a buffet of billionaires
it's rich people yum yum time.
I started writing this essay about billionaires some time ago. I was gripped by money, the idea of never quite having enough to feel safe.
I thought it would be funny and strange and smart to write about billionaires and how awful they were. I wanted to channel my frustration into some kind of artistic violence.
I also didn't want to finish this essay for a long time, but I am trying hard to not be swallowed by my own fears. I think writing is a way to tend to this.
***
A couple of months ago, at an inner-city bookstore, I picked up a copy of ‘Sister Outsider’, a collection of socio-political essays by Audre Lorde written circa 1975. ‘This is the most purchased book in the neighbourhood’ the clerk told me. The average house costs $2.2 million dollars in this neighbourhood. This neighbourhood was once a timber forest, cared deeply for by the Gadigal people. All of this land was once a home.
Over the weeks I read Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde unravelled my mind; unpicking ideas of whiteness, misogyny and homophobia. Black, lesbian, mother, warrior and poet; some of Audre Lorde’s most compelling analysis lies in the issue of class, and its insidious influence on everything else:
‘Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue…A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose but so are reams of paper, a typewriter and plenty of time…In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers?’ 1
These words were published nearly fifty years ago.
Billionaire artists are tortured too, apparently. Two years ago, a despondent Jay-Z told the world that the word ‘capitalist’ is the new derogatory slur. Around that same time, I was tending to the gardens of the ultra-wealthy in Sydney, largely self-segregated to the north shore of Sydney. Acres of opulent greenery. Architecture spewing with hostility. Luxury cars gleaming in dark garages.
A personal chef to a local multi-millionaire once told me she would have to hide behind the marble counter when guests arrived, so her client could have appeared to have cooked the food herself. The chef would have to sneak out through the back door, past the tiny dog and the shrivelling cactus, when no one else was looking.
There’s infinitely worse stories about the wealthy, yes, but there is always something affirming about hearing them verge towards insanity.
Makes me feel, I dunno, slightly less insane.
We are sitting in the yellow-orange light of a tiny diner when a friend teaches me the word: ‘Interregnum’
It takes me some time to move the word around my mouth.
Interregnum, is the name for the time between the collapse of one system, but not yet the birth of another one. The cut-line between creation and death. An unhatched egg.
In some circumstances, an interregnum is obvious. The dissolution of a government, the fall of a king. Perhaps less obviously, the slow and moaning unfurling of the ‘free’ market.
I think about interregnum often. I think about interregnum when I am standing in the rain some weeks ago at a protest. I feel like a column of air. The statues are bitter and unnerving. We are all here to mourn Palestine, but we also are all here to mourn the horrors of imperialism.
When the poets rise to speak at the podium, everyone listens closely.
‘Within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all of our futures into dust.’2
It is remarkably easy to lose your grip on compassion in the cavities of capitalism, and I am startled into wakefulness each time I hear someone speaking from the clarity of grief.
We have a collective duty to keep freeing each other from the glistening prison of individualism. I wish and pray and dream for a clearer path out.
There are some loud and lofty ideas for putting capitalism in the bin, such as:
Billionaires should not exist!!!
Eat the rich!!!!!!!!!!
Or, the government should help people live in houses and stop helping corporations and banks!!!!!!!
Take Vienna, for example, where 60% of the 1.8 million population live in subsidised public housing. These public houses, indistinguishable from any other privately owned flat, have no lease expiration and are regularly upkept by the government.
Startlingly, the only requirements for accessing public housing in Vienna are meeting a cap on income high enough that 75 percent of the population qualifies, and having lived in the city for two years.
“Social housing policies in Vienna have been shaped by the political commitment that housing is a basic right”. 3
Vienna is a glorious exception to the warped logic of neoliberalism.
There is some part of the leftish-centre demographic, (and even some part of me) that wants to believe if we taxed billionaires and spread the money around, maybe everyone would be okay for a bit.
But hey, we all know billionaires don’t want to be taxed. Most regular people, who understand the logic behind tax, don’t want to be taxed. The free market has always been set up for a select few: mega companies buffeted by public money when things go south. A system that is set up to provide welfare for the rich, in a world that barely believes in welfare for the poor.
Superbly, rich people have gotten even more weird and embarrassing since Marie Antoinette made her hair into a boat, while the French population ate rocks.
There’s an especially goofy video on Youtube called “Billionaire Bill Gates Guesses Grocery Store Prices”. In this segment, insufferable millionaire Ellen DeGeneres explains that Bill Gates has not gone to a supermarket for a very long time, and in a cruel twist of fate, Ellen is going to give something to the audience, if Bill can correctly guess the price of everyday items.
‘Five dollars’ says Bill Gates confidently, as Ellen Degeneres points to a one dollar box of rice-a-roni. The audience groans. The audience is also exhilirated white women who desperately want whatever the FUCK Ellen is offering. Is it a car? A new kidney? Maybe even a pot of vaseline? It doesn’t even matter, because Bill has no idea how much anything costs!
Frankly, neither do I. We are both lost in this late-stage comi-tragedy, on either end of the wealth spectrum. I can’t fathom one billion dollars, and Bill Gates can’t fathom the cost of milk. But here we both are, hurtling towards some blurry and inevitable future.
Perhaps we will tear down the skyscrapers and footpaths and fences, and finally give the land back.
***
I have lost my copy of Sister Outsider. On a bus somewhere, on a chair in a cafe, in a kerbside, floating in a gutter. Or perhaps, dreamily, now in the embrace of someone else. I have scoured my room and my bags, and I am petulant about not returning to that inner-city bookstore to buy another copy. I am trying to recall a sentence I read: ‘...we are surviving, under the enormous pressure of being alive right now…’ But I cannot find those words attributed to Audre Lorde anywhere. I am so certain I read them, at the bottom of a page that I can see so clearly in my mind. And even if I have confected these words, or drawn them out from the substance of Lorde’s wisdom, those words hold enormous truth. I thank Lorde, for her clarity and generosity, in a time that demanded otherwise.
We are surviving in this moment, under gargantuan and multiplied pressures, but I know there is an infinitely more valuable economy of care and kindness that I, too, am fighting to hold onto.
If you too are struggling with the enormous pressure of being alive right now, here’s some resources that have given me hope in the past few months:
Listen: “revolution, then, is a faith-based practice” by Ismatu Gwendolyn
Listen: Milyakburra by Emily Wurramara
Listen: “Episode #202…Why we can’t think beyond capitalism” by Stephen West
References:
Passage taken from Audre Lorde’s essay Age, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference* (published in1984)
Passage taken from Audre Lorde’s essay Lessons from the 1960s (from the same speech delivered to Harvard University in 1982)
Quote from Deputy Mayor of Vienna, Kathrin Gall, to POLITICO
Beautifully written as always Tesh. I often find myself thinking if not Capitalism then what? Socialism seems to be the more broadly accepted answer, but all our economic systems are flawed. I'm thinking they're flawed because the people who create them are also inherently flawed. That doesn't stop me from yearning for a world filled with kindness where basic needs are met though. Maybe one day.