What if . . .
In August of 1964, I decided to drop out of the Brooklyn Polytech Aeronautical Engineering program and sell authentic Peruvian hats, mittens and scarfs out of a street cart in what is now called Tribeca, in lower Manhattan. This was my personal response to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that I still remember very vividly reading about in the Sunday, NY Times, deciding that me and the US were moving in different philosophical directions. (I was 19.)
As luck would have it, I got to trade my college text books, two boxes of my old 45RPM records, and the August 1962 issue of Playboy magazine for the entire Peruvian village that was making these hats and scarfs and mittens, and I was now, more or less, kind of, a capitalist, a visionary, an entremanure if you will.
Business boomed those first summer months; most of my customers wore shredded college sweats and carried back issues of the NY Times "This Week in Review", so I knew that we were all on the same political page and that we also shared a passion for primitive llama hats with itchy earflaps.
I have never doubted, since then, that the GOTR was the singular event that began the end of the Great America we all believed in, but who cares about that when, six months later, NeimanMarcus picked up our product line and I got piggy piggy rich very fast, and moved from my Tribeca coldwater flat (cardboard windows held together with packaging tape) to my new estate on Long Island (the old Vanderbilt place).
Soon after that move, it became obvious to me that what's killing our great country, and the world, are the little people. The lazy worker bees. The "giveme giveme's" I called them. The Peruvian weaver women, caked in dust and dirt, wanting more more more from me in terms of pay raises.
Happily the power of money was on my side at that point, and I easily got stinkingly richer and richer (buying common goods from village weavers and selling to wealthy New Yorkers who craved "artisan craftwork and clothing" at a 10,000% markup). But sadly, after only 4 brief decades of excessive profits, fortune (and those "fair trade" freaks) slowed our cash flow, so I sold out and retired to the South Pacific.
As I sit here on the deck of my island estate, watching the sun set over the crew repainting the helipad markers on the top deck my yacht , I think of the cold heartless world out there that remembers me badly for buying stuff from poor people and selling it to rich reople.
Life sucks, I tell you. It just ain't fair, and what really hurts is that nobody cares . . . nobody cares about me.