Vampires, Sucking on the People’s Blut

by Jim Washburn

Why Are the Rich So Rich?

Vampires are ruining TV for me. My wife is hooked on True Blood, HBO’s hemosexual romp that’s half bodice-ripping soap-opera, half Zalman King-styled softcore kink porn. She records it on the DVR and we watch it during dinner. Does it bother me that I’m trying to enjoy a nice plate of whatever while our TV screen is awash in blood, gore and spinal columns torn fresh from someone’s back and waved around like a drum major’s baton? No, not much.

It’s the teeth that bother me, where, at the first sign of disharmony, everyone’s incisors go schwing!—really; their teeth have their own sound effect—and are suddenly pronging out of their mouths like inverted goalposts.

It’s such a frequent occurrence, plus vampires are so ubiquitous in media these days, that no matter what I’m watching—Mad Men, Rick’s List, Antiques Roadshow—I keep expecting those damned teeth to piston into place at any instant. “You’re telling me that’s not a real Wakefield chair?” Schwing!

Between True Blood, Being Human, Vampire Diaries and kindred shows, there may be more vampires on the air these days than there are blacks or Hispanics. On the cover of the current Rolling Stone, you’ll find True Blood’s stars naked, in a faint echo of the famous 1980 nude John Lennon cover, except the three vampire stars are splattered in blood, as Lennon was five hours after his photo had been taken. For those of us old or mistaken enough to see a resemblance between the two photos, it’s an unsettling sight.

Lennon had sung “the dream is over” ten years before that, but for a lot of us it wasn’t over until that December day, when it was settled that the world would have to stumble along through the cosmos with no further light from the Beatles. Which is apropos of nothing, except that it’s been a long twilight since then, and while vampires amuse me, I don’t get much of a glow from them.

I miss the aristocratic bloodsuckers of old. Any nimwit gets to be a vampire now: hillbillies, shitkickers, rural teens who can’t find a meth lab. Back when, most vampires were exclusively the upper crust with overbite. Even Blacula, despite its ghetto whore vampirettes, has a title character who’s is an ancient African king (played by the Shakespearian actor William Marshall). Has there ever been a better movie title in the history of cinema than the sequel’s Scream, Blacula, Scream?

Back when you had guys like Bela Lugosi at your throat, you knew you were being bled by some old-world money, bound up in an almost Catholic sense of archaic ritual as regards sunlight, native soil, garlic and all that.

Because they featured the rich feasting on the working folk, old school vampire stories were incisive allegories for the societies in which they were made. It’s one of the oldest stories in the world, except, instead of getting rich off the sweat of another man’s brow, vampires go right to the tap.

“Babylon system is the vampire, sucking the blood of the sufferers.” Bob Marley sang that, not too many years after he’d worked at a Chrysler plant in Delaware. (It kind of makes you want to buy a 1968 Chrysler 300 just on the off-chance it might be a Bob-built one.) Though his would-be assassin’s aim was worse, Bob got shot, too. You shouldn’t say bad things about the rich, folks.

Marley didn’t live long enough to see things get really bad, where now the gap between rich and poor, and the accordant gap in power, is perhaps the greatest it’s been since Pharaonic times. In the U.S., the gap has widened nearly every year since Ronald Reagan bestowed his grace on us, and it was a pretty good gap to begin with.

For doing as little or less than they’ve historically done, those who own everything own even more of it now, while those who own your labor are making more off of it than ever.

I know plenty of fine rich people, who mostly got that way by creating something new and good in the world. Hooray for that. But there is also being just too damn rich.

Consider Irvine Co. tycoon Donald Bren for a moment. He’s the 16th richest person in America, according to Forbes, worth some $16 billion in his stocking feet. He owns a fully staffed 240-foot yacht, five jets, and several stunning homes, and consistently has spent $3 to $5 million a month for other stuff. Most of this info is only public fodder because he’s being sued by two now-adult offspring he had by way of a woman who was not his wife.

The two apparently feel their youths were stunted by the paltry $3 million Bren paid in child support for their upbringing over 14 years ($107,000 per kid per year, if you were wondering) and in their lawsuit are seeking back child support of $400,000 apiece a month.

Kind of puts your puny problems in perspective, doesn’t it?

If you’re like most Americans, it’s all you can do to pay your mortgage or rent, insure your health, and keep oatmeal on the table. If you’re working, by all accounts you’re working harder and for less real money than you were 30 years ago.

That’s really got me scratching my head: If you’re getting less of the money from your labor, where could it be going? Then there’s the rich, who it seems can’t help but wake up atop of a new pile of money every day. Where can that magic money be coming from? I could maybe understand one of these happening, but how could two such inexplicable things be going on at the same time?

People on the fringe like to think there’s a Trilateral Commission, Illuminati or SMERSH controlling world events from behind the scenes. I think otherwise. Yes, of course powerful people will work in concert to perpetuate their self-interests, but, like they say, man makes plans and God laughs. View humanity from the clouds or higher, and our societies scarcely make more sense than a chicken coop’s. We peck and we preen and we heave up mighty buildings and knock them down, and our fellow man still dies of exposure out in the ice plants. We are such a muddled, interwoven mass of self-interests, fears, innovations and unexpected tsunamis that any coven’s schemes of global domination are doomed to frustration.

So much for plans, but then there are tendencies. You don’t get a concentration of wealth like we have today without the tectonic mass of it causing whole continents to shift. Wealth tilts everything its way. It’s like how Gore Vidal described battles of the Greco-Persian wars in his book Creation: not so much a matter of strategy and resolve as of having a force so vast and ponderous that it pretty much just absorbed the enemy city-states in its path.

Interesting article in the L.A. Times last week. It was titled “The ad wars intensify” but went on to paint a very one-sided war, where conservative advocacy groups are pouring unprecedented amounts of money into this year’s elections. At the forefront of these is the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Who’s that? No one knows. The way our laws are currently structured, they don’t have to say who the donors are. It might be Haliburton; it might be a shell company for the Sultanate of Brunei, but you gotta serve somebody.

When the Supreme Court ruled this January that, in election campaigns, money equals free speech, that knocked down one of the few remaining protections keeping the roar of money from drowning out the human voice. Just when you thought representative democracy couldn’t get any less representative, here come unlimited piles of money to glut the airwaves with an unlimited number of shallow, fear-invoking commercials.

Back when the founding fathers were founding things, one of the givens of free speech was that you generally knew who was speaking so freely to you. Some of our current Congressfolk thought it would be useful to voters to know which individuals and corporations were paying for what messages, and tried to pass a modest disclosure law, which was blocked by Republicans. The Times article quotes President Obama from a speech he made in Austin, Texas, where he warned that nebulous groups like Americans for Prosperity would spend millions to influence elections without people ever knowing who was behind it.

“And you don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s an insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line,” the Pres said.

Sometimes I wish Jefferson, Tom Paine and the gang had hung around though the centuries—they’d need to be vampires, I suppose—so they could visit the members of the Roberts court in the wee small hours and let them know what they thought of their ruling.

As for the current crop of vampires, I just don’t know. The old rules don’t apply. They drawl, saying “I want to drink your bluyud” instead of the crisp Germanic “blut” that Gary Oldman and his vampires predecessors craved. Blut: ask for it by name.

For a vital resource, the True Blood vampires wastefully throw blood and viscera around like it was unearned income. It’s a washday nightmare. And it’s getting harder to find novel ways to kill them. I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it, but I’m pretty sure there are only a few things left that the show hasn’t used yet to impale a vampire’s heart: a Sonicare, a Flying V headstock, and a raging hard-on. Maybe they’re saving those for the DVD box set.

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