I'm Bored With This Ugly Renaissance, Says Byronius. [View all]

[byronius]

The Ugly Renaissance by Alexander Lee is a damned amazing book, and I'm not bored with it at all. But I'm reading the history of Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and guess what? It's all about merchant bankers and the super-wealthy conspiring to degrade and destroy constitutional government in order to tilt the lion's share of the wealth their way, while every other human being gets the shaft because the misinformation industry is rolling in cash. People working for less-than-starvation wages under the cunning control of absolutely ruthless one percenters, anyone who sticks their head up gets slandered or whipped through the streets or accidentally murdered, and every last thing on earth that is green or good gets eaten up or shriveled to dust because the RICH SOCIOPATHS MUST HAVE EVERYTHING.

Sound familiar? Lee does a great job of pointing out the similarities. Some differences. Then, the guilty feelings of the merchant bankers drove them on their deathbed to give money to the churches they corrupted to pray for their souls after they died, and to build edifices and commission art to make them look like better people than the disgustingly horrible hoarder cheats they really were, because it's all about what it looks like, not what it is. Nowadays they don't really give a fuck how evil they look to anyone. To their hypnotized fans, Evil is Good. Evil is Strength.

And I had an epiphany. It's exactly the same fight. Same cast of filthy-souled characters, same primitive ends, same disorganized and demoralized and demonized progressives trying to advance the human cause one more inch -- really, we're still doing this? After six hundred years?

Slow. We're slow. Allowing the plutocrat vampires to grow tendrils into every branch of democracy, allowing them to destroy the futures of all who are not them, allowing the subconscious warped sexuality of incompetent Gollums to be writ large across the world's future, simply because this is the standard cycle --

It's fucking boring. Boring boring boring. Inefficient, stupid, moronic, hurts everyone including them, and here we are doing the SAME GODDAMNED DANCE OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

Can't we just kind of skip ahead somehow to the Star Trek post-apocalyptic moneyless Ethical Society? It's just all so obvious and dull, this crap. 'Hoarding money is bad'. Wow, they knew that in 1370. 'Allowing money hoarders to influence civil government will eventually weaken and destroy the society that permits it.' Yeah, top of the charts in 1401. They knew, and they fought it and died for it, and they inched forward to bring us all the way to --

Six fucking inches forward. Pbhtttttt. Gag me. Boring. Aaagh. Antonin Scalia fits right into 1393 Florence, wearing a funny little conical red hat and with a silk sash wrapped around his fat little evil belly. Oh, such a holy man he'd be back then. He'd get a statue, I'm sure. Paid for in blood money.

The Medici still live. They're called Kochs now. Fuck this rerun. I'm bored.

Where's the fast-forward button? Can't seem to find it. Nothing but this same old crap on Reality again. Bleah.