I want to write about America's present condition. Our tentative
standing on the world stage has come at the steep price of spilled
patriotic blood, and our golden towers stand on foundations of groaning,
suffering, and deluded laborers. The great lie of this nation has
brought it enormous prosperity through investment. The investment of
capital, of time, and of countless millions of lives. Only the
attractive illusion that nothing stands in the way of success but sloth
and idleness still sustains this country. In fact, this is a nation
where few frolic in luxury and many work for the upkeep of a monolith
that provides just enough of the essential to keep them working. In
short, this is scarcely a special place. It is a nation like so many
other nations, with one of the few points of difference being that the
forces of our oppression cannot be as easily named as a single dictator
or coercive polity. Our framework of exploitation harnesses the forces
of capitalistic competition to act as an engine for ceaseless striving,
and it would really be no exploitation at all if what the common person
could attain through back-breaking pursuits were not capped from the
start. In the United States of America, the butcher's boy, in almost
every single case, remains the butcher's boy until his dying day. The
underdog billionaires serve as his idols as he puts slab after slab of
beef on the chopping block, as he invests his meager earnings and dreams
of a meat processing conglomerate owned and managed by him.
The
Bill Gates' and Steve Jobs' of this country are the ones who beat the
odds, who overcame through sheer force of circumstance, timely
innovation, and perhaps a measure of brilliance. But that, wish as he
might, try as he might, shall not be the fate of the butcher's boy. To
talk about change in this system and the subversion of the oppressive
force of the long-dead-or-maybe-never-real American dream would require
political and economic insight I do not possess, but I believe that the
negative impact of this superstructure on the common man can be lessened
by his attainment of self-consciousness (yes, hello Marx). Again, my
goal as I present this idea is not systemic change through revolution,
because that would be inherently political in nature. The laborer's
self-consciousness should arise because it will, following a period of
violent disillusionment, lead to the development of a far more
psychologically healthy conception of his place and prospects in this
nation. Work must never stop, but he who works in constant striving for
the realistically unattainable tempts eternal discontentment. This
nation's chief commodity is the concept of "not enough", with the
government as its distributor and the highly visible elite as its
self-interested promoter.
"Work hard and you can be just like me!"...sounds real good coming from the king of the metaphorical castle, with
his pearly white teeth and Italian shoes buffed to a shine by black
servants who are likely the direct descendants of the slaves his family
once owned in droves. The common man cannot be content in his place if
he whole-heartedly believes that his labor, his only selling point, can
earn him a drastically better place. The unlikelihood of radical upwards
mobility is a truth interestingly not-so-evident to this nation's poor
and lower middle class. Would it not be better, would it not alleviate
many of the symptoms of this sweeping social disease of discontentment,
if those in the muck did not dream of shitting into golden toilets? If
they did not, perhaps no one could afford to actually do so. And that,
to me, seems proper. Shit is bound for the sewers, so why the fancy
medium?
-Artem Potemkin
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