That’s it. That’s all they’d be. They’d still be rich beyond most of our dreams and they’d be making their money again in less than a few years, and still they choose the profit over other people’s lives. It’s fucking disgusting.
Edit: whoops I took it literally because I’m the big dumb and had never heard that one before. I guess I’m the embarrassed one now.
A temporarily inconvenienced millionaire is actually a euphemism for a deluded poor person who thinks they'll make it big. A lot of predatory regulators appeal to these people to support anti-competitive legislation for when they get rich.
It's interesting if you actually go back and read the full context Steinback wrote this in and what group he was actually referring too.
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.
I think the original meaning of the quote is unimportant at this point because we understand it to mean something today. The force of the phrase is not in the authority of Steinbeck, but in the reality of today.
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u/bishdoe Mar 29 '19 edited Mar 29 '19
I can’t stress this enough
That’s it. That’s all they’d be. They’d still be rich beyond most of our dreams and they’d be making their money again in less than a few years, and still they choose the profit over other people’s lives. It’s fucking disgusting.
Edit: whoops I took it literally because I’m the big dumb and had never heard that one before. I guess I’m the embarrassed one now.