Only in Hell Can the Dow Ever Climb

Dow Industrial Average, December 29, 1978 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 37"

Some context, kind of…

There are 2 million people in Gaza. Half of them are children.

Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 200 points. Hold onto those employer’s matching contributions, Americanos—Me, you and Raytheon are gonna get stinking rich! Not quite equitably though, as Raytheon CEO, psycho-killer Gregory Hayes, gets his 22 million salary (along with kick-ass portfolio bulging, private plane journeys to anywhere, and subcutaneous pâté de foie gras fat deposits along the neck and armpits), while you intake the annual colonoscope, any coffee drink on the menu, IPA’s a-plenty, and the many cold child ghosts of Canaan (figuratively breathed in of course). Gregory Hayes will build more bombs and you will (literally of course) drop them on daily victims of Apartheid.

Before you get all defensive, citing CNN propaganda-ignorance of international law, history, and the life-saving forces of the Golden Rule, the Gazinians can be violent monsters too. They just don’t have airplanes funded by you and me to kill indiscriminately. In fact, they don’t have any airplanes because, inside-trading portfolio savants, Yoav Gallant and Joe Biden, pretend to believe the other Canaanites, the occupied ones, are human animals.

Americans know that occupied animals don’t have portfolios. Duh! They are herded in and out of pens in Colorado, or, far far away, in Israel-Palestine:

List of military checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip

Here is a long (longer than a Taylor Swift concert) video of a lecture from one old man at a podium. He shares insight on the euphemistic “conflict” that can only end when the majority of U.S. middle-classers eat rice at every meal and grow their own garlic scapes.

What did you think?

If you watched 10 minutes of it, my conscience will accept that you formed an opinion worth hearing. 20 minutes, and I would vote for you to be President of Earth. The entire video? Let’s you and me make a toast to our mutual sensibilities.

The Golden Rule is the only truth among humanity. And an “eye for an eye” necessary to avenge its trespass. Just one eye for one eye, though. Not 50,000 babies for 300 babies.

Dow Jones Industrial Average, December 31, 1985 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 37"

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Now to these paintings…

I wrote about the concept for this little series I did a few years ago. I believe retirement portfolios we invest in are responsible for the present hell suffered by the non-portfolio holders worldwide. It’s blood money. No other way to look at it. I’ll relate a phrase my deceased father-in-law, Joe, used to say about the powers that be:

“They got us by the sneaks.”

We are slaves of the system. Unavoidable until we avoid it. As Joe was able to do. He escaped the guilt of contributing to the suffering of others in order to boost wealth he didn’t earn. He lived like a pauper, under the radar, not paying tax, not investing in stocks. A cash only world. Cheat the IRS at every turn. He buried Ball® jars in the dirt and unwittingly cleaned his conscience (Joe was a cheap son-of-a-gun, not a bleeding heart). Too bad he died young and was unable to enjoy the guilt-free retirement he very much deserved.

Anyway, here is the blurb:

Dow Jones Industrial Average, January 2, 1981 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 37"

National Public Radio thinks its status (the Dow) must be bull-horned every hour on the hour, else people will stop driving their cars and fall out of them onto the street. President® Grump uses it to mark his triumph as a bootlicker to more successful imperialists. And everyday I pray to Pan that its average drops to the single digits, so mother earth can lick herself clean, and perhaps decide to give human beings another go at living on her back skin.

This week the Dow burped and lifted my spirits. I have been wanting to begin my series on the capitalist’s devil marker for some time, and it was a pleasant coincidence to start now, while the bubbles burst. I can only hope and pray that Monday brings a sharper decline of the kind that actually might set up a vena cava road block on Warren Buffet’s multiple potholed cardiac super highway, or find a frat boy pervert Zuckerburg tearing his own face off in the mirror. What a dream to finally see a steady stream of Chinese corporitos screaming off bridges, and my local Congressman® losing all his crony corporate funding quicker than a fly barf on a rotting pile of weapons industry CEO suicides.

The NPR® announcement comes every hour to remind us that the dark forces are under control. If one likes horror stories, he can delve deeper into the blackness and measure individual company ups and downs on the Lifehate® meter, via CNN Money®, Marketwatch®, The New York Times®, or his or her own secret hush money on-line portfolio (401K means 401,000 species closer to extinction).

One can dream.

I dream a familial human economy (with access to antibiotics) close to the lifestyles of rabbits in their warrens, instead of all the rabbits dead and my portfolio achieving the best underwater condo in South Florida. It’s my dream. It can be as crazy as yours without the lace underwear.

I made another painting the next day, while the Dow was dropping satanically, 666 points:

Dow Jones Industrial Average, January 5, 2018 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 37"

The two are of the same vista. The first is a sylvan scene in my memory when the Dow was reasonable and I was a boy dreaming of a just and fair society. God, I remember back then parents thinking the world was ending they had it so bad, and yet, in hindsight, the Dow was just a gleam in the eye of the total global domination monster it is today.

The second is of the Dow this year climbing to remarkable, unexplored heights of Chinese Plastic Crap Mountain. I made this scene more fuzzy because I believe that time and the repetition of status-keeping, money hoarding, and career-building makes adults so stupid and afraid of practically everything that they begin to see the strangest demons climbing out of rabbit warrens.

Privately, every dollar we keep in the Dow is just a reminder of death around the corner. Publicly, its existence is our human being account sheet delivered to Pan’s desk at quitting time.

Most of America ate dinner in 1981. Americans still eat dinner today. What has changed? Two generations of coddled babies in their cribs make for terrible activists of revolution that needs to happen. Too many parents are dreaming that arbitrary wealth acquisition is the best way to make a living.

So I hope and pray Pan makes the economy implode. Because no human thinks to knock the Dow Jones propagandist out of his chair, I must call providence to action. I still dream like the child, who never dreamed about money to suddenly appear and make the world go away.

Compare the paintings together and see—the living future is the living past, more or less, no matter what the numbers tell you.