False Hope

I'm sick of people telling me what to do. Not my mother, but the tech titans and anybody with an elite college degree seems entitled to pontificate on how I should live my life, as if they've got the tablets from God and I'm lost in the wilderness.

The left is the worst on this. Having left behind the working class, wanting nothing to do with the disadvantaged after paying lip service to them at best, the strivers and achievers keep telling us they know better, these people who ruined the economy. Bankers are extremely wealthy but for a long time they blamed borrowers, the people who got into homes who shouldn't have. But the disadvantaged see what you've got and want some of that, meanwhile those at the top control the economy and even those with the best intentions couldn't pay their mortgage when the crash came.

Used to be we looked to artists for guidance. Back when money was secondary and living outside the law was primary. But today's "artists" are mini-coporations, they talk about their "brand" and money is their main focus and if they're not making it they keep bitching about it.

And Bob Dylan famously sang not to follow leaders and watch the parking meters and you may be flummoxed by that lyric but you're not by those dominating today's hit parade, which basically say I've got a lot and I want more. Kudos to Beyonce for revealing her dirty laundry in public, but "Lemonade" was primarily a victory in marketing, most people haven't heard it and many don't want to, but the press keeps telling us she's a genius. Huh?

But that's fodder for the masses. Nobodies going nowhere. But if you're a thinking person you're inundated with the tales of those who made it to the top, whether it be Larry Ellison telling USC graduates to follow their dream or Sheryl Sandberg telling her brethren to lean in. But the truth is Ellison is not like you or me, you have about as much chance of walking in his footsteps as you do of breaking Joe DiMaggio's consecutive hit streak. As for Ms. Sandberg, she did a mea culpa, now that she's a single mother, she had no idea it was so HARD!

Yes, it is.

You may say we need to raise the minimum wage, but you've got no idea what life is really like on the bottom. You don't eat with us, you don't fly with us, you want nothing to do with us.

The right wing tells us to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps while the left wing says we can come into the big tent, but we've got to serve them drinks and dinner.

No wonder the young and disadvantaged are voting for Bernie and Trump.

I just read a story in the "Times" by a woman with four children who says motherhood is not really overwhelming, she's got plenty of free time. But she's got a husband and a nanny and she's on the road giving talks... How many people can live that privileged life?

And speaking of privilege, it's self-reinforcing. The elite institutions are peopled with the scions of the already rich. And forget affirmative action, the real crime of college is not that you can't get in, but that you can't PAY FOR IT!

But we keep reading the stories of the successful, who tell us to just change this or that and we too can be rich. Utter hogwash. And they pay lip service to teachers but they don't want to pay them like doctors, like they do in Finland, and the doctors themselves don't make the money of the techies and everybody's trying to climb the greased pole believing the flaw is with them when the problem is the system.

Just because you're rich that does not mean you know better, it just means you're rich.

And once upon a time the rich lived in the same neighborhoods as the middle class. That's passe. The rich live behind gates, and the middle class can't live in Manhattan and if you're never exposed to something how in the hell are you gonna know what's going on?

That's the conundrum of the season, how the press got it so wrong on both Bernie and Trump. And now they say they're adjusting, but I believe their frame of reference is off, how do you konw what's going down on the farm when you spend all your time in Paree?

A columnist uses his perch to write books and become a celebrity. No one is happy where they are. Everybody thinks they can do better. But not everybody can be rich, we don't all live in Lake Wobegon.

But they tell us we do. You can't get a good ticket because the acts scalp their own, you're just trying to participate and they blame Ticketmaster, which is just a conduit, a middleman that does what the acts tell them to.

But everybody with a buck is telling us what to do. Everybody who went to the Ivy League tells us what to do. As if they were better than us.

THEY'RE NOT!


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