S
w
i
f
t
i
e
s
were swooning
at the wedding
Taylor-made in
Madison Square Garden.
Closing off major roads,
costing the city millions,
and making a public spectacle out
of a private union are no object to
billionaires and their excesses. It’s
a society as tiered as a wedding cake that
we all live in. ‘Let them eat cake,’ the rich
will say. ‘Eat the rich,’ is how we’d answer.
Let the Swifties boast of their heroine’s ineffectual
charity work. May their red-lipped idol, and all her
wealthy ilk, go the bloody way of Marie Antoinette.
Cake
Published
Infinite Ocean 
Thank you, Mawr — for expressing all my own objections to this fiasco so eloquently. I live in NYC and was appalled by not only the grotesque spectacle of this public display of obscene wealth, but the genuine excitement expressed by so-called Swifties — as well as corporate media.
This was a travesty that should have offended every working-class New Yorker — that should have been the object of our scorn and ridicule, not our adulation and idolatry. She could have held this event at any one of her half-dozen properties — in Rhode Island or Beverly Hills or wherever — but couldn’t resist the temptation to flex her celebrity for the rest of us to admire.
How she votes is irrelevant to me; it’s how she lives that I can’t abide.
Thanks again for your wonderful comments on my poem, Sean! How are you doing? I haven’t seen an article from you in a while.
I’m well, thank you! I have been posting irregularly for the past year-plus; I made a choice to invest my (finite) time and creative energy into my long-form fiction over short-form nonfic. I’m almost finished revising a collection of novellas, at which point I plan to do a deep-dive analysis of the 1990 teen drama Pump up the Volume for my blog. Kinda looking forward to writing an analytical essay again! I honestly don’t know how you do it with such regularity — and in such depth!
I have skimmed some of your recent excellent studies — of First Blood and Friday the 13th and Phantasm and Magic — and I’m looking forward, later this summer, to giving all of them the attentive read they deserve. You should consider perhaps one day publishing a book of your film criticisms; they are some of the best I’ve ever read.
Gee, thanks again! I’m about to start on an analysis of ‘Deep Red,’ the 1975 giallo film by Dario Argento. I’ve also been working on a lot of prose, in particular, a fantasy novel that is a political allegory for our troubled times. I’m at 80,000 words: When I get it into the 90,000 word area, I’ll do my final revisions and edits and try to find a publisher. If I can get it published, I hope you’ll read it.
I haven’t seen ‘Pump Up the Volume.’ Part of the reason I’ve had the time to write so much on my blog is that, ever since covid, I’ve been chronically underemployed. Ugh!
As I don’t need to tell you, sir, there are many folks who contribute meaningfully to their communities and/or society at large in absolutely essential roles that nonetheless have no monetary value in a capitalist society: poets, informal eldercare aides, food-pantry volunteers, citizen archivists, animal fosters — on and on and on.
What a bountiful, happy world we could have — not without its problems, but maybe without the current order’s disgraceful inequality and rapacious exploitation — if we moved from a technofeudalist economy to a democratic socialist one, where everyone’s needs were provided for, allowing all of us to pursue meaningful, joyous pursuits that create value not measurable on a quarterly report. What you do has meaning, Mawr — even if (perhaps because) your motivation is passion, not profit.
To that end: Hell, yes, I’ll read your fantasy novel when it’s published! I’m about to start soliciting publishers for my novella collection, so hopefully you and I both will find homes for our projects — and have copies to share with one another in the near future! In the meantime, looking forward to your analysis of Deep Red…