kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with class war

There are two classes in the US and possibly the world and only a single test is needed to determine which is which: there is the class of people who have had anxiety about affording groceries and the class that has never had to worry about affording groceries. In our current era of remoteness from anyone who grows a hundred percent of their own food, dependence upon the grocery store for daily sustenance is a given. On one side of the divide, we have those who have never skipped a meal for the reason they could not afford it. As much as certain people who used to fall into the Occupy Wall Street crowd want to think the upper crust is a tiny fraction of one percent who spoil outcomes for the remainder of the pyramid, the class of effortless grocery buyers that accidentally ruin everything are more like the upper twenty percent. This level is what I will call the salary class for the duration of this essay. The lower eighty percent is comprised of the lower middle class, the desperately poor, and everyone within that large spectrum. If you’ve never sweated the choice between a fast food meal and the last eighteen dollars in your bank account, it is likely you have never experienced being outside of the salary class.

Food, glorious food

Americans have a particularly warped relationship with food. Etheric starvation is especially pronounced here, hence our armies of diabetics, overweight, and obese citizens. Being dramatically overweight is a regular occurrence even among the wealthy in the US. The rich who are not overweight often go the opposite road of orthorexia, anorexia, and bulimia, enmeshing themselves in diet and exercise culture that hybridizes excessive pride in one’s physical appearance with obsessive lifestyle perfectionism.

I bore witness to an exhibit of this elite perfectionism once during a trip to Whole Foods. A mother and her young adult daughter were in front of me in the checkout line, both in a state of supermodel-esque near-emaciation. They were clothed in athletic gear that probably cost more than my monthly tax, title, and mortgage. They had a huge load of fresh produce on the conveyer belt. It took FOREVER for the cashier to scan all of their fruits and veggies, and to their credit, they were not at all impatient. The total of their groceries ended being over seven hundred dollars. The women expressed some wry amusement at the total, and the mother made a comment about the daughter being hungry.

Never in my life have I spent over three hundred dollars for groceries, and to add insult to injury, there is a supermarket down the street from Whole Foods that sells the very same brands of organic produce for a third of the cost. The two women did not have to care. They had plenty of money to burn.

The salary class

To be truly salary class, your wealth must come from sources outside of the work you do for money, if you deign to work at all. I grew up upper middle class and in my profound naivete, I did not realize that the key difference between my father and my friends’ fathers was that my salesman father earned his commission-based income in the direct, old fashioned way and my friends’ fathers provided mostly via inheritances and dividends. This is nothing new. Most of Jane Austen’s heroines end up marrying men whose “umpteen thousand a year” salaries come from investments. I have only recently come to realize this distinction on the soul level. If I had not been part of the lower classes after getting married, I don’t know that I would have truly understood the distinction.

The salary class kids are largely not OK. I have not seen many examples of salary class parents in my Generation X that have produced well-rounded, emotionally stable offspring. Severe drug addiction is par for the course as is severe depression. One boy I grew up with was obsessed with reliving being bullied in high school twenty years after the fact. His badly-managed trauma turned him into a depressive narcissist and a sex addict. A girl I grew up with name drops compulsively to this day — she has never figured out how to develop apparent self-worth. She is pathetic. Another girl has more substance addictions under her belt than Justin Bieber. Sadly two out of three of the aforementioned individuals has reproduced. These kids all had parents who gave them comfortable childhoods and a lack of financial limits that will last until their parents die and give them umpteen thousand a year from beyond the grave. It’s funny how little they’ve benefitted from never having to worry where grocery money is going to come from.

Meanwhile, back in the hood…

Most of my neighbors in the lower middle class neighborhood where I live are renters. Some of them are the non-conscientious poor, i.e. the “trash” of various races. White trash, black trash, Hispanic trash, etc. The trashiest of the trash depend on welfare, quietly deal drugs, and have lawns strewn with discarded furniture and bikes. Their loud fights are impossible not to overhear from their houses and yards. They are parasites and people like them are the primary reason the poor are so despised.

The backbone of the neighborhood (and thankfully the majority, at least for now) are the conscientious working poor. A single woman lives in a converted house apartment nearby. She has three jobs, one of which is Dollar Tree. Another is disabled and depends on her husband who works at Walmart. There is a family of Mexicans who immigrated a long time ago and raised their kids here: the whole family works. In rare cases where the conscientious working poor own property, they are typically quite house proud, pouring themselves and their strained resources into home improvement and maintenance.

To be the conscientious working poor is to feel you are always drowning. The second you believe you are getting ahead — not Lululemon and seven Ben Franklins at Whole Foods ahead but ahead in the sense you can afford you car payments for a couple of months — the System kicks you in the face and the undertow sucks you into the brine again. If you dare unclench, you are immediately threatened with losing your apartment and being forced to surrender your pets to the shelter. You are always oppressed by the specter of NOT ENOUGH MONEY, and on good days, you numb the consciousness of it by putting your nose to the grindstone and working harder or laughing it off. On bad days, it threatens to swallow you whole and crush you under its weight. It becomes much easier to hate Richie Rich and her clueless, designer-dressed entourage, but that kind of sepsis does not pay your bills so you do your best to shelve it. Besides, the trashy poor person you live next to is more of a direct threat, so any worrying time is usually spent on him. Being conscientious, working, and poor at the same time sucks ass and all of my conscientious working class neighbors know it intimately.

Cost of living is so bad that the average adult’s wage, side gigs and hustles included, equals about 1/17th of the buying power it had for a comparable young adult in 1973. I remember when a small bag of candy was ten cents and bread was under a dollar. A house that cost $150,000 was palatial and there were plenty of dumps comparable to the one my husband and I bought in 2016 that were $30,000 or less. No wonder so many adult children live with their parents: what other choice do they have? Often it is the parents who have nowhere to go. The 92 year old parent of a friend of mine is interred in a nursing home that costs $14,000 per month. Yes, what I just said probably deserves its own essay. I’ll give it some thought. At 14K per month, I have asked myself why the woman’s four children don’t just rent a house and a full-time, live in RN? Wouldn’t such an arrangement cost half the price or less? I guess nobody asked me.

Blame the rich

The rich women in Whole Foods and my salary class classmates are in many ways to blame for the current predicament of the lower eighty percent. When Richie Rich demolishes an already luxurious home or part of that home to build an executive mansion instead of making do in a more conservative, smaller house, it drives all property prices skyward and the taxes make it all but impossible for the conscientious working poor to buy the homes they deserve. When they buy seven hundred dollars worth of already-overpriced groceries, the stores raise their prices because they can. When they hire armies of questionably-documented workers to build, clean, and maintain their homes, the demand for that cheap labor makes it difficult for skilled laborers to compete. Every restaurant, warehouse, and store presents similar competition where poor illegal migrants compete for entry-level jobs. I tried explaining this to my salary class friend once and he did not get it. As Upton Sinclair said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.

I am not like the Occupy people. I do not want wealth redistribution. In fact, I eschew and rebuke all wealth that I did not earn. I will never own a single stock, not only because of my lackluster math skills, but because I have grown to hate and despise unearned wealth. To my mind, money made off of investments and stocks is unearned and that means it comes at the price of me having to earn it back in future lifetimes. Nope, DO NOT WANT. You’ll never know if I hit it big (with earned wealth, of course) because I will not live ostentatiously. I hate McMansions and I make no secret of this in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. If unearned wealth somehow comes my way, I will do my damnedest to give it away as quickly as possible to a reputable charity. I think if more members of the salary class were like me, they would actually be better adjusted. There are more important and meaningful things than luxury and jet travel.

All in all, I am glad I was never salary class and I am grateful for my bohemian existence, even with its constant fear of financial drowning. Being thrown into this situation gave me insight into what most people are going through and enabled me to come down to Mama Earth rather than being another bored, depressed, confused, detached, perpetual tourist. I can do cool things I never would have learned how to do if I had been salary class: I can make all sorts of tasty meals from scratch, for instance, and the cost of groceries is closer to seven dollars instead of seven hundred. Little things make me happy and grateful in ways Richie Rich will never understand. Limits are powerful forces and financial limits can be taskmasters. As always, it is up to each one of us to make the best of what we are given, and in a perverse way, that can be easier when what you are given is a bit less.

Anyone who is not living on a desert island has likely heard of Anthony Oliver, the viral singer-songwriter whose song, Rich Men North of Richmond, implicates a certain set of elites in Washington DC who allegedly ruin the country with their bad decisions. What if I told you those politicians had a fairly inconsequential part in creating the mess that inspired Rich Men North of Richmond? Politicians are despotic... trust me, I know, I live in Illinois and when a member of my Speakeasy group derided others for voting in the miserable crew we have at the moment, I asked him, "Have you met Illinois?" Elections here do not matter. I have personally witnessed two election officials brazenly looking at my completed ballot in disgust and I would not have been shocked if every ballot they disagreed with ended up tossed in a dumpster at the end of the night. It is an open secret that Illinois is a banana republic with its own renditions of Charles II at the helm. The only way of deposing the Illinois monarchy is via guillotine, and though I am sure that can be arranged, the common folk are not quite ready to go full Jacobin at this time.

As fun and easy as it is to scapegoat politicians for their copious bad decisions and dictates, the meat of the problem lies right here at home. When I was a child in the 1970s and early 80s, I knew my neighbors so well that they were a stone's throw away from acting as godparents. Our tight-knit family reliably spent holidays at each other's houses. The elementary school self-published a mimeographed book of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every student and teacher and gave copies to everyone in the school. Many of the families in town were wealthy, but the most ostentatious displays of wealth were limited to having a small in-ground pool and having a vacation home in either Florida or Wisconsin. Fast forward forty years and nearly every neighbor I grew up with has either moved far away or has atomized to distant corners of the country and globe. In my own case, I strongly considered running off to a faraway land where it would not be necessary to own a car. Nobody would dream of publishing the private phone numbers of little kids in a paper book. Displays of wealth have metastasized: there is hardly a McMansion out there without an in-ground pool. In northern Illinois, such a pool can only be used a quarter of the year at best. In all other seasons, it must be drained, covered, and cleaned by a small crew of typically brown men who may or may not be here legally.

SIMRES: Suckas Idolizing Mediocre Real Estate

The trouble with Rich Men North of Richmond is that it isn't just them. I cannot afford to live anywhere near the neighborhood where I grew up. The area is beset with suburbanites trying to outdo each other. In the 80s, the upper middle class added to their existing homes, morphing modest three bedrooms into four, expanding kitchens and bathrooms, and adding garages. In the 90s, McMansions entered the scene, and now the remodeled four bedroom seemed modest in comparison. In the 2000s, the home equity craze had people using their homes as piggy banks, desperate to climb the property ladder. This trend was stalled by the crash of 2008 but was back and rolling by the mid-2010s. Covidmania blew the housing prices sky-high, and though the exodus from big cities tamped down the bubble by a modest amount, a 776 square foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom high rise apartment in San Francisco, the Poop Capital of the World, costs $2720 per month. As long as someone is willing to pay it, someone else will charge it.

The problems Anthony Oliver sings about in Rich Men North of Richmond -- too many hours for bulls**t pay, people on the street going hungry while obese wokesters get fat on welfare, and runaway inflation -- are actually the logical results of the decisions average people make and continue to make. The upper middle class is at fault. I have a relative who moved into an ugly McMansion in an exclusive neighborhood. When asked why she chose to have her husband purchased the place when they had a very nice, expanded, remodeled home to begin with, she said, "Because I can". My parents, who used their financial prosperity to buy a vacation home in the 1980s, are at fault. Some kids I grew up with had hoarder parents who owned no less than five storage units stuffed to the gills with accumulated junk. They are at fault. I am at fault and so are you.

The Karma of Unearned Wealth

The reason why I try very hard not to do unearned wealth anymore is because someone has to earn it. I do not want the karma of unearned wealth to hit me in this and future lives, so I try to avoid it. When my parents decided to take their economic windfalls of the 1980s and buy a vacation home, it was a decision that rippled all around them. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to rent a sketchy cottage on a lakeshore; it became de rigueur to own a place where you could go at almost any time. When one person puts an addition on their home or takes a wrecking ball to a perfectly useable place in order to erect a much larger, newer building in its entirety, the property values and taxes are raised across the board. A neighborhood that was once populated by people who made just enough to live in a smaller home becomes the domain of doctors, lawyers, and insurance CEOS. Music teachers and security guards have to go elsewhere. Towns begin competing for wealth in a similar race. Maybe you've heard of a town where I used to live and work called Naperville. Naperville is an extremely prosperous town that put McMansions on the map back in the day. The downtown is the cold-weather version of Dubai. Downers Grove, the town where I grew up, wants to be Naperville, yet has never been able to attract the huge corporate money that has enabled Naperville to pave its streets in silver and gold. Downers Grove's stupid city council avoided putting Napervillian infrastructure in high-traffic areas for fifty years and now has screwed itself out of Naperville creme de la creme status because of it. Yet if you walk down any Downers Grove street, you can sense the longing and jealousy. In both Naperville and Downers Grove, I have often spotted this sign:

This sign irritates me to no end. Though it is put up by well-meaning people, it is pure, empty virtue signaling. I have never seen the sign in the lower middle class neighborhood where I live. Not once.

I could not help but make my own version to get even:

There is an old saying "If you cannot beat them, join them" that is essentially what I tried to do when I was straight out of college. I grew up salary class and though I should have known better, I went through a phase where I tried to become salary class. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I realize that the salary class is not for me and I cannot join them without completely selling out. I would honestly rather die as a kamikaze than become more grist for the salary class mill, so with this bargain I consign myself to great and mournful losses.

None if By Plane

I won't speak for anyone else, however, in my desire to be the change, I may never travel by plane again. I am not afraid of flying. The problem with flying is that it has become a common leisure activity. I knew someone who actually flew to China from the US and only stayed there for a few hours. Basically this person saw a Chinese airport firsthand and then turned around and flew back. I knew two other Americans who visited Antarctica. A trip to Antarctica involves flying to South America and either crossing the Drake Passage via ship or another flight. Just as family trips to Florida in the 80s morphed into family trips to Prague and Budapest in the 2010s, vacationing in St. Barts is no longer enough. You've got to go to ANTARCTICA now to get those bragging rights. You need to rack up eighteen hours (at least) in order to get there. The amount of fossil fuel resources squandered in order to indulge such a vacation is absolutely staggering. Anyone who goes to Antarctica for pleasure is the opposite of an environmentalist, even if they are fruit-only vegans for the duration of their lives who avoid having biological children and driving a car.

I will not contribute to the gentrification of my lower middle class neighborhood any more than I already have. My husband and I have improved our house and garden to the best of our ability and within the limits of our modest finances. That's where it ends. Even if I end up somehow earning a far larger income than I am working with right now, I am not going to betray the only neighborhood where I could afford a house a decade ago by turning around and starting a property ladder race. I will not go out and buy a McMansion "because I can". If I have a windfall, I will put it into the creation of a private physical library, a music school, or a brick and mortar sheet music store.

The salary class and their handlers fear people who cannot be bought. The rich men north of Richmond were bought off long ago, though at this point, any compromising videos of them with "miners" can be passed off as AI deepfakes. The poor girl who would sell her body and soul to become an influencer and the pampered suburban boy who becomes far more pampered with the help of sponsorship cheddar are very much part of the problem. Anyone who can be bought is part of the problem, and the only solution to my mind is to avoid the dealers.

Hi Everyone, this post is likely it for this week -- I'm trying to finish a song project and I'll be pouring lots of effort into it Wednesday, when I usually put out a new post. Thanks for reading and please respect my no-profanity rules in the comments.

I have had more close friendships end due to my own choice than the other way around. In most of the cases, I was responsible for both the breakup and at least in part for the conflict that led to the breakup. In only one case did I feel completely innocent. Unlike the others, I never crap-talked this friend, I didn't enchant a guy she was obsessed with, and I was never so much as rude to her though she did not return the favor. She had an irritating habit of telling me I looked tired that I don't miss -- though I blew it off, this seemed to be a form of concern-trolling meant to inform me I was looking my chronological age and not youthful and fresh as we women are supposed to look at all times. She was often kind and considerate, but when the going got rough in her life, she turned out to be a bitter lunatic, obsessed with what she could not have. In her case, the holy grail was a biological child. She spent the second half of our decade-long friendship convinced that she deserved a healthy, perfect baby of her own genetic extraction. As an adoptee who was abandoned by my natural mother at ten days old despite being physically and mentally unblemished, it struck me as odd that she saw adoption as a vastly distant second best to procreation. Somewhere near the end, she found Jesus at the local McBox church -- during our last meeting she insisted she was finally content in life because of her newfound religion. My BS detector started ringing; she was raised agnostic atheist. The friendship came to a screeching halt when I asked, "What if Jesus doesn't have it in His plan for you to conceive?" You could almost hear the snap of the friendship breaking. Despite the pointed nature of my question, I still don't think I did anything wrong.

In a similar vein, I don't feel I wronged my vegan friends when I ended my vegan meetup group of ten years in August. Like my baby-obsessed former pal, vegans and vegetarians have become lunatics about their own holy grail, which is the toppling of the legally elected 45th president of the United States by any means necessary. They began this psychotic break in 2015, when Donald Trump went from fading reality TV show star to leader of the Executive Branch. Though my former friends accuse me of being a Trump fetishist, he has elicited no more than a "meh" from me in his entire presidential journey. I think he's done as good of a job as a person could do given the situation, but unlike them, I wouldn't take his job if it were handed to me on a silver platter, for all the power it would grant me.

I'm intellectually honest: Trump is a weird blowhard. He looks funny with his orange skin and puffy combover. He's also apparently quite competent at being President. He got in the way of foreign powers like China and Russia without goading them into firefights and he also got in the way of domestic terrorists like BLM and Antifa. He did not start any new wars. He's OK in my book. "Oh yeah, he seems OK" is the highest compliment I can give a president as a staid, born and bred, non-city dwelling Midwesterner. Make of that what you will. I am not excited about Trump. He elicits no passion from me one way or the other. I think he is OK, that is all.

Don't tell the other vegetarians, though. Former friends of mine foam at the mouth at the mention of Trump's name, their higher instincts thrown overboard in favor of Pavlovian hate porn gleefully propagated in every byte of mainstream media chatter. Between Facebook, Twitter, and CNN, their lives are one long, solid dog whistle, a teakettle of piss left on a dung-encrusted stove that never stops boiling over. My husband warned me that saying "All lives matter" got Jessica Doty Whitaker, the 24 year old Indiana mother of a three year old boy, fatally shot in the face. Recently, when I put out a sign letting my students know I would not force them to wear a mask inside my business, an adult piano student of a certain age confronted me, citing the governor's authority to deal with me for breaking the mask mandate. When I retorted with "The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land," she got so mad, she quit the lessons she had been taking for over two years. She was not mature about the matter. She ghosted me and did not pay for the half month she was present before our political disagreement. I was far more irritated by the ghosting than the money. People who are older than I am should know better than to act in such a rude and uncouth manner, especially over such trivia as politics. I just hope she finds a teacher in political agreement with whom to resume her lessons, because she was finally beginning to make real progress. I would hate to see two years of work, both mine and hers, wasted!

I am 47. Never did I think I would see a day when a despised Hollywood elite was more interested in cheering on BLM communism than making money in their chosen crafts of acting, directing, and film production, but here we are. Never did I suspect the Left would become the party of censorship. Never did I think people who marched for an end to the war in Vietnam would stump for an all out warmonger who put hundreds of thousands of black people in prison while his own son smoked crack cocaine with the groomed 14 year old daughter of his own dead brother. I didn't expect Donald Trump to be president in the first place and I'm more shocked to see that he's not half-bad at it. I'm done being surprised.

I would like to see a collective return to the old fashioned notions of civility and decorum. This means I would like to see a world where people don't shout in each other's faces or ghost their piano teachers because they are politically disgruntled. I'd like to see a world where Americans wear proper clothes in public spaces instead of open-toed Birkenstocks, shorts, sweatpants complete with sweat stains, and pajamas. I'd like to see a general disavowal of calling people the eff word and the C word and a return to more literary yet devastating insults. I'm entitled to my pipe dreams, I suppose. There are life lessons here that are being learned, that much is obvious. I pray we don't need a civil war to figure them out.

We may be at peak Coronapocalypse, because Buzzfeed finally featured an article about people who were diligent savers who were wiped out by the panicdemic. In other words, a good seven months after every lower middle class person realized that shutting down every restaurant, bar, concert hall, and sports arena would decimate an already fragile economy, the geniuses at Buzzfeed managed to put together the puzzle pieces. Yes, collapse ripples from the bottom up. Yes, the financially responsible types who save every spare penny are feeling the pain right now. Yes, the Professional Managerial Class is next in line.

They Only Wanted Rest

I understand why the Professional Managerial Class was gung ho about shutting down the economy. When I was a kid, my family had more disposable income than we do now. I was upper middle class in the 1980s and I gradually fell down into the lower middle class. This isn't hard to do nowadays. I don't mind though, because I remember being an upper middle class child. Though I had all the ingredients for a happy childhood, it was hell. I had great parents, a nice house, the best schools, and plenty of food and perks. I was academically gifted and I was blessed with good physical health. What made it hell was the lack of sleep. I was cursed by my own night owl temperament. Insomnia was exacerbated by electric lights and constant stimuli. The TV was always on. Between electronic inputs and my mammoth imagination, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't alone. I had friends in high school who opted out of lunch so they could cram in more pre-college classes for credit. Nobody slept. Sleep was for wussies.

Insomnia Takes Its Toll

What happens when you don't sleep? Physically, the eyes become bloodshot and bleary. Everything itches. The ears ring. The gastrointestinal tract gets extremely messed up -- count on gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, anything but normal digestion. In the upper respiratory, inflammation is the name of the game. Phlegm: every kid I knew had issues with it, to the point where we all had boxes of tissues in our desks. The body aches. There are migraines.

I existed in a mental fog most of my youth. I was almost always tired. I was often grumpy because of blood sugar issues caused by lack of sleep. On Friday night and Saturday night, from the age of 8 - 17 I slept twelve hours both nights, midnight to noon, as my body and mind frantically tried to make up for sleep debt. Irritation at being forced to conform to the morning-centric schedules of others led to despair and eventually suicidal nihilism. Like many, I retreated to a toxic indoor world. For me, dysmorphia and obsession with my appearance plagued my teenaged mind. For the modern teen, it is often videogames, porn, or social media that becomes addictive.

Insomnia may be bad physically and mentally, but its worst effects happen in the astral plane, otherwise known as the realm of imagination, emotion, and feeling. Deep sleep cleanses the imagination, ridding it of junk. The reason light sleep is often not refreshing is because it's a surface clean. Five hours a night for me was superficial sleep -- the state of constant anxiety and misery I dwelled in as a young person only went away once a week on Saturday and Sunday.

Enter the Panicdemic

The Corona closures that were supposed to last two weeks and have ended up dragging on for most of a year were, among other things, a one size fits all solution to a nearly universal insomnia problem. Before the pandemic, the Professional Managerial Classes (PMC) were the most sleepless of them all. To be upper middle class is to give up on sleep as a human need. I have already explained how I didn't sleep as a PMC child. PMC adults sleep even less. In the PMC household, dad most likely gets up before dawn to face a grueling commute, or at least he used to before COVID. Mom's job is to manage the children, so of course she doesn't get to sleep in.

The pandemic solved all of this by ending dad's commute and cancelling the trip to school as well as all extracurricular activities, including in-restaurant dining and about half to three quarters of all brick and mortar shopping. Plane travel, an activity that used to be de rigueur for PMC families every holiday and summer break, was also cancelled without further notice. The PMC had two weeks of no school, no clubs, no sports, no dance, yet plenty of money to pay for Uber Eats, Netflix, and Amazon.com. Best of all, they had the guilty pleasure of times long past: adequate sleep. COVID was paradise; all they had to do was give plenty of lip service to "essential" workers and order their takeout food from struggling independent restaurants instead of the usual chains once in a while. Some convinced themselves COVID was lethal to large swathes of the population and not just the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Mainstream media was right there to help them gin up death estimates and foment hysteria.

The Declaration of War

The Professional Managerial Classes went to war with the classes beneath them because those classes started demanding to take their pandemic away. The PMC are not dumb. They know that rest time is over once everyone is allowed to go back to movie theaters and soccer games. For now, the essential workers have picked up the slack as they toil fulfilling Amazon orders and stocking grocery store shelves. Make no mistake -- anyone who wants to live in a country where you can hug your grandma without taking weird and special precautions and/or see the high school musical where the unmasked protagonists share a funny albeit brief stage kiss is literally Hitler and most likely a Drumpfen SS sympathizer who kills puppies as a hobby. Eight months into a pandemic that peaked within three weeks of its arrival, the cozy PMC lauds the holy grail of a vaccine by Big Daddy Government that will save us all from a flu that kills a third of a percent of the people it infects.

The New Normal the PMC thinks it wants is a state of permanent rest courtesy of lower class work (the grocery stores and delivery services aren't closing anytime soon) and government handouts. The PMC believes this can happen without a total collapse of the economy. When they pass a permanently shuttered restaurant, they shake their heads and mutter a vacuous incantation about how a vaccine could have stopped the closure if only it had been rolled out in time, or they spit a bit of foul language about people who don't compulsively cover their noses and mouths with masks. There is never an acceptance of personal responsibility such as "Fear did this and I am one who lives in fear." What they have failed to put together is how they've amputated most of the vital parts of the culture in which they used to take pride. As an artist, I have straddled the bohemian gap between lower class pragmatism and high art; I like to think I have a decent perspective of both sides. Like the underfunded inner city public schools that cut out their art and music programs, the PMC has managed to chop away the arts and all who would aspire to work in them for the whole of American society via COVID. The New Normal means no dad will be able to take his kid to a crowded baseball game ever again. It means there won't be any careers being made on New York's Broadway because Broadway will cease to exist. It means no more rock concerts, Olympics, or Nutcracker ballets at Christmastime. The New Normal is an introvert's utopia, a glass snow globe of government welfare, solitary confinement, and Zoom meetings, every man, woman, and child for himself. The New Normal is the ultimate in luxurious quiet desperation, deaf to the cries of the deplorables who aren't well-off enough to similarly virtue signal from a safe window view.