While preparing dinner this evening, I saw a man walk by my kitchen window followed by a woman. He smiled and waved at me. I thought they might be guests of my upstairs neighbor and continued cutting chicken. A knock on the back door accompanied my remembrance that my neighbor wasn't home, so I went to the back hallway shared with my neighbor to answer the door.
"Good evening!" the man said, cheerful in the windy frigid weather. "We knocked on your front door but you didn't answer!"
I nodded, spotting an electronic device in the man's hand with the corporate word Spectrum printed there. Spectrum, for my international readers, is a telecommunications company called Charter Communications, owned by Liberty Media Corporation, which owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves baseball team, among other collections of human beings, buildings, and tiny connections similar to, if not exactly the same as, the world of the movie Tron.
I had a meal to make, it was 6:30, I was getting hungry, rice was cooking. The man gave me his first name, introduced the woman. They both smiled, cheerful in the wind though it was cold as a motherfucker.
He began his spiel: turns out I let my Spectrum subscription lapse. More than 200 cable channels, great internet speed, an excellent deal all around.
"I've never had Spectrum, ever."
"Oh! Well, what do you have and how much do you pay for internet?"
"It doesn't matter, I'm not interested."
"Okay well, have a great night!"
"You too."
I wondered later if, in this supposedly little-train-engine-that-could economy of ours, this couple, a husband and wife team perhaps, had done something else with their lives as recently as a year ago. Struggling to pay off a mortgage, cope with daily expenses, help out their struggling young adult children, they grabbed a job, any job, maybe even a second job, hucksters for Spectrum, a telecom providing its customers with the freedom to press the channel changing button on their remotes more than 200 times before cycling back to the beginning of more channels hardly worth watching.
I don't know, it's just a thought. In the summer of 2020, that same back door got knocked on by a middle-aged man offering to do garden and lawn care work. I don't have a garden and I'm the one who mows the big lawn by arrangement with my landlord, who knocks some dollars off of my rent in return.
The gig economy. People who would do anything but drive for Uber, for instance, except that a cold steel shaft has punctured their American dream while business-oriented publications and news networks (like those to be viewed via a Spectrum subscription) insist that the economy may be faltering a bit, but really it's nothing to worry about; we're in good hands. Competent bankers, the Federal Reserve, Joe Biden's brain, Goldman Sachs, are all looking out for us, and if need be, a war over Ukraine will help boost the arms industry, and don't forget the profits of Big Pharma from their maculate Covid vaccines.
Everything is fine, don't worry, the couple walking door to door in the dark, schlepping Spectrum in two degree Fahrenheit wind chill couldn't possibly want to do something else with their time.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris's poll numbers are even lower than Biden's 33%. Nancy Pelosi, an eighty-one year old hag who has just announced she's running for re-election, insists that everything she and her Democratic colleagues do is "for the children." Flint's drinking water problem persists, the criminals who caused that catastrophe have gotten away with it, lead-poisoned children there do not feel Pelosi's care for them. She and her husband regularly and brazenly engage in insider trading, nobody on Capitol Hill gives a shit because many others in that profession do the same. The Democrats haven't done anything for the American people since winning big in 2020, but they will lose to the Republicans in 2022. The Republicans will, I hope, go after Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH for their underhandedness in covering up the true circumstances of the Covid-19 disaster.
The news media circus will continue, however, as Trump remains in the spotlight to boost ratings that sagged after he flew away from Washington. It's said by many he'll run for president in 2023 and 2024. He'll defeat Biden, probably, because the current president sucks so hard at his job. In my lifetime I've watched one shitty president after another--they just get worse and worse.
Corporate America runs this country, that's the problem. The only way to make America great--in a humane sense--is to put a stop to that. I have no idea how. But keep speaking out.
The first word of such a revolution is NO.
Vic Neptune
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