no voice to speak for themselves or whose voices have been forcibly silenced.

But I was rather hoping that he’d loan his voice from the comfortable confines of a large mansion, kind of like the one that George Clooney just bought for Amal Alamuddin, with a cozy but elegantly appointed guest house where I could spend my dotage.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter so much whether somebody who is white, male, able-bodied, cis, hetero, born into money, educated, conventionally beautiful, or loved, became successful because of merit, writes Max. What matters is that our culture is inherently racist, sexist, and biased in very unuseful (I feel) and unjust ways.

Oi.

The great thing about racism, sexism and poverty is that they gave those of us who are naturally subversive the opportunity to make a lot of really funny jokes.

In the brave new world where each of us will beam contentedly over our noonday platter of mung beans and kelp, no one will have a sense of humor.

Because humor is inherently the pearl in the oyster. The transformation of the grit.

Without the grit -- sexism, racism, poverty -- there can be no pearls.

Now. I do realize that my own sense of humor tilts towards the pathologically black side of the spectrum; that it is, in fact, a defense mechanism, because I’ve had to endure a lot of pain in my life.

But it’s one of the things I really like about myself.

And I despair of a future in which a sense of humor has been replaced by a heightened sense of vigilance.