MONEY FOR NUTHIN'!

"That ain't workin'! That's the way to do it! Money for nuthin'!" So goes the line from the old Dire Straits song. In the news recently is the 20-something college dropout who founded "Facebook" and turned down an offer of one billion dollars from Yahoo for its purchase. Now what exactly is "Facebook" one must ask, other than a glorified bulletin board? The people who join it do all the work! They put up all the blurbs about how they like bagels but dislike croissants. They post all the photos from their latest vacation, photos that everyone on Earth is just dying to see! In fact, the entire contents of Facebook is provided by its members, yet somehow this entrepreneurial genius 20-something college dropout gets the one billion. Oh I forgot, he turned it down (as experts say it's worth at least ten!) My question is, and imagine this shouted through one of those 20 foot-long Alpine horns from a mountain top in the Swiss Alps, "HOW THE FUCK CAN SOMEONE MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS BY IN ESSENCE DOING NOTHING?!" In today's world, if you make an Internet template on which teenagers and college students can talk about last night's date then you are in line for a mega-bonanza. Yet as far as I know, no one ever asks, "What exactly have they created?", or rather, "Is Life really that good?" It certainly is for the two 20-somethings who made "Life is Good" t-shirts and other endless paraphernalia. Only in America can someone become multi-millionaires by marketing a completely banal, insipid, vacant catch-phrase and having the masses gobble it up. So I must pose the question: What does this do for you, those of you who proudly wear this ubiquitous slogan on your t-shirts? Does it announce to everyone that you are woefully out of touch with world events? Life is indeed not that good in most places. (Ever hear of Baghdad?) How 'bout life is good for a Mexican immigrant? For an African with AIDS? For a woman in the United States concerned about her reproductive rights? The list is endless. Or perhaps the "Life is Good" t-shirt is a testament to pure narcissism: "Who gives a shit about anyone else! For me, life is good!" To greed: "I made my million, and I deserve it, so life is good, goddamn it! (And fuck the lazy slackers!") To solipsism: "I am so self-absorbed as to be the center of my own universe, and as God looked out, so do I and say, 'Life is Good!'" These things make me wonder if Americans are perhaps the stupidest, most gullible (and egocentric) people on the planet. But maybe I'm just going about it the wrong way. Perhaps I should start my own Internet template. Call it "Life Sucks" where everyone bitches and moans about how shitty things are, and everyone will log on to everyone else's site to see who has it worse off than they do! Or perhaps I can call it "My Self-Indulgent Life with Lots of Crappy Boring Photos", and then I can just sit around and wait for Yahoo to make me an offer...