SNICKERS CAPITALISM

From Cortez, PNG Chaps, 1992, reprinted in Driverside Airbag.

I ask a question. It’s a Moloch presentation on catastrophic insurance. It’s mandatory for all employees. Moloch is lobbying state government for a change in the no-fault insurance law. Moloch hired many lawyers and lobbyists. They run around Lansing, the Michigan state capital, and pedal influence. Moloch claims to represent the motoring public, whatever and wherever they are and might be.

I raise my hand like a kid in grade school.

Behind the podium stands a Moloch vice president. It is the question and answer period. He acknowledges my hand. “Yes,” he says, and then he points at me.

“If the company’s liability will be limited to $200,00,” I ask, “who will pay for the additional cost? I mean, the medical costs can skyrocket for catastrophic health care. Who’ll pay for the rest?”

“Good question,” responds Moloch’s vice president, even though it is obvious the question is not good, in fact it is bad, something to be avoided. “In such cases, the state will pay for the injured’s health care.”

“Oh,” I say, and then, instead of biting my tongue, I continue with, “I see, so you’re saying the taxpayers will have to pick up the tab?”

Moloch’s vice president says yes, the state of Michigan will pay for any medical costs up and beyond the $200,000 range.

I shouldn’t have asked the question.

I read in the newspaper this morning about corporate charity. On average it is less than I% of corporate worth. I think of president Wilson. He prevented the Red Cross from delivering much needed foodstuffs to the starving farmers of Arkansas during the Depression. Wilson said charity makes them dependent, shiftless, and lazy. Maybe the CEO of Moloch believes the same as Wilson. Moloch gives charity to the Great Unwashed, though never without a gratuitous public relations spin attached. I believe it was Wilson who said the business of business is business. Cutting catastrophically injured motorists off at the $200,000 level is good for business, even if the taxpayers have to pick up the tab. Moloch likes to fix the blame on shyster lawyers, a climate of litigation, and skyrocketing health care costs, but the fact remains—it can easily cost a million dollars or more to rehabilitate a catastrophically injured person. Moloch, like all behemoth corporations, negotiates its own deal with a corrupt government. It wines, dines, and prostitutes the public trust in so-called representational government.

I’m on the shit list because I ask such questions.

I will never be employee of the month.

In Russia you can buy nearly anything if you have American money. In Russia, since the communist regime fell, you can buy freedom, if you can afford it. There is very little government intervention in social and business affairs. Because the government is now almost completely ineffectual. In Russia today the inflation is 10% per month. Impoverished people sell family belongings in the street. You can see them in Gorky Park selling heirlooms, stolen goods, candy bars. Nationalist leaders call this new free market scheme “Snickers capitalism.” If you have money you can buy nearly anything at the kiosks on the street. Russia has never known capitalism. Russians, before Lenin and the Bolsheviks, were mostly religious peasants dominated by a czarist elite. Class war against the bourgeoisie catapulted the Russian peasant into the 20th century. Now the artificially designated proletariat, former peasants of the land, drink vodka in productionless factories. State capitalism no longer exists. Now the big bosses, who are all former communist party members, run the economy. Meanwhile, below the streets of Moscow in a dirty and dangerous mass transit tube, orphans beg for devalued kopecks.

Snickers capitalism will save the world!

In the lawless void created by the departure of the communist rulers, Russia has spawned its own version of the Mafia. Entrepreneurs are shot down in the street if they do not cough up protection loot. Drugs and prostitution are everywhere. In response, the United States has sent in the FBI to help catch the bad guys. I never thought I’d see the FBI in Russia. I’d have to say they’re not finished catching the bad guys in America. We still have plenty of S & L crooks on the loose.

I never thought we’d be the world’s baby-sitter.

I watch a Russian woman on television. She tells the camera about her struggle to stay afloat in an economic sea torn by chaos. She is thirty-something. If not for the Russian she speaks, the woman might pass for American. She is Slavic, tall and thin and blonde, wears modern westernized clothes. A translated voice-over tells me how the woman lost her husband to the war in Afghanistan. She has two children. It is difficult for the woman to get the basics for a decent life in Russia. Does she think Boris Yeltsin can do anything about her problems? No, she answers, quickly and cynically, she does not think Yeltsin or anybody else can turn things around.

I look at the television.

It’s on sale in the department store where I buy nearly everything I need. Moloch Food & Retail Acres. I listen to the Russian woman talk about Snickers capitalism and then I turn away and walk down the department store aisle. I walk over to the Moloch Color One station. I have a roll of Moloch brand 35mm film to be processed. I take a processing envelope from a slot on the station. I look around for a pen. I see a beaded chain without a pen attached to it. Somebody has stolen the pen, somebody thinks they put one over on Moloch Color One. Instead I’m inconvenienced. I look around, see a woman in a red Moloch Food & Retail Acres smock, and I walk over to where she stands near the floral section. She looks at me and her face says please don’t ask me a question and then I ask her a question. Can I borrow your pen? I ask her. Somebody stole the pen from the Color One station and I can’t fill out a processing envelope without one. Sure, she says, as she searches the pockets of the red smock, I have one here somewhere. She is distracted, squints like a person who needs glasses. I look at the side of her face. She’s twenty-something, has thin shoulder-length auburn-colored hair, the nose is sharp, as are all of her facial features, and her lips are thin and pushed together like a person on the edge of an anxiety attack. She wears blue jeans and black Reeboks. Oh, here’s a pen, she exclaims, almost exasperated, though controlled (like all employees she is afraid of customer complaints and management retribution), and gives me the pen. It’s a blue ink pen minus cap. I take the pen and tell her thanks. She says would you please put it over there on the counter near the jewelry register when you’re finished with it and then she looks at me with dark brown eyes. She looks exhausted. She is probably pulling a double shift. Okay, I say, and then I walk back over to the Color One station. I fill in my name, address, and telephone number on a processing envelope. Finally I put the film canister in the envelope, tear off the perforated and numbered receipt, and walk the pen over to the glass counter. I lay it on the glass near the register, and then I get out of there.

I drive in the car, windows rolled down.

I listen to Big Jim, the talk radio host on the conspiracy station. He’s all worked up over Bill Clinton’s health ID card. It’s what they call a “smartcard,” which is to say the thing has a microprocessor. Clinton’s proposed smartcard, Big Jim informs me, is the first step in the New World Order’s plan to monitor the populace. Next will come the postal smartcard, the IRS smartcard, the INS smartcard, and of course the eavesdropping Clipper microprocessor chip in every new telephone, fax machine, and computer modem. How about, Big Jim booms, one smartcard for everything! Don’t leave home without it!

Next Big Jim takes a call.

Big Jim, this is Randy in Waterford.

Hi, Randy. What’s on your mind tonight?

Well, Big Jim, quite frankly I’m afraid of this new credit card thing you’re talking about here on the broadcast.

It’s not a credit card, Randy. It’s a card for access to your bank account, your insurance, and for any transaction you might conduct with the government. And you’re right, Randy—this is something to be afraid of. Have you ever read George Orwell, Randy?

Uh, no. No I haven’t, Big Jim.

George Orwell said that bureaucrats, simply doing what bureaucrats do, without motivation or intent, will use technology to enslave the people. Bill Clinton wants to use the health care smart-card as the first step to monitor the people and violate the personal freedoms shared by all citizens of this magnificent nation.

The United States of Moloch, I think, and then I switch off the radio.

Snickers capitalism on parade. Nearly everything I pass on Michigan Avenue on the way to and from the job, which I keep simply to fend off homelessness and starvation, is geared in one way or another to Snickers capitalism—the gas stations, the carry-out fish shoppe, the dry cleaners, the liquor stores, McDonalds, KFC, the banks and travel agencies, the strip malls with dozens of shops, the porno theater and bookstore, the collision shops, even the whores and pimps and drug dealers on the sidewalk—all of it and more, even the trees and grass, are dedicated to the continuation and fulfillment of Snickers capitalism.

I don’t see how we need half the shit they sell us.

On the east side of 1-275, there is something called Mount Trashmore. It’s a huge landfill, a barren and lifeless yellow-brown dirt semi-mountain, beneath which rests the half-decomposed remains of our consumption. I drive past and look over at Mount Trashmore. It dominates the landscape. Furious sea gulls clutter a pale blue sky above the huge artificial mound of clay and dirt. On the top, as if triumphant, stands a yellow bulldozer. It looks smaller than a matchbox bulldozer from my vantage on the freeway. All the rejected things of our endless and mostly absurd consumption. In ten years something will leak out and there will be a congressional investigation.

I think this as I drive south 1-275 to the 1-96 interchange.

It will take a long time for Snickers capitalism to reach inside sub-Saharan Africa and make obedient and passive the tribal inhabitants of an arid and broken quarter of the world. In a magazine article I read about cell phone and computer links everywhere in the world—except sub-Sahara Africa. I see, while in the department store electronics section, the starving and diseased children of Rwanda. I have witnessed (via newspaper and television) starvation now several times in my forty some years. It usually occurs in Asia and Africa, rarely in the so-called “advanced industrial nations.” I think about the government subsidies to American agricorporations, how the government encourages the production of food, only to have much of the surplus rot in storage. Amber waves of grain, the world’s bread basket. It makes a nice postcard. Something to teach the kiddies in grade school.

Meanwhile, children in Africa starve.

I feel helpless to do anything about anything. I look at the babies dying under scrawny brown trees in Africa on the new Korean color television in the department store where I buy eggs and bread and cigarettes and beer and toilet paper to wipe my fat consumerist American white ass. I find it difficult enough to wake up in the morning and look at my worker face in the mirror. I can give money in a vicarious way to the 1-800 Sally Struthers number I see on television. I can join some organization and collect food and be generally optimistic about my selfish little personal reason for marching door to door asking for spare cans of Spam and processed macaroni and cheese for the poor starving children of Africa.

Do you think you can make a difference?

Moloch world-wide will eventually cut a wide and harsh swath across the wild and untamed backlands of every continent on the globe. And then? Nothing left, maybe we will dig up Mount Trashmore and sort out the semi-useful. Or trek off to Mars. Yeah, now there’s some untapped real estate! And no pesky indigenous savages to worry about. We can Christianize the Moon, Mars, and maybe even Venus in a heavily insulated suit. I’d have to say the rest of the solar system’s a loss, though. Mostly gas, ice crystals, and alternately burned and frozen rocks. Mars is the most logical choice for exploitation—er, exploration. Even so, who’d want to live there? No trees, all the water’s frozen beneath the surface, no summer breeze that gently ruffles lace curtains in the kitchen window. Nothing but oxidized rocks. Sub-zero temperatures. Great place to take the kids. Maybe we can go to Mars with the Russians. They have plenty of unused booster rockets and unemployed workers. Send an advance team, and then a colonization team, maybe those folks who were interned under that glass dome in the Arizona desert a few years back, and send in the work crews, the labor gangs in pressurized suits, the missionaries, the land speculators, the cops, the bosses, the mail-order brides, and have them build domes, huge all-inclusive domes with everything inside, and then send new Martian citizens, thousands of them, millions, the genetic material for a new generation of aliens, and hope the pressurized and air-conditioned domes never crack or get slammed by a meteor. Good plan, yes? It will only cost billions and billions, trillions, ga-zillions to build Quality Inns and JCPennys and Chuckie Cheesies on Mars.

No, thanks. I’ll stay here in my cheap mobile home.

I listen as the vice president of Moloch Insurance answers a question. A woman in a white dress and tan leather belt stands up in the corporate auditorium and asks about Moloch’s new advertising campaign. WE HAVE A FRIEND WITH MOLOCH LIFE & CAR. Friendly and nicely dressed people, average worker Americans, chant the Moloch mantra on television, between baseball innings, after the ten o’clock news, and in the morning before the weather report.

Never ask any questions.

Remain invisible and anonymous.

I wait for the presentation to conclude. It eventually does and I exit the auditorium with all the other workers-on-the-half-shell. Most head for the elevator. I walk in the opposite direction. I walk to the smoke lounge. I pass the wide windows of Moloch Insurance. Outside birds chirp in the nicely manicured corporate trees. I look at them. I am envious of them.

I don’t want to live on Mars.