(from Beverly Hills Stories)
- Look at that thing. The new Center For The Performing Arts.
- Looks like a giant cardboard box.
- Paid for by the publisher of TV Guide.
- The box that held the garbage he dumped on the American people.
- Yes. See the cracks? Ventilation for the air conditioning equipment, the architect claims, but I think it is to taunt all the street sleepers in Beverly Hills who spend their days at the library here next door. The city will give them a box to sleep in, allow them to hang out here, but they shouldn't get too warm and comfortable.
- You have an explanation for everything.
- Sure, what else am I to do?
- You're at a library. You could read books.
- I'm at what's called a public library. You know, we are educated to go out in public and expect that something will happen, something unanticipated. The people we meet will bring out surprises in our lives. That's over. Now when we go in public we find that nothing surprising happens. Everyone, however much they've grown up to expect something good and new from meeting each other now, afraid of losing their livelihood follows strict rules of conduct, not only in work, but in private life too.
- I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.
- Ever talk to any of the hundreds that live on the street in our beautiful city of Beverly Hills?
- I've tried.
- Then maybe you found out that most have families, often wealthy families. They're street wanderers because the public economic principle of acting as if we're enemies who're making deals with each other, giving each other jobs buying and selling things to each other, has invaded family life. The people on the street came out losers in deals, didn't correctly reinvest profit, had no marketable services, so were simply ejected from their families.*
- They're mostly crazy.
- Made crazy then by the economic principle of everyone being everyone's enemy but pretending to be friends, made crazy by being the least practical of people put in circumstances that even the most practical couldn't handle.
- They're always talking of conspiracies.
- There is a conspiracy against them, but it's not secret. The people who profit most by the endless buying and selling things and renting ourselves as slaves to each other meet publicly at published times and places. The mystery is not in the actual planning to direct this system to profit the people who are meeting. The mystery is the feeling we have when we continue to go into public, remember thinking anything is possible from each other, but knowing now that is no longer true and unable to figure out why.
- We believe in conspiracies because we can't face up to the fact our public life is gone.
- Yes. We can't communicate to each other not only because we're all afraid for our lives and can't relax for a moment from buying and selling and renting each other out to each other, but also because the former public meeting places have become controlled by the people who openly conspire at published times and places. You can write and publish messages and be read and heard by people like yourself who already think pretty much like you do, but the newspapers, magazines, electronic broadcasting, which at one time had a more general audience are now owned by the publicly conspiring and only publish announcements of terrifying events causes for which are never investigated. Because the stories are never followed up they dull the audience into thinking that, since despite continual bad news the world doesn't end, nothing really has to be done after all.
- A conspiracy theorist went to the Los Angeles Airport this weekend and opened fire on federal security agents. What do you think about that?
- In the 19th century anarchists, despairing from the loss of public life, threw themselves into a campaign to assassinate representatives of power.
- And what happened?
- The Russian revolution.
Continued at Somebody Out There Likes You
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* A Big Mistake
