After Old Folks got on permanent with
Suent Scientific, Brenda bought a trailer in Wewa. Then she sold it, quit her job,
and moved to Atlanta. She and Old Folks bought a house in Norcross, a VA repo.
Old Folks took out mortgage insurance on himself so that if they defaulted on the
loan the bank would be paid.
When Old Folks signed a 30-year mortgage, at
age 60, he gave himself a present of a web page. The Daily Bugle.
He was writing a book a month.
He posted the books he wrote at The Daily
Bugle, daily, as he wrote them.
He wrote about work. A report from the
trenches.
Imagine Orwell writing, and publishing, Down and Out in Paris
and London, or The Road to Wigan Pier, in real time.
Imagine being
able to read books like that as they were being written.
* * *
If there was one thing Old Folks couldn't stand it was hypocrisy. Or deliberate,
party-line insincerity.
George Orwell said the hallmark of political speech
was insincerity. That was the hallmark of corporate speech, too.
Harris
Sussman says a knowledge worker answers to a higher authority than his employer.
Old Folks believed that. He also believed that, now that the telecommunications
revolution was here, we were all knowledge workers. We all answered to a higher
authority than our employer.
We could all write novels about work on the
Internet, or all read novels about work on the Internet at work.
The employer
who tried to bullshit a knowledge worker was fucking with primal forces. The knowledge
worker could find out the veracity of a claim on the Internet. All was shouted from
the housetops, now. Not hidden in the closet.
The knowledge worker might
say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," like Peter
Finch said in Network. As he had a grand mal seizure and fainted.
Old Folks was mad as hell.
* * *
Suent Scientific had what they called corporate partners. These were associations
of individuals with something in common, who were given time off from work to meet
and office space to meet in, auditorium space when they held an Ethnic Heritage luncheon.
There was one for blacks, one for women, one for Latinos, one for Asians, one for
the handicapped, one for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or undecided persons.
There was one for everybody except the straight white male, who was presumed to be
at the top, holding everybody else down, the enemy, the one group it was okay to
vilify.
When you logged in every morning, on the company computer, on the
factory intranet, the factory home page, a screen came up called The Diversity Circle.
It was a circle of hands, shaking hands, in a display of amity and cooperation and
team spirit. One white, one yellow, one brown, one black hand.
In his book,
Old Folks added a fifth hand, a blue hand, a Thalidomide flipper. He called the
screen The Circle Jerk.
A circle jerk is when teenaged boys masturbate to
see who can ejaculate, or "come" first.
An exercise in group masturbation.
Old Folks implied that the corporate partners at Suent Scientific were like the animals
in Animal Farm singing "Beasts of England."
It was a charade.
Like Chinese Communists waving the little red Quotations from the Chairman,
and cheering, or a Hitler youth rally, with costumes and flags, symbols and slogans,
theme music and logos.
It was theater.
With a Wizard of Oz behind
the scenes, pulling the levers.
Run, Toto, run.
This was before President
Bush's War on Totemism, and the collapse of Suent Scientific in an Enron-like implosion
of dark cable, when the market for fiber-optic cable products dried up.
Dark cable meant the end of Old Folks's stable job, his prosperity, his peace
of mind.
It was coming.
He could feel it in the balls of his
feet, the balls of his feet. As the trapeze artist said to his deaf-mute
catch-man.
Needless to say, the pain was going to be excruciating.
* * *
But that's what gave Old Folks the temerity to write as he did, and post
it on the worldwide web.
He was going to lose his job anyway, when the economy
went tango uniform (tits-up).
It had happened to Old Folks before, and he
knew the signs.
He saw the full magnolia coming.
Corpses with rouge
on their cheeks.
Jacking off. Bones clacking like castanets.