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.
3 comments:
PART 1
Certainly, protest, better yet, as Karen says, we need general strikes and consumer boycotts. But we who are decent and sane shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that those tactics have a high probability, let alone guarantee, of being effective against an authoritarian government with no respect for traditional democratic values but in possession of advanced, ubiquitous surveillance methods, militarized police, courts stacked with right-wing ideologues, and an army, should the former methods not provide adequate repression. All that supported by the economic system even in normal times, and likely even more so as the country becomes more-openly fascistic. And the system's repressive actions likely rationalized and mostly backed by the significant fraction of the populace that helped install the current authoritarian in power, and will, I think, continue to support him, because it itself believes in self-centered, selfish, social-Darwinistic ideologies and authoritarian repression, indeed, I think, would be quite willing to supply the guards for future concentration camps. If, however, whether deliberately planned or simply through cascading circumstance, the authorities should slaughter a bunch of white, upper-middle-class protesters, as at Kent State, all bets are off, and we will likely soon have Syria-on-the-Hudson.
In many of the situations that we sane and decent people of the U.S. face and are likely to face under Trump and his Co-President Musk, protest, strikes, boycotts, or court challenges have a strong probability of being even less effective than the proverbial knife at a gunfight. So one better have a "Plan B". I can't decide for others what they should do, but anyone even halfway-educated knows that historically, the two most likely paths in response to serious oppression (not counting submission and "hoping for the best"), are either revolution or departure.
PART 2
The first path, revolution, is the one that the original founders of this country took --- so, ironically, it has a built-in legitimacy! I won't discuss that further here. I'm not one to lead such a strategy, and by temperament, I wouldn't be inclined to be much of a follower for it either.
The second is to leave the country, either temporarily or permanently --- migration or emigration, which have inherent biological and evolutionary legitimacy, that's what many animals do when facing difficult circumstances. Their very existence/persistence as complex and costly biological strategies suggest the probability of them being evolutionarily adaptive. (Just remember, however, that movement from someplace implies movement into someplace else; but intelligent primates tend to be territorial, and in an overcrowded world, you are likely to be met not with open arms, but rather, with arms of a far different sort. The increasing opposition, worldwide, to refugees, and the closing-off of possibilities for migration and emigration, are, I believe, increasing the likelihood that revolution in many locales, not just the U.S., will occur).
Degree of welcome aside, you leaving where you now are should engender no guilt, would be no different than what your ancestors did in leaving where they were then to come to the U.S.(assuming that they came here voluntarily, not in the hold of a slave ship). If your country does not care about you, including your full rights, current well-being, and future, it makes no logical sense for you to care about that country. Doubly-so if the particular country in question is actually actively trying to oppress you, such as by actions of its political system to take away your traditional civil rights and bodily autonomy, and reduce your democratic input to government, and economic systems that deliberately produce massive and increasing inequality. And the scale of barbarism by Nazi Germany --- and in several other places since then --- should have unequivocally and for all time proven that departure from some places at some times is the only reasonable course of action, anything less is suicidal.
Even in less-extreme oppression, a human being is not furniture for a country nor the property of any of its rulers. In the twenty-first century, we should be long-past times when slavery and serfdom were accepted by people claiming to be "civilized". Wherever you are, you should have an inalienable human right to leave, doubly-so if oppressed, and be sheltered wherever you arrive. (Interestingly, in our modern capitalistic world, capital has far more rights to move across borders than do even obviously endangered people; that's insane).
I'm beginning to see advertising for services that will facilitate leaving America. This, after many decades of the flag used as a marketing gambit on domestic products. The lapel pin is one of those.
Of the people that fate has brought into contact with me, one of them I came to recognize as a very gullible person. This happened reliably and repeatedly over and over. One year she was a feminist, next year she was a Hillary hater, spouting "Bengazi" at me.
Whenever I drive north out of this city, I pass a billboard dedicated to Coca Cola. The theme there is always youth and happiness (of a mindless sort). I have caught myself wondering (like a barely audible murmur) If my life could ever be fulfilled without Coca Cola. Like the force of nature in us called Libido, we, like Ponce de Leon, can't ever completely dispose of the wish to recover youthfulness. To wield power, whether it's making an omelet or war, is also basic to humans, whether it's through beauty or bullying, violence or kindness.
My gullible friend was susceptible to influences with the credulity of a child. That is supposed to be cured eventually by the sophistication of critical evaluation. A modicum of that, widespread among Americans, might have forestalled the current political debacle. Isn't it obvious that a sufficient number of voters have been sufficiently fooled toward this result. But aren't we always, as with Coca Cola, kept susceptible to being fooled by advertising. Advertising is, inter alia, what turns a person aspiring to leadership into a product. A choose A or B or C proposition. I call it the shopper solution. We are often referred to as media consumers. That state of mind eschews science and history, displaced by the dominant lexicon of our age, advertising. We employ it in our self-representation to the extent that we accept a prominent figure being referred to as a rising or declining "brand" according to a growing or diminishing personal "capital". There are many gradations to dehumanization. That protective faculty to detect what or who someone actually is, is the project of advertising to disable. It has succeeded in making credible to a sufficient audience someone as mendaciously vile as DJT. It was an industrial effort.
The dismantling of the apparatus of a governed society is being sold to us under the rationale of "efficiency". Mr Vaught has told us that he will traumatize bureaucrats out of their jobs. Seemingly forever, officials and their aspirants have been pontificating about the glory of "jobs". Never can have too many of those. But now, in an Orwellian reversal, jobs are the enemy of "efficiency". My gullible friend, R I P, would have been hopping around with "waste, fraud, and abuse."
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