..a pitiless righteousness, a righteousness that will condemn everything except money…

When that time comes anything that resembles virtue – nay, anything but ardent devotion to Plutus – will be regarded as vastly ridiculous. Justice – if, in this unfortunate epoch, any justice can still exist – will forbid the existence of citizens who are unable to make their fortunes.

Your wife, O Bourgeois, your chaste other half, whose legitimacy is your poetry, giving to legality an irreproachable infamy, vigilant and loving guardian of your strongbox – your wife will be nothing more than the ideal type of kept woman. Your daughter, in her childish nubility, will dream in her cradle that she is selling herself for a million. And you yourself, O Bourgeois – even less a poet than you are today – will make no objection; you will have no complaint.

– Charles Baudelaire

Even though he thought it a "ridiculous role" to be cast as a prophet, Baudelaire sure saw clearly into our own time. The only benchmark we have for anything these days is how much money is involved, and Bush has recast our government of and for the people into a revenue producing machine at the service of the rich. Justice is just another commodity in which an expensive lawyer can deliver any verdict at the right price and the Supreme Court is hijacked by deep pocketed ideological groups. As for the young nubiles being happily sold by their fathers – I guess you’d have to ask Mr. Spears and Mr. Simpson why they pushed their minor daughters out on stage to writhe as sex objects. And even Baudelaire wasn’t perverse enough to dream up the kind of parent who’d hand their kid over to Michael Jackson. Why? In the words of the rap song: May sound strange may sound funny/But that’s what people do for money. And old Charles sussed that out long ago….

Yr Pal,

UBU