Wealth n’ Fame
It’s bizarre that American culture relentlessly promotes the idea that the two ideal states to which we should all aspire are 1) great wealth and 2) fame - yet when we observe those possessing of great wealth and fame, they so often seem dysregulated, in states of desperation and, ironically, obsessed with acquiring more wealth and notoriety. In other words, we see that even those in America who reach the Valhalla state act as if it had not been reached, as if some other, more distant, ever-receding paradise must be pursued and then satisfaction and the end of striving may finally arrive. This never happens.
The two men exhibiting this paradox most publicly and most ubiquitously at the moment are Elon Musk & El Donaldo. Elon’s is a tragic case. There is no quantity of money that will calm him. There is no amount of being known that will satisfy him. His days are spent striking awkward adolescent poses in which he looks like the hapless younger brother of Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen and in paroxysms of tweeted tantrums that are boring in their emotional content, as if all of his life’s greatest desires were the calcified frustrations of an awkward boy neglected by his father. Which they are.
El Donaldo, at least, is somewhat more unique in his misery profile. His dreams and imagination are still merely petty and joyless, but he is singular in the way in which he has never once in the last twenty years of public life displayed a moment of contentment and ease. There is only the language used in the service of manipulation and deception. Again, no end point is ever reached. Fucking over one person, one thousand people, one million people… There is no number of people he can deceive and fuck over that will permit him to unclench and to pause the con. It is as if he is living his entire existence with a knife poised at his throat — in a state of perpetual terror. And his response to this terror is to terrorize others.
And this is the prize one gets for being fabulously wealthy and famous in the United States of America. Go team?
