Interesting concept, isn’t it? Dirty money? It starts as an innocent dollar bill, or digital dollar. Use it in a crime and it becomes dirty. It gets laundered through various trickery or seized by law enforcement and suddenly it’s clean again and goes back into the system.
It made it past the gauntlet, the system gets to count it. Clean, dirty, clean. It’s the same dollar. If it was digital there weren’t even any germs involved. Then on the other side, legitimate parts of the system don’t have to be moral, just legal.
A large corporation can do all kinds of harm, exploit people, destroy the place they live. But because it was legal, it’s clean money.
I wonder how it would feel to be a dollar with a conscience? Pretty confusing I imagine.
BTW, sometime read A Simple Plan, about a regular guy who thought he could handle a duffel bag full of dirty money. Gave me nightmares for days. Interesting now I think of it that his family had lost the farm to the bank. The Edge always goes to the house
I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.
The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.
A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.
My name was called.
I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?
The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.
I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.
I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.
There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.
Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.
U2 – Until the End of the World
What it meant
That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.
It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.
The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.
The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?
The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.
I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.
Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.
I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.
Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.
Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take
It’s not just a Christian thing
What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.
It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.
Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.
The Machine
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.
I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.
Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.
The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.
The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.
Premonitions and Predictions
Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.
I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.
So the saga of the billionaire submersible comes to an end. It seems the underwater craft imploded, ending CEO Stockton Rush and his wealthy passengers in the blink of an eye.
It’s been interesting to see how people have been reacting. There are exceptions, but for the most part people don’t seem very fazed by the tragedy. I’ve seen a lot of “too soon” jokes and not much finger wagging.
The Titanic – A spiritual field recording by Alan Lomax at St. Simons Island, April, 1960. Performers include John Davis, Bessie Jones, Emma Ramsay and Hobart Smith.
A lot of it has to do with the hubris and foolhardiness of the CEO. He apparently did it on the cheap, used off the shelf parts and ignored the warnings of people who knew how dangerous it was.
James Cameron made a good point. Kind of ironic how similar Rush’s fate was to that of Captain Smith of the Titanic. One thing’s for sure, Rush will be remembered. He’s become a myth, like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
I can’t say I wouldn’t have done myself in if I’d had the resources to make a submarine. How hard could it be? I grew up on shows like Salvage 1, where Andy Griffith plays a junk man who makes his own spaceship. A lot of the Golden Age sci fi I read had premises like that.
TV in the ’70s was so dumb – and fun. Pretty sure I watched every ridiculous episode.
Mostly though, the lack of empathy toward the CEO seems to be about class. Like why should we care about billionaires when they don’t care about us?
I understand the sentiment to an extent. I was excited when Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. The thought of colonizing other planets excites me. I have a much harder time caring about “extreme tourism” for the wealthy. Billionaires in space or billionaires under the sea – the rest of the world could really use those resources.
If you’re not careful though, you can get carried away. The guys who died in that sub didn’t deserve it just because they were wealthy.
If you think of it, the wealthy are just as trapped by the system as the rest of us. I’ve actually met a billionaire and I like the guy. He runs an ethical company and believes in paying his taxes (he’s European).
Money is survival and wealth is security. If you don’t have enough, the system will let you die. But how much is enough? If you have a lot, you’re gonna want more, just in case.
The more you have and the less everyone else has, the more you have to close yourself off. You can do it with walls and surveillance, private security, or distance. You can use your influence to keep the people you’re scared of away.
The Bastille was a prison, but so was Versailles. Nobody wants to get robbed or Marie Antoinetted. But the worse life becomes for those people you never see, the more likely it becomes. Poverty is a trap, but so is wealth.
I don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this mess, but billionaires do have a lot of resources. If enough of them could be convinced that we’re all in this together, they could do a lot of good.
It’s worth remembering that FDR, who helped the country out of a depression and got us through a world war, came from the wealthy class.
I think Internet’s troubles began when the boss got online. At first you knew your boss barely knew how to get online. Wasting the boss’s time was kind of an ongoing joke for years.
In the mid-90s, only one computer at my newspaper was connected. That was the boss’s computer and he only used it when someone from the head office demanded.
He hated the Internet, said it was a waste of time and he didn’t want to hear about it. You could get fired if you got caught using it. We had a newspaper to get out.
When smartphones came along and it became apparent that we were having too much fun at the boss’s expense, the boss’s boss, or the boss’s boss’s boss, thought “Hmm. Those peons aren’t just employees wasting company time. They’re a piggy bank we haven’t cracked yet. Maybe we can make back some of the money we have to pay them?”
Now every time I get online, I get a deluge of people trying to sell me something. Everything that used to be free, they’re telling me, “upgrade to premium! It’s just a few dollars a month!”
Now the Internet is a money-making machine and we’re both the product and the customer… Maybe the Internet is the boss and the company store all rolled into one?
When I was an editor at small town papers, you could always get a feature story in a pinch by asking for a tour of a local factory. I could fill a lot of column inches in a hurry. I knew they would hook me up.
I didn’t really mind, to be honest. I got to geek out. Factories have a lot of science-y stuff in them. You just asked how everything worked, took a lot of notes and wrote up your story. Easy peasy.
I learned what the Venturi effect was in one of those, a factory that made gizmos for moving material around in factories. They also made a device that fired confetti at football games.
At another factory, I learned that a wedge of Styrofoam inside a box of wine will help you get every drop. I had a curious mind and it was all very interesting.
And these factories hired a lot of people in town. It felt like a public service. Anything to help your local companies succeed, and not un-coincidentally – advertise. I still believed in Trickle Down theory back then and I thought: company does good, local economy does good.
The towns I worked in tended to be at or just above broke. There were honest to God poor people in my coverage area and there’s no poor like country poor – no services, no nothing.
I developed a really Chamber of Commerce-y attitude. If it brought in jobs, I was for it. I didn’t know what else to dol I saw some of the pressures these towns were under. If a company closed up shop, people had to work in the city and commute. They spent their money elsewhere and everyone lost.
Amon Tobin – Esther’s
If a town depends on a company – especially if it advertises – the newspaper will be a friend of that company.
One of my favorites was a tour of a brick factory. It was a long building with lots of coal burning inside long kilns. The ovens were black on the outside smelled like a fresh-baked bread. The men at the plant carried on around us, working very hard. Many were immigrants, all of them were poor.
I saw them working the assembly lines, moving huge loads of around, sweat pouring off, and I respected them. I couldn’t lift a fraction of that weight, even once. They had to do it all day. It was obviously a hard life, but what other work was there?
After I saw the whole process of clay to brick, the guys in management pointed at the “new” factory in the field next door. Everything would be automated. I wondered how those hard-working men felt, seeing the new factory spring up next door at the place that paid their rent.
I couldn’t help but think that company owed those men something. Still the company also had a side. They were automating because their competitors were automating. They’re caught up in the machine like everybody else.
I did what I always did, filled up all the white space, got the paper out, started working on the next one. But that brick plant gave me an eerie feeling. It wasn’t going to stop with factories. I was online constantly, but I knew the internet was about to eat my lunch. Technology was coming for us.
Late Boomer's Den 
You must be logged in to post a comment.