The Chips are Down

It's all a big hustle, and then some.

Acts of self-aggrandizement are now at all all-time high, on the Right, Left, and in the Center.

Self-aggrandizement is now packaged in the form of celebrity, with celebrity replacing actual political engagement to become a movement of its own, empty of actual political content other than its own will to power for the purpose of furthering its celebrity.

Newt Gingrich is once again in the news, as is Bill Clinton.

The Left doesn't believe in god, and the Right believes in a god that doesn't exist.

The poor no longer need protection: having once been protected by the rich the poor now find it much more in their self-interest to go unprotected.

Man becomes the measure of all lesser things.

B-List celebrities are allowed to blossom into A-List celebrities in imitation of equal opportunity. 

The American marketplace is overcrowded with consumers who walk around more or less unconsciously; they are consumed by their consumption.

Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman, does not wake up one morning transformed into an insect: in the 2019 edition of The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a carbuncle that's appointed Secretary of State after graduating from West Point.

Newt Gingrich's wife Callista is made US Ambassador to The Holy See in 2017. Callista graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1988, a music major.

Twelve of the major art museums in the US--from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--are chaired or co-chaired by founders or co-founders of large private equity firms, oil and gas suppliers, and a casino and resort developer, according to The New York Times, a media conglomerate. 

And thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre whose play The Chips are Down, written in 1943 and published in 1947, provided the title for this little piece.