When the writing’s on the wall, the writing’s on the wall. The first time I saw a website with an advertisement in a paper magazine, I knew that industry was on its slow crawl out. That’s when you knew the magazines were just playing out their string. They understood the cash was in the fancy-new and it was high time to cash in before the Internet murdered it or at least relegated it to the niche of nostalgia and enthusiasts. Like grand opera. It was the time for winding it down.
It’s always been like that. You know when radio acquiesced to the sponsors selling teevees, that was the writing in the air as well. It was like riding your horses and your buggy to buy that first Model T car or taking your last rail ride to your first airport. The hoarders who own all of these things, the inheritance class, they’re in all manners but the literal rats and the only things a rat’s brain knows is when to jump off a sinking ship and onto another to also ruin with foul leavings.
The message of Christ was fundamentally lost when the Roman Empire started selling it off as scrap for extra shekels, Muhammed’s word devoured by the abusive sheiks, the Buddha erased by kings declaring war in Buddha’s name. The pivot gets us every time and it’s never The Rich who suffer the consequences, they just move on like locusts to the next green field. It’s the man who sold buggywhips door-to-door who suffers, a man who inherited buggy factories just buys three car factories instead. The Wheel of Samsara just keeps spinning, but the dice just keep on coming up craps for everyone who didn’t inherit the casinos started by their criminal grandpas.
Because that’s the real bitch of the bunch? It’s not just that we get to witness a medium sell off chunks of its own dying body to its successors, it’s that we get to watch all those new ideas and tools then get bought up by all the old standards again, shoved back into boxes so the folks who had to get their dumb-asses bought through Yale can understand them, even a little bit? Perhaps they’re less rats, more like lamprey eels? Fusing themselves to bodies until they suck the whole thing dry before hopping off just prior to death, then attaching somewheres else shiny and new.
Watching the paradox of progress is hard enough without those ancillary generational parasites.
But here we are all anyway, each of us a brief living witness to the world’s dumbest snake not even chewing on its own tail, rather grotesquely gorging on its own excrements over and over, that foulness concentrating further each digestion. The good news is that history has taught us that there’s always some kind of change coming over the horizon. The bad news is that history has also taught, when the change comes, it can always get worse. Hold onto your buggywhips.
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