The PowerElite
JohnNollson
"The PowerElite" John Nollson For the past thousand or so years, the middle class has been rising and the aristocracy has been declining. After the French Revolution, the surviving...
...There is no appeal...
...After thinking it over for a while, the machine decides, in a wholly arbitrary manner, whether it will consent to raise the toll gate...
...Who are its members...
...Nor do they accept scrip...
...As often as not, it decides in the negative...
...They are beyond the control of the ordinary citizen and are literally untouchable, often unreachable, by the citizens they mercilessly exploit...
...Neither will they deign to give receipts...
...In the tradition of the Elizabethan cavalier, they disdain pennies...
...After the French Revolution, the surviving aristocrats thought it prudent to abandon knickers in favor of long pants...
...Meanwhile, not so long ago, a Yugoslav writer introduced the notion of the "new class," which is, to simplify, the class that runs everything...
...Pedophilia is rampant among battery purveyors, and pre-teenage boys willingly deliver their younger sisters to the beasts in order to keep their little beeping machines charged up Meanwhile, the battery makers trade in lead with the dental mechanics, each group reinforcing the other's power, wealth, and influence...
...The State refuses to intervene, and the Church thinks it serves them right...
...So vital have their products become that they literally dare any consumer to knock a battery off their shoulder...
...The more powerful filling station operators resemble the medieval barons in another essential respect...
...Most filling stations are capable of withstanding long sieges, especially on weekends, when they pull up their drawbridges and exclude the outer world...
...This has made it harder to tell who belongs in what class...
...No amount of protest will affect it...
...Another influential segment of the new New Class is the dental mechanics...
...They are treated with extraordinary deference, since an ordinary bourgeois cannot get his tank filled unless he removes his hat when asking the operator to fill 'er up...
...It is to this new New Class that we must now turn our attention...
...The battery makers established their control over society by deliberately withholding double-A batteries from the market at the height of Christmas season...
...enforcers of the alleged price control system are not allowed to cross the boundary of a filling station unless the operator allows it...
...Recent studies, however, indicate that the composition of the class that runs everything has undergone a rapid transformation in the wake of recent crises...
...Such abuses far exceed anything the barons had against had King John, even before he signed the Magna Carta...
...They show all the arrogance of the parvenu...
...Our only hope in combatting the new New Class is to get its members fighting among themselves...
...Some of the serfs have come to resent this, but there is nothing they can do about it...
...Not yet so influential as either filling statioia operators or dental mechanics, but rising steadily nonetheless, are the purveyors of flashlight batteries...
...First of all, there is the new aristocracy, namely the operators of filling stations...
...People suspect That this is a lie or, if true, supremely irrelevant, but they are cowed into silence...
...They will perform no service unless they are first honored with a characteristic salute, which consists of raising the left arm while holding within a clenched fist the requisite coins...
...Instead, they make fillings and other dental fixtures from baser metals such as lead and antimony...
...Like the guilds of old, filling stations are exempt from the prerogatives of the state...
...Like filling station operators, dental mechanics demand their pick of the prettiest hygienists before they will supply the dentist with dental bullion...
...They are allowed to get away with this since every central banker knows that the survival of the world's financial and monetary system depends on the cooperation of dental mechanics...
...It is no pleasantry to have one's jaw weighted down by lead fillings, but there is nothing that can be done about it...
...The most interesting members of the new New Class, though the least commented upon, are of course the exact-change machines that control access to bridges, tunnels, and turnpikes...
...It remains adamant...
...Let the exact-change machines feast on a diet of slugs which, in the chewing, will wreck its teeth...
...The machine then silently demands that the coins be thrown into it with a thud...
...Like the baronies of old, filling stations have come to resemble feudal castles, surrounded by moats designed to keep out the rabble...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980...
...Whenever a car bearing the sign "Just Married" appears, the operator insists upon exercising the right of prima nocte before dispensing the unleaded...
...John Nollson THE POWER ELITE F o r the past thousand or so years, the middle class has been rising and the aristocracy has been declining...
...Through this ploy, they were able to quintuple the price of batteries, and everyone who owned either a transistor radio or an electronic game was forced to bend the knee...
...They are, for example, landed, and their filling stations are passed on to the oldest son intact...
...This is why dentists have thus far escaped a windfall profits tax, though everyone knows that they are filling teeth with fifty dollar gold while pretending that it's five hundred and twenty-five dollar gold...
...If the citizen seeks to trespass upon its immunity by assaulting it, he is immediately arrested and incarcerated...
...With their enormous power and their characteristic mode of dress, speech, and musical preferences, they show all the markings of traditional aristocracy...
...Maybe when it discovers the cost of having its teeth repaired, it will learn a little humility...
...Battery purveyors show their contempt for a society powerless to restrain them by claiming to pack power into their little cylinders under a pressure that exceeds 10,000 pounds per square inch...
...They are withholding gold from fillings in order to horde it...
...Because dental mechanics control a significant fraction of the world's gold supply, they are now afforded more deference than even the gnomes of Zurich...
...Dental mechanics believe in Gresham's Law, and practice it...
Vol. 13 • June 1980 • No. 6
