Elon In His Abattoir

 In the cult slasher film"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" a family of dispossessed slaugherhouse workers get their revenge on technolical 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 nobless 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."

then I suppose we shouldbe grateful to Elon Musk, who is arrogant and cluelesseenough to displaybefore 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 ass) 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.