“Once I know that I can remember
whenever I like, I forget.”
—Umberto Eco
“Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.”
—Umberto Eco
Maybe it's time we just did stuff instead of building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines in the hopes of luring the market’s animal sentiments into doing it for us.
- How can we solve the student debt crisis? Well, we could cancel student debt and regulate the price of education, either directly or through free state college.
- How can we solve America's heath-debt crisis? We could cancel health debt and create Medicare For All.
- How can we solve America's homelessness crisis? We could build houses and let homeless people live in them.
- How can we solve America's wage-stagnation crisis? We could raise the minimum wage and/or create a federal jobs guarantee.
- How can we solve America's workplace abuse crisis? We could allow workers to unionize.
- How can we solve America's price-gouging greedflation crisis? With price controls and/or windfall taxes.
- How can we solve America's inequality crisis? We could tax billionaires.
- How can we solve America's monopoly crisis? We could break up monopolies.
- How can we solve America's traffic crisis? We could build public transit.
- How can we solve America's carbon crisis? We can regulate carbon emissions.
I learned how to drink champagne a while ago. But the way I like to drink champagne is I like to make what we call a Montana Cooler, where you buy a case of champagne and you take all the bottles out, and you take all the cardboard out, and you put a garbage bag inside of it, then you put all the bottles back in and then you cover it with ice, and then you wrap it up and you close it. And that will keep it all cold for a weekend and you can drink every single bottle. And the way I like to drink it in a big pint glass with ice. I fill it with ice and I pour the champagne in it, because champagne can never be too cold. And the problem people have with champagne is they drink it and they crash with it, because the sugar content is so high and you get really dehydrated. But if you can get the ice in it, you can drink it supremely cold and at the same time you're getting the melting ice, so it's like a hydration level, and you can stay at this great level for a whole weekend. You don't want to crash. You want to keep that buzz, that bling, that smile.
Bill Murray, in an interview with Daze Digital
Don’t Look Up feels a much better fit for the reality we’re actually living through. There’s no villainous authoritarian ending democracy; as in our world, American democracy in the film has already been smothered under the weight of oligarch money and corporate profit-chasing. There’s no secret evil conspiracy, at least in the salacious form these Trump-era stories imagined; the villains are a self-obsessed, blinkered elite, and it’s their greed, venality and stupidity that lead them to evil decisions.
What touches all should be decided by all.
Our rage against the machine actually strengthens the machine’s grip on us when it’s packaged in the form of Rage Against the Machine™, a capitalistic product in a universe where that’s the only thing that matters, a pacifying media spectacle among spectacles.
Essentially, it's just one big, slow-moving cattle drive for the entire day for the entire summer, day in day out. And what we're trying to accomplish is regenerating the land, getting our animals full and protecting them from predators.
