“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.” — William S. Burroughs
I don’t always agree with this author, but in this case, yes.
In the spirit of Ireland’s Jonathan Swift in his 1755 satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal,” advocating the consumption of children to meet the combined concerns of food shortages and a society’s inability to care for its young, the real, not metaphorical, matter of the ritual, societal pulverization of young people as they approach adulthood applies.
This essay could as easily be entitled, “The Misdirected Anger of American Youth.” A huge part of what’s at the root of the MAGA insurgency facing us now owes to this. The mangling, and the spirit suffocating, of the lives of ordinary people as an allegedly necessary part of “growing up” does naturally provoke anger from its victims, especially if they are not born sucking on a proverbial silver spoon. Such anger is not wrong, but can easily be misdirected.
But even those born to riches are afflicted. When Rudyard Kipling prodded his son to enlist in the Great War (World War 1), which son was soon killed, while it led to an outpouring of grief, alas, it was an emotional expression that came far too late. The emotion should have been felt to keep the boy out of the war to begin with.
The powerful World War 1 poet, son of elites, himself, Wilfred Owen, severely pained by the plights of his peers in the trenches, wrote “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” among many others, before being slain, himself, only hours before the armistice ended the fighting in 1918. In his “Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” he wrote about the horrors of war as Abraham defying God’s order to spare Isaac: “But the old man would not so, but slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”
Years later, the British composer Benjamin Britten took those words from Owen and put them to music in his striking War Requiem oratorio.
To be clear, many sons and daughters of the elites, like those of Yale’s Whiffenpoofs (Baa, baa, baa!), so happy in their final days of creative freedom as I saw them perform this week, do not yet know of the punishing demands that will be placed on them by their parents’ generation of unyielding task masters then they enter the worlds of law or finance.
But for most of us, that transition is even more deadly, if not by gunshots, by drugs, or a combination of a numbing routine and desperate scramble to make student loan or rent payments, and to hang onto tattered threads of marriage, inlaws and children.
This is the powerkeg out of which the MAGA movement has grown, nourished by sinister fascist overlords who’ve deployed the anger arising from these conditions to turn it against those perceived even more vulnerable, racial minorities, women, immigrants and gays. But these MAGA people get nothing out of it, either, except that they’ve demolished any ability they might have had to shape a movement of all their likewise oppressed brothers and sisters against those actually responsible for their suffering.
The problem, you see, is not the anger. It is its misdirection. How much effort do our overlords put into dismantling the anger they don’t control? How many paeans to inner peace and passivity, how many football games and rock concerts are there in the effort to defuse a righteous anger against how these elites are destroying society, and us, to protect their ways?
In this context, if anything, Jesus Christ called for righteous anger and action, not against our own, but against the rulers who impose their demands on us. Yes, sorry MAGA, but Jesus was very much a progressive, a liberal.
Anyone reading his Sermon on the Mount, considered by keen historical analysis very close to the real words of Jesus, or his parables, can hardly come to any other conclusion.
“Indivisible” is in America’s Pledge of Allegiance, coming after the “under God” phrase that was added during the McCarthy period. Let’s be indivisible.
