Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

If you were from California and the year was 2013, you might say something like, “It was, like, so ironic, because, you know, we both totally bought, like, red cars.”

There was nothing ironic about two people buying red cars. There was no underlying secondary meaning. Two people buying red cars is a coincidence .

Many moral scolds had adopted grammar as a place where they could make other people feel bad about themselves. These people tended to be disturbed by the apparent misuse of the words ironic and irony.

On one hand, they had a point. There really wasn’t anything ironic about two people buying cars of the same color.

On the other hand, the words irony and ironic were just symbols with shifting meaning given their value by a general agreement amongst members in a society.

They were like money. They were imaginary.

Or maybe they were more like the bullshit words in Baby’s Annie Zero or Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land .

Just some crap that someone made up once.

When J. Karacehennem said that he was a flaming liberal who believed in Jeffersonian Democracy, the irony did not derive from J. Karacehennem being a flaming liberal. He was indeed a flaming liberal.

As a flaming liberal, J. Karacehennem believed in an equality of people regardless of social constructs like sexual preference, race, gender and creed. As a flaming liberal, J. Karacehennem believed that the best way to achieve this equality, and address other ills, was through a reordering of society via governmental policies and the redistribution of wealth.

The irony in his statement derived from the fact that, as everyone knows, Jeffersonian Democracy was a wonderful fantasy about a nation comprised of farmers who hated a centralized government and embraced agrarian freedoms.

Being a flaming liberal was old-fashioned and almost totally discredited, because the national dialogue had been hijacked by an oligarchy of the ultra-wealthy. This oligarchy recognized that, in a reordering of society via governmental policies, it was their wealth which would be redistributed.

So they had thrown their resources behind corrupting the terms of the argument. The ideas of flaming liberals were verboten.

Instead, people were told to embrace intolerable bullshit like pulling themselves up by their bootstraps , which was a figure of speech that meant nothing.

People were told to embrace intolerable bullshit like Jeffersonian Democracy, which decentralized the importance of the Federal Government.

People loved talking about Jeffersonian Democracy. It was mentioned with an astounding frequency in the national dialogue, considering that it was a stupid fantasy about farmers.

What people didn’t love talking about was the personal life of Thomas Jefferson, the man for whom Jeffersonian Democracy was named.

Jefferson was American’s third President. He had been one of its richest men. He was its greatest theoretical architect of freedom. He believed in self expression and freedom of speech .

He was also one of the twelve Presidents of the United States to own slaves, which is a larger figure than the number of Presidents who had beards.

Even among the one-fourth of Presidents who owned slaves, Jefferson stood out.

After Thomas Jefferson’s wife died, Thomas Jefferson started venting his lust in his wife’s half-sister, Sally Hemmings.

Sally Hemmings had eumelanin in the stratum basale of her epidermis. Sally Hemming was Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s sister and she was Thomas Jefferson’s slave.

Sally Hemmings was Thomas Jefferson’s dead wife’s sister because Thomas Jefferson’s dead wife’s father enjoyed venting his lust in Sally Hemmings’s mother. Sally Hemmings’s mother was Thomas Jefferson’s dead wife’s father’s slave.

The venting of lust into slaves was also known as rape. So Thomas Jefferson was a rapist and Thomas Jefferson’s dead wife’s father was also a rapist.

If you were from California and the year was 2013, and you were discussing Thomas Jefferson’s sex life, you might say, “It’s, like, so ironic, because Thomas Jefferson was, like, totally a rapist who, you know, was raping a woman who, like, you know, herself was totally produced by a rape.”

You’d be wrong.

It wasn’t ironic that Thomas Jefferson raped a woman who was created by rape. It was coincidence that Thomas Jefferson raped a woman created by rape.

Well.

It was either coincidence or it was symptomatic of institutionalized racism that devalued the agency and individual rights of people based on their race and economic status.

You know, like, either one.

Four other Presidents have been accused of raping children into their slaves. These Presidents were: George Washington, William Henry Harrison, James K. Polk and John Tyler.

A great number of rich White men had vented lust into their slaves, and a great number had produced children in their slaves, but very few had produced a body of written work about the necessity of human freedom.

Thomas Jefferson was the rare slave holder who enjoyed raping his property while writing declarations and essays and letters about the dignity of man.

He was enslaving people at home while crafting a philosophical system that advocated the spread of liberty throughout the world.

It was a hell of a time to be alive.

Christine was under pressure.

She had rented the same apartment since 1997.

The apartment was rent-controlled, which meant that her landlord could raise the rent by only a small yearly percentage. This percentage was set by the San Francisco Rent Board.

The highest increase had been 2.9 %.

The lowest had been 0.1 %.

Christine rented her apartment in 1997 at $1,000 a month.

With all the percentage increases, Christine at present was paying $1350 per month. By the halfway point of 2013, the median price of 1BRs in San Francisco was $2,800.

Rent control is a miracle.

Christine lived in an apartment complex with six units spread across two buildings. This rendered her a less likely candidate for eviction, thanks to technicalities in the laws that governed evictions. But it was still possible.

The most important of these laws was the Ellis Act.

The Ellis Act had been passed by the California State Legislature in 1986. It was a way for landlords to get out of the business of renting.

But laws are weird. They create loopholes and manufacture unexpected consequences.

An unexpected consequence of the Ellis Act was that it created market incentives for landlords to convert their properties into condo buildings or rip down pre-existing structures and erect new gargantuan buildings in their stead.

Created for one purpose, it had assumed another. It had become the de facto method of evicting the elderly and ethnic minorities.

The elderly and ethnic minorities were living in rent controlled apartments. They were taking up space that could be occupied by employees of Google.

The biggest problem with Christine’s living situation is that all six units had been occupied for years. All of the apartments were rent controlled.

The landlord had inherited the buildings from his mother in the late 1970s. He didn’t have eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

He tried to be a patient man, but every day the news media bombarded him with stories about the city’s rising rents. He couldn’t help but calculate how much money he would be making if his tenants paid the market rate.

He was losing tens of thousands of dollars a month.