The Trustbuster

by Gunther Carlsbad—Your Senior Misanthrope Correspondent

So, I watched a movie called “Friends With Money.” It was a decent flick, at first. Jennifer Aniston was pretty good. It had Catherine Keener in it–I like her okay. Anyway, it was about Jennifer Aniston’s character, Olivia, being upset because she’s getting older and she’s single and doesn’t have a career she likes. All her friends are married and wealthier and I guess happier. But during the movie you of course find out that they aren’t happy with their careers and spouses and lives. Okay, that sounds good so far. I agree with that notion. I know plenty of people who have “everything” and hate their lives. People who live the proverbial “American Dream” but wear sad, compromising faces and whine and bitch about how bad everything is. And, I know plenty of people who have no direction in life and dislike everything about the working world and don’t know what the hell to do with themselves. Alright, “Friends With Money,” I can dig it. What’s your answer to this problem? What do you have to say about the zeitgeist? Why are we so miserable with having whatever we want whenever we want it?
By the end of the movie, Olivia hooks up with a shut-in weirdo and realizes he is the lone heir to a gigantic amount of money. The last scene includes her and her socially awkward but fabulously wealthy new boy friend talking about how she would like to spend some of his inheritance decorating the place…That’s the fucking answer? The key to happiness is having enough money so you don’t have to work? Or: leeching off a person with that kind of wealth? So, if the goal of existence is happiness, and many people would claim that it is, then doing nothing is what we should all be doing? Well that’s the answer according to “Friends With Money.” You know what, Fuck You “Friends With Money!” Your answer to the greatest problem facing mankind is to luck out and fall into a vat of money? Fuck you! Are you trying to make everybody feel worse?

by Gunther Carlsbad, your Senior Misanthrope Correspondent

Let’s reorganize the salary structure. By that I mean the amount people get paid and for what. I understand that in “real” reality, money does not “make the man,” as it were. But, in this society’s illusory version of reality, money is everything. How much money you have or make determines your worth as a person. Perhaps there is nothing inherently evil about money itself. After all, there is no longer a gold standard, or even a silver standard (that one is for all you William Jennings Bryan fans), so money is only worth what we think its worth. $1 is worth $1 because we all agree that it is worth $1. And, we can barely agree on that. Currency values are always fluctuating. So, really, money has no real value in the “real” reality. I suppose that means there is no “real” reality because society could deem anything to be real or fake, except physical things like rocks and such. Perhaps we as a species could all agree that rocks are fake, thus making them null and void. That could mean everything is subjective. Anyway back to this version of reality, which may or may not be real at all. Let’s assume it is for the sake of this rant. We place entirely too much value on wealth and the accumulation of things you can get with that wealth. But, the people who have the most money are not necessarily the most deserving. For instance: actors and athletes. Actors used to be beneath prostitutes on the social scale, at least in Elizibethan England. Maybe they, the Elizabethans, had the right idea, at least about that. A paid actor is essentially just a lucky jackass clever or dumb enough to want to pretend to be somebody else all day. I like acting, so I will include myself in this group. Athletes are mostly morons who happen to be good at playing a game. I also like athletics so I will include myself in this group of idiots. That’s fine, but what if janitors or teachers or soldiers were paid the most in this society? Can you imagine how clean everything would be if janitors or groundskeepers or people who spend all day cleaning up after you were paid a six-figure salary? The entire planet would be so much cleaner. Schools would be churning out thousands of willing youngsters with advanced degrees in shit cleaning. I’m all for it. I love it when things are clean. Teachers have one of the hardest jobs in the world. They have to deal with kids or young adults, a term, which basically means older kid. There are no real adults. Think about it. When you get older you just graduate to being able to pay for more expensive toys. I’m sure you all dream of making money and living a sweet life. Who doesn’t? But what are you going to do with that money? Most likely, you will buy more crap, which will eventually become garbage. Remember the crap you wanted for Christmas? When you got it you were happy. A couple weeks later you became bored with it. You probably threw most of it out within a month. Some of that crap you just retired for more expensive crap. A skateboard or bike becomes a car or motorcycle or boat. In fact, you were being more responsible as a child because at the very least, you weren’t polluting the planet riding around on your bike or skateboard. All your fantasies are pretty shallow. Look, I want a sweet TV too but come on, that’s what you spend all your time and effort on, the getting of a sweet TV. What am I saying here? Let’s realize that the people who have the crappiest jobs are probably doing the most important tasks in this society. If you think a lawyer finding tax loopholes for their rich pig clients is important then you are sorely mistaken. Maybe doctors should continue to be paid a lot. Doctors have to go to school for a long time and are actually trying to save lives and make people more comfortable. But lawyers are just educated tricksters. And what about soldiers? They arguably have the most important job of all. They are protecting us, perhaps in a convoluted way, but they’re laying their lives on the line voluntarily for God’s sake. And they can’t even get good health care when they get back from a fucking war zone. They should be able to get the best health care money can buy. That makes me hate the current administration more than anything. These people use troops as pawns in their political game. They say they support the troops but their actions tell a different story. If you are going to volunteer for the Armed Services you should be pulling in six figures, easy.

by Virginia

One thing I don’t understand is how it is possible that I have an infection and the treatment for that infection makes me wish for death. When discussing this with a friend who works in the medical field, he reminded me that, “most medications act as a poison in your body.” Ridiculous. I can understand this if toxins are being pumped into your body to, I don’t know, kill cancer or attempt to regulate the reproduction of the HIV virus but for a bladder infection?! I just don’t understand.

This brought my mind to a memory of a conversation with the technical theatre teacher at College of the Canyons. I was teching a “production” called Holiday Voices and while I was waiting for intermission to douse the cast in plastic glittery snow we were discussing the side-effects that drug companies choose to announce in their commercials. Anal-leakage came up pretty quickly seeing as that “side-effect” would make me NEVER EVER CONSUME THAT PRODUCT. What possible enhancement could be provided by this drug that would over-shadow the embarrassment of anal-leakage?

I guess if I’d carefully read the side-effects before I began chowing on these freaking pills I’d have hesitated to swallow them, but now they’re ruining my favorite thing to do on this planet. Eat. I love food more than I love possessions or people. Food may be my God. After all, if it weren’t for food, I wouldn’t exsist. Think about that. No, think about that for a bit longer. Yeah. Food is awesome and when I see it or smell it I want to boof. That makes me sad and when I’m sad I don’t laugh and isn’t laughter the best medicine of all?

i’ve been thinking a lot about how to go about with the general task of being a good person and an artist in the world, and trying to foster some kind of net positive change in the long run. i’ve traveled around the us now for some years, talking to people of all sorts that i could run across, mostly bums and bohemians to be sure, but still trying to take it all in, and come up with some sort of median perspective that these people can share. i’m interested in what unites us. the things we need as human organisms that are central and basic. i’m thinking about creating spaces - people need spaces to meet and do things, to talk and dream together and plan, and what i’ve witness across the board is a wholesale scaling back of public space, with greater restrictions on what you can and cannot do there. there is an implied threat, that you cannot violate the city’s idea of what a public space is for, backed up by an armed guard. i group this phenomena with a larger trend that i like to refer to as “the war on difference.”

think about it. you have all these streets, all these sidewalks, and squares, leading to homes and shops, jobs and venues of entertainment. but that mall just can’t float in space. it needs the public places to be valuable. all the businesses need all of that space in which travel from here to there is designated, but it would seem that more and more, travel is all those spaces can be utilized for. meanwhile parks have signs that prohibit rallies and gatherings without permits. well, what if a bunch of free individuals want to get together in a public place, and sit down and have a big picnic and give away food to bums, and not disturb anyone? how could you stop them from doing that? well you probably run into health codes, and ordinances of where you can sit and for what reasons, and if there’s any central leadership or some kind of organization promoting it you’ve got someone to come down on it. all you can do is be moving from point a to point b. if you can just sit down, and take in all the people running around, maybe watch a guy do a magic trick, or listen to some folk musician play his guts out, or witness any kind of public spectacle that is a demonstration of free expression, you are essentially threatening the surrounding businesses, the movie theaters who would have entranced you for a couple hours at 10 bucks a pop. the shoe store that you could have lost yourself browsing through. the restaurants who would prefer you to not just buy some fruit and sit down and eat with your friends on a bench. all of these interests have some kind of sway on the city government who makes the rules about what you can do where, and if you’re not contributing to the local economy you’re taking away from it. the police will enforce these rules like they have nothing better to do. nevermind the cultural value of people doing these things, enriching peoples’ lives, that doesn’t have an economic metric to calculate and therefore doesn’t really exist. i have some ideas. i want to create tiny happenings, a movement of small scale spectacles that are simple enough to intuitively understand, at a size that the common passerby can participate in. i want to focus on things like food and water, and expression and entertainment, things that grab people on a visceral level that transcends aesthetic and culture and gets down to humanity at its core, the social animal. gatherings for anyone. flash mobs and art pranks, surreal and practical, all the same. a potluck in the park, initiated over myspace messages and sms txt’s and email and hand bill flyers. a giant cardboard box fort on the campus. a “peanuts” style free psychology booth. a mass masturbation march on the white house. anything that people can get behind without arguing over causes - causes have divided us. i want to be fun, and spontaneous. i want to smile and compliment a stranger who looks sullen. i want to leave every person that i meet a little more motivated than before, and of course i want to be a bit more motivated by them as well. i view each transaction in society as a challenge - an opportunity to rise to the occasion of being an authentic human being. i think we owe it to ourselves and our future as a species. will you go out into your day with your head down, complying with the routine motions of your predefined spaces that you inhabit? walking into the super market, not upsetting anyone, filing in line to the check out point - all possibilities narrowed down to a predictable range - no better than a piece of some grand machine that only services you in an incidental manner? or will you demand more from your experience of humanity and society, and ask for just a little more each day out of your necessary interactions with the rest of the world? i hope that you encounter a place some day, that will encourage something like the latter to stir within you, and that you will have the audacity to scream, or speak your mind, or debate and question, or fall in love. i hope you take that trip to an unknown place. when you feel like you’ve arrived, you’ll be in good company. there are more authentic living breathing free people in the world than we might give credit. good luck.