Coming Soon: Corporate Kindness

Soon a corporate kindness will overcome us all. Some of us will be blinded, others will go round for weeks seeking light at the middle of daytime while wearing wool and polyester blend suits. Soon there will be corporate kindness.

Look: you have Google, and Microsoft, and IBM and Intel. Are not these giants (veritable leviathans) just opening their arms to humanity and calling themselves out: you can meet me! I provide your database! From there anything is possible: the tower of Babel or perhaps the right kind of ladder: a ladder to the heaven, absolute fulfillment, every man is enchanted by his own Houri dancer, who keeps shifting and changing and she never grows old.... that sort of thing: every man given a fig tree and some dried fruit!

Or maybe just the good old thing: knowledge is power. That's just the thing: a knowledgeable pep-talk: some young corporate believers, and older climbers, and some hangers-on will take up notice: the university is a corporation: mental health is provided to you via a corporation: all of these great corporations seem to have a certain limited grasp: they want to help you but nobody seems to have the time: they are trying to make time for the performance checks that are handed out by the corporations: performance and copy-rights handed down: that's what we are talking about: half of humanity could be starving: in fact it is: starving right now for food and shelter and some kind of human face that would say: hey, now, it's really OK just to live here: and you don't have to watch TV and you don't have to watch some kind of COPS or Reality TV show just to know what kind of criminal you should aspire to!

But even if that half showed up on our doorstep: tired, hungry, watching too much TV: I mean the tired, the poor the hungry, the huddled, the starving masses, watching-always-watching too much fucking TV: I mean those masses, huddled round us now, like some creature who was wrapped up and snuggled: a creature made of starvation itself: wrapped up around all our cool and quaint technological innovation: now imagine that!

Ways of Being "Played"

And I'm over here in the basement: mixing up the medicine: taking leering glances at Robert Walser, saying, "cool it, man, are you for real?" "Shit, you fooling me?" and so on indicating that one is playing the other just as a gilded harp or some kind of finely strung instrument: like the magic harp from "Jack and the Beanstalk" -- now there is some sort of completely dorky story! I remember hearing it on my "tale-spinners-for-children" records. My player was a mickey mouse machine: with a picture of Pluto, the dog: there we go: turning the god of the dead into your faithful dog: I mean, what the fuck were you thinking Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney or whoever you are: "I'm thinking of making a lot of money in the entertainment industry," well is that so mister entertainer?

And then we would look at each other for a few moments, Walt Disney and I, that veritable saint of children's games and fun-type media material: and I'd back down right then and there: I am not a man to strike up that sort of an argument, not with Walt Disney at least: he'd beat the shit out of me and I know it.

Anyway the arm of the record player was constructed of Pluto's bone: we played our Disney, corporate children's entertainment, on the Disneyland record player with pluto's bone and some wires stuck in the plastic bone simulation and a record stylus caught up underneath: a mickey mouse record player in that rough teal plastic blue. Well I could go on an on about this sort of trivial thing but of course you won't understand and will think it entirely irrelevant, I mean there isn't any such thing as a teal or turquoise blue Mickey Mouse record player any more in my reality, so what is the point of speaking about it at all, except that I was stuck with the thing in my childhood, and may have suffered severe emotional damage because of it (people are thinking up of the strangest things to receive emotional damage from so why not this).

So... Jack and the Beanstalk... (not David and Goliath, how could I ever be such a dolt as to forget this one!) is that really the name of that one? Jack, a quick witted fellow, spry and kind of flat Jack, not much here: move along now kind of Jack: well we have that sort of thing. Jack is a beanstalk: I mean, have you ever seen a really thick "Jack," though I am sure there are lots of them, in my life it is clear that there are no thick-looking Jack the Beanstalk kind of people, only slim ones who go diving up to the roof of the world like it was no problem.

Jack and the Beanstalk: always a corporate climber, no doubt moving upwards in a straight line, tall thin and narrow is the line to success, and each member of society is capable of the same straight line to success, no matter how inconceivable the adversity, no matter how many times they have carried round with them their own shattered dreams, like they are just serfs, and no matter what they will do they will remain serfs, unless they marry some of the landed monetary royalty: now there is a farce: the one's with power in this society are the one's with money! Of course there are other sorts of power, there is power all over the place: there is power in the woman who is turning a stirring spoon in her cooking pot for God's sake, so please leave me be: stir your own pot if you want to do that! There are pot-stirrers, there are battleships and gunboats for little boys to play with: they wear white Napoleonic Uniforms and those devastatingly fashionable Napoleonic hats: but wait I am getting beyond myself.

Corporate kindness, you beg to differ, such a foolish intimation would never be entered into by any self-respecting scholar: we all know that the corporations are in this for the power of the buck, and the bottom line is the bottom line: Dollars and Cents. But I always fancied that money taken in this respect was crass and, to say the least, somewhat unsightly and lacking in earnestness: the earnestness of the hard-working man who comes home after a day and a week of his hard-earned-labor saying: Mom I did this: I have professed the nations and the nations are somehow made invisible by my own attempts: we have conquered the world problem of capitalism or some such thing.

Well you know at least when you sober up from this kind of unsightly thinking that there are at least four (4) things in life that make sense:

1. Do not damage your dental work, it will wind up costing you more out of your pocket and drain your insurance.
2. Always keep a fresh pair of Napoleonic pants handy, just in case your hysterical pre-occupations make you insist that you can turn a Mickey Mouse deal into a Multi-National slam dunk agreement (or else all-out war).
3. Prepare yourself for the coming of the corporate messiah: clearly this one is coming soon, I have read all the signs correctly: his teaching will be: "You had your chance now get in line!"
   
4. Take a deep breath and breathe: even if what you are greeted with is insincerity you can sill sell it to somebody for half-price!