Zero Interest

According to a report by Spiegel magazine, strip bar owners in Tampa expect lucrative business during the Republican convention, this coming week. One wily stripper even held a press conference because her act consists in stripping as a Sara Palin double, who, the stripper points out, also liked to wear rather suggestive clothing, to focus public attention on her preferred assets.

One bar owner elaborated that Republicans spend much more money on strip bars, including tipping three times as much as Democrats (some of whom obviously need their pound of flesh, as well). One might of course wonder, why such staunch exploiters of religious dogmas would want to view women in their god-given attire. It obviously is not because they regard covering up God’s beautiful creation with human garments as a sin, which it clearly must be, from God’s point of view.

It may well be that some of these so-called conservatives are so bored by their own lifestyle that they have to get aroused by the very same titillations which they try so strenuously to forbid, against all reason.

However, a more likely explanation is that for them, as good capitalists, everything is for sale, is only of value to the extent in which that value can be given a dollar sign. “Since everything is for sale, nothing has any value.” So they use churches to sell more cars and life insurance; they use nationalism as a way to sell more weapons; they use the trauma of unwanted pregnancy to collect more campaign contributions… Trusting only in the dollar sign, they have to remind themselves that they should advertise instead on each dollar bill “In God We Trust.”

Having cheapened everything beyond recovery, they try to regain some sense of direction by spending their ill-gotten money on cheapening the human body over and over again, to prove to each other that they are real men, after all, and therefore can be trusted to fight against the evils of human compassion.

As we drift more and more toward a society of listless hypocrites, the banking powers frantically try to stimulate us into new buying frenzies by charging practically no interest to the big boys, so that that they may get out of the strip joints and off the bully pulpits and start exploiting American workers again. The biggest success stories these days seem to come from innovators of advertising, from Google to much of the computer industry and the tax experts, who can show ever new ways of extracting revenue from people who otherwise would not know what to spend their dollars on.

Our world is so numbed by all the hype about what we should be interested in, including what should be forbidden, so as to make it all the more interesting, that the greatest exploiters of “I know the value of a dollar and nothing else” have to return to dingy places  in which a semblance of a mother’s breast is for sale, to get back to basics, perhaps.

The silliness of it all can make one laugh. It is the ruthless propagation of their species of shallowness that is chilling.