The Stupid Rich, the Middle Class, the Poor, and Me

No current comparable ‘metric’ of the great distance between the financial valuations and assessments of the rich and the poor can now morally or legally be made, other than the quasi-legal argument that the rich deserve their wealth and the poor deserve their poverty.

The middle class, once neither thought of as either overachievers or underachievers, are now being buried beneath the rubble of mass stupidity—pure greed, the idiotic so-called populist cult-based ‘leadership’ of this country’s political ‘class’, professional sports, torn-up lottery tickets…

…the poor are poor for a reason, the thinking goes.

I’m middle class, I suppose, as you are middle class. I only ever wanted to have enough money not to worry about having money. I like both not spending money and spending it if, that is, I have it, and sometimes I have both at the same time. For instance, I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes searching for a Wallace Stevens poem I read years ago with the line, ‘Money too is a kind of poetry’; or is Stevens’ line, ‘Poetry too is a kind of money’?

(Artificial Intelligence, such a peculiar phrase, is having a heyday! Perhaps poor people, people who’ve fallen below any measurable economic metric, i.e.unable to trace having any reasonable amount of money that would prove they had at least some visible means of support, will be able to queue while waiting for a Waymo driverless car. Why not share the incredible wealth generated by the AI movement, the fortunate sons and daughters of wealth who are making even more and more wealth. AI seems so obvious, and somehow weirdly retro—Herbert Hoover, famous engineer, true believer who believed engineering could solve almost everything, former US president for whom a school is named about 4 blocks from my home in San Francisco, The Herbert Hoover Middle School; robots; Issac Asimov; sci-fi; AI restaurants now turning out AI meals; an inventor in the Bay Area who’s just designed an AI device that will make your bed…)

What once seemed to have worked in this country doesn’t seem to be working now; what worked then, when the country was big enough— where the buffalo roamed— to actually welcome the poor, where so many of the poor worked so hard for years to become middle class…

…perhaps the very rich have become rich enough now to be stupid. Or have they become complacent? Stuffed to the gills with lies, fantasy, delusion? Asleep or very nearly asleep, but not willing to share, at least not yet, their great prosperous stupor?