The Necessity/Luxury Disconnect

(from Rex's Credit Card Confessions notebook)

Our markets are not so much the source of outright bondage as they are the source of an ailment. I, myself, suffer form this ailment generated by the markets - they pull me from one need to another using a language of vacancy and boredom.

Boredom is the condition of existing in a space of time, however lengthy or brief, devoid of purpose. You may be simultaneously bored and engaged in activity, but you can at least recognize that those activities that manifest a physical process that is relevant ONLY in that it eventually produces some intended product or effect.

We are CONSTANTLY engaged in such physical processes - drones focused on some effect/product. For years we engaged in the struggle - the product/effect of which is a necessity to the individual engaged in the process. Or at least the product/effect would be some correlative to daily life the subsequent absence of which would render it a necessity.

Eventually, we were told that we were ENTITLED to such necessities. As soon as the suggestion sank in, we grew tired and completely disconnected from the effect/product of satisfying or addressing a necessity. We began to expect access to the 'extra-necessary' at the expense of the same amount of labor expended at one time to merely reach the necessary. We became a by-default luxury culture.

Credit was created and marketed to a large base of individuals who could not foreseeably move themselves from the baseline to the level of luxury they were told that (a) most other individuals were already enjoying and (b) they were therefore entitled to - as citizens and as equals. A system was implemented for those such individuals to 'front-load the luxury' and then earn it by paying off the creditor that enabled them to acquire the luxury. It was simple - a man might as well enjoy what he was hoping to acquire WHILE he was engaged in the work-process of acquiring it.

That system rendered the product/effect of the physical process ALREADY ACQUIRED from the start, and Marx's 'alienation of the worker' became an especially true fate. Placing the goal before the physical process renders the process less valuable to the worker, who can then formulate his own conclusions abou how hard he should have to work for a particular product/effect.

A worker thus empowered indulges the instinct to become a SAMPLER of products/effects and a retro-decider of the necessity of such products/effects.

The worker is thereby divorced from his original definition of necessary. The necessary should rightfully have a higher value as a product/effect where value is determined by the physical process.

Alma: Miami, Florida

To tell you the truth, I don't even know what I can tell you about Paul Rex that's useful. I didn't vote for him the first time around. Found him to be too close to Fidel Castro. You're born in Cuba, like me, you don't want another talker who will repeat the same business over and over again to convince you he's doing the best for you, even if you don't realize it, even if it hurts. I remember when he started getting popular down here - people were calling him the golden rule guy and a small group of people in Little Havana just came out and endorsed him. Just like they built that shrine to Elian, I think there's a house somewhere off Douglas with like a shrine to Paul Rex in it... supposedly it was in the kitchen of the house where he wrote his Credit Card Confessions paper.

My husband read that paper and practically started campaigning for Paul Rex. I've never been but my husband has been to the shrine-kitchen in Little Havana at least twice to see the spot. The first time, he visited it on the Saturday after he read the Credit Card Confessions. He tried to get me to go with him, but it was early, and I wake up early every weekday, and I need my Saturday mornings to rest up. Facundo gets home - Facundo, that's my husband - and he's like a changed man. He sits down at our kitchen table and starts writing out a new househod budget, and talks about our regular daily lives like it's a new battle and he doesn't want the powers that be to steal the money we're going to need to survive armageddon. Facundo can explain it better - not an armageddon but something the powers that be want us to think is armageddon.

Anyway, ever since Facundo got into this Paul Rex guy, he's lost interest in tv shows, started clipping couponds from the newspaper everyday and - our son is still a little pissed about this - he sold our plasma television to a neighbor. We've been having the best sex of my life, and he's always having these conversations with me about how things can get better if we take careful stock of what's important.