For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
–Mark 8:36
Did that ever work? Were unfathomably rich cretins, particularly the ones who inherited their wealth or did little to accumulate it (cough Donald Trump cough) have a semblance of shame, prompted by social mores or famous biblical passages? It seems, throughout history, those who have done the least to “earn” their millions, excuse me, billions, are the ones who most obsessively guard it, seek to expand it, even or especially of it relies on the active misery of others. With a soulless, wounded human void like Trump there was never a hope of redemption, a prayer that he’d lift a finger, literal or figurative, to help a fellow human being even one tiny bit.
But we look at someone like Elon Musk, another deeply wounded man-child so deeply deformed by dysfunction that the very drive to succeed derives from standing on top of his brothers and sisters. It’s not exactly a crooked line to get from the moral depravity of “Greed is Good,” excuse me, the Republican platform these last many decades to Jesus warning us (via Matthew, 19:24, in a quote everyone’s heard, few understand, and even fewer follow) “I’ll say it again: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”
The thing Jesus couldn’t have anticipated is that, even if enough people believed in an actual Heaven that rewards the merciful and excludes the evil, it’s not quite enough for men like Trump and Musk, who worship an even higher power: themselves. Or worse, the dopamine hits, stronger than any chemical, of ceaselessly seeking the one currency more satisfying and addicting than money: attention.
Don’t hate the player, they say. Hate the game.
Well I do hate the game. But I also reserve the right to despise. And crave the prospect of comeuppance for the players who bulldozed this world like it was their personal playpen. For the horror movie monsters who laughed at the carnage they caused. Because they could. Because no one down here could stop them.
This, then, is offered up with maximum disdain and all the ill-will I can muster, for Elon Musk. Add to that the apparently tens of millions of fellow Americans who are not merely content, but anxious to see it all burn down so they can live vicariously. And then the bottom of our societal barrel, the maggots crawling around on stale carcasses manifesting their own fears and hatreds into the world, unconsciously (consciously?) doing the opposite of all the things their so-called savior once said.
My thanks to Dumbo Press for publishing this one.
Elon Musk’s Money
What’s the point of having all those billions
if you’re not willing to invest most of it
to develop a kind of liquidated virtual reality
that can be added to all the morphine drips
of born-again Christians—who’ve happily used
archaic biblical passages to bolster the unbelievable
interpretations of sex and race and salvation—
so that the last thing they see before they die
is Jesus, who of course is black, and then after
processing the shock and pain of this revelation,
another unwelcome vision proving God’s a woman,
and finally, as they gasp through their last horrors,
a movie-version Moses who looks almost exactly
like Charlton Heston appears out of nowhere
to inform them, as he turns off the lights forever,
there never has been any heaven awaiting them?
