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At 10:30 a.m., Jack Benny Hicks pulled out of Marty’s Feed and Seed, his truck loaded with a thousand gallons of diesel fuel and a half ton of fertilizer. JB had seen the purchases logged and recorded in real time with both Hicks’ credit card company, and the US Dept. of Agriculture. Had he wanted, JB mused, Hicks could have bypassed the credit card entirely and paid with his phone. The Statist masturbatory fantasy of a cashless society with everyone being plugged into a central database had almost been realized. From his searches of the past week, JB had noted that Hicks had opted out of an initiative by the school his three children attended to implant ID and tracking chips in the students. It was simply forestalling the inevitable. Most people now voluntarily took their GPS locators and personal ID chips with them in their phones. Who needed to implant them? Most people couldn’t function without them. With the arrival of personal banking apps on their phones, it would be a small matter, if necessary, to completely cut a person off from all their funding. All in the name of national security, of course.
It still baffled JB a little. Only the most fatuous would believe that the revelations of the logging of Americans’ private electronic communications stopped at simply storing metadata, but -good for people like JB- most Americans were content to swallow that very tripe. Most understood there was no NSA operative poring over their every phone call, email, porn viewing habits, or other personal data trail. What they didn’t seem to get was that all this information was cataloged, collated and stored, to be called up to use at anytime if someone became a problem. That selfie you sexted to your girlfriend twenty years ago? You might have thought it was gone, but it was still there the minute you tried to run for political office. That gay porn site you accidentally stumbled on? Saved on raw server logs at your ISP, ammunition to be used against you with your wife if the need arose. That anti-government rant you wrote and emailed privately to friends? That likely put you on a watch list.
Take this guy, Hicks. Not only had his purchases at Marty’s Feed and Seed been recorded, the fact that he had used a preferred customer card along the way to buy a pack of Nabs (eighty-nine cents) and a Coke (a buck) at a large chain not only told JB when and where he had been at a particular time, but what his buying habits were. And if push came to shove, the Dept. Of Agriculture wouldn’t have to look the other way every time Hicks rolled out of Marty’s Feed and Seed with a thousand gallons of diesel fuel and no Hazmat license. It was all there, all waiting to be called up and used, stored in limitless databases in Bluffton, Utah.
If, after all that, one were still as spotless as a girl scout’s panties, the biggest gun of all was the oldest and most effective: The Lie. Most people knew the government lied to them. They simply didn’t want to believe just how much, how outrageously, and how blatantly. When all else failed, incriminating evidence could be planted and disseminated widely with only a few mouse clicks. And one couldn’t fight it. Once it was out there, and it circulated long enough, and lodged itself into the search engine databases, and couldn’t be expunged, it -like a stubborn stain- became truth.
JB’s stomach rumbled a little. A midmorning snack would do him good. He ordered a sub sandwich and a bottled water sent in. While he waited for his meal to show up, he carefully watched the green vector arrow of Jack Benny Hicks’ vehicle slowly nosing its way back home.