Parasite is the Great Gatsby of our Era

I said to my wife in the car after seeing  Parasite that it was Gatsby. I hadn't thought about it since but the more that film resonates and now after getting Best Picture I really do believe it is a modern parable much in the same vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Both stories involve class stratification and ultimately class warfare. Parasite and Gatsby may be culturally worlds apart but they both tell the story of the American Dream or the World Dream gone bad.
 
Gatsby's telling of Tom Buchannan's world of privilege that Gatsby has bought his way into by being a bootlegger is much the same as the Kim's world of buying their way into the one percent  by posing as servants to the upper class. Deception is key in both stories. Gatsby fakes his lineage and the source of his money while the Kim's fake their pedigrees of education and serving the rich. The protagonists of both parables are doomed by their efforts to move up and ultimately destroyed by the forces that hold them down.

While Gatsby is but a 1920s singular comment on the American Dream as it existed in early twentieth century America, Parasite spreads out and gives the world view that the dream of having a family and living a life of satisfying work, leisure, with a comfortable home and a better world for our children transcends the boundaries of America and reaches into the corners of the world as a modern comment on the ongoing struggle between the haves and have nots. In both cases, Gatsby being shot by Myrtle Wilsons deranged husband and the Kim's destruction at the hand of the deranged husband of the housekeeper are eerily similar in that the rich use the very people they oppress to murder those who dare to break out of their class. Ninety five years separate these two stories, but the world that is painted is much the same.

william hazelgrove

Does Capitalism Work for the Many?

Should one human have a billion dollars at their disposal? It would seem an indictment of capitalism that such things can occur. But they do and now we have lots of billionaires. That kind of concentration of wealth into the hands of the few is unsustainable. Should an Oprah have billions and billions of dollars?Should a Bill Gates? Some would say the good provided is worth the payout,but in our wired world of five billion people and three and a half billion jobs, it just doesn't make sense.

Behind the OWS movement is a basic proposition: capitalism favors the few at the expense of the many. The few are people who game the system and make the billions. And why shouldn't they? They are smart enough to do that. But we are all on the same planet and just because one person can have the intelligence or luck to make a billion dollars should society permit that kind of inequity?

The problem is people don't share. Even if the President proposed a tax on billionaires it would never pass the congress because the billionaires can buy the congressmen. Even this rarefied world of billionaires could cry class warfare and say people are taking from them unjustly. We would like think that a sort of mega philanthropy would kick in for people at this leve,l but money has a nasty habit of staying in the same circles.

Capitalism allows anyone to become a billionaire in theory. But becoming a billionaire is largely a fluke in a system that allows one individual to prosper at the expense of the many. It would seem the many are starting to wake up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Occupy Chicago's rag tag band in the rain

Rain is hard in Chicago. It is a brooding dark city in the South loop anyway and when it rains in October and the people have gone away then you really feel that old Nelson Algren metropolis that seems so much like Gotham. Maybe it's because Chicago is a northern city that has to get through the long winters. But South Loop has always been strange and deserted at night and Lasalle Street is even more deserted with the closed up CBOT and the giant pillars of the Federal Reserve. And then in all that rain and dreariness is a small group of people with soggy signs and plastic slickers. They stand there on one corner looking like homeless people: Occupy Chicago.

You can't beat them up too much. Protesting in the modern age like everything else is derivative. I remember the huge parade of people going down Michigan Avenue when the Iraq war broke out. The first one. A lone black man said to me we goin to war. And then they marched down Congress and that was a large protest, but they too were swallowed up by indifference. The war happened anyway. What is interesting is that the Occupy movement is pretty small or so it seems and they are getting media coverage. But this too is on a time limit.

My buddy and I huddled in the CBOT doorway out of the rain and watched the protester's. One woman held up a sign: WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT. A few people honked as they went by. The rain came down even harder. The rest of the protester's talked as if at a really bad concert waiting for the next band. Somebody hit a giant drum. But other than that there was just the marble edifices of modern finance and the small motley crew of people. A cop pulled up and sat in his car, staring at the ad hoc tent of plastic someone had set up over boxes. Hooverville of the Depression comes to mind.

And then there was really not much to do. We were in the middle of the night in the middle of  a rainstorm watching people get soaked with a few soggy signs. No change it would seem here. It was almost embarrassing to watch. Maybe all movements start like this but television certainly glamorizes because this was just small and dismal. So we moved on and found a bar.

It was a yuppie bar on Michigan Avenue with a strange feel of 1985 for yuppies. But no one had told these people the party was over. Men in suits and women in designer dresses. Martinis all around. A wealthy man with long grey hair just down the bar. We order up and sit among the if not one percent then certainly the up and coming ten percent. Who knows. We were a long way from that ragged band of soaked people on a street corner.

So it is with all revolutions.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Sixties are back in The Teens

Was a kid during the sixties but I picked up the vibes and they are the same. The squares thought they could do an end run under the crummy guise of patriotism and fiscal responsibility and call themselves a name hearkening back to throwing tea into the Boston Harbor. Figure the left had gone to sleep and now look what has happened, we have a generational conflict mirroring the big push back of the counterculture in the sixties when Vietnam lit the fuse. Now it is pillaging of the American dream on a massive scale touching off the new powderkeg of populist discontent.

And it is the young again. The middle aged middle class people have too much to lose usually to go park it in New York or Chicago or LA. But if you read about the OWS movement and listen to the pundits calling them anti American or class warfare warriors or mobs or rabble rousers or just plain un-American you think all the way back to the bearded bums statements by many during the sixties. The students then were agitators or Communists or anarchists or socialists or agents of the Soviet Union. The college students to Nixon and company were nothing short of the enemy and Kent State proved the point.

And will we have another Kent State? The keg is being filled and you wonder who will touch it off. Will the police try and clear the park or will somebody call in the National Guard again. Who knows? But the lines are being drawn and it is lining up just like fifty years ago when one generation drew a line against another. And look what came out of that turbulence...our very culture.

We'll see this time what comes out of our new sixties which might well be called... the teens.
It fits doesn't it?

http://www.billhazelgrove/.

Rocket Man...one mans war against suburbia

The Pigs Will Have Their Day

Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. An old mortgage man said that to me a long time ago. The hogs it would seem are about to get slaughtered. You may laugh at the small size of these gatherings on Wall Street but you should start watching this. The middle class has been decimated and the children of the middle class have nowhere to go, but to the streets. And no one has been listening.

FDR saw this coming in the thirties. He knew that if inequities were not addressed then there would be trouble. So The New Deal emerged and he gave the middle class a piece of the pie. Now you have that pie divided into tiny slivers with the one percent taking the giant gulp. Should there be this type of inequality in society? This is the basic question of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Strip it down and it is about the removal of representation for the middle class. America is truly an oligarchy with only the wealthy represented in Washington. The Middle Class simply does not have a lobby to push their concerns. The middle class is not represented because there is no room at a table composed of bankers and corporations. So what is left for them but to take to the streets for those who have disenfranchised?

Dis-comfort. That is the opposite of comfort. The people in Washington are all comfortable. They have no dis-comfort. Demonstrations by their nature create dis-comfort. They shake up the status quo. There is no clear agenda and there are no leaders. But there will be dis-comfort as the protest grows. This is the age of social media and it could well spider out. And it would seem Washington will not see the writing on the wall until it comes to their door.

That old mortgage man went on to explain that if you take too much, if you are greedy, then you might end up getting nothing. Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Someone should write it down and send it to every person in Washington who has forgotten about who they really are supposed to represent.

Because the pigs will have their day.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...a story of one man trying to find the American Dream

                                                                   

Why does the Tea Party hate the Unions?

If you are populist party why pick on working people? I mean what did they do to you but work and try to get a little ahead and raise their families and own a home and maybe a couple of cars. What is wrong with people who want just a sliver of the pie that the rich gobble up like a feral cats? If the Bush tax cuts expired and the rich kicked in then half of the deficit would disappear tomorrow. Poof. So why does the Tea Party want to bust the unions and get rid of middle class entitlements if they are really the party of the people?

Or are they a shill for corporations that exploit the dark crevasses of the American psyche. Our secret xenophobia of the other that creates a birther movement because we have an African American President, then starts in on middle class entitlements like they are a Socialist plot. Could there be any bigger power play in America than dressing up a woman in Patriotism and folksy idiotic Alaska ditties, outfitting her with a great body and looks that can kill and then having her say every heinous thing about working people that gets fed to her by a network designed to break the backs of the working class?

So why does the Tea Party hate Unions? Are they an extension of the heinous government that offers Medicaid to the poor, Medicare to the elderly, tax deductions and Social Security for the middle class? Its like the woman from Wisconsin I talked too who said she hated the teacher unions, but whose husband was in a union. But that's different. They aren't radicals she said. Teachers are radicals? Oh I get it now. Those people in puffy jackets with a hats and scarves in Madison Wisconsin are radicals. My daughters first grade teacher a radical. Right.

But really. Mr. Hoffa calls the Tea Party a bunch of sonsofbitches and can you blame him? They are trying to eviscerate working class people. Wouldn't you call them a bunch of sonsofbitches. I'm not in union. I don't have a pension or retirement. I will will work (write) until the day I die. Should I bust the union because they are covered and I'm not? Thinking of it that way it does seem like class envy.

So that must be it. I think I will trade off my two degrees and years of doing what the hell I wanted to be in a Union and work my ass off. This must be the reason the Tea Party people hate them because they envy the unions for their jobs and their benefits. Wow. I guess things are pretty bad when we are envying a bunch of people working on assembly lines and in factories,warehouses and mills.  Or those rogue teachers in their cinder block luxury offices grading papers in schools without air conditioning.

 Sonsofbitches. All of them.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man First Chapter--The American Dream Gone Wrong