01-26-2024, 11:47 PM
Others may be more significant in nearly two months since I added anyone here, but I notice the passing of two porn stars under questionable circumstances. I'm not naming them. My suggestion for anyone of modest talent who contemplates going into this line of work: do anything else -- even migrant farm labor, retail salesclerking, or domestic service. The money could be seductive, but it usually goes into self-destructive habits that make one a candidate for suicide, overdose, or personal violence.
Our plutocratic order rewards mediocrity badly, but still one can keep one's honor. One can at least live among people who endure the same exploitation, deprivation, and frustration and develop some solidarity among those who suffer for big landowners, shareholders, executives, and bureaucrats. Indeed, in as corrupt a society as ours is -- one that can elevate a swine like Donald Trump to nearly dictatorial power -- poverty can be a sign more of integrity than of failure. Power has all too often implied the capacity to inflict suffering...as if anyone needed to read Karl Marx to learn that. The highest profits come from either managing scarcity or from pushing wars and oppression, if not outright corruption by any standard.
Our plutocratic order rewards mediocrity badly, but still one can keep one's honor. One can at least live among people who endure the same exploitation, deprivation, and frustration and develop some solidarity among those who suffer for big landowners, shareholders, executives, and bureaucrats. Indeed, in as corrupt a society as ours is -- one that can elevate a swine like Donald Trump to nearly dictatorial power -- poverty can be a sign more of integrity than of failure. Power has all too often implied the capacity to inflict suffering...as if anyone needed to read Karl Marx to learn that. The highest profits come from either managing scarcity or from pushing wars and oppression, if not outright corruption by any standard.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.