How to control the masses without even trying. Oct. 3, 1985

  

I want to blame it all on illness, the stiff shoulder, the upset stomach, the dull throb at my temples,

I want to excuse my anger with the symptoms of disease, only it’s not just the disease, its theirs as well, Fotomat and Dunkin Donuts, catching up with the evils of the world.

For six years, America has been playing the kill-me-kill-you blues, the macho disease the public seems to catch just before we leap into war with both feet.

People’s rights get infringed upon in the interest of national security or social justice, or any other excuse needed to keep people from questioning what comes next.

It’s so contagious, some people embrace this disease as if it was a benefit, and willingly allow government to begin collecting data it has no business collecting, motor vehicle knowing as much about people’s private lives as people’s mothers do, using it to clamp down on questionable people before there is a reason to.

The disease isn’t exclusive to government. Here in Fotomat, there is a climate of mistrust, spies constantly looking over the shoulders of employees for infractions that have not yet and may never happen. New rules get set in place as a precaution, adding to this sense of distrust, the constant watching and waiting for that time when they (whoever they are in upper management) know you will do what they are accusing you of doing.

Rules become a kind of stream of consciousness, injected into our brains so they seem only natural, and keep people afraid, waiting for the hammer to come down on them.

This week management sent out a survey asking for all sorts of personal and financial information it has no right to, such as where we do our banking, how we go about depositing our pay checks (why don’t they look at the canceled checks and determine that for themselves), even asking how often we access our funds. Fotomat claims it needs this information to improve its own flow of cash and how it regulates its money. We get something similar from government which is trying to do away with the concept of cash, to undermine the black market, so we’ll all carry around little cards instead of cash – which can be monitored and worse, absconded with any time some bureaucrat somewhere behind the curtain decides we have done something wrong (what wrong means at that point.)

This infringement on privacy scares the living daylights out of me, making me drag out my copy of Orwell to refresh my memory on how to build a fascist state.

What does it mean to regulate money?

I actually had a pay check bounce once back in the days when I worked for a greeting card company and went through hell and high water to get it corrected, since the main office at the time was in Dallas. I don’t even know where the main office for Fotomat is, unlike the job I have at Dunkin where if he doesn’t pay me, I trap him in his office until he does.

Although it was alarming to find a note on my time card saying there will be a company meeting next Tuesday – all are required to attend. What the fuck does that mean?

Maybe I’m over reacting, partly due to the Fascist changes going on at the college campus, where civil liberties cease to exist and censorship seen as a right and proper way of life, very efficient, able to control the message.

Ripmaster would blame capitalism in his usual Marxist interpretation of reality. But it’s not just them. Orwell was right in questioning a socialism that looks so much like fascism that it is difficult to distinguish between them, both appear to want to control the lives of small people like me, to regulate how we live, what we think and what we might do in the future.

Ripmaster used to talk about social engineering as if it was exclusive to the conservative class, but it’s not. Everybody does it, and perhaps we’ll get a Broadway play someday called “How to control the masses without even trying.”

 

   1985 Menu 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more