Watching Rome Fall, USA-style! A Satirical Guide to the New Gilded Age

Yeh, so it’s been about a year… That’s probably long enough for a siesta. Maybe more like a hibernation, but that’s the way we roll here, we who are onlineandbored. We’ve stirred our jowls, our bowels and our minds, in an extraordinarily effusive manner – actually, we’re being quite spritely, considering the rather droll dullards we most comfortably accept that we are. Out of our slumber and into the bright light of a way over-active world.

onlineandbored.com waking up from a slumber bruce-mars-wBuPCQiweuA-unsplash — Ok.. so this is NOT us. This person is way too good looking to be us. But you aren’t going to want to look at us in the early stages of rousing ourselves from extended hibernation. No siree. So you have instead, this great (and free, ’cause that’s what the folk at Unsplash do) photo, taken by the famous photographer Bruce Mars, and we have now suitably visualised a rousing from a deep sleep. You’re welcome.

And what do we see? We see the end of the world’s loudest, proudest, most powerful, most wealthy, and most self-congratulatory, self-flagellating empire. What a spectacle.

Golly Gosh! So many highly motivated, irritated, angry, terrified, excited people. How do they all find the energy? Now it should be noted—this is an AI image. So it’s probably copied from some poor sucker’s work, hidden in twisted code no one can untangle. Ergo, said sucker remains suckered, unpaid, and artistically violated. Which counts, when you fundamentally disagree with the idea of effort..

While news outlets and coffee shop wannabe political analysts frown and berate each other, we rub our eyes and pause to see if staying still will make the noise stop. ?. ?. Nup. Ok, we’re gonna have to participate. Unwillingly. Grudgingly. Badly. But we’ve just woken up, so we’re ok with that. Maybe you are? Maybe you aren’t? It’s too big a job to work that through, so we’ll just have to ask you to tag along, while we try and navigate this very different world.

Anyway, we’ve convinced AI (or HAL, or the next-gen Terminator – we’re not entirely sure what moniker he/she/it/they are known by) to lend us a sliver of its all-consuming brilliance to make a button for you to push. Yes, we do care. We’ve grudgingly added our dismal effort, and come up with a task for you Button-Pushers guaranteed to provide enormous fun. So much fun.

That’s probably enough fun. More than enough fun. If you feel deficient in the fun-stakes, perhaps try pushing the button again. Or not. It’s up to you, because we’re now a little sleepy. So much effort.

Looking out of our hovel, it does appear that the Great American Dream has been reset just a tad. As in – it’s been lifted up, eviscerated, shredded, diced, roughly sauteed, doused with salt, charcoal-grilled and finally, smothered with some evil-smelling sauce. Ooohhh. Nice.

Remaking the Great American Dream, Gilded Age 1890’s style. What fun. There’s so much to be gotten rid of, when we return to the Good Ol’ Days of child labour, massive inequality, oppression of workers, and a boom-bust cycle that would make a Ukrainian drone operator proud. Surely all those hiccups are mere side issues to a wonderful industrial flourishing,

Only to be born again in a bright new, freshly scrubbed reincarnation of ‘The Gilded Age‘ of those untidy late 1800’s. Although some folk don’t see that as necessarily a good thing, those folk are probably from the demographic that were on the receiving end of the Gilded Age’s less savoury social imperatives. Whingeing beggars! A country can’t get great again without a few workers falling under the wheels!

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