Velociworld

Patron Saints

I mentioned patrons briefly in my last jeremiad, and indeed alluded further to that most callow of relationships further in the post title. Clientelism being that state of social affairs when the rich patrons provide the powerless, but theoretically gifted, clients with the wherewithal to blossom. Or to at least ramp up their diets from cabbages and rutabagas, and perfume themselves for the inevitably poor choices in harlots and grifters they will invariably squander the patron's beneficence upon.

I should have expostulated further on that concept in the original post, however I was either 1) being coy in my own brilliantly obscure way, or 2) half-bent on middling cabernet and couldn't be bothered fleshing out the germ of the idea at the time.

I vote for 2).

Thus it is incumbent upon me to say more precisely what I meant, or mean. Now, I knock the patron-client relationship, of course, because we all look upon it as a sort of prostitution, or whoring of one's talents to please the patron. Yet the thing has given us Michelangelo and Leonardo via the de Medicis, for example. Without the patron many great talents would have died aborning, or never seen light of fame and fortune.

No, the clientelism I speak of is only coming into full flower now: the master-slave relationship one finds in corporatism, wherein the corporation (or industrialist, or software maker) is become beholden to the teat of public monies, as doled out by the government.

The early seeds we saw in the progressive trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt (Peace Be Upon Him). For although one is hard-pressed not to admire the man, he was no classical liberal. TR's movement to destroy monopolies quickly became an exercise in working with them. Wilson furthered this corporatism in World War I, and FDR during the Depression. Government and Industry sat down and, hand in hand, crafted socio-economic policy. The payoff to government: control of the means of production. The payoff to the corporations: they were able to destroy their competition.

It all has the taint of strange bedfellows to it, however the reality is much starker: this foul union was never a marriage of equals. The corporations were never equals to those who could ultimately legislate or regulate or tax or strong arm them out of existence. They were the bully's henchman, an infinitely better place to be than the victimized, but second fiddle, and fumbling for the sheet music.

Now comes the new administration. Before any of us proletarians even realized the deal was truly going down every government agency, state, city, city-state, town, hamlet, and village had a properly authorized wish list in front of their representative, and 800 pages of filthy garbage was duly issued forth like bubbles from a barnacle. There will be much backslapping over the miniscule revisions made to the stimulus bill, as the legislators congratulate themselves on their obeisance to the vox populi, but this thing will still reek of high heaven, and the patrons will have gifted the clients with that which the clients must have in order to survive in their socially acceptable, echo-chambered barnacle shells.

The Clientelism survives, and is indeed stronger for it. The 70% of the private sector that is small business? You, perhaps? You are fucked. You have no patron. You are the sap, the myrrh, that made this unholy thing possible in the first place. So shut up, por favor.

An aside: I know I will garner no comments or links for this post. It lacks the red meat you crazy fuckers crave. That's okay, sinners. For in the process of writing this screed I created a new drink: tomato juice, unbonded corn liquor, and copious amounts of ground cayenne pepper. It's a hillbilly drink, sure, but I like it, and have dubbed it the Bloody Ebsen.

Given that fact, I reckon I'll be out of pocket for a while.