world built by white man

What would the world look like if it reflected my purchasing activities between 1980 and 2020?

No Amazon, no Walmart, no fast food, no internet, no big-box stores, no stocks or meta-level economic activity, no telecommunication other than payphones, a tiny amount of gold coins, no sedans, no pickup trucks newer than 1987, and an inexplicable number of very large lever harps. Walgreens and Woolworths would be mom-and-pops wedged between huge vegetable stores with mildly poisoned vegetables and a bizarre amount of high-fat yogurt with uncomfortably high levels of teat pus. Films would be things you watched in run-down Tartarian cathedrals.

I’m not white because race doesn’t exist. And I’m not a man—amidst their absurdities the wokes had one good point about how we needn’t slavishly follow gender norms made up by tribal complacency. But people and police officers look at me and tell me I’m a man and white so I play along. As for “world” I mean America, of course. Arrogant brevity, but here we are. [Looks around. Canada?]

By world I also only mean the surface structures atop the vastly better builds of some ancient civ that knew how to bore perfect tunnels through granite mountains without murdering Chinamen and how to loft a hundred huge and nearly fireproof glorious castles beside the harbors in what we Johnny-come-latelies call San Francisco or Washington D.C. And I’m pretty sure those true geniuses did most of the sustaining bottomwork on most of the older roads and perhaps most of the roads: the difficult part of surveying and the second-most-difficult part of amassing a flood-proof substructure that can last centuries. On top of that, we add some junk and in no time it has potholes.

World: the hideosities built down to code from sea to shining. If the world reflected my purchasing habits billionaires would be few, and most of them would be holed up in their stolen unheated Tartarian castles buggering children and eating them with garnishes of Gray Poupon.

If you want a full build you could add in the taxes I paid for five years as a professor. The navy would be a colorful collection of WW2 aircraft carriers, the air force would be Vietnam Hueys, and we’d have figured out that Michigan-style militia brigades are probably cheaper in the long run. The CIA would have to be content murdering third-rate heads of state amidst the annual offing of the latest inventor to discover free energy.

But I didn’t build the world we call “world.” You lot did. You paid for it. You built it. You asked for it—you got it, but even the Toyotas are now crap. You sent vast sums of money off to the millionaires to turn them into billionaires so you could complain about their products.

I’m just the ghost inhabiting your world, balancing boxes on my head made out of the new cheap cardboard. The boxes, not my head. I’m the fool who showed up late to the party. I’m innocent. And if you believe that, like and subscribe.

—Dave in B.C.

Picture topside is of my grandfather’s diary, recently discovered by my western cousin here in British Columbia on a visit out east to Niagara. The little tome is oddly lacking in discussions of Tartaria.