“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and . . . then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I don’t know how many of our readers are aware of a famous and very successful series of books and movies from the last decade called The Hunger Games.

They’re SF stories set in a dystopian future where glittering technology exists in a feudal society. In fact that technology enables it. For the purposes of this post the following is a key plotline:

[The Hunger Games] universe is a dystopia set in Panem, a North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 13 districts in varying states of poverty. Every year, children from the first 12 districts are selected via lottery to participate in a compulsory televised battle royale death match called The Hunger Games.
…
Capitol citizens are extremely wealthy and life moves very slowly until the Games,… Many Capitol residents are extremely shallow, always looking for ways to be noticed. An outrageous sense of style and fashion are very important to the citizens of the Capitol… Capitol citizens are noted to have quite high ranking and integral roles and occupations for Panem as a whole…

You get the picture.

While not quite as gaudy as those characters, the following is a great example of how the same attitudes are rampant among our rulers nowadays, as San Francisco Mayor London Breed, had fun the other day in a San Francisco nightclub. I guess she’s read some of these counter-narrative articles on masks.

What she’s actually doing in that video is announcing the new law that you do not have to wear a mask if:

  1.  You are “having a good time,”
  2. “Feeling the spirit,”
  3. Watching the reunion of a band you like.

BTW, she insists that the reunion of the jazz band, Tony Toni Tone, is the story here, and not her defying her own mask mandate. I especially loved this quote:

“We don’t need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing,” she said during an interview, contending she was drinking at the time and started dancing because she was “feeling the spirit” and “wasn’t thinking about a mask,” according to reports.

The irony in that statement is so fucking thick you could cut it with a knife.

Perhaps SF citizens should keep that in mind if an actual cop (very much not “fun”) or some other asshole hassles them about wearing a mask. Maybe print out her interview answers on a card to show cops that the law has been repealed by the mayor herself.

This is nothing new of course, for in the past year the following has occurred:

California Governor Newsom at a lovely dinner with other unmasked rich people at one of the world’s most expensive restaurants, the French Laundry. The staff are masked of course, per order of the Governor.

Barack Obama’s 60th birthday unmasked bash with his celebrity friends at their home in Martha’s Vineyard. The servants wore masks.

Obama’s Party

Nancy Pelosi’s fundraiser in the expensive vine yards of California. The servants wore masks.

And of course, the Met Ball a few days ago.

These people either don’t believe their own bullshit about masks (and other things) or they’re glorying in applying those rules to little people who can’t fight back, at least not without ending up in jail.

Or perhaps what we Untermenchen should take from all these events is that they’re just deliberately rubbing our noses in this shit. That the whole point is to make it clear who the boss is: that the rules apply to us, not them, and they want us to know it.

We are ruled by terrible, unkind, incompetent, uncaring people. I’m tempted to say that they are evil people, not out of deliberation but shallow callousness.