Charity dinners and the vast global conspiracy.

I have slept for a few hours and now for my brief period of consciousness before I return to my slumber I will talk about Sunday night.

It was the Brian Grant Foundation's Shake it Till We Make it dinner gala, for those unaware, Brian Grant is an ex-Portland Trailblazer who has early onset Parkinson's Disease, and his Foundation exists to both help find a cure, and to provide resources and support for those with the disease to manage their symptoms and improve quality of life.

I am gonna say a lot of mean things here, but I want to make clear I have no problem with the Foundation itself or with the cause, totally fine with curing/managing Parkinson's.

First, I took issue with the title of the event, which I realize is a very Portland liberal thing to do, and a minor grip in general but there it is, as you may know the most well known symptom of the disease is uncontrollable shaking, the other really well known fact about it is you don't actually end up making it, it is degenerative an incurable. So the title is kind of a lie and a little bit mean in my opinion, however I also know that they probably talked with actual Parkinson's sufferers when creating the event, and if they didn't get mad about it it isn't on me to be for them, so whatever.

My problems lie with the rich, and with the culture that makes the events possible. What this basically was, was rich adult prom, when everyone dresses to the nines in their finest suits and most expensive (and tiniest) dresses, then they mill about attempting to impress each other, there is music no one really cares about, often a speech or two, then they go home, drunker than when they came in, and possibly not with the same person they arrived with.

That good causes have to put on what are essentially massively wasteful ego stroking events so that they can get actually make a stab at funding their programs is very depressing to me, in that arena Sunday the one percent of Portland was represented, the average attendee makes more money in a year than I will see in my lifetime, and the secret about these galas is it isn't actually about the cause, it is about the attendees, the speeches and content are all targeted at the audience, telling them how great they are for coming tonight to be told how great they are. It's maddening, if they truly believed in the cause, they wouldn't have to hear an hour of masturbatory speeches about how awesome they are before donating.

These people are not like you and me, they live in a world where the usual concerns of daily life simply do not exist for them, I found a check on the floor, filled out to the tune of four zeros, I found the owner an he thanked me for returning it, but did not appear particularly worried or embarrassed by the mistake, returning the check to the same pocket it originally fell out of.

There was a hosted bar, which means tons of drinking before the event started, I noticed that the emcee attempted to get people in their seats ten minutes before the entertainment started, but he was simply not important enough to listen to, it took about twenty before people actually moved to sit down, reluctantly abandoning their conversations.

Things were kicked off by Speech, from the group Arrested Development, his set mostly consisted of reasonably well done covers of pop hip-hop classics, which mostly the crowd didn't care about, he spent a lot of effort trying to get audience participation, the whole: I say hey, you say ho, bit, they weren't too interested and honestly I didn't get why he was trying to make people get up and dance at an event that was clearly not for getting up and dancing, it was both funny and creepy though to see the room full of the wealthy elite waving their hands in the air like they just don't care, I believed they didn't care.
Speeches did manage to include a fair bit of material about race in his set, ending with an acapella  version of Bob Marley's Redemption Song, which did well. This was a Portland crowd, and thus mostly white, I think it made people a little uncomfortable.

There was also a very long and drawn out interpretive dance performance about Parkinson's, with the stated goal of describing the effects of Parkinson's through dance and poetry, and with the unstated goal of being the worst thing anyone has ever done to entertain or push a message, it seemed strange that they used people who had perfect control over their bodies to describe a condition that takes that control away to me, but whatever, it was also factually wrong one of the lines that were focused on was "It won't take my mind" I refer you to the Wiki I linked earlier, one of the advanced symptoms actually totally will do that.

Closing entertainment was provided by a soul/jazz performer who is notable for performing with people like Prince and Michael Jackson by the name of Mike Phillips, he did a good job, though I would have preferred no singing to the massively auto-tuned distortion he favored, also the closing number was an over five minute rendition of the Imperial March from Star Wars, I found that strangely appropriate, yet I don't really think it fit the intended message of the night. I sort of wonder if the musicians did it on purpose, Redemption Song and the Imperial March combine to seem vaguely accusatory, if so that is pretty great.

Recipes and ingredients for food were all donated, from the kitchens and minds of various high profile executive chefs all around the West Coast, the theme basically being healthy food, stuff with benefits that could help those with Parkinson's, the stuff on the plates looked decent to me, and I ate some leftover duck for lunch at work today, it was alright, but a little tough having been reheated.

I threw away so much food that night, a conservative estimate would be something like a third of what was sent out on plates came back uneaten and was put in the compost bins, it was really depressing to see all those resources, and the effort making it, thrown away by people who don't think twice. If I had paid what these people did for dinner, eating what I paid for would be a priority for me, but these people don't think like I do, they don't even notice that money being gone, it is more of... a tax on their lifestyle to them if that makes any sense, I don't think they think of it as paying for things, more like they have a lifestyle they live, and periodically living that lifestyle means writing a check or running a credit card, not for any specific good or service, just to keep doing what they do.

There was an auction, tens of thousands of dollars spent on a few vanity items, like trips to Hawaii or a fishing trip with a celebrity. At one point the auctioneer said "It's only money, you can just make more" while trying to get someone to bid nine thousand dollars for a VIP suite at a Blazer game, and I realized that this is a culture that I will never understand, and I don't think they will ever understand mine either, and that is horrible, because they have so much power of my level of society that it is hard to believe, an they wield it without thinking, and without understanding those they have power over.

No one should be that rich, and the thing is, those people there tonight were probably in the bottom one percent of the one percent, but even at that level it was clear that they may as well be aliens for all I have in common with them, can you imagine what it is like at the top of the one percent? The multi billionaires who literally control, if not the world, then a reasonable portion of it? I doubt the people I saw the other night can actually comprehend what it is like to be poor, but there might be a few who approach it, what about the people who can't comprehend what it is like to be a mere millionaire?

It's terrifying to me, we are controlled by people who can buy and sell us by the thousands without even knowing it, they make decisions that control the fate of the country and world, fund politicians who attempt to make social change, and they know NOTHING about the people they influence daily.

That level of wealth and power is historically unprecedented, even in the most unequal monarchies of history, there is a conspiracy theory that says the elite who control the world are actually secretly aliens of some variety or another, it isn't wrong really, but there isn't a secret, they are aliens compared to those without power, and it is the power they wield that makes them so, that must change, a small percentage of a powerful alien group controlling the vast masses of poor natives might seem the stuff of science fiction, but it is essentially the process of colonialism writ global.

The historical examples of that don't end well for the natives.