Hermeneutic of the Bag
A useless inquiry.
What does it mean to have the bag? What does it mean to get it? Few questions if any seem more essential for grasping the essence of the American psyche in the year 2020. The bag seems to sit at the very crux of the oft-discussed Fucks-given Shit-taken Matrix (FgStM), the magnum opus of celebrated Princeton macroeconomist Rue E. Bomkins. The FgStM, which Bomkins claims to have devised while observing a Manhattanite pigeon nibbling on a horse turd, plots the adversarial relations of elite and working classes by subbing in fucks and shits for more traditional x and y axes. Its genius is its simplicity, and vice versa. We know from Bomkin’s own wide-ranging (and widely-streamed) lecture circuits that even grade-school students totally unversed in graph-reading are able to glean its central insight instantly. Namely, that society is increasingly polarized between jet-setting elites who take no shit and give no fucks and the shit-eating, fucks-giving schmucks compelled to service them.
This insight, while hardly earth-shattering or even original, is weighty enough that Thomas Piketty himself now relies on the FgStM as a sort of trump card — a literal pocket Ace — in debates centering on wealth inequality. The FgStM’s unlikely pairing of graphic elegance with indelicate language appears expertly engineered to pierce the armor of even the most trenchant libertarian meritocrats — i.e. people who genuinely believe they deserve their wealth (bag) more than other, poorer people would. Within the context of the FgStM, to get the bag is to take no shit and give no fucks simultaneously. It is to achieve perfect equilibrium. Little wonder, then, that bag-getting or bagdom should be the very highest compliment that a citizen of the 21st century can hope to be paid. Yet this prestige makes the bag a fraught object. Like a coin, it always has a hidden face (or two).
Obviously, getting the bag is no simple task. Not just anyone is capable of it. As Gucci Mane holds in I Get the Bag (feat. Migos), where “you get the bag and fumble it, I (Gucci Mane) get the bag and flip it and tumble it” (italics mine). Gucci reminds us that getting the bag is only one step in a process — but where does this process begin and end? While the average American would probably assume that the endpoint of getting the bag would be having it, Gucci seems to insinuate otherwise.
Gucci may be onto something, for while having the bag would at first glance appear to mean having already gotten it, a more thorough appraisal inevitably leads us to the conclusion that those who merely have the bag have it less than those in the process of getting it. In other words, the bag is one of those elusive objects that can only be groped at or fondled, never wholly possessed. The bag is then a non-commodity, an absolute value. It sits on phenomenal existence’s very top shelf, somewhere in the rank of ego death, God, and grade-A orgasms.
Yet the workings of the bag far exceed sheer enjoyment. For one thing, the bag dodges physics (consider the case of the dopp kit). However small it may appear, it belies endless depths, much like the infinite-capacity handbag used by Hermione in Harry Potter. Just as you can put just about anything in the bag, you can pull just about anything out of it. The bag is a magician’s hat, and for a human being (living) under capitalism, it is also a sort of über-passport, an ultimate authenticator (much more so than any Twitter checkmark, magazine profile, award, or estate). This capacity for authentication further expands the bag’s mystery: assuming self-esteem and its associated computations take place only within human brains, and never in the ghostly ether of the Big Other, it seems reasonable to conclude that bagdom is a purely subjective category. No one can hand you the bag, nor can anyone deprive you of it. In Potterish terms: the bag chooses the baller.
And yet — few of us will ever get the bag. Of those few who do, fewer yet will remember getting it. And so we are left with a discomfiting paradox: how can something be at once so difficult and so easy? It is not unlike the question that haunts the ruminant insomniac, awake all night chewing on the cud of his thoughts. The elusive thing is the easiest thing. All the harder things come easier.
