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A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping.  It does not matter whether his work is needed or not; he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least.  This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob.  The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.  A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

“We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness.  But don’t expect us to do anything about it.  We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition.  We feel that you are much safer as you are.  The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day.  So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.”

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays.  Very few cultivated people have less than, say, four hundred pounds a year; and naturally they side with the rich because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty.  Foreseeing some dismal Marxian utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.  Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them.  It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear.  It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, but in reality there is no such difference.  The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy-dandy:  which is the justice and which is the thief?

Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well.  But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor.  For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?  In my copy of Villon’s poems, the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “ne pain ne voient qu’aux fenetres” by a footnote, so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally.  The educated man pictures a horde of sub-men, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.  ”Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice sooner than let that mob loose.”   He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose.  The mob is loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom.

Hello, friends and readers!

As you probably already know if you are strangely obsessed with the financial peculiarities of people on the internet, I am a full-time freelance writer, and at the moment, 100% of my drastically tiny income is derived from writing.  And although I would never suggest that I am your equal in matters of hygiene, physical attractiveness, or basic human decency, I am like you in that I got bills to pay.

Many people reach out to their readers with donation drives; I am not one of them.  I work for a living, and don’t feel comfortable taking handouts for any number of reasons.  First, I prefer to think that the money I get is earned, not out of any abiding love of capitalism or self-reliance, but because it pleases me to think there’s at least one thing I’m good enough at that someone will pay me to do it.  Second, as you also probably already know, I did something pretty disgraceful and stupid earlier in my career, and I don’t feel like I’ve earned enough trust from my readers to ask them to pay me for doing nothing.  So you won’t see a big yellow glad-hand button on this site anytime soon.

But money I need, and if money you got, I’m happy to suggest ways for you to spend it.

First and most urgently, there’s the direct approach.  I offer a number of exciting and somewhat unique services via this website, all of which may be purchased by you at a surprisingly reasonable price.  Real people like yourself have taken advantage of them, to the overall enhancement of their lives.  Might your life be similarly enhanced?  Why don’t we find out together?  These services include, but are not limited to:

- Raps.  For a very small fee, I will write a rap for you about food; for a slightly larger fee, I will write a ‘dis’ rap making sport of a person of your acquaintance; and for a still larger but absolutely affordable fee, I will not only wrote a rap about any subject of your choosing, but I will also record it over an illegally acquired beat and send a copy to you for your listening pleasure.

- Spice mixes.  I am in the habit of creating mixes for the express purpose of enhancing the flavor of foods with a variety of ethnic and cuisine-specific herbs and spices; for not very much money, I will send you one at random, or for a bit more money, I will send you a specific blend (list of varieties available upon request) or even make you a tailored blend suited to your taste and temperament.

- Naming service.  Perhaps you are writing a novel, and are unable to come up with the perfect name that communicates that your hero is a lantern-jawed no-nonsense sort of fellow disinclined to take guff.  Perhaps you have crafted a home-brew and want a clever name to distract your friends from its terrible taste.  Perhaps you have just had a baby, and are boring.  I name things for you!

- Menu planning.  Putting together a party, get-together, soiree, or ‘happening’?  Lack the time, talent, or ability to put together a menu that pleases your guests and their high standards of mooching?  For a reasonable fee, I will plan a multi-course menu suited to your event, complete with recipes.  If you have more money than good sense, I will even come to your home and cook it for you!

- Short story subscription service.  Starting in June, I will be offering a new short story, delivered exclusively via e-mail only to subscribers, each month to those who join the plan.  Higher-level members will receive additional materials and even a short novella once per year!  Help revive the great pulp tradition, only in a much stranger and less relatable fashion.

- Mysterious boxes of thrift.  For a small fee, I will travel to a nearby thrift store, purchase a small number of items selected according to a rigorous but impenetrable process, and send them to you in the mail.  For a bit more, I will drive to another city or town, purchase a larger number of items via the same enigmatic criteria, and deliver them to you via U.S. post.  Thrillingly odd!

- Textual gaslighting.  You send me:  money and randomly selected items from your home upon which things can be written.  I send you:  the same items, but this time with various cryptic, disturbing, mysterious, threatening, and/or unsettling messages, slogans and other forms of unnerving one-way communication.  Frighten your spouse!  Drive your roommates insane!  Not for gambling!

If you have any inquiries, special requests, or a desire to learn exactly what the hell I think I’m doing here, please send me an e-mail; you can learn more about these strikingly special services by clicking here, on the “American Milk Solids Council” logo on the side menu, on the chubby self-delusional aristocrat logo above, on the “menu de l’offre” link at the top of the page, or on the “PURCHASE EXCITING LUDIC LIVE INTERNET HANDICRAFTS” option on the Links menu.  Payment may be made via cash or money order, or via PayPal:  leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.

I am, of course, also available to hire as a freelance writer.  I have 25 years’ experience and a vast range of writing skills; I have worked for dozens of satisfied clients at alternative weeklies, websites, local and national magazines, trade and consumer publications, advertising agencies and media design firms, educational publishers, and other private companies.  I have written corporate newsletters, advertising copy, album liner notes and DVD packaging copy, record reviews, film reviews, book reviews, television reviews, restaurant reviews, interviews, features, textbooks, magazine articles, fiction, humor, news reportage, obituaries, and everything in between.  I have written two books and contributed to three more.  There is no kind of writing assignment I can’t handle — on time, in tone, when and how you need it.

If you’re interested in hiring an experienced, efficient, and talented writer for your project, paper, or any other required writing, please consider me.   A brief selection of my work can be found by clicking here, on the distressed robot head, atop the page on “Portfolio”, or in the links sidebar.  If you’re looking for longer-term assignments and wish to view my CV or résumé, or if you’d like additional credits or items from my portfolio to help you make your hiring decision, please e-mail me here or at leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.

If you prefer a more indirect way of giving me money, perhaps you’d like to purchase my latest book, If You Like The Sopranos.  The first of a series by the fine folks at Limelight Editions, the book deals with the “Century of Crime”, in which a rising tide of urban organized crime was reflected in popular culture — film, television, literature, even music and video games — culminating in the development of The Sopranos, a show that forever changed the way we viewed both organized crime and television.  Well-reviewed and containing a plenitude of tips for even veteran crime-show watchers, it’s available at a peach of a price by clicking here, on the pork-fed sociopath above,  at the top of the page where it says “BUY MY BOOK”, or on the self-evident sidebar locations.  Buy enough copies, and I may get some royalties — or another book deal.

In addition, please watch this space — I’m hoping to make an announcement within the next two weeks about the availability for purchase of my next book, a collection of short humor entitled Moods from Marbletown.  It’ll be available as POD from Lulu.com, with the majority of the profit coming to me and not to middlemen.  If you have any inquiries about my books, again, please e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.

There are also plenty of ways to support me and my work without spending a dime.  Obviously, I would prefer that dimes be spent, as my creditors do not accept the clicking of a “Like” button as legal tender, but my name is my name, and I appreciate any and all support you care to give me:

You can visit my Tumblr at First World Problems and learn about the intolerable suffering of white people in America.

You can listen to the outstanding, award-nominated podcast Wasted Words, on which I am a regular guest panelist.

You can purchase the AV Club’s Inventory…

or Chunklet’s Indie Cred Test, both of which feature many contributions from me.

You can get a load of the High Hat, an internet journal of arts and culture I was pleased to write for and edit for several years.

You can purchase this issue of the excellent magazine Burning Ambulance, in which I have a featured article on fascist style.

And, of course, you can follow me on the usual social media suspects:  Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, and Yelp!.

Again, please watch this space for announcements of future projects.  I encourage and appreciate your custom, and those of you who put some money my way are guaranteed a place in Heaven if by some hilarious misunderstanding I am ever elected God.  You can always contact me via e-mail (leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com), telephone (210-569-4082), or postal service (4051 Tallulah Drive; San Antonio, TX 78218).  All inquiries welcome, all projects considered, all offers 100% genuine.  Thank you for your continued attention.

If only the eliminated contestants would disappear forever.  If only I had written this in March when it had a tiny amount of relevance.  If only I hadn’t filled out my actually NCAA brackets based on which team had the guys with the funniest names.  So many regrets.

Cultural Conference, Round 1

Guy Who Bears An Irrational Hatred of Dubstep But Isn’t Quite Sure What It Is vs. Guy Whose Only Opinion About Music Is That It Hasn’t Been Any Good Since 1982

Guy Who Constantly Makes Incredibly Petty Factual Corrections Preceded With The Word “Actually” vs. Woman Who Thinks That Being A Stickler For Grammar Is The Same Thing As Being A Literary Critic

Guy Who Scornfully Shits All Over Anything That Is Popular vs. Guy Who Thinks He Is Super Brave And Hip For Liking Popular Things

Guy Who Gets Strangely Upset About The Casting Of Black Actors In Genre Fiction Films vs. Woman Who Is Angrily Defensive About Reading Nothing But Young Adult Novels

Guy Who Claims To Really Hate Furries But Also Knows An Alarmingly Large Amount Of Details About Them vs. Guy Who Quotes Immanuel Kant When Talking About Giant Robot Cartoons

Guy Whose Reaction To Everything Is To Quote South Park vs. Woman Who Spends 14 Hours A Day Writing Stories Where Male Space Aliens Have Tender Sex With One Another

Woman Who Counts The Number Of People Of Color In The Cast Of A Television Show Before Watching It vs. Guy Who Gets Super Angry About Spike Lee Even When Spike Lee Is Not The Topic Of Conversation

Guy Who Has Written 2,217 Wikipedia Entries About The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers vs. Guy Who Complains That Video Game Commercials Have Girls In Them

Lifestyle Conference, Round 1

Guy Who Has A Google Alert Set Up To Inform Him If Anyone Makes A Disparaging Comment About Esperanto vs. Guy Who Thinks That Buying Beer That Costs Less Than $3 A Six-Pack Makes Him An Outlaw Rebel Hero

Woman Who Believes That If She Constantly Updates Her “Oenophile” Blog No One Will Notice That She’s A Sloppy Drunk vs. Guy Who Has Written 28,000 Words On Hundreds Of Identical-Tasting Potato Chips

Guy Who Thinks Everyone Else Is Stoned vs. Guy Who Thinks Everyone Else Is Gay

Guy Who Is Having A Hard Time Making Ends Meet On His $475,000 Annual Salary vs. Woman Who Just Can’t Believe How Everyone But Her Raises Their Children

Guy Who Is Creepily Obsessed With Guns But Has Never Owned One Or Fired One vs. Woman Who Is Always Trying To Convince You That Her All-Raw Food Vegan Diet Is Way More Awesome Than Steak

Guy Who Always Calls Celebrities By Their First Name Like He’s Their Best Friend Or Something vs. Woman Who Comes Up With Hilarious Puns On Celebrities’ Names To Show How Much She Hates Them

Guy Who Doesn’t Think There’s Anything Unusual About The Fact That He Only Dates Asian Women vs. Woman Who Has A Bunch Of “Girl Crushes” But Does Not Actually Date Real Humans Of Either Sex

Guy Who Claims To Be A Wealthy Businessman Even Though All He Does Is Post On Comment Boards All Day vs. Guy Who Is Mad About Teenagers Who Get Enthusiastic About Things He Has Already Known About For Years

Political Conference, Round 1

Guy Who Uses The Internet At His State College To Complain About Government Spending vs. Guy Who Spells America With Three Ks

Guy Who Thinks That The Existence Of Michael Moore Invalidates 250 Years Of Progressivism vs. Woman Who Calls Ann Coulter A Cunt But Gets Bent Out Of Shape At Fat Jokes About Jonah Goldberg

Guy Who Still Gets Super Pissed About The Lawsuit Involving The Old Lady Who Got Burned By McDonalds Coffee vs. Guy Whose Trust Fund Pays For His Tuition At Columbia But Eats Out Of Dumpsters

Woman Who Isn’t Racist But vs. Guy Who Doesn’t Hate Gays He Is Just Saying That’s All

Guy Who Makes $20,500 A Year And Hates All Those Liberal Jerks Who Want To Tax The Rich vs. Woman Who Awkwardly Tries To Express Cultural Solidarity With Her Cleaning Lady

Guy Who Thinks We Can’t Give People Unemployment Insurance Because Of What Stalin Did vs. Guy Who Pretends That His All-Consuming Interest In Marijuana Has Something To Do With Medicine

Guy Who Thinks There’s No Political Issue That Can’t Be Solved By Nuking Something vs. Guy Who Longs For The Triumphant Return Of The Free Soil Party

Guy Who Haunts IMDB Message Boards Complaining That Every Movie Is Proof Of A Vast Liberal Conspiracy vs. Woman Who Thinks Politics Are Just Unpleasant And Why Can’t We All Just Talk About Nice Things

So, I’m not black.

I’m able to say that I’m not white, either — ironically, through the very mechanism of white privilege.  If you’re white and you choose to reject whiteness, you are able to do so only because you’re white.  People of color can never deny their color; they carry the evidence on their faces.  So when I tell people that I’m not white, all I’m doing is calling attention to the utterly arbitrary nature of race, and try to squirm my way out of the unwanted privilege (and the oppression on which it rests) that I was born into.

And when I hear people tell me, when I speak of the endless and daily indignities we heap on black Americans, that I suffer from something called “white guilt”, I understand it is meant to be an insult, but I can never quite understand why.  America is not unique in being marbled to the bone with racism, but our racism is unique; our relationship with the descendants of our slaves is like nothing else in any country, because we alone developed a system of slavery that carried into the modern era and was predicated entirely upon racism against blacks.  For me to feel white guilt seems the only reasonable reaction not only to the historical crimes people like me have committed against blacks for hundreds of years, but also to being part of and benefiting from the toxic soup of prejudice, bigotry and injustice that we force black Americans to swim in every day.  When I think about the unimaginable subjection blacks have encountered in my country’s history and the fact its legacy is a near-universal assumption that we’ve done enough to make up for it and from this point forward they’re on their own; when I think about the soul-stirring beauty and grace of what they have brought to our national culture, and in what base, worthless coin we’ve paid them back — what could a reasonable person feel other than guilt and shame?

I am poor, and I am from a low family, and I have had to claw and scrape to get by as have many people whose skin defines them as “white”.  But since the day I was born, I was spared the million daily debasements and indignities that I might have suffered if I’d been born black.  No matter what I try to do to erase my own privilege, and to make people like me aware of theirs, no matter how deep my embrace of what blacks have brought to our culture, I will never be one of them; I will never fully understand what they must feel and how they must live in a world that judges them in a way that, whatever barriers are set in my path and whatever blame is directed my way, it will never judge me.

But sometimes I think about them.  Recently I have thought a lot about Trayvon Martin, and the way the public has reacted to his death.  I think about the way the leader of our country, whose skin knows some things mine never will, has reacted to his death, and I think about how a man who wants to lead the country, and who looks a lot more like I do, reacted to that reaction.  I think about the way that so many people are trying to treat this incident — the dreadfully inevitable result of a law that could not have been better designed to end with the death of young black men; this incident which could not possibly be more about race – as if it were not about race.  And I feel like I should say something, but who am I to say anything?  Other people in a much better position than I to appreciate how an innocent young man ended up dead on the ground have already said it better.  His tragedy is not my tragedy.  All I own of it is my part in sustaining a culture where blacks are under suspicion merely for being alive.

It’s still not enough, though.  I have heard endless times since the election of Barack Obama that we live in a “post-racial society”, that racism is no longer a serious problem, that the “real” racism is something called “reverse racism” and that it injures only whites, that by talking about racism I am only making it worse.  I have been told to look on the president’s race as clear evidence that racism is over, as if sexism ended when the first woman was elected to high office or poverty ended the first time unemployment dipped below 10%.  I am assured that open racism has flattened away to nothing under the weight of public disapprobation, that the victories over the blatant violence and oppression of the past are enough and the improvements that have been made mean we can now stop fighting against all the still-present prejudices and cruelties, that we have collectively transformed the world through some mysterious event horizon of multiculturalism into a world where the only true form of tyranny comes from the stalking spectre of “political correctness”.

I hear all these things and try to make sense of them, but I can’t.  Because wherever I go to read a story about Trayvon Martin — who no more deserved to die than the purest, most innocent little white blonde girl who was tormented to death by some brain-fogged maniac — I see this:

- “Anyone recall the carjacking, torture, rape and slayings of a beautiful couple Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23 by 5 blacks?  MS media didn’t touch it.”

- “Jesse Jackson is a race baiting POS.  This had nothing to do with white people, so why is he bringing it up?  Because he is a shitsttarting racebaiting POS”

- “The media spin on this is amazing!  The race card is alive and well with the left.”

- “Nigger tried to front, got owned by a gun.”

- “Blacks ruin every community in the U.S.”

- “Common sense dictates that when black men stop being sperm donors and instead become responsible fathers we will see the end of stories like this one.”

- “O PLEASE – tell the truth.  The neighborhood had the same problems that exist in any ‘diversified neighborhood’ The neighborhood is a Gated Ghetto NOT WHITE.”

- “Trayvon Martin was a wannabe thug, a 6 ft tall bully in school who was suspended, and wasn’t the innocent teen the media made him out to be.  don’t be brainwashed by that Reverse Racist Propaganda that the news throws at you.”

- “Because Obama is a RACIST BIGOT for all to see now!!!!!”

- “If this kid was 17, where’s a recent photo?  These pictures are clearly many years old.  All violent offenders were ‘peaceful’ until they weren’t.  So far, this is all about those who thrive on promoting racism.”

- “Hispanics are valuable people they pick the berries and keep the coon population down.”

- “The Congressional Caucus is planning on showing solidarity by having its members get teardrop tattoos and L.A. Dodger jackets with a hoodie…….wont that be nice?”

- “So now this thugs family has the colored panthers on thier side.  Good choice, call the taliban and see if they will help you also!!!”

- “Timothy johson BLACK Hoodie killed a computer store owner in Lancaster CA .north of LA, Johson was caught today wearing his NIGGER hood.  shot all BLACKS,totally worthless.”

- “The media and Obama have really taken advantage of this ‘opportunity’ to set race relations back several decades.  What a sade time to be an american!”

- “The moral to the Trayvon Martin shooting:  ’If you make it a point to walk like a duck… talke like a duck… and to look like a duck…. don’t be surprised is someone concludes you are a duck… and decides to go duck hunting…’”

- “buy stock in KFC and colt 45, monkey boys parents will be spending lots of that money they will be getting there and the local meth dealers will make a haul also”

- “just keep wondering what was he doing in a gated community?”

- “Hopefully Zimmerman has started a trend that will continue.”

I read these things, and I think about how Trayvon Martin’s family can read them too.  How they watched their son go out to buy some candy for his little brother, and the next time they saw him was cold and dead and gone forever, in the morgue with his chest blown open for the crime of being black, shot because some cop-loving motherfucker saw him put his hood up in the rain and decided he was a criminal and a drug addict; and how now the name of their dead child is on the front page of every newspaper in America, and all they have to do is scroll down a few inches and read ten thousand anonymous racist cowards salivating out pure acid about how he deserved it and worse.  And I think, I should say something.  But what can I say that will make one goddamn bit of difference to them, to their grief and pain, to their dead son whose crime was his color?

The murder of Trayvon Martin:  it seems like the only thing we should be talking about.  But it seems like there is nothing we can say.

Attention media professionals, academics, authors, popular culture enthusiasts, seekers after wisdom, and other information-needing individuals and/or organizations:  today is your lucky day!  For today is the day I , Leonard A. Pierce Jr., announce that I am available for consultation on any and all topics — at a highly reasonable fee — as a Qualified Expert!

Ermm…on what, exactly?

On everything.

Could you be a bit more precise?

I am offering my expertise to you, your organization, your institution, company, conglomerate, website, pod-cast, think tank, ruling government and/or loyal opposition, criminal enterprise, rebel group, or ‘uncategorizable’ as a Qualified Expert on all things.  I will answer all questions, decide all issues, settle all arguments, reveal all secrets, pass all judgments, and provide all advice you may require, for a fee suitable to your needs and resources.

Why you, exactly?

Because I am never wrong.

What?

You heard me.

But surely.

But surely indeed.  And yet here we both are.

What…I mean, you’re not saying you’re always right, are you?

No, I am saying I am never wrong.  The distinction is subtle but important.  However, if it furthers your trust in the Leonard Pierce, Qualified Expert experience to believe that I am always right, I am willing to settle for that interpretation of my abilities.

But what about that one time…

Yes.  Even then.

You know which time I’m talking about?

Yes.

And yet you still maintain…

Yes, even then I was right.  No one is more surprised than me.  Indeed, it was that time that convinced me that if I was not wrong under those circumstances — which seemed specifically constructed to make me wrong — then it was entirely possible, perhaps even probable, and from there a mere gavotte across the floor to inevitable, that I am never wrong.

About…

Anything.

So you’re saying that you know everything.

No, I am not saying that.  I have no more access to information than any other jobless oaf with an internet connection. I do not know everything; however, I am never wrong.  If you ask me a question, the answer I give you may not be factually correct, but neither will it be wrong.

I don’t think I fully understand this concept.

It is difficult to completely comprehend until you see it in action.

And I assume that’s going to cost me?

Yes.  But the price may range from a cocktail to several hundred million dollars.  From each according to his abilities and all that.

Who said that, smart guy?

Uh-uh, no freebies.  Hit the sidewalk, freeloader.

All right, fine.  For what sort of questions might I utilize your service?

• The true meaning of life
• How to make a proper Gibson cocktail
• The identity of the greatest athlete in human history
• The correct moral action in any given situation
• The soundtrack one should prepare for a specific activity, from a half-hour masturbation session to one’s betrothal ceremony to a ewe
• Advice to the lovelorn
• The rectitude and applicability of various permutations of foul language
• All correct opinions on art, literature, music, film, philosophy, and culture
• Presenting one’s self to society
• Ending a sentence with a proposition and why it is acceptable
• Employing the word ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ and why it is not acceptable
• Etc.

But, listen.  Surely you don’t think that you are genuinely right about everything.

I know that I am.

How?

I believe that I was created by God to be his own oracle on Earth, dispensing the truth to all who know to ask the right questions.

Come on.  You don’t even believe in God.

That’s true.

So how do you know you’re always right?

It just seems like I would be.

So assuming I credit this outrageously ridiculous claim, how might I take advantage of your alleged correctness on all possible topics?

Simply write to me via this website, leonard at ludic live dot com.  Let me know what your subject of inquiry is, in what venue you would like it answered (podcast, tele-vision program, e-mail, secret meeting of sinister cabal, etc.), and what learning the answer to your pressing question might be worth to you.  I guarantee the process will be rewarding, satisfying, and potentially life-altering, up to but not including the point at which those terms become legally actionable.  Write today!  I get not wronger every minute.

Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money.

All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing we have built our entire culture and values system around.  Some of these are merely amusing, such as the curious dramatic trope of writing amounts of money on a piece of paper rather than saying them out loud, just like no one has ever actually done.  Others are ham-handed attempts at workplace dominance disguised as behavioral niceties, such as the bogus stricture that one must never reveal one’s salary to one’s co-workers; money (and class, money’s social signifier) is often invoked as something not to be discussed in polite company along with religion and politics, no doubt accounting for the is-it-raining-where-you-are banality of conversation with strangers.  Lying about money is practically the national pastime of the United States; poor people lie about it to avoid shame and disgrace, rich people lie about it to deflect envy and outrage, and the hilariously named financial services industry lies about it to make more of it.

Part of the problem, of course, lies in definitions.  What we talk about when we talk about money depends on who we’re talking to, and who might be listening.  The late Neil Postman once astutely observed that we are used to thinking of “big words” as being complicated and daunting, when in fact the opposite is true:  polysyllabic mouthfuls like ‘participle’ or ‘centrifugal’ have very specific fixed meanings upon which everyone agrees, while defining seemingly simple words like ‘true’ or ‘good’ leads us into an inescapable rat’s nest of contentious debate.  So, too, is the case whenever we discuss dollars and cents:  the meaning of simple terms becomes frustratingly thorny, often by design.

Take, for example, the notion of ‘debt’.  We have been trained to think of the national debt as resembling a household debt; indeed, there is a popular internet meme, endlessly re-posted by partisans of both the left and the right, that makes this comparison explicit.  But wiser heads have reminded us that in fact, the national debt is nothing at all like a family budget, and to conceive it as such is to make a profound error in understanding our national financial priorities.  The national debt is more an obligation of which we must be mindful than an actual number with the kind of meaning we affix to overdrafts on our checking accounts.  ’Earn’ is another word that’s hard to pin down; conservatives often claim that people receiving social services did not ‘earn’ that money, even if they’ve fallen on hard times after decades of paying money into the system.  But those same conservatives also support things like the extension of intellectual property laws, and the repeal of inheritance taxes; it’s hard to conceive of a person who did less to ‘earn’ their riches than one who was just born into a wealthy family.

Budgets, too, are something we are encouraged to think of in very different ways depending on who is asking us to think about them and to what end.  The financial conservatives, when they are in the mood for belt-tightening, always sell austerity measures in terms of budget expenditures that we as a nation can simply no longer afford.  This rarely applies to military and security spending, however; the vast quantities of cash we shovel into national defense is almost always justified with the claim that they are used to protect our freedoms.  Another prickly word, though, that ‘freedom’:  some folks would argue that there’s little use in protecting one’s freedom when one has no money and the only freedom offered is the freedom to starve.  Even that strain of ultra-conservative fiscal hawk that will allow for cuts to the military budget will not touch such secretive — and staggeringly expensive — allowances as the national security budget and the Pentagon’s so-called ‘black budget’, the literally uncountable billions that go to projects, almost all developed by private industry, the results of which we will never know and the details of which we are not allowed to ask.  Few households could function if one of their members were allowed to set aside gigantic piles of money for secret projects about which no one was ever allowed to inquire.  And, too, any poor family will tell you that the greatest expenditures go towards events that cannot be predicted, and, therefore, cannot be budgeted:  health crises, car repairs, natural disasters, and the like.  Our government, conversely, has begun to to place in the realm of the unbudgeted voluntary boondoggles like the Iraq War, which is best visualized as a huge bonfire into which we continually threw money every single minute for eight years.

Speaking of visualizations, the amounts of money we spend on this or that item are often presented in terms of a stack of bills that reaches to (insert distant object here), as if people were having trouble with the physical size of the money rather than its value.  ”Rich” is another one of those short words that is almost impossible to define, except insofar as almost everyone, rich or poor, defines it as “someone who has more money than I do”; and so the question of how much money constitutes a lot of money becomes a lot more difficult than it needs to be.  Two such disparate characters as Sam Spade and Casper Gutman were once able to agree that a million dollars is a lot of dough, but nowadays, all we hear is how a million dollars isn’t what it used to be.  Loretta Lynn once sang about how her father raised eight kids on miner’s pay (which, for our younger readers, is approximately jack shit thousand dollars per year, adjusted for inflation), and managed to sound pretty cheerful about it; today, there are entire websites dedicated to the morose bitching of people trying to raise one kid on banker’s pay.  So, whenever people talk about money — especially the kind of money that the owners of our country tend to have — I find this to be a useful illustration.

Ever since that glorious day in August of 1927 when the nation’s millionaires officially ceded control of America over to the nation’s billionaires, the G.O.P. has been the party of the very, very rich.  The party as currently constituted may not agree on much, but they do agree on this:  millionaires pay far too much in taxes, and billionaires pay far, far, far too much in taxes.  Official Republican godhead Ronald Reagan literally defined the party as the one that “wants to see an America in which people can still get rich“; more recent developments have subtly altered this to “still get richer”, and later to “still stay richer”.  If the G.O.P. of Grover Norquist, of the Tea Party and the Anti-Tax Pledge, can be said to stand for anything, it is that billionaires should be all but exempt from taxation, and that they should be free to do anything they like with their money short of being asked to help people who haven’t got any.

To appreciate what this really means, it seems necessary to get a grip on exactly how much a billion dollars (or, if you prefer, a thousand ‘doesn’t-go-as-far-as-it-used-to’ million dollars) really is.  Let us say that you are the freshly scrubbed recipient of one billion dollars, which you have gotten through a clever combination of sound investments and emerging from a vagina into which a rich man once shot a load of sperm.  You have already paid your 14% tax rate on the money, just like your chauffer and your maid except a lot less, and you have decided:  ”You know what?  Fuck my stupid kids.  Fuck saving for the future.  Fuck investments and wise financial discipline.  I’m going to take all this money, convert it into cash, and start spending it like the Rapture is coming.  I’m not even going to put a single goddamn dime of it into a shitty low-yield savings account at some swindling mega-bank.  I’m just gonna start pissing it away, to the tune of $25,000 every single day, until the money runs out.”  That’ll show whoever!

So starting on January 1st of the new year, you pay some college intern to take your money and put it into stacks of 250 $100 bills.  They’re too big to put in your pocket so you take the first stack and you pay Shoshanna Lonstein to design you a special money hat.  And you set out on your mission to piss away the rest of the billion dollars, 25 grand at a time.  At first, it’s easy.  You pay off your student loans.  You buy a couple of giant houses, a couple of giant cars, a couple of giant bags of cocaine.  You take a trip to Europe.  You hire a homeless guy to break a bottle against his face.  But then you start to notice:  you’ve already bought yourself every possible material comfort you have ever imagined, and it’s not even April.  That’s when you decide to sit down and do the math: starting with a billion dollars, and spending $25,000 every single day — an amount of money that over 70 million American adults do not make in an entire year — it will take you over 109 years to spend it all.  If you are old enough to read these words, it is basically impossible that, following this course of action, you would live long enough to do anything but leave your children multiple millions of dollars.

Now, of course, not every big Republican donor has a billion dollars.  Many have far more than that.  Swift Boat funder T. Boone Pickens is worth triple that amount; Amway guru Rich DeVos is worth over $4 billion; Christian arch-conservative Philip Anschutz   has about $6.4 billion to his name; and FOX News prince of darkness Rupert Murdoch clocks in at well over $7 billion.  The shadowy Koch Brothers spend huge chunks of cash funding conservative causes and disseminating right-wing propaganda; lucky for them they have $50 billion in cash-chunks.  (Which means that they could spend $1,250,000 a day for over a century without running out.)  And at the very top, the Walton family of exurban retail banditry is worth a combined total of $90 billion, meaning that they could spend our arbitrary $25,000 a day retroactively going back to the beginning of human civilization and still have tens of millions left over.

These people all do two things with their time:  make more money, and lobby to ensure that they have to pay as little money as possible into the system that allowed them to make all the money they already have.  They have so much that I have to invent perverse illustrations like the one above just to render the amount of cash they have to hand fathomable to the human mind, and yet their primary occupations are increasing that amount and ensuring that virtually none of it goes to helping people who have less by orders of magnitude.  It’s just something to think about the next time someone mentions austerity measures, or assures you that the country simply hasn’t got the money to spend on a social safety net any more.

Food-addicted man-hog that I am, I somehow manage to miss key developments in industrial nutrition technology.  I often fail to see the consumption-enhancement forest for the new-flavor-of-Slurpee trees, to put it another way; by way of example, despite its fascinating nature and evocative name, I only just yesterday found out about the “ready-to-use therapeutic food” known as Plumpy Nut.

What’s more, I have managed to live in San Antonio — home to approximately 6.2 kerjillion military personnel — for almost five years without dipping my taste buds into the high-protein swimming pool of MREs, a.k.a. “Meals Ready-to-Eat”, the staple food of our boys overseas.  Although not normally commercially available, the Fort Sam Houston commissary, to which I have access via a nefarious series of market manipulations, offers MREs that have fallen off a truck, available for only $7.50 for those unlucky grunts who got addicted to them while serving in the Middle East and just can’t shake the institutional cuisine monkey off their backs.  If there are three things I am famous for, it is eating garbage, co-opting items normally meant for military use in some disgraceful manner, and mocking my betters, so how could I resist the opportunity to do all three at once?

The history of military rations is actually quite fascinating.  The necessity to feed a mobile force of thousands of people whose lives are already at constant risk has posed any number of compelling challenges, both nutritionally and logistically, and reading about it is a compelling study of human ingenuity.  This post, however, will deal with none of that history and instead focus on the mildly amusing minutiae of my having purchased and consumed an Army MRE claiming to be “Beef Ravioli”.  Because of the nutritional challenge of service in the Middle East, many developments in food technology are represented herein, from its innovative self-heating system (like atheists, microwave ovens are nowhere to be found in your average foxhole) to its high protein content, meant to sustain a supply of concentrated high energy throughout the day.  Of course, it is meant to be eaten by fit, motivated soldiers carrying out a tense military mission in trying climactic conditions and not by fat slobs who spend all day on the couch watching reruns of That ’70s Show, but what would a government resource be if it wasn’t subject to egregious abuse?

These things are designed by high-powered military nutritionists to exactly meet the needs of today’s soldier, but those needs only exist under specific conditions, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that the desperate returning vets who eat these things over the sink after coming back from the Afghan front are doing their health a favor.   The high protein quotient isn’t ideal for civilian life, and the fact that MREs are meant to survive without refrigeration for long periods of time means that they’re absolutely crammed with sodium.  I could feel my blood pressure going up the second I opened up the dreary-looking brown plastic bag, but even through the throbbing pulse in my temples, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the huge amount of food they managed to shove into a small space; it’s the kind of clever package design one usually can’t get without the aid of Chinese slave labor.

First into my gaping maw was the “beef stick snack”, because I can’t resist a good jerky.  Which is why it was such a disappointment that this was a terrible jerky.  Texturally, it was somewhere between a Slim Jim-style quasi-meat tube-stick and an actual tooth-damaging dehydrated beef-leather jerky, but flavor-wise, it was somewhere between a shoe and a piece of cardboard.  There is nothing un-American about seasonings, Department of Defense.

Needing something to wash the non-taste of the beef bar out of my mouth, and deciding that gin was contrary to the spirit of this experiment, I busted out the “carbohydrate electrolyte beverage powder”, which is bureaucratese for “instant Gatorade powder”.  The instructions called for chemically purifying 12 ounces of water, letting it stand for half an hour, pouring it into the oversized pouch, and then drinking it with all the grace of a man sipping fruit punch out of a sandwich bag.  Attempting to maintain a modicum of dignity, I decided instead to just pour the powder into a bottle of Aquafina.  Despite sugar being its primary ingredient, the CEBP wasn’t very sweet, and tasted more or less like Kool-Aid that someone had neglected to sweeten.  But that just meant that it tasted like ordinary bottled water, which was fine with me because I chased it with “vegetable crackers and fortified cheese spread with jalapeños”.  The crackers were meant to survive rumbling around in a Humvee all day without turning into powder, so they’re vacuum-sealed, and when the package is torn open, a satisfying hiss of air is emitted.  The vitamin-packed cheese spread, while unpretty, is actually quite tasty, and the two make a good combination; unfortunately, there are more crackers than there is cheese spread, so eventually you have to face up to the fact that the crackers are so sturdy because they look, and probably taste, like roofing shingles.

After all this foreplay, I figured it was time for the main event.  Beef ravioli time!  It’s far too complicated to describe the magical science wonders of the FRH (the bag that heats your meal), but basically, it’s a plastic pouch you stuff into a box with your food, and then hydrogen happens, somehow, and the result is hot food.  The FRH itself contains lots of helpful advice, such as “do not put hydrogen gas near an open flame”, “do not drink the water you use to heat your food with”, and “be careful placing an activated heater in your pocket”, none of which make me feel especially enthusiastic about the intelligence of our servicemen.  My absolute favorite part of the packaging is an illustration that tells you to prop the box and heater up so that the liquid doesn’t spill out; it has a picture of a boulder on which the whole works are leaning, and it is labeled “ROCK OR SOMETHING”.

I didn’t have a rock, but I still have lots of somethings in the house, so I got busy readying my meal to eat.  Basically, you just jam the food bag into the FRH pouch, pour in a little water, and sure enough, the magic science sticks heat up like a jockstrap filled with Tiger Balm.  Then you slide it back into the box, lean it up against your rock or something, and wait only three to five times as long as you would if your foxhole really did come with a microwave.  The eventual result?  Something that could be, technically, described as a serving of semi-piping hot beef ravioli!  It didn’t taste that bad, but should you ever doubt how important visual presentation is to a meal, imagine this stuff slithering out of its foil pouch, looking like a Horta and eerily conforming to the exact dimensions of the package it came from, and you will know.

After surviving that ordeal, I felt like I had earned a tasty dessert.  Luckily, the MRE came with two:  a big bag of tiny toffee cookies that were far and away the tastiest item in the whole package (and whose unusually large serving size made me wonder about how seriously the Army intends to combat the problem of obesity), and something described as a “frosted brown sugar cinnamon toaster pastry”. Now, it wasn’t awful — it was as good as any other unheated Pop-Tart, which is to say, well, I guess it was awful after all — but it suggested an interesting conundrum.  Since it was obviously meant to be eaten unheated — it could not be prepared in the FRH pouch, and foxholes are as rarely equipped with toasters as they are microwaves — how could it, rationally, be called a toaster pastry?

I don’t drink coffee, so I wasn’t able to enjoy most of the contents of an additional goodie bag, to wit, a tube of Taster’s Choice instant joe, a bag of non-dairy creamer, a packet of Splenda, and a clear plastic bag to prepare them in which looks exactly like the bag that clinics use to collect urine samples.  The goodie bag also contained a folded paper napkin, a refreshing moist towelette (not, alas from Hawthorne Wipes, but from — no joke — Towelettes Etc. of Penacook, New Hampshire), a packet of Tabasco sauce, some salt, a book of matches, and a couple of mint-flavored Chiclets.  I considered thinking of a way to combine these all into a single, fiery experience, but my stomach was starting to cramp, almost certainly from a different meal I’d eaten earlier in the day.  (I did, however, save the best for last:  showing the hand of an evil genius at work, the MRE contained an entire bag of caffeinated after-dinner mints.)

It’s hard to offer an overall analysis of the MRE without invoking Dr. Johnson’s line about female clerics.  But it certainly made me appreciate our men and women in uniform all the more, knowing the great lengths to which technology had come in order to allow them to survive on the kind of diet ordinarily only available to people with regular access to a gas station mini-mart.  So here’s to you, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines:  may you all come home soon, to better ravioli.