10/28/99
Q. Do you remember America?
A. I was born in 1963 and I remember some of it since. I've studied America. I know something about it. I'm sure America is a land made great by a large number of very smart people who became extremely rich, starting way back at the very foundation. Huge fortunes were made by a smaller number of people at both the beginning and the end of the 20th century.
Q. What about everyone else?
A. Well, some people learned how to make movies, became sports stars, business tycoons, or did other really popular things, and also became very rich. Many people got to be medium rich. Parts of their lives were sometimes pretty good, and they were happy and entertained, but after a while most of them started to feel like their whole existence was half empty. Other people were just completely left behind. They ended up with televisions (so they wouldn't think too much about how they had been left behind), but millions and millions didn't even have health care. They didn't get the fancy cars and expensive yachts and jet planes so many other people did. They had mediocre, unchallenging jobs. They stopped voting.
Q. Well that doesn't sound so terrible. After all, almost everybody else was really rich! Practically a whole country full of people with everything they could ever want. What's bad about that?
A. It turned out that the old rumor that big corporations act immorally was true after all. The environment started to fall apart. Meanwhile, the politicians looked out for themselves, the lobbyists looked out for the corporations...
Q. What are you saying?
A. Maybe the people who had the really big fortunes got together with the people who made the movies and TV, and with the people who ran the government, and decided that they were just going to look out for their own bunch.
Q. What did everyone do?
A. Pretty much nothing. Probably what happened was that all those rich people were so busy looking out for themselves and getting rich, that an even smaller group of people took over. As time went on, that group kept getting smaller and smaller. Finally it was so small, that by the end of the century almost nobody was even sure they were still in the group anymore.
Q. How do you think that happened?
A. They were so completely befuddled by what they saw on their televisions and computer monitors, and also by what they saw in the movies and read in the papers, that they almost completely forgot what reality was. Everything seemed like a big joke, even presidential elections. They were still happy, because they were rich, but they were also very afraid because inside, they knew they were adrift. They worried that somebody would unleash a germ, chemical or even nuclear attack in one of their cities. The environmental problems got worse and worse, and the corporations kept on getting bigger and richer. Nobody was looking out for them.
Q. Nobody was looking out for who?
A. Nobody was looking out for anybody, but it was worst for the people who were left behind, or excluded because of some kind of prejudice.
Q. Ok ok, was it really that bad?
A. Yes, it almost was, because so many people were so busy making entertainment for other people or being entertained themselves, that just about everybody forgot how to think critically. Almost all that people believed in was movie stars and advertising images. They thought they could have informed opinions about things without ever paying attention in school, or to what was going on in the world once they were done with school. In the end, they pretty much did what they were told without even realizing what they were doing!
Q. Then what happened?
A. Irony took over, and almost everyone accepted the idea that the free world was ruled by "politicians" pretending to cater to the opinions of small random samples of people who didn't even know what they were talking about.
Q. Wow! What else happened?
A. That's the end of the story, as far as I know.