#31. Mutiny on The Bounty.
Bohemian Hustle PART 2: Corporations / governments want our wallets / our votes. We gotta wake up and take a long nap. On a Tuesday afternoon. After watering the succulents.
Dearest Readers,
May I present Part 2 of Bohemian Hustle: A one-woman attempt to subvert late-stage capitalism by supporting The Arts and small businesses - including her own. You can read Part 1 here! Thank you so much for your text messages, emails and comments left on Substack - it is good to know I am not attempting Order from Chaos on these murky shores all alone!
Wit everlasting love and non-biodegradable gratitude,
~ TS.
I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that, Willy?
~ Arthur Miller, From the play Death of a Salesman, 1949.
I am not sure anyone knows exactly what went down on The HMS Bounty in 1787 but the most enduring (white, male) tale is this: Grand maritime feats, dangerous savages and other risks endured by heroes of the Colonial Project as they arrived uninvited to fecund shores to steal from The Natives. Plot twist: White guys stayed a bit too long, got a touch of the sun. A few mingled with hot Polynesian women and realised life doesn’t have to be a slog, a grind, a misery!
Stuff that! said young acting-Lieutenant Christian Fletcher. The hell with scrubbing decks! Why should I throw away my life for someone else’s profit when I can make sweet love under the South Pacific sun, eat breadfruit to my heart’s content and learn to surf? Let’s take over the ship. Here’s a little boat laden with food and gadgets, now fuck off, Captain Bligh, chop-chop! Hope you make it alive to Timor. Your work here is done!
In a brief moment of clarity, Fletcher broke his chains and chose Freedom.
And so can we!
Simplistic? Yes! I am sure Teehuteatuaonoa and the other ten Polynesian women on board The Bounty would like to add some texture here, but as writer-God, while I read about their abductions and their beautiful beaten barkcloth, I choose the Gibson / Gable fable to illustrate my ends.
My ends: How to recognise/resist enslavement and cut back a bit on one’s participation in the plunder of the planet and the pillage of the powerless while - incredibly - also leaving a little room to enjoy our one and only lives.
Rich bohemians have more fun than poor bohemians.
- Charles Handy, in an interview for The Idler, a magazine and school dedicated to fun, freedom, and fulfilment.
How did we arrive here? How did a handful of insatiable psychopaths manage to convince the rest of humanity to Obey? To be cogs in the wheels of their Gobbledy-Gobble Machine? Especially when the psychopaths didn’t bother even to pretend that The Bounty produced in their Factory would be shared. Six gluttonous Overlords stole all the breadfruit on the island and threw breadcrumbs at The Natives. And we lapped it up, didn’t we? What a coup!
Oh dear.
Okay, we know, we know. We gave up our lives to work at Factory A. But must we now spend all our meagre kopeks buying stuff from Factory B? Slave: “So sorry son, I missed your entire childhood and have no clue who you are, but I am sure you would enjoy these twelve iPhones!”. Master: “I feel dead inside, and so I must spend my underserved fortune launching myself into space / the bottom of the ocean to assure myself that I am alive”.
We are all - bar none - stuck in late-stage capitalism goo. So what to do, what to do? Some ideas:
If we are poor: We must try to survive.
If we are middle class: We must stop shopping, start living! Stop working, start napping! On a Tuesday afternoon. After watering the succulents. Because Rest is Resistance! And when we wake up, we must start a small business. Or support a small business. We must manage our Greed / FOMO. And, obviously, we must support The Arts. How else will we know what in *God’s* name is going on? From the “News”? Hahahaha! Funny.
If we are Henry Sugar: We must steal the cash from Uncle’s casino and fling it out of the balcony on the East Wing of Daddy’s mansion to the beggars and plumbers and washerwomen below. We must rewild The Estate! We must save an endangered habitat! We must save an endangered species! We must save our everlasting souls!
If we are not Henry Sugar: Here’s a little submersible laden with food and gadgets, now fuck off, Captain Elon, chop-chop! We’re taking over the ship. Hope you make it alive to Mars. Your work here is done!
[…To be Continued…]
Read Part 1 of Bohemian Hustle here! Part 3 Coming Soon.
...Men like Henry Sugar can be found drifting like seaweed all over the world. They’re not particularly bad men, but they’re not good men either. They’re simply part of the decoration. All rich people of Henry’s type, of course, have one peculiarity in common: a terrific urge to make themselves richer. The 10 million is never enough. Nor is 20 million. Always they suffer the insatiable longing for more money and the terror of waking up one morning and finding nothing in the bank...
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The ancient anthem, that gets more relevant given the continuum of politics of day gone, here and yet to come!
“Let me have men about me that are fat: Sleep-headed men; and such as sleep o' nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”