Grandma just called me, said she had a research question.

"Do you think, given how good you are with computers, that you could research and find a wealthy person with a good heart who could lead us out of this mess we're all in?"

I'm paraphrasing, of course, but this is reeeeeally close to what she said. When I tried to explain that the close link between inherited wealth, the profit motive, and social standing within modern capitalism would virtually disallow this hypothetical individual to exist, she basically said "ok, but what if they did exist."

I started explaining that even if, somehow, a person made it through the social pressures of being raised by wealthy elites and being surrounded during their formative years by wealthy elites and being indoctrinated into the belief systems of wealthy elites (e.g. wealth is inherited, wealth is deserved, growth is hypothetically infinite, poverty is a choice etc etc) and made it to the other side with a healthy sense of crippling existential guilt over their privilege and the blood money they inherited, that even then they would have to contend with the class pressures associated with taking inherited wealth and turning it against the interests of the class.

But by the time i get this far, my grandma's pseudobulber affect starts, well, affecting her. She can't remember what I started with. She goes back to her original question, this time with an example: "See, there's a man from history named (jfc end me now) DALE CARNEGIE, and he spent his life and wealth building hospitals/schools/libraries. Aren't there any people like that anymore?"

So I start explaining that Dale Carnegie's inherited wealth came from the functional enslavement of chinese immigrants who built the American railroad network and that though it may seem that Andrew Carnegie's son was acting out of a sense of guilt, it is only the results of this "guilt" that would count as any form of absolution, and the results of the philanthropy of the Carnegie family has always gone to further entrench the prestige and social adulation of white, upper-class men and their projects in government.

But I'm an idiot. Pseudobulber. She can't hold the whole concept in her head at once without getting confused. And now she is confused. It doesn't help that her hearing aids aren't great when they're up next to a telephone speaker, and she's missing one out of every three long words. And so, it comes back to her original idea, albeit in a slightly different form.

"I just think if someone with the enough wealth, and who feels enough guilt about it, and with good charisma, and their skin is a color people will like, and..."

At this moment i flip the switch, engaging the lever that opens the cage hanging above me, releasing the 13-ft Boa Constrictor I had ordered for just such an occasion.