IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

Every once in awhile I take a keen personal interest in the expense reports my staffers submit for approval.  Nothing livens up a dead afternoon like asking a mid-level manager, with just a few years to go until retirement, why he felt it necessary to pay for a new vicuna coat with the R.A. Enterprises AMEX.  Since I hold these little interviews in the presence of my legal samurai Mr. Suntori and a couple of his litigation ninja I'm usually guaranteed a good time.  Lately, however, I've become increasingly distressed by a line item that continues to rocket upwards despite my best efforts.  I'm speaking, of course, of the gasoline bill.  Even more distressing than the phenomenal rise of petrol prices is the fact that investigating the matter led to a more horrific exposé than a Super Bowl^TM half-time show.  Lucky for me that I needed a column idea isn't it?

Now I'm not normally a very cynical person.  I mean my first thought was that perhaps my staff members were exercising a wee bit of a lead foot and using up more gasoline than necessary.  I called down to my fleet manager "Bonnie Charlie" McNebbish.  "Och Laddie, there's not mooch more Ah can doo.  These wee Neon's ye've got the poor bastards drivin' can barely get on the rood safely, they're so slow.  Ye're as cheap as me own sainted mother laddie, and Ah'll gie ye all doo respect, but you're going to have to look elsewhere."  Now Bonnie Charlie is no more Scottish than Christopher Lambert, but he pinches a penny tighter than a hydraulic vise.  Nothing is wasted in his garage, unless you count the little terrier with a fondness for the Glenlivet.  Clearly the quest for an answer was longer than I thought.

At this point a creeping dread began to overcome me.  Unless I had a chambered round in my 9mm with which to blow my brains out, I was looking at an extended search on the Internet.  "Oh Christ," I thought, "I hope those bastards at Google haven't ruined their search engine by going public yet."  Finding useful information on Google is already like trying to divine the future by examining piles of fresh shit: what you end up with is a big mess that stinks.  When their stockholders actually force them to earn a profit, you'll end up with something far worse: Yahoo.  I thought about calling my favorite neighborhood Wiccan, and, trying to keep a straight face, asking her what the stars doth auger.  Unfortunately I'm fresh out of chickens and black cats.  Seeing that I had failed to reload my gun clip after the last round of "negotiations" with the clown that edits this electronic cageliner, I realized that Google was going to be my only hope.

So there I am sitting at my little computer looking at the Google home page.  I type in "gasoline prices" and right on top, well second from the top, is the following gold ring in the smuggler's excrement.

Now it was time to find out exactly what was going on with gas prices and Lo! and Behold! my own government was going to tell me.  As you might expect I was disappointed. The link was utter gibberish.  What I needed was a chart.  It took about 3 lifetimes and another check of my pistol before I found this, and discovered that in real, inflation adjusted dollars current gasoline prices are actually fairly reasonable and nowhere near "record" highs.  The real scam here is being perpetrated by the media once again jumping out and yelling "Boo!" at you by focusing on the easier to understand "nominal" (wallet) prices.

So now the question going through my brain is "What is Big Media^TM up to?" and the answer arrives so quickly and so forcefully into my consciousness that I have to check the gun again to make sure there hasn't been an accident.  You see what Big Media^TM is trying to do is fill up space, feed the news cycle, jam content into the ever hungry maw of 24/7 coverage.  In this case they're getting you so worked up about gasoline, a product whose price since the 1980's has generally *fallen* in inflation adjusted dollars, that you begin the highly entertaining spectacle of making Presidential Candidates promise to do something about it.  Let's sing Hosannas on high that the boys are already starting.

George Bush, for example, is promising that he WON'T raise federal taxes on gasoline.  Although how he plans on getting the refinery-owning suckling pigs, drowning in the milk flowing from the public's wallets, to stop pumping you at the pump I don't know.  Just because the chairman of Texaco is a golfing buddy of George II doesn't mean he wants to go without a new yacht this year.  I don't want to mention it, but let's recall what happened the last time we believed this burning Bush.  Of course this time we're talking about money, not something trivial, like weapons that could kill the entire world, so it's unlikely that he'd be lying to us.  He is, after all, a good little Republican.

Now it is campaign season so let's give John "who wants to marry a millionairess" Kerry equal time  In order to protect "the common man"^TM, Kerry thinks that arm twisting the OPEC nations will go a long way.  You remember the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries right?  Mostly it's made up of bastards in the Middle East who are our "allies" like Saudi Arabia (hmmm....Islamic charities funding terrorism anyone?) and Qatar (al-Jazeera yes?) or people we've been pissing off for the last 3 years (i.e. everyone else).  Kerry also wants to delay refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserves  the military maintains for use in emergencies.  Not only emergencies like an ongoing world political climate where any Boy Scout can irradiate thousands of square miles of American Heartland^TM while earning his Atomic Energy Badge¹, or just because he's pissed off that his gay scout master got bum rushed (so to speak) out of the troop, but also emergencies like the ongoing mortgage refinancing Kerry's Hollywood friends have to endure every time they fuel up the ol' Escalade.  Ain't it a bitch bein' a playah?

So there you go.  One more ring in the Presidential Politics circus.  Get out there, do your part, and twist those bastards in the wind.  Forget Mad House or Surreal Life, the most amusing reality show is right out your front door at the corner Conoco.  Me, I'm going to reduce my staff to riding bicycles.  Or at the very least make them buy their own damn gas.  Mr. Suntori is already hastily amending the contracts and employee handbooks.  If I have to I'll lay off the whole damn bunch of 'em if it means you, my loyal reader, can fire up your Hummer for 99 cents a gallon.

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¹ The Radioactive Boy Scout.  It's a book. It's scary.  It's *not* by Stephen King^TM.