Monday, January 3, 2011
Generosity
Somewhere out in the zero-degree night, let's say on the edge of a smallish shabby town, there is a man drinking and quailing at the thought of having to go to work tomorrow. He operates a backhoe. He freezes his ass off all day every day in his backhoe. His back hurts. He does not love his wife and she sure does not love him. His kids are never around. He has cable now, and he loves ballgames. He wishes, hard, that he could just stay in his chair in his warm house with his TV and his bourbon and be assured that the bills would be paid. He really wants to stay this way. I want him to have what he wants. If I could, I'd give him a garage full of money and booze so he could just sit there at ease, knowing more or less what tomorrow will bring.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Maybe in the period of corporate restructurings and public executions and stuff after the Chinese call in their loans you could suggest this sort of conscientious objector status to the industrial/capitalist/backhoe system.
ReplyDeleteIdea for a series: "Darwin's Angels". At the end of every show--each of which would involve them blocking piece of wealth-redistribution legislation or taking the organ from a secretly alcoholic would-be transplant patient--they would have little ad hoc conversations about fat, short,lazy, near-sighted dumb people and then chuckle. It would be revenge porn for the financial elite who resent those who resent them and are at their limit as public questioning of their competence stretches into it's eight month or so.
ReplyDelete"Its", not "it's". And I know that the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks but it just seems wrong since punctuation marks have meaning but not a meaning attached to the quotation. So.
ReplyDeleteI think the Chinese will like my compassion and give me money to redistribute. I could be something like the local Red Guard SEcretary for Wealth Reallocation, using my judgment to prop up the lives of poor people who are tired of striving. They could wish and wish and occassionally one of them would get exactly what heshe wishes for. No strings attached, except they have to thank the Chinese Communist Party on state television.
ReplyDeleteBTW: the Chinese won't care that much about your punctuation. In fact, they are grateful. It is our history of outrages against the English Language that has debased our political system to the point where the Chinese can walk right in.
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah, and plus I've been messing up English Without Means, which I think they'll go crazy about. But I hope they don't give us Cultural Genocide or anything.
ReplyDeleteThey may give us a Great Kick in the Ass Forward, but we're too mutually indebted to get all genocidal and whatnot.
ReplyDelete