Wendy’s really tried it.
Though their “dynamic pricing” scheme was galling enough, what truly stoked the public’s ire was that C-Suite thinking they could play in our faces like that. But to treat the matter with a mite more seriousness, the whole fiasco (which hasn’t been entirely walked back, as I understand it) is cause for sorrow among much of my cohort because it is so blatant an attack on what many of us perceived as one of our last real realms of refuge. You’re riding around at 3 in the morning after a night at the club and everywhere is closed. Your fridge is empty. And maybe an exit or two down glows, like a lighthouse beacon, the face of our freckled, pig-tailed savior. Or you’ve been on your feet for 18 hours, you’ve worked a double, and while you know your kids need to eat healthy, there isn’t a single muscle or tendon in your body powerful enough to spirit you to the grocery store for some vegetables. Even if you had the money, even if you had the time, you sure as shit don’t have the energy. But those 4 for $4 meals just might help y’all make it to the next day.
For what seems like nearly every day for perhaps the past six to nine months, Yahoo Finance has pushed notifications to my phone cheering on whatever new record the S&P 500 has broken. Almost every day, it seems, NASDAQ reaches record highs. NVIDIA just closed at a $2 trillion market cap. For so many months now, X hundred-thousand jobs get added to the market. PS5’s are now available at retail! And yet some economic miasma hangs in the air, a malodor emanating from our wallets. Look at GDP, look at any of the standard rubrics that tell the story of a healthy and robust national economy, and our rise from the Mordor of the Quarantine Era would guarantee whoever was our custodian another run at the tables, right? And yet everything sucks.1 How many of those X hundred-thousand jobs that opened up in any given month guaranteed a living wage? Here’s a joke: say you have 200,000 jobs, how many would an American have to work to afford rent…200,000. The crowd groans, then laughs, then cries a little, then maybe laughs again. Or who knows? Maybe someone just threw a tomato at me.
“The economy’s doing great,” our C-Suite-in-Chief tells the gangrenous journalism industry. “Something, something wage growth, something inflation,” he says from his podium as we cancel yet another streaming subscription. I’m sure he’s confused as hell as to why he’s so reviled, but it’s probably been a while since he’s eaten at Wendy’s. Someone should tell him the price of the brick’s gone up.
Whose economy, you know? ‘Cause Zaslav’s economy is not my economy. Jensen Huang’s economy is certainly not my economy. At least Logan Roy knew what a gallon of milk cost.
It’s a confusion of stories. NASDAQ is the Homeric epic, GDP the creation myth, and yet most everyone I know is a character in a Dostoevsky novel, you know, the one constantly besieged by demons.2
Ken Opalo said it best: “You can’t eat democracy.”
He writes:
As scholars and democracy promoters fret over democratic erosion/autocratization in the region, it is worth focusing less on the behavior of individual leaders like Patrice Talon (Benin) or Yoweri Museveni (Uganda) and more on the structural conditions that facilitate their rise (and successes at autocratization). In particular, it is worth appreciating the fact that the gap between the promise of democracy and its realized dividends over the last 30 years is arguably the biggest threat to democratic consolidation in African states.
His post is about African states, but a tremor of terrifying recognition shivers the American spine upon reading:
The dissatisfaction with democracy is reflected in the erosion of legitimacy of the electoral process and disengagement from partisan mobilization. A majority of respondents believe that electoral processes do not result in legislative representatives who reflect the views of voters (most voters want to see effort reflected in visible and attributable outcomes).
The events of the past several years that gave the Coup Belt its name put our Jan. 6 to shame, but the “it can’t happen here” of it all sounds increasingly hollow. Especially given that, as Opalo writes:
While most African states have witnessed significant economic growth over the last 30 years, it is also true that much of that growth has not resulted in sustainable development for the vast majority of Africans. Poverty reduction in the region has stalled. Urbanization has largely created consumption rather than production cities. […] From climate change to inflation, few African governments seem to have any coherent policy responses. The quality of public services is abysmal in most countries. Several countries struggle to guarantee basic physical safety.
Faced with some or all of these challenges, people across the region are justified in their demand for a system of government that does more than allow for ritualistic punishment of incumbents every election cycle. (emphasis added)
A post on whether the normative imperative toward constitutionalism and liberal democracy merits its moral underpinnings is a subject for another time. Liberal democracy works and it doesn’t. Same as Communism.
But you hear echoes of the above in every Millennial lamentation about the broken economic promise of this new American Century. “You told me to pledge my firstborn to afford college, go there for 4 years, then a job with a livable wage would be waiting for me, and I played the game just like you said, I switched to DirecTV for God’s sake! And now all I have is this shitty content creation job masquerading as journalism—a job I’ve just been fired from—and my landlord jacked up my pandemic-era rent, and every time you say ‘home ownership,’ I have to look it up in the dictionary.” Now I’ll not say that the whole concept of liberal democracy is to blame for soaring rents, the evisceration of the journalism industry, and the fact that I can’t watch Westworld anywhere anymore. But, you know, we used to be a country.
The story we’re being told about ourselves—and Election Years, like the NFL postseason, are replete with narrative—is for many, many, many folks (and has been for an incredibly long time) a fiction. And it’s wild that the storyteller will get confused in the face of our skepticism, ‘cause what does Qualcomm’s S&P 500 performance have to do with the price of a Baconator?
Does the Storyteller-in-Chief realize that the story of the United States economy is a horror story?
The storyteller’s confusion matters when the storyteller’s in charge (more or less; often, of late, less) of the bombs and the roads and the composition of the judiciary. But confusion, at least, implies some concern about how the story is received. There’s an argument—weak, but existent nonetheless—that confusion is better than apathy. Better than disdain. Than derision.
A TikTok arrived on my For You page shortly after Israel began its bombardment of the Gaza Strip in response to the Hamas attack that left 1,139 Israelis dead. The video had a commentator over a green screen explaining what was happening behind her. Explaining Malaysians playing Roblox. In the video, the boxy avatars strut and hop around their playscape waving Palestinian flags; indeed, the whole place is festooned with them. Blocky avatars marching and bopping down virtual avenues, standing in a crowd before a virtual podium, the flags are everywhere, and, as explained by the commentator, this was done as an expression of solidarity on behalf of these Malaysian players with the plight of the besieged, bombed Palestinians trapped in that small slice of land arced against the Mediterranean. A “we hear you, we support you, we will do our part to advocate for your survival and an end to your suffering” for the deceased, the dying, and those well on their way to either. “#FreePalestine”
There was an audio track to the video, playing over the commentary, and if the song was familiar, it was because I had heard it in at least two dozen videos prior. Inevitably over a video of someone expressing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, or a Jewish-American explaining how Israel’s response had the scales falling from their eyes re their lifelong adherence to Zionism, or a meme about how to properly wear a keffiyeh.
The song was “Dammi Falastini” by Mohammed Assaf:
I didn’t recognize the song title, but I did recognize the name. A story about where I know that name from:
June 22, 2013, I was sitting on my bed in a flat in Ramallah. I’d come to Palestine a month earlier to work with a prisoner’s rights organization and was living with a fellow law student who was working in women’s rights. My window faced in the direction of the city center, but our place was far enough away that the nights were serene enough for me to read some of the books I’d brought with me: an effort to beat back the haunts that had followed me from New York where I’d been going to law school.
My flatmate might have mentioned Arab Idol prior or it might have been a colleague from the office, probably to indicate to me what was most important to people at that moment. Doing human rights work, it’s easy, David battling Goliath, to be consumed by mission. Because you’re thinking of little other than your quest (delivering food aid, advocating on behalf of the unjustly imprisoned, securing hygiene products for the underserved and those in need, land rights, etc.), you start to think that the people you’re helping think about little other than those things. Of course the imprisoned is 24/7 occupied with how to get out of solitary confinement, to leave behind being force-fed. Of course the food insecure are constantly, in every second of every minute of every day, consumed by thoughts of where their next piece of bread will come from. But the reality, communicated to me by everyone around me, was that the thing that had most powerfully caught their attention was this smooth-faced Gazan who’d snuck into a building in Egypt and made it past the Beirut casting stage singing “Ala Babi Waef Amarin” by Melhem Barakat.
On the night of June 22, the cheering outside of my window was sudden and suddenly everywhere. I think even the family upstairs was screaming. Horns honked, chants roared, I think there might have even been fireworks.
I asked my flatmate what happened, was there some holiday I missed? Some pre-Ramadan tradition? No. Mohammed Assaf had won Arab Idol. The entire city had erupted and everything else—every worry, every frustration, every resentment, every quiet fear—all of those things the Occupation injects into the day and into the night of a person living in the Territories, all of it fell away and what took its place, what towered above all of those things, was joy. Joy and pride. I can’t even imagine what Gaza was like that night. What filled the hearts of his former classmates at Gaza City’s Palestine University? What did Khan Younis turn into that night? And here this young man was in my phone. On my TikTok.
If TikTok is any indication, if conversations both inside and outside of my friend circles are any indication, if the news coverage from places outside the US is any indication, many who didn’t know before are learning of the Palestinians. And if Gaza’s bombardment is both their point of entry and the present moment at which history has brought them, then perhaps the story they’re learning of the Palestinians is one of mass displacement, of massacres committed by the Irgun, of Gaza under siege, of wells throughout the West Bank being filled with concrete, of administrative detention and the Intifadas, of 1948 and 1967 and 1993. Dates and deaths. It’s a story seen from 30,000 feet in the air. And it colors every subplot seen on the ground. The stories of life, of art, persisting in the face of these horrors, the successes (however paltry they may seem in the face of larger tragedy) of individuals surmounting odds in the diaspora, it’s like…in 2020, a lot of non-Black folk talked to and about Black folk like the entirety of their history in this country was oppression, like that was the beginning and end of our experience in the US, and everything from Thurgood Marshall to the blues, from Blaxploitation to the Kente-patterned stoles worn by Black kids graduating from college, all of it was filtered through the looking glass of “look at what they’ve gone through, how much they’ve fought to achieve this,” and, like, is that it? Is that the whole story? Is “We Shall Overcome” the only song Black people have ever sung?
There’s not supposed to be anything prescriptive here. Far be it from me to tell people what or how to think about Gaza, about Sderot, about Rafah, about the PA, about Israelis and Palestinians. We’re all for the most part thinking and feeling things, so come to your own conclusions, would be the only thing I would tell a person. But when Palestine comes up in conversation, every time Gaza is bombed or another horror is enacted on Arabs in the West Bank or when I remember what it was like to pass through a checkpoint in Hebron, I try to think about Mohammed Assaf and that night in Ramallah. In the story economy, 1 person is as much and at the same time somehow more than 30,000. Each of those people is more than 30,000.
There’s the horror story told in numbers—this many Palestinians dead in bombings, this many Israelis held hostage, this many countries aligned with South Africa in their case against Israel in the ICJ, this many times the US has vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire—and there’s the story of Mohammed Assaf. There’s the horror story the Israeli government tells about Palestinians—a story they’ve managed to get enough people to believe for long enough to enable what they’ve done, what they’re doing, a story told with disdain and derision, abounding in falsehoods—and there’s the story of Mohammed Assaf. There’s the horror story of 75+ years of Occupation, and there’s the story of Mohammed Assaf.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know how the rest of the story goes, but I know that the night of June 22, 2013, that singular night in Ramallah, is part of it.
Currently reading: The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
Currently listening: Kiken - Eqler
There’s a depressing and obvious causal arrow here with the hiring boom in tech and gaming and entertainment powered by the shareholder belief that we were always going to be spending this much time on Twitch or this much time watching Hulu or that we would be locked down long enough to find a Meta headset or whatever tf appealing. Then the obvious happened and the bubble burst, and all three sectors over the past two years have been hit with calamitous levels of layoffs.
Who are we kidding? That’s, like, every Dostoevsky character.