The Emporer's New Clothes

I heard an astonished fake-news reporter on the radio the other day—this was the day the stock market was losing a billion points or something (suckers!) and cops in Greece were whacking people with sticks (perhaps they had just returned from a training session in the US)—commenting that the dirty little secret in the whole mess was that "the world has no money, and the emperor has no clothes." Take heart and join the club, Court Stenographer, we already knew that.

So as I was laughing at this poor sap who had lived his whole life without realizing that Wall Street and it's companion wretched hive of scum and villainy, Washington, DC, were absolutely not real and also totally fake, I started to think about this whole naked emperor scenario. Of course everyone knows the story (if you don't, please immediately chastise your parents—if you know at least one—for not caring about you and depriving you of useful fables during your obviously intellectually and culturally impoverished childhood). The emperor is afraid of looking foolish and low class, and the high class people of the court are afraid of falling out of favor with the emperor. The regular folks are somehow intimidated into pretending to see what the high class types saw, probably due to the effects of some variation of the corporatist system of bribery, extortion, and general corruption which was no doubt ravaging the economy of this allegorical empire, and which is also now extant in every corner of the actual world we live in. But anyway, in a high school English class way, who is supposed to be what? Is it generally assumed that the emperor is a stand in for real world royal types, and the peasantry is supposed to be us, the everyday people who can recognize the nonsense of the royalty* but don't? Is the little boy who has the courage (or total lack of awareness of appropriate public behavior) supposed to be those who are willing to "speak truth to power?" (as the smart folks are saying these days.)

Maybe. When this yahoo started practically sobbing about the stock market drop—which I assume he was worried about because his stupid pension and/or 401(k) is wrapped up in it—I started thinking that the emperor was us. We're the ones using phony fiat dollars everyday, pretending they're so valuable. We're the ones who have been duped by the cunning weavers into this whole program of trading valuable capital (labor, time, ingenuity, etc) for Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs). The weavers, by the way, would be the Federal Reserve System and the nefarious banks behind it, whichever those might be, and good luck finding out. We are also the ones who insist that the peasantry recognize our fine fabric as something other than the auto-delusional farce that it is (see how that works out? Because FRNs are made of a fabric/paper material. See?). Remember that one time when Iran said they wanted to stop using FRNs as the default currency for trading oil? And remember when the US started threatening Iran right after that? "See my fine clothes, wretched villain! Glory in the majesty of my extravagant finery!" We're the emperor, because he was so easily duped in his pride, arrogance, and ignorance, and because we persist in forcing our non-existent non-money on the world. True, they wanted it while the illusion held, but now that the intrinsic value of the dollar is being noticed, the masters of the system are reluctant to let go. Don't you hate being the emperor? I hate being the emperor. I think the emperor should have executed the weavers and tossed their bodies into the ocean for the crabs to eat, or at least shooed them away with a stern look. That seems to be the only sensible thing to do.

By the way, Ron Paul is the young boy in the crowd who dared to proclaim the nakedness of the emperor. Who else?





*I'm including elected officials here because let's face it, they really are. Don't try to argue against this.