Author: Eric T. Styles

I never met so many so called Socialists until I moved to the French Quarter.

When I was in my early 20s, I read and believed in the Communist Manifesto. My interpretation of it was much different from how the socialists of today seem to interpret it. I imagined a world much like the Amish: a community living humble, modest lives; making the best of resources they had with simple living; sharing harvests; and helping one another to construct their community.

In my mind, when I read the word “bourgeois,” I pictured the decedent robber barons eating fat steaks and drinking expensive wine in their private train cars, and wearing expensive suits that cost a year’s wage for their employees. This seems to be the life style that most of today’s “socialists” envy and want the means to emulate. It’s just “not fair” that they don’t have the means to live it. Take one of those expensive sports cars and give it to me. It’s not fair that some people have two Lotuses when some have none.

It’s just not right that a corporate CEO makes $40 million a year, no one should make $40 million a year—unless it’s their favorite Hollywood celebrity making $40 million for just one film. Then not only are they “worth it,” but the socialist will stand in line to fork over the price of a ticket to add to the $200 million box office gross. Then they will use their newest smartphone to boast about how they just helped to pay the $40 million fee of their favorite screen star.  

Modern socialists get all bent out of shape if they read about a businessman’s private jet or luxury yacht, but would throw their grandmother under a bus to climb on board of the yacht of their favorite Hollywood heart throb. Spend their free time day dreaming about sharing a flight on a private jet to a film festival with one of their idols.

Once I had a socialist friend sneer at my simple diet. “How can you eat that? It’s so bland.” “Yea, I’m a poor person, that’s how we eat.” Oh wait, this is the same friend who was always boasting about eating barbecue from the hipster joint, Thai food take out, sushi for lunch and, of course, avocado toast.

The gourmet food that we see today had its beginning thousands of years ago. Wealthy kings and noblemen could afford exotic spices from around the world, mostly to mask the taste of poorly kept food that was half spoiled. They would hold huge banquets for other wealthy nobility and impress their guests with spices imported from around the world. Spices transported by camels or shipped from China, India and the Middle East; a few ounces of which would cost the equivalent of a year’s wage for the common peasant.

Today’s socialists order food on line that is precut and premeasured with pompous ingredients, probably fantasizing in their minds that they are some famous TV chef as they dump it all into the overpriced cookware they ordered from Amazon. Over their trendy photographed and shared online dinner, they spout the virtues of socialism. Those billionaires should be taxed more to feed the hungry, pass the Salted Caramel Angry Lobster Fatty Melt.

The socialists I know are generally the most materialistic consumers one could imagine. The latest electronic gadgets, smartphones, wireless speakers, ear buds, huge flat screen TVs and the like. They seem to have no concern about where they came from or who manufactured them. Child slaves digging the minerals and poorly paid teenagers assembling them in a building surrounded by a suicide net. They’ll use their devices to virtue signal about the evils of slavery from 200 years ago while holding the toil of modern slaves in their hands. I imagine a self-righteous woman in the 1800’s crowing about the evils of slavery and then in the next breath boasting “So, do you like my new cotton dress?” Same thing.

Socialists love to pompously boast about their travels. They are oh so sophisticated and learned, experienced in other cultures. Most of the time their travels are to a resort where they stay shitfaced drunk the entire time. Impoverished nations with genuinely poor people waiting for the decedent Americans to arrive on a cruise ship and toss them coins, just like the robber barons use to. They are so well-traveled, boasting how they binge drank on three different continents. Arriving home, they wish someone else would pay off their student loans so they could afford more vacations. A degree that proves sexism exists, because they can’t find a position that needs a degree in Women’s Studies.

The ones screaming for socialism today aren’t really poor,
they are just broke from consumerism.