The Naked Game
by John Saward
There are a great many things that might send you howling into insanity. Israel’s ongoing carnival of perverted and psychotic violence, either gleefully facilitated or strategically ignored by your government. Your college, hosting and financing avant-garde sting operations where state trooper burnouts chase student protestors into coffeeshops. The mercenaries hired by the U.S. to patrol Gaza aid sites, biker thugs playing out elaborate Rambo fantasies. ICE working to make extrajudicial abductions something like America’s fifth major sport.
That’s the big stuff, the annihilating stuff. But there are all the ambient gnawing indignities too, the frauds and pollutions that you now live with like a kind of weather. Your local vet clinic is now a pump-and-dump scheme operated by the chinless slobs of Wall Street. A third of all Minor League Baseball has been hijacked by a private equity firm that is holding cities from Portland, Maine to Rancho Cucamonga, California hostage for $2 million in “stadium renovations” it will never make.
Text message scams, municipal scams, real estate scams, Pat McAfee pushing 5-leg parlays between commercials for other companies where you can place 5-leg parlays. Your concert ticket requires an app download and also the third-party use of your data. Rick Scott, Florida senator and D-list hustler, is wagging his pale little fingers at a committee audience and croaking out a plea to keep right on insider trading, and he can’t believe you’d even ask him to explain himself. Is it illegal to “make money” in America, now?
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