Lounge Chair Rant About Stupid Power

The $17,000 Lounge Chair 2018. Acrylic on press cleaning sheet, 9 x 15"

I am tired of politics as usual. So tired. Most of us are helping to push national politics to a James Bond ideal between pure evil and pure good (with both sides possessing equal, and real nifty machinations of death and destruction to show off with, and yet not seeing the irony). For all the to-do about great wealth flexing its muscle, the woeful city dwellers and country peasantry (you and me) are just the “innocent” bystanders and collateral damage in the battle between power-broker good and evil. None of us are invited to their toothy smile situation rooms, though enormous media and corporate effort is made to make us think we are welcome, that we play some part in their decision-making.
We do not.
Our lives are leagues down from D.C. proper. So far down and likely burnt up on earth’s iron core when matched against real wealth and power that controls life in the galaxy. Yet so many of us have infantile trust that the celebrity politician, actor, or even multi-billionaire is just a reasonable argument away from “doing the right thing”.
Enter Larry and Barbara Miller, low-level millionaires and ludicrous lounge chair buyers of the great western world. Barbara is an old childhood friend who married a rich man on his way to getting richer. Last summer while our CIA® was involved in any coup attempt somewhere, and the NSA® was reading your ninth-grader’s texts to her friends at school, Larry and Barbara purchased two lounge chairs for the back patio of one of their Florida homes, for the price of $34,000.00. To imagine that this couple acts on the same moral plane as the mass majority of humanity, is an idiot’s dream. To lecture to the Millers on subjects such as the societal improvement realized by universal healthcare, would be like having a discussion about nuclear disarmament with a goat.
Larry and Barbara are small-town millionaires. They have influence to a degree. Sure, with some effort, they could buy the election of a state Senator® or Assemblyman®. Just pick a side in the James Bond saga, and fund it. The “good” or the “evil”. The Zuckerburg shill or the Koch shill, depending on which aisle they send out patio party invitations to.
The Millers are low-level power-brokers. D.C. politicians probably exist one-up from their influence, while Zuckerburg and Koch appear as circling vultures a few hundred feet above the Capitol building. Above them, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and then there play in my imagination people orbiting earth with moon-like power over the tides of real change.
We do not know of them. They shall remain unnamed.

The present day Republican® and Democratic parties® are warped, unrecognizable mutations of another centuries’ good intentions.

This is all the great power allows us to see. Americans split into their choice group, which is twisted beyond all recognition of what their true minds desire. A group cognitive dissonance on mass scale. And our mothers and fathers still age with struggle while the Pentagon® spends 13 billion dollars on another boat that floats and kills people when it wants to.
I fear that the superpowers function thus only because too many people think that stupid wealth, like that of the Millers and the CIA® is a-ok, nothing to see here, just keep movin’ right along...
To neglect and deny our children’s natural birthright will continue as long as we allow high level flaunting of stupid wealth. Stupid wealth are the Millers and the United States Treasury®. Both would purchase idiot lounge chairs to mock the dignity of its neighbors and citizenry. Lounge chair battleships purchased for the great big stupid party in charge while the jingo parade marches on and on.

Stupid wealth.
Stupid, arrogant wealth.
Hell doesn’t even want them.