It's so hard to understand you
start seeing some men sweating digging ditches all day and coming home late to their kids and
other men going off in nice cars and coming home early to their kids and you say it's not
fair and then you hear to each according to his needs communism and you
ask your dad what communism is and
he says it's Louie across the street you could see him in his undershirt with his feet up on the
railing with his pitcher of beer beside him it's Louie sitting there all day
drinking beer and me going off to work and at the end of the day we both get
the same amount of money and you say that's not fair and you go to college and
some professors say your dad is wrong and some say he's right and they
recommend authors to make it clear and those authors are all trying hard but you're
still confused because though they go into great detail to make sure they've
got the right and wrong of it they can't untangle you from the New England
literature your grammar school started you with where you learned how much better
spirituality was than materialism just like in church and this one author took
you to a cabin he built by himself on a pond to prove it and then your father asks where
the axe he used to build the cabin came from and you think of your friend who
played the violin divinely and could fill the house with spiritual music
because her father was a materialist and made enough capital to buy her lessons
and you see you'll have to try harder and dig into the root of the problem which
the best people tell you is the law that makes a corporation a person and some
scholars tell you that's a bane and some tell you it's a blessing because
taking a corporation as a person is what gave capitalism its great boost in our
country and made us rich and able to afford lessons for our daughters who could
fill the house with divine music and some said no you've got to look more
closely and everybody was working very hard, oh my how hard, trying to decide
just which of a natural person's rights a corporate person should have, and it
wasn't ever easy because to get corporate personhood straight you had to get
corporate capitalism straight and oh my god what a problem that was for a
person like me who couldn't even get Piketty straight and was losing hope until
a critic in the New York Times (7-3-15)
showed he maybe had it in a nutshell knowing that for corporate capitalism
"nothing matters that can't be quantified and monetized" sent me down
to the Museum of Modern Art hoping that the artist, a conceptual artist, one whose deepest concerns, he
said, were "continually rendered irrelevant by the pervasive powers of
corporate capitalism," might be the helper I was looking for, the final
one, the one who had worked the hardest, but alas, though I saw many interesting
and provocative pictures I saw nothing that improved my grip on "corporate
capitalism," though one, of the word "Diesel" all by itself in one of
the frames, did, I think, show that she might be aware of my problem, or at
least of the area in which it is found.
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