Some thoughts on dead billionaires

We are starved for direct action. Every day we get to watch, in real-time, billionaires extract the last of everything. And the "proper channels" for change are ill-equipped and unwilling to stop it. In no metaphorical terms, the world is burning before our eyes. We've become a sort of helpless observer, and in the absence of direct action, it's the symbolic events that feed us. This helpless observation has become our muse for expression. It is the lens of despair in which we see the world. It feels perfectly reasonable, even morally sound, that our voices have become rasped and our tongues sharp.

Just ten years ago, openly expressing this kind of unbridled joy for death would be unthinkable. Even and especially if the dead happened to be a billionaire. Sure, someone would tweet out a light jab that felt too soon. But such a sentiment would be labeled fringe. We loved billionaires in the not-so-distant past. Cover stories marketed billionaires like Elon Musk as geniuses who would change the world. We loved and aspired to be them. They were a type of superhero.

Think about our biggest superhero of the 2010s— a white billionaire genius whose only superpower was wealth. Fast forward to today, it's a brown kid from Brooklyn with an anti-capitalist best friend. Our enchantment over the ultra-wealthy has dissipated, and pop culture has adjusted accordingly. Tony Stark is dead.

I'd also like to note that we were all content, giddy even, with the story of a Ukrainian grandmother who placed sunflower seeds into a Russian soldier's pockets. The joke here is when that soldier is dead, sunflowers will grow from his corpse. It turns out you can find crass humor in death.

So, is a dead billionaire funny? I don't know; I haven't had the pleasure of talking to one.