prompt: capacity/ title: greatness made in misc. flash fiction

Had “The Great Gatsby” been written in 2019, I’m certain it would unfold in almost exactly the opposite direction, its central conceit inverted on each axis. Jimmy Gatz would be the fraud Jay Gatsby the Fourth was trying to hide or at least elude, at least elide. He would be generationally wealthy, rich five-forefathers-deep, pretending his fortune glamorously self-made, oh, just some loan from grandmother after college to jump-start an Instagram empire selling bad colognes and junk-science dietary supplements to the rubes. His Stanford education chalked up not to a family influence but rather a scholarship for some fringe sport he never actually played. A rowing team and a minor spinal injury, perhaps, of which you could never tell when posed for a selfie on one of his tacky-ass yachts in an ironic trucker hat and an otherwise immaculate designer ensemble.

This is what we ask of “influencers” now, or maybe we always did but our popular-culture is no longer subtle about it, we want “our betters” to be golden-gods beyond our understanding, these temporarily embarrassed robber-barons that we rabble are all now, just with some capacity for a facsimile of low-born coarseness to appeal to suckers out on Iowan tractor or watching from the dive-bars of the Jersey shore. If they’re actually warped from the isolation of life-long privilege, all the better, all the easier to act it out if a monstrousness is true and the wellspring from which sociopathy springs is all that’s fudged. All the easier maintaining the kabuki of appealing to the masses for the paparazzi gossip rags.

Jason Gatz would have a sex tape, that’s for sure, I mean, he’d have dozens of them but the only one you’d see would be the one he had staged and then leaked for the publicity. His lady-partner would be famous, though not famous as the Great Gatz, maybe a pop-singer who hadn’t a hit on the bubblegum charts in the last couple of years. The videography would feint at rawness, but it would all be flattering gauzy bleached and it’d just make him more marketable a bad boy to sell green-tea suppositories and sub-prime loans.

He’d only disdain Tom Buchanan’s racist diatribes because he actually believed them, he would himself espouse ethnic hatred, sure, but only to shill to the loyal customer-base that is the hatred demographic. He’d believe anyone with money was the best person, regardless of race, creed or gender, but he’d never say it out-loud to anyone, lest it cut down profits.

The main point of divergence, though, would be the ending. Gatz would not see comeuppance, people like him never do, they only profit from disaster. He’d have Daisy on the side but grow bored with her when her attention no longer fueled his ego. Eventually, Tom Buchanan would end up his vice-president, I guess. We used to at least pretend to be ashamed of our monsters once exposed. Now, we’re just supposed to be jealous we don’t get to be monsters ourselves.