Weapon of the Masses
Yesterday afternoon, I was on the Lexington Avenue No. 6 train during it’s brief hour of proper functioning. I thought that it was strangely crowded, but I forgot about it as soon as I boarded the R at 59th Street. It wasn't until this morning that I found out how lucky I'd been. On the front page of the Times this morning, I read that power failures and signal breakdowns halted the East Side trains for most of yesterday’s work day. I almost threw up from sheer bitterness, but I wasn't surprised. I have decided that the following fragment from Overheard in New York captures the guiding ethos of today’s business and political leaders:
Man in fur: You know, we should get rid of the subways.
Woman in fur: Why? People ride them to get to work.
Man in fur: Exactly. The subway is the weapon of the masses.
--82nd St. and 3rd Ave.
And it isn’t just “the masses” to whom the leadership is indifferent. It’s everyone, other insiders included. The control of this country has been taken over by manic sharks who don’t give a damn about the dollar’s fall or the price of oil. They’re gleefully engaged in a destructive game of musical chairs, each convinced that he or she (but mostly he) has a good shot at the final survivorship - and, hey, when you're the one who can't find a chair, you've at least racked up a fortune mismanaging things. What kind of world the survivor will have to make do with doesn’t enter into the calculation, however, because, like sharks, these people can’t see further than the struggle for survival. They have forgotten, in their collective mania, that nobody survives indefinitely even in the best of all possible worlds, much less the one that’s taking shape on their watch. Frenzied dementia on high, narcotism (by television) below.
My head feels like a Flemish village in World War I: barraged by futility.
