Free Elon

In liberating ourselves from him, we liberate him from the mob

‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’

—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

This is the time of year where we’re all supposed to drag out the Dickens. It’s probably not worth getting pissed about, anymore. Let them have their Dollar Store cheer, their auto-pilot “critiques” about commercialism and even their War on Christmas fantasies if it gives them something to masturbate about. It’s not (all) Dickens’ fault his toothache-inducing little fable has become that dread cultural product, A Christmas Classic. That every third ad your parents have watched since mid-October has Scrooge marveling at all these savings is a feeble irony, I guess, but any irony is better than none at all.

And yet, and yet. It’s worth repeating that the lonely old miser who gains the world only to lose his soul was a cliché eons before Dickens got his quills on it. For as long as humans have been able to count money, the gilded cage has been a stock set in our repertoire. Every now and again, people have even been able to extract high art from it. That our age always uses “The Midas Touch” as a form of praise is one of those ironies socialists ought to take as a spur to get cracking on their consciousness-raising.

This Christmas season, at least, we should be grateful that help is on the way. A spirit is visiting us. It represents the past, to be sure, and (horribly) the present. Whether it represents the future is to up to us.

Visions…

Now comes Elon Musk, Colossus bestride the narrow world, master of all he sees, other people’s money falling out of his very pockets. Tyrants and democrats alike bow before him. He is the World’s Richest Man. He isn’t just a visionary; he is the vision. Astro-physicists, moral philosophers, artists, fascinating people everywhere crave his company (and his companies). An army of (otherwise) smart, beautiful and sexy women are eager, even desperate, to bear his seed. Another army of editors, hacks and cultural gatekeepers are ready to run interference for him, lest any of his countless social lessers forget themselves and ask impertinent questions. Having run out of worlds to conquer, he does not weep. He looks beyond the very heavens themselves. They dare not hold him.

Forget for now whether he’s “earned” any of this power. Never mind the bit about making mankind his business. The question is this. Having gotten all this power, how does Musk wield it? He begs Bari Weiss (!) to look at him. He sweats like a freshly spritzed turnip while the boos rain down upon him, and then he stays up all night trying to convince us that people were, in fact, saying “Boo-urns.” He crashes (previously docile) hacks’ public chats about him and then shuts it—and them—down mid-question. He spends hours cheering on one of the countless suck-balls accounts in the company he’s just bought on a whim—an account dedicated to quoting his own sapience and wit.

The polite surprise on the faces of his (shrinking) bourgeois fan-base is a thing to behold. The same crowd that un-ironically wonders whether “Elon” is losing the “Midas Touch” (let’s hope so, for all those kids’ sakes) asks out loud, in the tone of the guileless Dickensian urchin, why he’d burn All This down for a few cheesy Twitter beefs? The obvious answer—that he can’t fucking help himself, because he and his entire debauched class of 10th-rate princelings are every bit the prisoners of the dialectic as the lumpen types they now draft for their war against the “elites”—isn’t even thinkable, let alone utterable. Instead, they send their secular prayers up to deaf heaven, that somehow Elon might be visited by the spirits and learn the True Meaning of Christmas.

Ebeneezer Scrooge? The man’s not even Ron Burgundy. It’s hard not to feel a pang here. Musk clearly hasn’t a friend in the world. Sad? “It would take a heart of stone,” Oscar Wilde once said of another Dickens’ confection, “not to burst out laughing.”

Dear Old Oscar

Dear Old Oscar is always worth reading in any case, but especially when we’re confronted by the ruling class behaving badly. That’s not (just) because Wilde was noblest of all the great Victorians. It’s also because he’s one of the most radical thinkers our species has yet produced.

Unlike Dickens, Wilde had no use at all for the incurably rich. He spent his life and work mocking them and making them pay for his pleasure in it. (“Earnest” was a word gay London used as a way to find friends. Reread Wilde’s most popular play in that light. See if it doesn’t hyperbolize your laughter, laughing at Wilde laughing at respectable London laughing at jokes they thought they “got.” Heart of stone, forsooth.)

And yet, and yet. If you’re going to mock Musk or any of other members of his sordid Kappa Smegma fraternity (and, by Jove, you should), Wilde’s counsel is even more important to keep. That’s because he warned his fellow socialists against the dangers of populism and mere resentment. Watching peasants and slum-dwellers rise in revolt, he writes in Sonnet to Liberty, delights “my discreet soul.” But he begins the poem,

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe, 
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know...

Anyone who chants “Vox populi, vox dei,” in other words, is looking for trouble. It’s hard not to read Wilde’s Sonnet as a prophecy. He published it in 1881. Less than 15 years later, the same respectable London that (still) flocked to his play half-woke to his little jokes. They tossed him to a baying mob of know-nothings who (literally) ground him down on the wheel of Victorian hypocrisy. That mob, of course, was led by a pick-nose lordling who had his own resentments against the “elite,” and his own obsessions with what you might call “pedo guys.”

The danger

From now on, for as long as Musk lives, the only reason decent people won’t laugh at him is because they won’t be thinking about him at all. There is tragedy here, probably, and ironies, to be sure. That doesn’t make Musk or any other upper-class twit any less dangerous. The paleo- and neo-fascist right he now runs to for comfort are the direct descendants of the very mob that ground Wilde to dust. This culture has seen first-hand the suffering that follows when half-wits vow to get the last laugh. Read every “lol” Musk tacks onto his gormless tweets as a warning.

One of the many lessons of this low, dishonest, un-American century is that the consumer culture that gave us such monstrous fungi as Musk is dying. Whatever else that means, it means we’ll all simply have to stop spectating. Take pride in your Yelp reviews if you must, but 21st Century civic life requires that you work in the real world, too. (Maybe start by talking with your investment advisers, or pension managers, or even candidates who dare ask for your vote. Ask them not just what they’re doing to keep your money out of Musk’s greasy pockets, but what measures they’re taking to make sure that a guy like that can’t ooze out of any of your future investments.)

Will it work? Hell if I know. It certainly hasn’t been tried in a while. The exercise might help clarify a few things, anyway. It may or may not be true that Wilde said the trouble with his kind of socialism was “that it would take up too many evenings.” The gob-smacking thing about Musk and his fetid cronies is they’re willing to do so much of the organizing for us. As a class, they can’t get out of their own way. Watch Musk or any of his kind bark and clap like wheezing seals in a moth-eaten circus, hoping the carnies will toss them a fish. It’s hard not to wonder, Whose side are they on? A single Musk tweet does more to degrade the might and majesty of the capitalist class than even the most brilliant, active socialist mind could accomplish in a lifetime of pamphleteering.

“The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism,” Dear Old Oscar wrote elsewhere, “is undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.”

Musk is just the latest in a long line of middling douche canoes who hope to lead the people by following the mob. In liberating ourselves from him, we liberate him from the mob. Wilde’s sense of irony outstripped even his socialism, so it’s hard not to think that maybe he’d appreciate a liberation movement that began under the banner, “Free Elon.” God bless us, everyone.