I was standing in a Starbucks, which is really a mediocre way to start any story. Could there be a less-descript experience than standing in a Starbucks amid the teeming masses coming and going to and from nowhere–but in a hurry–which is an experience almost as universal and unsatisfying as the ubiquity of judeo-christian thought?
In much the same way the burned, brown brew is a cheap distillation of a rich, beverage-borne culture into its most soulless and commercially viable rendering, the experience of waiting in a Starbucks rolls the lifestyle of the instant into a consumer-culture-appropriate morsel. Take a second and queue up a nostalgia-laden slideshow of 90s Starbucks. Then go wait 35 minutes for a midline latte in the bare, industrial space planted awkwardly into a demanding drive-thru footprint at the expense of anything resembling a coffee shop, inside. It’s no coincidence that Dr. Evil, of late-90s Pastiche “The Spy Who Shagged Me,” and his empire own a not-insignificant amount of the company during its dot-com era capitalization phase–which warped the idea of ‘a coffee shop for every town’ into ‘a fast food shop on every corner.’ Only an empire with “evil” on the box would so morbidly misappropriate the idea of a third place. Here be monsters, and they’re wearing your favorite, old companies’ faces as thin, clinging masks.
Exposed HVAC equipment hanging in matte black repose amid a bare-rafters ceiling was once, arguably, an interior design decision but it has been laywayed by the grinding crush of late-stage corproto-capitalism into a physical depiction of profit margins driven past the point of good taste. It isn’t trendy, it’s trite cost cutting.
“We haven’t figured out how to cut the roof, yet, but we have some engineers working on replacing it with a much thinner plastic sheet.”
The ceiling above their heads is a modicum of baristas’ worries, as threats of unionization are met with methods that would make a Pinkerton blush. You’re surrounded by plastic products trumpeting their own faux-sustainable hype, despite major corporations being aware that plastic can’t be wholly and really recycled for nearly the entirety of the recycling movement’s presence in the public consciousness. The chairs are thin metal rods supporting stained particle boards–not because they can’t afford something more comfortable, but because the wisdom of “trickle down” economics is more shit than oat. Get your coffee and go. Why would you want to sit in here? Their CEO has lost no sleep over the lost work or lost love, from strikes or slashing budgets, because companies continue to inexplicably tighten belts in spite of record-breaking year after record-breaking year. The parasites at the top and suckled to the sides of the great, corrupt beast trading rampant on Wall Street trample the lives of thousands and reward themselves with pay raises. How many employees create products they cannot afford? How many shareholders create anything of value, at all? The nature of investing has mutated sickly from a vote of confidence in a fledgling business to a categorical wellspring of corruption and massive, state-sanctioned gambling.
Though the issue begins back here, in this coffeehouse-cum-bus-terminal that’s stretching the definition of a clean, well-lighted place nearly beyond the pale. Paradoxically, it’s actually the workers that are to blame. As a matter of fact, we all are. To sit quietly in this mobius strip of a queue for middling coffee is to tacitly condone a crushing system that creates need and meets that need with hostility. To be a worker ignoring the need for strong union efforts is to openly disagree with taking back some basic human decency from these corporate plantation shareholders who wrap themselves in a cellophane American flag to hide all your money falling out of their pockets. Yet, in lieu of mere disappointing silence, and in fact much worse, these employees return to the ‘company store’ in their off time as a twisted perpetuation of a postmodern nightmare cycle. What pittance the workers are allowed to collect in a jar, like the growing number of unhoused on the sidewalk outside, they spend swilling the same shit they themselves waste the bulk of their waking life pouring from pre-measured containers into pre-measured containers. We consume blindly, removed permanently from the joys of creation or cultivation. We’re a snake eating our own tail, and gagging at the writhing mass of it. The minor mechanical victory of successfully making oneself a coffee is, in and of itself, an important action. The connection to the world around us is cheapened by disposable consumerism. The Romans left the colosseum; we will live behind styrofoam plates and breast implants. Our ruins will be the ruins of the natural world, that we replaced with a fulfillment center automatedly, automatically delivering the means of our escapism/undoing.
Proverbial wisdom suggests that a goldfish is self-limited by the size and quality of its environs. Theoretically, this is true of all organisms, as the quality and range of their home and habitat dictates their health, wellbeing, and capability to prosper. Though our exceptionalist mindset often wishes otherwise, human beings are organisms like any other–only with interspecies conflict increasingly being fought and won in backroom deals with pilfered cash like fresh blood.
As such, our personal environs have become and will continue to devolve into artificial ecosystems actively hostile to the needs of humans. Joni Mitchell crooned that we were paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, the Talking Heads rebutted that a world covered in ‘(Nothing but) Flowers’ would be a similar nightmare. All of mankind’s enterprises are so often reduced by the passage of time to polemic squabbling with suffering, silent masses in the middle. Though 15% and 15% at either end of any bell curve may make a very loud, painful experience of providing evidence to the contrary, the world is actively harming the 70% in the middle, merely trying to get by, in its contrarian resistance to embracing a logical synthesis of ideas.
The goldfish of human civilization has been stifled and shrunk to carnival bowl sizes by a systematic replacement of its ecosystem with one for an artificial food web of industry, with carbon-belching megafauna prowling black asphalt swaths of narrow savannah back and forth between tight jungles of mindless suburban sprawl. Corporate interests ingrained a car culture that leaves teeming millions gridlocked into motionlessness as they shuttle back and forth as serfs attached to decentralized executives who have feudalized the country under the auspices of ‘economic progress.’ The average American has an individual urban footprint, spacewise, of your average, everyday mommy-mobile super-utility-vehicle. Don’t even get me started on the South African Bond Villain/Funnyman’s luxury automotive combination of coal powered electricity and the new scourge of expanded cobalt mining in the African Interior. We have allowed ‘fiduciary responsibility’ to overtake and overwrite responsibilities to fellow humans, fellow creatures, and to be stewards of the non-replenishable and intrinsic value of the earth from whence we sprung, whether by divinity or happenstance. Broad individual liberty must always be coupled with broad social responsibilities, as valueless liberty is profligate and anarchical. As the corollary, demands of individual social responsibility from a society that willfully compromises freedom and access to freedom in the name of bloody-handed graft ring as hollow and as flat as any.
The cities of tomorrow will look more like the cities of the distant past or they will look precisely like smoldering ruins picked over by the trademarked-and-branded buzzards of a post-modern cyberpunk nightmare gone horrible and actually awry.
Most American citizens will never set eyes on any of the places responsible for cultivating or producing the things they own which are increasingly disposable, as profits rise and production costs are lowered with more and more corners cut. The modern human diet, in so much of the world, is unrecognizable to the dietary needs of a civilized society. They create a false demand for unseasonal and unsustainable products which require massive warehousing and logistic initiatives to maintain. A bulk of civilization has been socially engineered around creating the demand for which business-cannibalizing megacorporations supply bandages. We fled downtowns because they became dirtied by industry and social neglect. We created inner city slums that drove business into larger, extant outcrops. People moved further from where they worked, as costs followed predatory real estate expansion. Suburbs piled atop suburbs until the hinterlands of populated America are a giant, incestuous mishmash of barely-living towns and cities that would cease to function or exist in the event supply chains were disrupted. The bedroom communities of the suburbs of Chicago, if food were not shipped in, would collapse into unrestrained chaos in a matter of moments.
“Create a problem; sell the solution.”
And all the solution costs is the low-low price of the human condition.
As the state of Oregon begins to think the answer to its housing crisis is violating its strict urban boundary provisions, one weeps for the unspoiled American wilderness that will be given over to low-income housing (which is a legislative and moral abomination not at all interested in actually solving the issues of housing availability). What is actually happening is the creation of slums and ghettos where those who do not wish to see the evil their hands have wrought in action. It’s hard to be a pharmaceutical executive (or at least I hope it is) when your occasional commute to headquarters is thronged with slack jawed zombies overmedicated on the expensive and ostensibly life-saving products for which you extort mankind. It’s less difficult when you’ve offloaded the worst of it into the hands of government subsidies which weaken our central state at the expense of propping up faux-capitalists who pat themselves on the back for their business acumen–while roads remain unpaved, essential government offices remain improperly staffed, and the access to effective public defense is at an all time low.
Where in that enterprise of people shuffling and wilderness degradation are the unhoused themselves being considered? Providing housing to someone ill-equipped to maintain it is a recipe for disaster. You can put them under a roof, but as long as they don’t feel like it’s theirs or that they can never do anything that isn’t given to them by a questionably benevolent system, they will continue to drink deep of their addictions and serve as an entropic force, sucking the vitality out of the world around them through their misguided quest for meaning.
Instead, consider the array of “undesirable” jobs necessary to keep an urban area functioning. Consider the array of unused space as people are priced out of their businesses and homes. Consider any and all of the things which unengaged human beings would be glad to perform, if given the opportunity. The further we remove those in need from the public eye and from the systems we utilize, the more likely we are to allow their needs to grow beyond manageable levels.
When we built this country, we elected to do so under the presumption of frustration at the deeply rooted monarchical corruption of 1600s England, among other mature nation-state issues across Europe. Somehow in that process, we sickly warped the idea of “no man should be king” into “everyone should be a king” with a demesne that includes a yard and his offspring–the rest of the world be damned. Theirs is a loud selfishness intentionally beat up in their breast by factional politics and reactionary guff. Your lawn is a war crime; your “she shack” an abuse of your good fortune.
The well-to-do (and predominantly white) freed the slaves and then fled the cities where they arrived, the first of a long line of condoned and pervasive generational poverty. As we rightly decided our children needed to be saved from the miseries of factory labor, we conveniently discovered no one really minded if you indentured the immigrants and recently freed into the new plantation, cleverly disguised by the word “factory.” Only now, the racial disparity took backseat to the inequality which would set the course for the intervening 150 years: that of gross wealth inequality.
You work for someone and he works for someone and his family has owned your life for longer than you’ve been aware. The entire hydra-headed monster chases those otherwise unable to prevent its attacks into the narrow little corridors of life the slave driving whips of parasitic shareholders prescribe for them. We’ve painted over feudalism with a post-capitalist ooze; tied serfs to vague corporate entities instead of the land; and wave brand logos like loyal bannermen marching to a manufactured conflict actually occurring between the petulantly wealthy.
And it’s because, in case you haven’t noticed a trend, we’re awfully comfortable stripping voice and agency from human beings until they begin behaving like the data point needle eyes that corporate overlords are constantly trying to force the limp dick of commercialism through. We move the poor and homeless because they cannot argue against. We lay off line workers and replace them with a more desperate, cheaper stock. We bloat middle management to allow room for ne’er-do-well offspring to suckle at the patrilineal teet until their unexceptional existence ends with all the fanfare of a departing hero. We ascribe virtue based solely upon economic worth, despite the biting and blindly obvious reality that that relationship is an inverse one.
So what?
“So what?”
So what?
You can stand in the street all day and scream that the sun isn’t going to rise tomorrow, and it’s still going to happen. You can stick your finger in every electrical socket you find, and I bet good money it will still bite. The cause and effect are changed none by the recognition of this implicit evil of the 21st century. Change, paradoxically, is the only way to beget more change.
It may start small. The renovation of a city block to include a green grocer and a bunkhouse instead of nine boutiques and a chain coffee shop. The idea that a Tesla, designed to make you sit in a car (alone) for hours of charging time on an artificial and environmentally unpleasant asphalt swath, is somehow a social utility greater than that of planning walkable communities is as laughable as it is catastrophic. Our environmental realities impact our actualities, and our environment has been stolen from us and is being sold back to the highest bidder irrespective of that individual’s actual deserving.
Jeff Bezos, who is high in my estimation for people making selfish decisions with the wellbeing of mankind somewhere in the “auxiliary concerns” column, deserves mention. Believe me, he agrees that someone should be mentioning him right now–always, actually. After he got done launching Captain Kirk into space, “for realzies,” he went back to his regular work of finding how to turn the cool thing he just did into something giant and soulless. The Amazon Fulfillment Polluting the countryside nearby corroborates the story, don’t worry. After his brief, expensive dalliance in space, Mr. Bezos was proud to submit:
“I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins…the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.”
In closing, I’d like to pick apart the way these big industrialists think and let you decide if that’s who you want setting the pace and course of human existence.
1). He’d like a trillion humans so the infinite growth capitalists fictionally ideate could stay a public fantasy a little longer.
2). Do you think it will be an Amazon Branded space station? Just like the Washington Post is an Amazon Branded Newspaper or so many little suburbs have become de facto factory towns for fulfillment centers that abuse employees and look forward to automating their work as fast as possible.
3). How many “Einsteins” and “Mozarts” are there currently, neglected by overworked inner city teachers and ignored by parents who are subjected to unrealistic working expectations as a two-income household fails to manage the lifestyle of a one-income household fifty years ago? How many Einsteins and Mozarts is Mr. Bezos ready to write off because they didn’t “overcome the odds” and prove themselves? Disregarding of course that it is increasingly more difficult in an impersonal world driven by businessmen-cum-oligarchs reading data concocted for them by their sons, nephews, and friends in order to further their wholly selfish interests.
If anyone tells you not to worry because, “the economy is healthy and people are living longer,” they are willfully refusing to acknowledge that the economy is only healthy for shareholders and that each and every waking minute of the extra life you’re afforded will be spent working and saving for a retirement that will never come.
You deserve a whole hell of a lot more than anyone is going to give you, the way things are now. I invite you to join together and take it until they give it freely.
Unless, of course, you’re a multi-billionaire that remains a multi-billionaire after reading this…in which case I invite you to die as slowly and as painfully as you are able–you miserable, greedy bastard.
Do good; do well,
–The Strangest
The Strangest in a Strange Land 