Elon In His Abattoir

 In the cult slasher film"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" a family of dispossessed slaugherhouse workers get their revenge on technological progress by eviscerating and eating a group of bourgeois interlopers.

In the cult horror movie known as Trump 2.0. showrunner Elon Musk has turned that plotline right on its (severed) ear. The richest man on the planet has reversed the roles, casting himself as the victim rather than as the cannibalistic predator that he truly is. The oligarchy under his watch has been transformed intothe lumpen proletariat doing battle against the designated "Other" - millions of federal buraucrats and the parasitic citizens that they serve. The irony of course is that Musk is using the very "cutting edge" A.I. technology to transport the modern centralized welfare state right back into the stone age. You can't even call it a reversion to feualism, because back in medieval times there was such a thing as noblesse oblige. The serfs were allowed to keep living and serving the lords, albeit at an often a bare subsistence level.

Nobody will ever accuse Elon Musk of subtlety. His appearance over the weekend in the CPAC revival tent, brandishing an actual chainsaw gifted to him by his fellow cannibal, the fascist leader of Argentina, was a gross rip-off of the orignial Tobe Hooper 1974 slasher flic.

Given that Musk has relocated to the same Texas hill country locale where the movie was filmed also fits in with the whole role-reversal theme of this gore-fest. Just as Elon is gentrifying the previously afforable Austin area, so too as the orignal ramshackle building used as the low-budget set for the slaughterhouse been refurbished into something of a glitzy historical landmark.

The theatrical antics of the Trump-Musk regime are blatantly designed to divert attention from the real enemy of the people, which is the oligarchy. By including desperate people in their fan club, this administration is instilliing the fales hope that they, too, can someday become rich. But first, they have to develop more hatred against their fellow lesser people - immigrants, college students and academics, anyone poor renough to require Medicaid and food assistance... the list of the "undeserving" goes on and on. Just as the wealth of billionaires increases exponentially. As Elon and his cohort slash their way thrugh the federal bureaucracy, the indebted gig gig workers of America are invited to forget their own woes by vicariously participating in the mass slaughter of those with the luck to hold heretofore secure government jobs. No matter that many of these workers are military veterans hailing from the same conomic underclass as those champing at the bit to take part in the slaughter of the "cattle."

So it's no accident that power tools, a staple of the slasher genre of the 70s and 80s, are staging a comeback in the hands of the psycho-nerds of the Tech Bro Aristocracy, Why go to the trouble of explaining mass death by algorithm when they can display their machismo with serrated gear that anybody can understand and covet?

As Mark Steven writes in "Splatter Capital:

the Political Economy of Gore Films,"

"Cannibalism in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not only about eating the bourgeoisie. it is also about forcing them to feast upon their own flesh and the flesh of their kin...

"What we are seeing is the labour of disenfranchised abattoir workers made unemloyable by the modernization of their industry and the crisis in value caused by that very modernization."

Musk and Trump thus are inviting us, through their right-wing populism, to parake in their feast, if only at a base symbolic level . Just watching them gorge on their gore should make us feel full. Or so they shope.

Marxist critic Nancy Fraser takes the metaphor further in her "Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet, and What We Can Do About It,"

She compares unfettered capitalism to the ouroboros, the salf-cannibalizing snake that devours its own tail. "That's a fitting image for a system that]s used to devour our social, political and natural bases of its own existence which are also the bases of ours."

Since, as Fraser posits, the cannibalism metaphor invites us to see society as a capitalist feeding frenzy, in which the main course is us."

 I suppose we should be grateful to Elon Musk, who is arrogant and clueles seenough to display before the whole world that his ultimate goal is not stopping fraud and waste, but  destruction and cruelty just for the sake of destruction and cruelty.

Rather than wait for capitalism to destroy itself (and while we are waiting and hoping for Elon to choke on his own assholery) we might at least slow the process down a bit. Street protests are okay, but largely ignored by the powers that be.

They might pay more attention to mass strikes and consumer boycotts. I doubt they they have the ability, for example, to maintain and repair their own chainsaws.

DEI-ty On the Rampage

 What does Elon Musk have against D.E.I. anyway?

Conventional wisdom would have us believe it's an adverse reaction to the gender transition of one of his children.

Here's an alternate theory. Although D.E.I. ostensibly is an acronym for the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion marketing slogan adopted by government agencies and their corporate sponsors, giving a nice liberal gloss to predatory capitalism - in lieu of, say, legislating a living   wage and guaranteed universal health care to all people - DEI is also a derivative of  the Latin word for God.

And as the richest person in the world, Elon Musk is effectually a deity, the self-appointed ruler of the world. We must have no other gods before us.

In "As Gods Among Mn." his history of wealth since the times of the earliest civilizations, Guido Alfani cites medieval philospher Nicole Oresme, who in his own turn cited Aristotle:

"The super-rcih (superabuntaes) are so unequal and exceed and overcome the others regarding their political power so much that it is reasonable to think that they are among others as God is among men... the cities which are governed democratically should relegate these people, i.e. they should send them into exile or banish them. as such cities try and pursue equality for all."

Before there were nation states there were city states, which brings us to another acronym: DOGE. Today it stands for the Musk-controlled Department of Government Efficiency. But back in the time of late feudalism, Doges were ultra-wealthy oligarchs in Venice who bought their way into lifetime positions of political power. (In one of those weird events of history repeating itself, the demi-god Donald Trump Jr recently got caught illegally slaugjtering a protected species of duck on an island off the coast of Venice. Like any Doge worth his salt, we can assume he just bought his way out of his crime, or at least paid no price for his bad behavior.)

While the Musk-Trump administration (call them President Eldon Mump)go about their merry pranksterism of tearing things down just because they can, there is no talk of building things up, other than building Trump-branded seaside resorts above the bones of aslaughtered Palestinians in Gaza).

And you're not hearing any talk from the feckless Democrats of redistributing the savings that supposedly will be gleaned from paring back government waste. On the contrary, the recently elected chair of the DNC openly calls for more billionaire moeny from the donor class. There is no talk of taxing Elon Musk and his oligarchic cohort, let alone banishing him from power let alone giving him a one way ticket to Mars on a government-subsidized rocket ship.

They should just cut to the chase and redefine DEI as Elon Musk, or even better, as the de facto state of affairs in global capitalistic rule: Deprive, Extract, Immiserate. To be really smart and streamlined and transparent about it, they could simply scramble the letters a bit and call their official policy "Just DIE already!"

Why else would both government agencies and the corporations that own them already be re moving all mention of diversity, equity and inclusion from their websites voluntarily and proactively?

It was mostlya sham to begin with, a way to substitute nice words for policies for the greater public good. It's the same thing as the USAID acronym falsely implying all these decades that it is a charity rather than first and foremost a regime-change CIA cutout and a tool for corporate plunder abroad. 

The only good thing you can say about all this manufactured chaos is that it's ripping the facade of democracy into a million tiny shreds.

You can have democracy or you can have billionaires. But you cannot have both. So let's go full Aristotle. Let the catapulting of the fat cats into deepest outer space begin!