Share

Friday, July 11, 2008

Let Them Eat Pizza!

I think it is a commercial for Pizza Hut. Two men stand in front of a huge wall mounted weekly calendar in an office. They are looking at what fast food restaurants have deals for that day of the week. One place has four dollar Tuesdays. Another place has Seven dollar value meals on Friday.
His friend, holding a slice of pizza simply says, Pizza Hut always has five dollar lunches every day of the week. I'm not putting it in quotes because it was late and I was falling asleep. But as I nodded off I got to thinking about that sales pitch. The young good looking and fit spokesperson tells you with a slight smugness that you should just go to Pizza Hut everyday of the week. After all, it's just five bucks.
Thats an office I would love to work in.
"Why is there such a long line for the bathrooms?"

There not selling the product based on it's merit. They are selling you the product based on how broke everyone is. These are the times we live in.
With everything we know about nutrition, adds will always appeal to the higher anxiety. Being broke right now is the national anxiety. It might be shit food, but at least I can afford to eat it.

With the stroke of his pen, the President made legal what they had been doing for years illegally; wiretapping everyone. The one tiny provision they made is that the Government can only listen in on the conversation when it is a call originating from outside the United States by a known terrorist to someone in this country who has done business with them in the past.
By that definition, the Bushes and Bin Ladens have been doing business together for decades. I guess there is a lot of tape somewhere with conversations between the President, and them.
The Fourth Amendment has been killed.
That was the amendment that guaranteed us privacy, the right to be secure in our personal papers, safe from government intrusion in our homes, and freedom from any search by the government without probable cause.
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the second amendment when it told Washington D.C. that the 32 year old ban on Hand Guns inside the city was unconstitutional. That got a lot of press and a lot of overweight white people holding misspelled signs of congratulations over their heads. Not only has the fourth amendment silently been destroyed, but the bill doing so granted immunity to the phone companies and Internet providers that went along with it. The worse part though is Obama voted for the law. Obama. Our great hope to restore all that Bush has done just voted in favor of a law that effectively demolishes every Americans right to privacy.
I guess now that we no longer have any rights to privacy, we might need all those guns.

This is the grand non-conspiracy at work. There never will come a time when the Government will knock at your door to take guns out of your hands. They don't need to. It is far easier to grant people the illusion of control than to use force. Great, you have a hand gun. Good for you. Do you know what the government has? A transcript of every web site you ever visited. A chat log of any conversation you had while on line. A complete list of phone numbers and recorded conversations. Satellites 42 miles above the Earth that can read vin numbers through clouds and the glare of windshield glass. Micro chips embedded in your passport. Get it? They don't need to take your guns because they already have the inside of your head. If they can make you believe attacking Iraq had something to do with what happened on 9/11, you have to ask yourself the much scarier question of what else did they pull off that we don't know about? That is not a fringe element crazy guy question to ponder at all. The fact is, we no longer have any privacy. We know this. But just like the lure of five dollar pizza lunches, we don't care. We will trade our privacy for porn, priceline, prescription medications, google, Youtube, Myspace and craigslist. So what if there is a vault somewhere sucking in all this information. Isn't it to keep us safe from those that want to hurt us anyway?
You will loose privacy, but you will get protection.
You will save money, but you will put on 15 pounds.
Same thing.
We always go for the bait switch. It's almost programed into us as Americans. There is an understanding that a con game is working on us, but we are strangely fascinated by it. And honestly what are you going do? Never use the Internet again? Throw away your cell phone? To a lot of people, the Internet doesn't seem real. You can't point to it. It is intangible. But a gun. It is solid, real, firm in your hand. The idea of that being taken away is easy to imagine. The idea of someone listening in to an instant message conversation seems far more distant. Besides, the reasoning goes, I don't have anything to hide. Right?
I will just eat five dollar pizza three times a week. That can't be that bad. Right?

If this trend continues, the Government giving it's self more power to monitor citizens that have broken no laws and advertisers pushing shitty food that will make you fat and constipated, then the people with headphones in the basement of the Pentagon are going to hear a lot of talk about diarrhea. With all the talk about "black outs," "dropping a bomb" and the next guy walking in and dying because of our "chemical warfare," a lot of Americans are going to end up on no-fly lists just cause there telling another buddy about the state of their bowels. That will be a lot of Americans ending up on the no fly list. Result? The airline industry, already falling apart, will go under all because the country is now a police state with upset stomachs from only being able to afford cheap food. Besides, a nation of fat people with guns is really not a problem for a government with flying drones equipped with heat seeking missiles. Enjoy the illusion of freedom, America. Enjoy the idea of being a free thinker in a land bombarded by commercials every where you turn. Enjoy your guns too. The Poor will not be wiped out with a hail of lead from masked SWAT teams at your door. The poor will be wiped out by coupons to Pizza Hut.

2 comments:

Dean said...

So they're on the No Fly list... big deal. Can you imagine what these Pizza Hut Frequent Eaters members will do to those tiny airplane toilets? YEESH!

Anonymous said...

One of the funniest, most ironic news stories I have seen in recent history was how the phone company no longer wire tapped for the government because they.. wait for it.. can't pay their bill.

In one of the most shining examples of the ineffectiveness of the Bush administration, they set themselves up to 1984 our lives but they can't foot the bill because of all the other ways they've financially "screwed the pooch".

What a legacy for George W. "Don't Tax but Spend" Bush.

So yeah, the bad news is they theoretically have the freedom to wiretap us into the grave. The reality is, they can no longer afford to do it.

So everyone be a dear and mail those pizza hut coupons to the fine folks at the NSA.

They probably need it.