This comes and goes in seasons. At the turn of the last century the broligarchs of the time (they called them robber barons then) had the game stitched up worse than today. They owned the state legislatures (who elected the senators at that time) lock, stock, and barrel. They bought laws as they pleased.

The mores of the time caused them to be a little more circumspect about their pornographic rapine of the body politic, but they squeezed just as hard and their fists were stronger. Children died working in factories, diseases of poverty claimed entire city quarters, Pinkertons shot striking workers flat dead and walked away like ICE with a brisk stride before they'd even holstered their weapon the way I read it.

Just like today they paid no tax of any kind. And we're heading back there at speed. The typical person is closer to being in an Amazon warehouse where someone has died or the subject of an OSHA report that Instacart hushed up than they were five years ago, things are getting worse for most everyone.

But a few things broke the public's way, a couple of muckracking journalists tee'd it up, Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, you get one class traitor in the White House, and in less than thirty years the robber barons had lost it all, the economy goes into hyperdrive, the working man goes to sleep every night knowing, not hoping, that his children will live far better than him.

This one comes back around too, and the endless vulgarity and corruption on every surface that can render a photo or a sentence? That's not organic someone is paying for all that, it ebbs and flows too. I'm optimistic we can have cool R-rated movies and no banned books without hustler culture Instagram and celebrity yachting YouTube being crammed into every eligible impression.

Until then?

The worse? The better.