Look dude I set the bar pretty low, you brought a f@#$%! shovel -- Anon Guest
[AN: Another one I love is, "The bar was set so low that it was a tripping hazard in Hades, but you had to go limbo with the devil." It's just... SO raw and so delicious.]
P.T. Barnum said it best, There's one born every minute. He anticipated people willing to believe his particular brand of bafflegab, but there's suckers that will fall for anything if you shovel the right horseshit. For many of them, if you just keep yelling the same lie, they will believe it. Such was life for Pundit Koltaan Virulgens, who told the people what the CEO's said they needed to know.
This was a big event, according to a month of hype. Where Koltaan himself, as the voice of the people for Greater Deregulation Upper South-West, was leaving the safety of the libertarian paradise to expose the deprivation and suffering in the Galactic Alliance. Full livesuit, live cam, the works. Billions would be tuning in. Great for ratings.
There were auxiliary camera crews, of course, to get everything that Koltaan's helmet cam didn't pick up. There were teams of hackers to snatch securicam feed from "the enemy" and add it to the supercuts of Koltaan's adventures in the depraved wilderness that was the rest of the alliance. "This is it, oh my faithful. This airlock leads to the hideous hellscape that the Alliance does not want you to see." Techie teams had to jimmy it open, and when it moved, it squealed like a dying beast.
The scene beyond was indeed a nightmare. Children in livesuits. Infrastructure falling apart. People performing exhausting labor tasks just to earn enough air to keep performing the same task. The starving, the diseased, the wanton displays of lust... all were out in the open.
"CUT!" Koltaan yelled, pressing the button that would add pre-recorded explosions and a loss of signal sign to show to the live audience. "What the hell is this? I could find the same scene in East Jerziside!"
A bell rung, and all the actors disengaged from their activities with low grumbles of discontent. The director emerged from inside one of the dilapidated walls. "Well we couldn't use the real footage from Scout Deel after he defected. It was too..." he fumbled for a word, "clean. There was no deprivation anywhere."
"We want to make those idiots scared," said Koltaan. "We don't want them going, oh hey, I shop there. For criminy's sake, we need worse than that cluster of mouth-breathing numbskulls are already living in."
"Sir?" said a minor flunky.
"I want them shitting their pants. I want them begging the CEO's to keep them safe. I want them running whenever one of those self-righteous, namby-pamby, you get food and water and shelter and medicine for nuh-thing see are see idiots comes within boo of them!"
"Sir?" the minor flunky nervously attempted to gesture for attention.
"I do most of the heavy lifting here, and even then you can't come up with something to keep all the jelly-brained, vegetative consumers out there scared enough to buy toothpaste!"
"Sir?" now they dared to tap Koltaan's shoulder.
"WHAT?" he demanded.
"Sir, we're still live."
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / moatsem059]
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