The Kill Riff by David J. Schow Read Free Book Online Page A

thought that painters and writers and rock stars would one day be writing the damned things off as business tax deductions? A reference tool for the creative. Lucas thought it was a nice sentiment, but probably hogwash in most cases; most purchasers probably had a motive no more complex than the desire to suck up movies nine hours per day. Then came home computers. The brilliance of the home computer boom was that people bought them without any real knowledge of what they were going to do with them. Cable TV had wired the country together in a little less than a decade. And now everyone was so terrified of venturing out into the city streets that it made perfect survival sense to hole up in front of the glowing altar screen, processing words rather than writing them, communicating via modem, switching to twenty-four-hour sports and religion channels when the all-day, all-night movies paled, handing off from those to moronic video games. Firms like Kroeger Concepts had abetted the manufacturers of each of these new toys and would soon be responsible for insuring there was an endless flow of "product" to keep the video zombies in sopor and out of mischief on a long-term basis. A lifetime basis. True video acolytes could be talked into anything. Their attention spans could be molded, their lives programmed via advertising. MTV had managed the mind-numbing feat of convincing viewers to watch programming that was all commercials.
        Lucas wondered whether he was a neophobe, bitching into his beer at Progress. On the other hand, any hive mind that could be gulled into believing there was no difference between seeing a film in a movie theater, in seventy-millimeter Super-Panavision with six-track Dolby sound, rolling off a $10,000 projection system and through a $12,000 audio system, and seeing the same film on a crappy beam-screen blowup with half the picture cropped away for TV aspect ratio, and calling both of these experiences "seeing movies"… why, such a mind could be conned into buying anything.
        And what of the people who could not afford all this glittery, hypnotic hardware and software? Not that welfare families had ever lacked for television sets. Burt had come up with an intriguing answer for that, sometime between lunch and the bow-in back at Kroeger.
        
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        "Most people, I think, believe if they stay flush during a given business year, then nobody really gives a good goddamn what the unemployment stats are or aren't," Burt had said. "Not if they're working. And honest. So, what of the unemployed? Who the hell are they? A lot of nerds who believed that college would hand them a career. Ex-housewives, seeking life beyond marriage. Ditch-digger types. Peter principle dummies who were shocked when somebody wised up and laid them off. Career industrial workers who find it beyond their capacity to believe that there is no longer a need for what they've been doing for forty years straight. A vast workpool has been driven to welfare, unemployment, loss of dignity. Now, consider this in light of the current administration."
         Uh-oh, Lucas thought. Burt rarely refused an opportunity to pontificate on matters political. Time to grit the teeth.
        "It's so big, so obvious, that no one sees it. A huge number of the unemployed are unskilled, urban minorities and poor white trash. They're on TV every time some politicians or celebrities do a fund-raiser, like that Hands Across America thing. 'Give us jobs, not food,' they say. And what happens when they get frustrated enough at not having jobs?"
        Lucas took the bait. There was no other way out. He was not normally a political person. "They liberate a few K-Marts, break bank windows, open fire hydrants, and kill a cop or two."
        "And the government is sitting back with folded hands, waiting for that day, waiting for the riots to commence. Because when they do, the Guard can be rolled in with plenty of justification.