The Unfairness of Style

Wonderful Art Nouveau Poster

So the Occupy Wall Street folks are griping about the current state of affairs. One of the complaints is that the CEO of Giant Multinational Conglomerate is making a zillion dollars a day while Rupert P. Diddlebums is having to scrounge through the dumpsters to find enough to survive on.

One post I saw had a link to a whole bunch of official government graphs that showed, something. I suppose they were supposed to show how bad the situation is, or how unfair it all is. Whatever. They are a bunch of charts. Pixels on the screen. Not even ink on paper. What does it all mean?

It does not matter how much money those guys are making. It could be a million or a billion or a zillion. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that they are making more money than I am. If the world were fair, all the money would be mine and you all would be doing my bidding. Since that is not the case God must hate me, and since I have done nothing wrong in this life, it must have been a past life, therefor reincarnation is real. QED. Ipso facto whateverium. Sorry, sometimes my tangents lead me astray. Back to our story.

The guys with the money aren't worried about the little people because they have bigger fish to fry. Some of them, it's true, are only interested in shuffling money around so that more of it sticks to them, but they are like the ads in the sidebar of a Google search page: they don't matter. What's really going on is the big guys are deciding whether to spend five billion on a new fab in China or India, or ten billion on a new pipeline across South America or a new coal mine in Manchuria. There's a million decisions like this being made every day. That's what's really going on.

But that's the world, and America is only a small part of the world. We used to be a huge part, but the rest of the world has been catching up. While we may still be the biggest fish, we no longer outweigh everybody else combined.

So what's going on here at home? I am beginning to think the biggest business in the US is arranging financing for projects in other countries. We don't need any big investments, we've done all that, we have all the industrial infrastructure we need. The second part is the computer revolution. Automation has eliminated half of all the jobs. The third thing is attitude. All the people who are making money in the new whiz bang, computerized money changer, US economy think they know what's right. They worked hard and made a ton of money, so everyone else must be a moron and it's their own fault they are stupid and broke. The problem, and this is really the crux of the matter, is that they are not smarter than everybody else, and they did not work any harder. They were simply lucky. Of course you can't tell them that, and even if you did, would it make any difference? Well, maybe.

Wretched Art Deco Poster

The problem is that when you blindly pursue profit and economic growth there are whole groups of people who are getting shoved aside, ignored and downtrodden. If it goes on long enough and hard enough you've got the breeding ground for revolution, or even, gasp, communists! On the other hand, if you find some way to include those people who are out on the fringe in your new world order (like it or not, here it comes), your economy will be that much larger, stronger, more powerful, and less likely to be wasting huge amounts of time and energy quibbling about how unfair it all is.

Back around the turn of the century, the last century that is, i.e. 1900, there was a fad in the art department called Art Nouveau. Pictures from this period are instantly recognizable and are very wonderful. Sometime around 1920, Art Nouveau slipped away and the god-awful Art Deco took off. Then in 1929 we had the crash, followed by the GREAT DEPRESSION. Coincidence? I don't think so. The morons that were screwing the economy were the same ones who were buying all that Art Deco crap.

The moral of this story is that if you like Art Deco you should be confined to your cubicle filling your role as a cog in the great corporate machine, but you should never be promoted to a position where you have any control over anyone else.

If you like Art Nouveau, you should spend your time sitting in cafes and sipping coffee until your funds run out whereupon you will be transplanted to the poor house where you will end your days subsisting on the thin gruel that passes for food in those places.

And who is going to run things? People with no appreciation for art. We're doomed.

Update November 2015. Replace missing Art Deco picture.

Update April 2022. Replace missing Art Nouveau picture.