A Picture Worth 1,500 Words
We’ve all heard the saying: A picture is worth a thousand words. Let’s put it to the test here and now. Perhaps we’ll discover that some pictures are worth more than a thousand words.
Look at this picture, for instance.
What do you see? Perception is inherently subjective, so we might differ in our assessments of the connotations. Still, allow me to begin the curation of your experience of this particular photograph by giving you some objective data about who and what is depicted in the frame of reference.
From left to right, we have the following personages: Nick Candy, Elon Musk, and Nigel Farage. In the background, behind the three men is a portrait painting of a young(er) Donald Trump. The painting is titled The Visionary, and it was created in 1989.
To this point, I have not offered a perspective or an opinion, but, rest assured, one is forthcoming. I know we’re in a post-factual period of history, but I think it’s important to set a factual foundation, an objective floor – hard and undeniable – for subsequent subjective opinion.
With a few basic facts established, allow me to tell you a bit about the men standing in front of the portrait. You are all familiar, no doubt, with the guy in the middle. You probably don’t actually know him, just as I don’t know him, but you are familiar with the persona that he projects to the universe (beyond Earth to Mars). His name, of course, is Elon Musk, and he is purportedly the richest man in the world, the principal owner and CTO of X (formerly Twitter), the CEO of Tesla, and the CEO, board chairman, and chief engineer of SpaceX, which I’ve written about recently. He has controlling interest in other companies, too, as I’m sure you know.
You perhaps noticed that I used the qualifying word “purportedly” when discussing Musk’s nominal status as the richest man in the world. Why did I do that? Well, I’m not sure that he is the richest man in the world. Maybe he is, maybe not. There’s a point where it doesn’t matter, except to those jockeying for the prize.
Those who compile lists of the richest people in the world never count royal or sovereign wealth, and I suspect that the principals in the royal families of Saudi Arabia, for instance – such as Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS – might have more personal wealth than Musk. We have no way of knowing because Fortune and Forbes, and all the other media trackers of the richest people in the world, don’t count the personal wealth attributable to specific members of royal families. Regardless, I don’t think MBS has to worry about his retirement.
Three Wise Guys
Anyway, enough about Musk. We hear about him every single day, usually as a result of what he has announces to the world on the social-media service he owns (X, formerly Twitter). I suspect he bought Twitter not as a business proposition, but as a platform and a set of algorithms that could be used for self-promotional purposes.
What about the guy on the left, Nick Candy? Most Americans are unfamiliar with him. His full name is Nicholas Anthony Christopher Candy and he and his brother, Christian, are generally described as high-end property developers, and billionaires, in the UK. Nick Candy has diversified his business interests beyond real estate, developing a portfolio of global investments in various technology realms, including augmented reality, computer vision, and data processing. Some of those investments have fared poorly, according to the Wikipedia page dedicated to Nick Candy.
More recently, Nick Candy was appointed treasurer of Reform UK, a British political party, whose leader is the other guy in this photograph, Nigel Farage.
Nigel Farage is probably better known than Nick Candy in the U.S. Farage is a longtime British politician and broadcaster, a veritable media gadfly, a Member of Parliament as well as the leader of Reform UK. Farage is frequently portrayed in the media as a right-wing populist, but a more accurate description might be opportunistic demagogue.
All three of the men in the frame of that photograph, standing in front of the painting of Donald Trump, were visiting Mar-a-Lago for purposes of self-aggrandizement. They all believe that personal advantage will derive from obeisance to the subject vaingloriously depicted in the painting behind them.
Now let’s consider the painting. I think it’s safe to assume that Trump commissioned the painting. Look at how he’s depicted in it: a god among men, a Christ-like figure anointed by providence, an omniscient Übermensch. What kind of man commissions that sort of portrait of himself without any trace of embarrassment, irony, or humility? It’s the act of a galloping narcissist, a free-range megalomaniac.
At one time, the photograph above, which serves as the dubious inspiration for this post, would have been comedic fodder, a springboard for ironic social commentary, or an impetus for scathing satire. Now, unfortunately, it’s just reality, meant to be taken earnestly and seriously, at face value. Even worse, it is taken seriously. Very few see it as farce, and if something isn’t perceived as farce, then it isn’t farce. The perception of farce, in these situations, depends on the puncturing of pretensions, and the pretensions on display in this photograph are blithely untroubled.
Adrift and Lost
I frankly admit to being adrift here, folks. Perhaps like some of you, I’m lost at sea, and I don’t see any landmarks that can help me find my way back to the land of the sane.
How did we get here, so far off course that wrong is right and everything is upside down? It’s not just about an election in a partisan political landscape. I believe the American electorate has been given a Hobson’s choice electorally for a long time. You can vote for Party A or Party B, for the leader of the former or the leader of the latter, but each party and each leader depends on the financial patronage of big money, and vested interests, for their political survival and viability. You get the best government money can buy, but the problem is, the people aren’t doing the buying.
What you have today is a plutocratic kakistocracy with superficial democratic trappings. In no way can you call it a government by the people, of the people, and for the people.
This photograph, and I’m sure it will be only one in a series of similar photographs, is what you get when a democracy is subverted and corrupted by big money. What was once farce is now tragedy.
The solution is not to hold your nose and pick one of the two parties presented to you by the money-fueled electoral system, but to demand substantive systemic reform so that all parties are more responsive to the needs and requirements of the electorate rather than to the blandishments and emoluments of well-heeled financial backers.
A plutocratic aristocracy should not be permitted to undermine a great democracy. Big money should be removed from the political equation, and if that is too grand an aspiration, we need to put guardrails in place so that the plutocracy is unable to run roughshod over the concerns and interests of the broader electorate.
Consider what is behind this photograph, and not just the grandiose painting of the subject. Right now in Mar-a-Lago, a succession of CEOs from the largest technology and financial companies in the U.S. (and much of the rest of the world) is paying obeisance to Donald Trump in one-on-one audiences with the president-elect. I can’t be the only one who thinks it's more than a little unseemly.
While I’m sure that past U.S. presidents met with corporate chieftains before, during, and after their time in the White House, usually those meetings, when they occurred, were furtive and carefully circumscribed. This is different. I’ve never seen such blatant, universal corporate solicitation of a U.S. president. It seems more like the fealty and deference paid to an organized-crime lord or the sort of unrepentant cronyism observers typically associate with repressive oligarchies.
Trump might have leveraged his own brand of demagogic populism to get elected, but he’s not bothering with the masses now that he has won office. Go ahead: You try getting an audience with the president-elect.
It also seems that what we’re now witnessing at Mar-a-Lago is the inverse of theoretical libertarianism. It’s more like an atavistic feudalism, with courtiers and a king deciding which aristocrats are assigned untrammeled rule over choice digital principalities.
I think we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room. We can’t keep acting as though this stuff is normal. It’s not normal. This is a deviation from what was the norm. Even more strangely, it's happening in plain sight, supposedly because we've all become inured to the underlying cynicism of the grim daily spectacle.
Years ago, I worked with a colleague who originally came from Pakistan. He used to tell me stories about a Pakistani prime minister who was known as Mr. Ten Percent, a sobriquet earned through allegedly rampant corruption. Maybe Mr. Ten Percent was actually a trailblazer, setting a sordid example for other political leaders everywhere to emulate in the digital era.