The rich man can pass into Heaven about as easily as a Camel can go through the eye of a needle, and other images throughout our 4,000-year history of stories by brave tough-minded men, have it, written down, or other-wise available.
Christ, before he was old enough to get a drink or be drafted in America, threw the money-changers out of the Temple. The story is not clear. Could He have done so with the Bank of America? And there's a Walt Whitman Savings and Loan in Walt's home town, showing us all how famous we'll get if we never cheat. The rewards are clear, and detestable.
"When did America go wrong?" is a question asked and asked again, everywhere. Thoreau asked it. Charles Olsen asks it in the Maximus Poems, and finds that fishing, in Glouchester, was out of the hands of fishermen, and into the hands of usurers (bankers) about 100 years before our first revolution.
"When did America go wrong" is a question easily answered. It was never right. And I say this having deeply, the dream of what this thing could have been. Could still be, if people would only get out of our way. Out of their way.
When I was in grade-school the story was called the "Triangle Trade." This turns out to be: (1) you buy black humans from Arabs, in Africa. (2) you sell these people in Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and any other islands in the Gulf. (3) you get these stolen, black, people to cut the sugar-cane down, and the cane is rendered into molasses, shipped "up East," turned into Rum, and sold in England.
It turns out to be a triangle of "trading," beginning with stolen, black humans and ending with poison, Rum, sold in England.
The whole thing is you have to get it absolutely straight, that "profit motive" means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible. "Good guys always lose," said Casey Stengel.
One of my favorites among the many tough, true, things that Kenneth Rexroth has said is this: "People look at our free public library system as something beautifully American, free, liberty, and all that, but the fact is those libraries were built with money that should have been paid to the steel-worker: in the first place." (I paraphrase, not having my books handy.)
Greed, then, and Usury (the most pernicious form of greed, the selling of money) have always been the carbuncles on the neck of America. We have never been free.
We are now in the middle of America's third revolution, (the second was the Civil War). This one hits America where it lives: "The conscience of most Americans is as thin as the skin of his wallet," said Nelson Algren.
When hundreds of thousands of "scions" they call them, of the greatest fortunes in America refuse to take over Dad's big company, then the revolution will really get going. In 1950 I got the vision that the fun of making huge corporations was over, and the creative thing (as difficult to do right as to build the corporations in the first place), the creative thing is, now, to give the corporations away.
How happy would South America be, if certain countries were told "United Fruit Company will no longer operate here?" Examples in every corner of this planet are too numerous and too obvious to include here.
Hold only to this one thought: it is now the time for America to give away its corporations. This, and this most of all, is the challenge to intelligence, creativity, or whatever.
Happily, thousands of youngsters understand this. One of the most important aspects of the present revolution, and one I've never seen written up, is the large number of folks, with real big money, who've dropped out.
Here's this kid with outrageous hair, big Harley, and weird leather clothes in a bar. He looks so young and strange he gets asked for his I.D., produces it, and takes to talking to a friend of mine. This friend of mine is a real Bibliophile, collects and loves books, really, that is, reads them. Memorizes some of them. So, in the course of a long conversation he allows as how his real ambition is to have a perfect bookstore. The kid says, "OK I'll get you one. Tomorrow we'll meet with my lawyer some place. Where?"
And it turned out to be true. There was the lawyer, the kid, the dream, the contract, everything. It's a real good bookstore in Southern California, the "owner" and his "partner" each get about $4,000 a year in salary, the shop makes a small profit which goes toward the investment ($10,000 I'd guess, considering the inventory of books has to be at least $5,000).
What we have here is a young man with money, and enough savvy to under-write a small business that is needed, and two whole families get their living out of it (making it frugally), and the rich kid loses nothing. Maybe gains by tax deductions, etc.
But, and this is so important, think what the rich kid is getting spiritually. We Buddhists insist that temples, and other offerings, earn us no merit. Well, maybe that is right in some stern way. But I think this young boy's offering of this bookstore, and the 2-family faring-well bit, is meritorious. Of course, it all depends on how he takes it or gives it. That's his problem. But do you know what this kid's damn fool father did? He, already slated to inherit more money than he could ever spend, stepped into Daddy's shoes and ran this huge corporation. Why?
Let's see it as the true revolution it is. Success, Ambition, Yankee Trading, and the rest of that is jazz, just plain old horseshit jazz. It's clear to those of us who don't have money, it's clear to those of us who do, and the removal of Money-as-God from America will crack, America faster than Christ cracked Rome.
Good riddance.
"You are all children of the Universe, you have a right to be here" the anonymous monk said. And while you are here you must:
(1) Eat and drink
(2) Sleep
(3) Piss and shit
(4) Die
(you can conceivably go without balling, though it is not recommended).
Since we have to pay money for (buy): (1) our eats (there being no land not owned, anywhere, anymore) and (2) a place to sleep or we get arrested, and (3) pay dearly for the place we shit and piss in, it appears that only a drink of water is still free, most places. For we certainly (4) have to pay dearly for death and burial, unless we are very clever indeed.
We are not free, we are slaves from the minute of birth until long after death --- we're on an eat later, work now, plan (maybe that's what is meant by Original Sin).
In order to pay for these things we cannot live without, we are expected to sell ourselves, not to the Devil (which might be a way better deal), but to a Corporation, a State System of several kinds, a husband, a rich relative, there are a variety of purchasers and the price may vary, but the fact remains we must, in order to live, die a little or a lot.
(Note that we left out breathing, and that the city of Tokyo now has a vending machine which gives you several breaths of good air, and that soon we will all wear metered masks).
Money is death. Ask yourself why banks and currency use the same images as tomb-stones.
But how to do it? And will it happen fast enough? Almost 15 years ago Gary Snyder had the vision: "If nobody bought a new car for just one year, the whole thing would collapse. Then maybe we could build it right this time."
This country, all countries, get younger every year. By 1970 more than half the population of the world will be under 25.
Some of these will find themselves "owning" huge amounts of money and power. I know one person who, years ago, told me he could "buy" 9 nations -- that is, he had more money than these nations had. It nearly drove him mad, did make him a little crazy, because it wasn't his Way to do this thing. He was benign enough, but he didn't want to be a dictator.
Somewhere around $100,000 money stops being money and turns into power. Thousands of young Americans have this power. The proper use of it could free the entire world.
It will be very difficult. You can't just give it away, because then it falls into greedy hands again. It has to be put to work, good work, and those who have this power have to learn what good work is. Not an easy task, but far simpler than most college profs would have you believe. Actually, everybody knows what's true and good, it was there in the first place.
And perhaps we'll be delivered by the hands of babes. I sure hope so.
