The Perfect Metaphor

Yikes! This is the last time I write under the influence!

Did a mild re-do this afternoon, hopefully resulting in a better read and argument.

As an English major, I possessed a deep appreciation of symbolism. Ensconced in a nerdy kind of awe, I marveled at how a single object or circumstance could represent and articulate a far-greater reality.

So when the news that Jeff Bezos and his ostentatious yacht would require the dismantling of a historic and recently-refurbished bridge in the Netherlands in order for it to reach the open sea, I immediately seized on it as the perfect representation of twenty-first century America.

With a combination of our elected representation and the Supreme Court either eroding fiscal legislation meant to keep Wall St. and our banks on a much-needed leash (the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act), or enabling oligarchy (the Citizen's United decision), it's no wonder America enjoys the income inequality of a third world nation.

America's 745 billionaires saw their wealth increase by seventy-percent last year. Yes. You read that correctly: seventy percent. Mine didn't. And I'm guessing yours didn't, either. This teeny, tiny circle of billionaires are now worth more than the bottom sixty-percent of the U.S. population.

Does anyone see a problem here?

So while you and I struggle with inflation and skyrocketing energy costs, the wealthy accumulate their wealth with unprecedented rapidity—even beyond the late nineteenth-century heyday of the Industrial Age, when the tax-free fortunes of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were amassed.

And I'm sure some of them, like investor Leon Cooperman (profiled in a recent article in the Washington Post), are thoughtful folk with a sense of the world outside of their own. But it is my belief many more resemble Donald Trump, and are preening, arrogant, amoral ghouls whose selfishness and self-centeredness cannot be measured.

I also believe the overwhelming majority of them are Republicans, and are funding the party's headlong rush towards oligarchy and totalitarianism. (And while I'm at it, who but a blue-collar Republican would swallow the notion that it is Democrats who are the 'elites'?)

What are the consequences when there exists a group of people able to pay 132 million-dollars for a home? Or 500 million-dollars for an outsized yacht? Or even more to build a personal space craft?

How does that resonate through a society where an ever-increasing amount of people struggle to afford housing? Or send their kids to school? Or find enough work to keep food on the table? To what extent are our prices distorted by a billionaire's ability to endlessly consume?

More to the point, what are the effects of such outlandish amounts of money held in so few hands?

One consequence of our enabling an oligarchy is this: While our national infrastructure crumbles all around us, legislation to repair it sits idle because same would reverse a recent trillion-dollar giveaway to our wealthiest citizens and their businesses.  

Beyond that, there are the Republican efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of existence, erect still-more barriers to non-white-voters and their curious take on election reform.

Yeah. 

Once we're done with that voting and voice of the people crap, we can focus on the streamlined, exclusionary government our billionaires deserve! And a country by, for and of the rich! Just like God intended!

Deep breath. 

O.K. Back to Jeffrey and his boat. Given the enormous entitlements Republicans have extended to the uber wealthy, it wouldn't surprise me to learn they feel the bridge should be removed for Bezos' boat. Hey! Bezos doesn't live there! He paid for it! It's his right to build a boat too big for the local infrastructure to handle! Let them fix their own damn bridge!

On the sane and sober side of the aisle, I feel that as a person of unimaginable wealth, it would behoove him to be the bigger man and offer to not only pay for the bridge's deconstruction, but for its reconstruction as well.

Toss in some high-profile public improvements on his dime and we can call it a draw.

Which, going forward, is more than the ninety-nine percent will ever see from a Republican.