Funny, ha ha

It’s funny how the methods of thieves and robbers and criminals in general get incorporated into the very fabric of how an economy functions. The assimilation is nowhere more perfected than in the USA.

            It’s funny if you think getting reamed up the ass with a corrugated pipe is funny.

            It’s very funny how these shady behaviours get accepted by the general populace, growl as they might. To curse and express anger at being robbed is deemed to be naïve, un-American, anti-social, or even seditious.

            How has this happened?

            Gradually, over very many years; and it dates back to long before the founding of the US, doesn’t it?

            A very small example, and one revealing of my own naiveté is my current Comcast (that bastion of corporate excrescence) bill. Little did I know I was being charged for HBO every month, after the first month’s free trial. I never asked for it, I never signed on, I never said yes.

            But apparently I never said NO (perhaps I had other things to do).

            Let’s nail him! they gloated, and I was 20 bucks poorer every month for something I did not want.

            Apparently I let my guard down, forgetting how ‘things work’.

            Are corporations evil? my daughter asked me one day, as we walked along the tree-lined streets of midtown Sacramento.

            It’s more complicated than that, I answered.

            But I’m not so sure.

            The businessmen, the politicians, the lawmen; they all learn from the crooks. Somewhere in their hearts they admire the crooks and their quick successes, and seek only to find ways to do the very same things, but within the gambit of some law or other. Protection rackets, shell games, snake-oil, thinly veiled stick-ups and high-jackings – they are all accepted under the cover of the proper amount of, or layers of, authority and official and showy decoration.

            Peel the layers off the onion and you find nothing. Something has been lost - likely stolen - and it is irretrievable.

            Maybe you can live with this.