Off the keyboard of Steve Ludlum

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Published on the Economic Undertow on May 10, 2016

March 9, 2011. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)[/caption]

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In our times of trouble, our nation turns its lonely eyes to …

… a fat guy who cheats at golf:

One morning in the mid-1990s, Mark Mulvoy was on the sixth hole of Long Island’s Garden City Golf Club with Donald Trump when the skies opened, and they ducked for cover under a nearby awning. The rain let up a few moments later, and Mulvoy, then the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, returned to the green. When he got there, he found a ball 10 feet from the pin that he didn’t remember seeing before the storm.

 

 

 

 

“Who the hell’s ball is this?” he said.

“That’s me,” the real estate mogul said, according to Mulvoy.

“Donald, give me a fucking break,” Mulvoy recalls telling him. “You’ve been hacking away in the weeds all day. You do not lie there.”

“Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time,” he recalls Trump replying. “I have to cheat just to keep up with them.”

“The worst celebrity golf cheat?” the rock star Alice Cooper said in a 2012 interview with Q magazine. “I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“I’ve never played with Alice Cooper,” Trump said. “That’s a terrible thing to say about people, especially me.”

 

 

 

How sinister! Goldfinger is running for president of the United States!

How will James Bond save us from ourselves this time? Nobody knows. Oscar Wilde famously remarked “life imitates art”; that was in a more genteel time when the world actually had ‘art’. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and life imitates commercials …

… our ‘alternative’ candidate: unstoppable, mechanistic, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t feel pity, etc. So far, no horror flick about an Ebbets Field era political cliché-slash-fall guy … no doubt Hollywood’s best minds are hard at work on a concept right at this moment.

Pop culture’s leadership program offers a range of stupid-psychotic characters to run our vital systems … so that we might gain the thieves’ return. Systems include governments, militaries, big businesses and religions. Thieves’ return is exactly what it sounds like; it costs the robber almost nothing to steal compared to the expenses borne by his victims whose relative good nature (they are the slower moving thieves) makes them deserving of their fate. The Cortezes and Napoleons, Goldmans and Sachses (and Madoffs), Trumps and their ilk are not accidents or outliers, they are integral components of modernity like the printing press or Hans Wegner chairs … iPhones and battleships. Our precious system cannot function without them.

The idea, to paraphrase Lewis Mumford, is “to maim and kill with more expert precision than one’s neighbor … “ but, to do so out of sight, without making a scene or scaring the horses, to kill and maim in another country. With a certain je ne sais quoi;

/bo͝orˈZHwä

• A part of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class,
• Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity,
• Dominated by commercial and industrial interests; capitalistic.

In the beginning, the maiming and killing process ‘worked’: gold and riches flowed from Spanish conquests in the New World toward Europe, then from South Asian, African and Chinese colonies toward England other European powers. When the most productive parts of the world were divided the Europeans turned against each other; the rot had begun to set in. America emerged from its century of isolation and European carnage and turned toward colonizing nature itself. With machines, complexity and fossil fuels, Americans and their imitators were able to achieve a level of prosperity and comfort unimaginable in earlier times.

Yet, nothing lasts forever. Analogous to Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis; prosperity carries with it the germ of its own undoing. Comfort and vanity are corrupting. The parade of thieves across history is evidence that ill-gotten gains are the only kind to be had. Labor, art and creativity are time-wasting hobbies and/or marketing. Innovation and technology are useful only as far as they leverage more efficient theft. Sorry dreamers: facts on the ground speak for themselves: we plunder therefor we are. If any of us chooses to do otherwise someone else steps up to plunder in our place. The iron laws of nature insist that humans pillage or die trying, it is either us… or rabbits and kangaroos: life is a contest with only one winner.

We have made it our destiny to spread our multitudes across the universe, to discover other worlds so we might empty them as we have done with this one … to reduce everything to accounting entities, to turn capital into waste, to replace value with ‘Made in China’ brand poison cat food and and the ‘magic of free parking’.

“Omelets are not made without breaking eggs,” right?

What keeps the various rogues in check is readiness of others to do the same thing. There are too few ‘fools in the market’ able to absorb costs and thereby support the enterprise. Our theft-based economy hiccups because of a shortage of victims solvent enough to justify the expense of stealing from them … or without resources to extract. Those making their way up the economic ladder of deprived of gains they feel entitled to … which in turn amplifies the increasingly vicious pillaging cycle.

Managers’ first and only job is to promote the interests of big business, to stand aside and allow those with most invested to run things. Leadership is a matter of role playing; the leader’s job is to conform to the public’s collective imagination and provide distractions. Managers are employed strictly by how they look, dress, speak, where certified and whom they ‘know’; where they live and work and how they travel. This is how Goldfinger becomes a presidential nominee: he’s a billionaire … or at least looks and acts like one. This is suggestive to his legions of supporters who see something of themselves within him. Under the circumstances, actual competence or capacity is unnecessary, only fashion.

Forms that require labor, skill, difficulty or do not present a marketing opportunity are penalized with diminished status. Because our scams are divorced from reality the scam managers are expected to be incompetent even as they are fashionable! There is no penalty for stupidity in America.

Competence is intolerable except where it allows for the proper internal functioning of the enterprise. The ostensible scam- masters might be buffoons but those who tend the boilers must know what they are about.

Actual or ‘real’ phenomena which take on pop culture’s forms are treated by the culture as if they are scams irrespective of logic: “Buy the fiction, sell the fact.” Because our institutions are acknowledged to be fraudulent and this is winked at it is not hard for marketing to promote what it wishes as frauds. This is how energy companies can falsely accuse climate science of being a scam and have a large part of the public accept it.

The Hollywood villain vicious cycle runs off the rails …

… to maim and kill with more expert precision than one’s neighbor.

Whether they intend to be or not, managers are First Law change-agents. The First Law relates to the costs associated with ballooning surpluses (see the upper right corner of this page). The sensible change-agent voluntarily reduces surpluses before management costs spiral out of control. Our bourgeois bossmen are not sensible, they are actors reading from scripts. In boardrooms and in offices, in central banks and strategy sessions verything possible is done in order to maximize surpluses, to gain them by force if need be. Costs rush through the back door and around corners, the surpluses evaporate.

Whoever wins the election later this year will be ill-equipped to do more but dodge responsibility for the country’s (the world’s) accelerating troubles. If the managers were to tell the truth they would discuss overpopulation, permawar, water- and petroleum depletion, loss of topsoil fertility, diminished waste-carrying capacity; resource constraints that will never ‘disappear’. Instead, candidate Trump blames Mexicans for the American working-man’s plight. He does not understand why Mexicans are at our door in the first place … changes in Mexican agriculture. With climate change and other self-amplifying costs of American industrial surpluses, there are more Mexicans and others certain to come.

We are up against thermodynamic entropy, evidence for this is everywhere a person chooses to look. Entropy is not subject to payoffs, PR or force; it does not negotiate. It is a consequence not an option. We had our chance: Instead of adapting, we were offered supply-side fantasies paid for with the charge card … leaving us with an overwhelming mess and hapless Hollywood villains who do not have a clue.

Good luck on us, we will need it.

Assad photo credit: Joseph Eid/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images