I was oiling my meme cannon in preparation for this week’s column when I was rudely interrupted by the (P)resident pouring large numbers from his flaccid mouth over and into the heads of leaders, bankers, and mega-grifters at Davos. I put that P between parentheses because it could have been the “resident” of a mental facility emptying his brain on that proscenium. I am not saying this because the numbers were so large they were capable of bulldozing the geography and history of many nations. No, I am saying this because their enormity (in dollars) was not accompanied by anything about the people this abstract bulldozer would plow under.
If there was a trace of concern for people, it was dividing them into “friends” and “enemies” who, in some instances, Russia for example, were one and the same. The people were also numbers because “too many of them are dying.” No numbers were mentioned here because they were too small. Other countries were not even “countries” and thus not worthy of numbers, Somalia for instance. What is that hell hole? The P(resident) asked rhetorically, before attacking congresswoman Ilhan Omar who had slid into MagAmerica from that hell hole to mess with the numbers.
The domestic feuds interested no one at Davos, but the numbers resonated. If any numbers represented anything other than numbers, it was what guns, tanks and missiles they bought and could buy. Like a true Maoist, the (P)resident noted that power comes from the barrel of a gun, and that gun was aimed at everyone who got in the way of even more gigantic numbers.
Nobody really got in the way of numbers. Some chiefs of states spoke of “values,” but everyone knew that “values” meant numbers. The fact that T(rump) made up these numbers bothered no one. In civilian life the Chief had exaggerated his wealth to get bigger loans to build kitsch palaces, but that was long ago. The new numbers were intended to build a new world for technologies that used people as collateral. There were not enough people on earth to warrant the loans needed to eliminate them. Let’s just say, the (P)resident wasn’t talking to poets.
We invented Zero but did we get credit?
The numbers applauded when the Zeros rolled in.
