I had just returned to my office from lunch Friday and was looking forward to getting some work done during a prolonged period of undisturbed time when Veronica plunked down in front of my private secretary and demanded to see me. I said send her in, of course. What else could I do?
“Whatever it is, couldn’t it have waited until I got home?” It was a reasonable question and I thought it deserved an answer.
“No,” Veronica asserted, clearly irritated that I would ask, “it can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s urgent, Tom,” she explained, seating herself on my desk, her fashionably shaped derriere covering the papers I had been reading. “It’s like everything’s happening all at once and I can’t focus. I need your help and I need it now.”
“Okay,” I relented, leaning back in my chair, “lay it on, dear ex-college girlfriend whom I hadn’t heard from in years and nevertheless decided to move in with me when her house burned down. What the hell is it now?”
“Well, first,” she began, her face bearing a slightly miffed expression in reaction to my characterization of her, “there’s Britney Spears.”
“Oh, boy,” I sighed, rolling my eyes, “what about her?”
“Tom, she’s about to get committed!”
“In that case, what I want to know is,” I declaimed rhetorically, “is what the hell took them so long?”
“How dare you,” she demanded, leaping up from my desk and strutting around in front of it indignantly, “talk about one of my friends like that?”
“You – are a friend of Britney Spears?”
“Certainly,” she assured me. “We met in rehab.”
“I’m sure she’s met a lot of people in rehab, Veronica. So what?”
“So it’s not like that at all, Tom! We became soul mates!”
“In rehab?”
“Yes!”
“So when was the last time you talked to Britney Spears, your soul mate you met in rehab?”
“In rehab.”
“That’s hardly an ongoing relationship, is it, Veronica?”
“You don’t understand,” she protested, slinking down onto the couch and gazing mystically out the window, “we don’t need to talk. We communicate on a higher astral plane.”
“And you’re communicating with her now, and you have communicated with her in the past?”
“Yes.”
“All right, what has she communicated to you?”
“Stuff like ‘Satan made me wear that outfit that made me look fat;’ and, ‘The CIA is beaming commands to me; I must travel to Washington and take off my shirt at the Scooter Libby hearing;’ and, ‘How come all these cops show up every time this damn car starts skidding around?’ and ‘Paparazzi are beaming radio messages into my brain – “Show us your patootie, Britney, show us your patootie!”;’ and, ‘[Expletive] you, Mom – try this beer bottle on for size;’ and, ‘Those bugs under the skin are coming back, I’ve got to shave my head again;’ and, ‘Kevin wants to bake my babies in the microwave oven – call 911!’; and, ‘Shut the [expletive] up, Elvis! I don’t care what the aliens are doing to you;’ and ‘Jesus [expletive] Christ, this place is boring; I wish I had some ketamine and Jack Daniels.’”
“Okay, based on what I, or any other member of the public has read and seen in the media, that sounds like what I would expect somebody listening in on Britney Spear’s mind might hear, or have heard,” I admitted. “But, if this is true, doesn’t the subject matter sort of prove that she’s ready for designer straightjacket pajamas and a reservation in the celebrity rubber room suite? Or, failing that, at least a serious date with Mighty Mister Thorazine?”
“Tom,” Veronica whispered as she turned to look pleadingly at me, “you have no idea what that poor woman has been through.”
“A bunch of ludicrous, demeaning, egregiously stupid, totally pointless and counterproductive self-inflicted tragedies?”
“Oh!” Veronica stood up and began pacing again. “That’s just like a man, for you to say that! When we met in rehab, she was completely vulnerable. So was I. We revealed our true selves to each other on a level of intimacy and sharing so basic and so powerful, few people ever experience it with another, not in their entire lifetimes. We told each other secrets that we had never told anyone else. We re-lived times of our lives through encounters that plumbed the depths of our souls. I can still recall, vividly, ever so vividly, the stories she told me about growing up poor on a farm in North Carolina, struggling in country-and-western bands, going to New York and finally getting a break in the first Broadway production of ‘Cats,’ and then…”
“Hey, wait a minute,” I interjected. “Britney Spears’ parents weren’t poor, and they weren’t farmers. She was born in Mississippi, then grew up in Louisiana – the family never lived anywhere near North Carolina. She never performed country-and-western music, either – when she was a kid, she was a gymnast, not singer or a musician. Then she was on ‘Star Search,’ and later, the Disney Channel hired her for two years on ‘The New Mickey Mouse Club.’ What’s more, the first Broadway production of ‘Cats’ opened in 1982, when Britney was ten months old!”
“What? That can’t possibly be true, Tom!”
So we spent a while on the Internet, reading about Britney Spears (and “Cats,” and C&W mustic) after which, Veronica got very quiet, took a seat on one of my plush chairs and stared, expressionless, down at the floor for several minutes.
“Is it possible,” I finally asked, “that, perhaps the person you met in rehab only thought she was Britney Spears?”
My inquiry brought Veronica back to life in a snap. “That [expletive]!” Veronica spewed vitriol through clenched teeth as she stamped her feet and balled up her fists, pounding the chair’s leather upholstered arms in high dungeon. “For more than two years, I’ve been groking with that woman on my most powerful astral planes! Staying up all night sometimes, sharing her deepest thoughts and dreams! Worrying about her career! Commiserating with her! Drinking deep of her pain, sorrow and humiliation! Feeling sorry for her! And for what? Nothing! She’s a complete nobody! And a crazy person at that – some worthless, lunatic [expletive] who thinks she’s Britney Spears! [Expletive] her! That [expletive] [expletive] [expletive]!”
“But what about your intense empathy, your cosmic attachment, your unfathomable caring for one another?”
“What?” Veronica demanded. “You think somebody like me has time for that kind of relationship with the psychic soul of some unknown mental patient? She tricked me! I thought I was having a long-distance clandestine telepathic lesbian love affair with a world-class, A-list celebrity! Strictly eight-figure Oprah-book-club-and-made-for-TV-movie deal material! And now I find out I’ve been brain-[expletive] a Dishwater Sally Jane Doe zero nothing no one… ordinary civilian… nut case!”
“No doubt you’ll meet a genuine celebrity in a similarly dramatic situation again, some day,” I consoled, “and you will get another shot at it. Now,” I continued, glancing meaningfully toward the door, “is there anything else?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Veronica replied, as I could see her, like any good survivor type, mentally dusting herself off and moving on. “As part of my last divorce settlement, I got ten thousand shares of Yahoo!”
“There was a time,” I commented, “when that was a good investment.”
“Tell me about it,” she responded ruefully.
“But the last six months, I’d say the handwriting’s been on the wall.”
“Huh? What handwriting?”
“’Mene, mene tekel Google,’ I guess.”
“All right, Tom,” she fumed, “you know I never liked it when you started making… references. What do you mean? And be sure to make sure that’s in English, please!”
“Oh, okay, it’s like this – when the Jews were slaves in Babylon, a message appeared on the walls. It was a graffito, just like today. Graffiti on walls goes way, way back, probably to the first walls, I bet. So, today, it’s ‘the handwriting on the wall,’ get it? The message said ‘Mene, mene tekel Upharsin,’ which means, loosely translated, ‘Look out Babylon, here come the Persians to kick your butts.’ So, what I was saying, that’s a metaphor, you know. I was saying Yahoo is Babylon and Google is the Persians. But in this case, it’s the Internet, instead of God, which has weighed Yahoo in the balance and found it wanting.”
“Weights and balances? What the [expletive] is this, the National Bureau of Measurements or something?”
“Ah, that used to be the National Bureau of Standards, but these days it’s the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”
“This kind of stuff,” she asserted ruefully, “is why I dumped you for a film student. He never had a thought in his head that a twelve year old couldn’t understand.”
“Which is, no doubt,” I shot back, “why he was such a success as a television drama producer in Hollywood. Now, before you and I get lost strolling down Memory Lane, what about Yahoo, anyway?”
“I just heard Microsoft wants to buy them. And what’s a ‘sixty-two percent price premium?’”
“That means Microsoft wants to buy them really, really bad.”
“Why would Microsoft want to buy Yahoo?” Veronica’s face assumed a perplexed little pout. “I mean, isn’t Bill Gates like, the smartest person who ever lived? If he wanted whatever Yahoo does, couldn’t he just have Microsoft do it?”
“Veronica, I know your existence more or less centers around finding rich men to take care of you, but really, where in the world did you get the idea that Bill Gates is some kind of intellectual giant?”
“You mean, he’s not?”
“Was Alphonse Capone?”
“Al Capone?”
“Yeah. Anybody who worships Bill Gates might as well worship Al Capone, too.”
“Huh?”
“Microsoft is nothing but an organized criminal enterprise,” I explained. “It got where it is today by breaking the law and then hiring lawyers to get off on whatever criminal charges and law suits happened to occur as a result.”
“But Microsoft could just build it’s own Yahoo, couldn’t it?”
“What Microsoft did,” I elaborated, “was steal stuff from other companies that were smaller than Yahoo, then build its own version of Yahoo, and use its huge battalion of lawyers to smack down any protests from the victims. But along came Google, and Google put Yahoo and Microsoft way back, to distant second and third places in the race.”
“In what race?”
“In searching for stuff on the Internet, that’s what.”
“Searching for stuff pays money?”
“No, searching for stuff is free. Advertising pays money.”
“So Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo so it can compete with Google for advertising?”
“Veronica, my dear,” I clarified, “only God knows why Microsoft does things. I can only speculate. Microsoft’s entire history has consisted of using illegal business practices to crush competitors to its crappy computer operating systems, stealing other companies’ software products, making crappy imitations of them and building those crappy imitations into Microsoft’s crappy operating systems, and relying on its lawyers to get them off afterward.”
“But what about that thingy…” Veronica looked up at the ceiling, the gears turning, as she tried to remember, “ah, what… the big charity…”
“You mean the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?”
“Yeah, yeah,” her face brighten with a tiny burst of satisfaction, having found the phrase she sought, “that’s it!”
“If you look at history, my dear, you will see it’s the same ploy John D. Rockefeller used after he stole a huge fortune in another big business.”
“What business?”
“Petroleum. After the law caught up with Standard Oil, old John, he, too, became a great philanthropist. It’s insurance, just in case the authorities get their dander up and come after these crooks again years later, their attorneys will be able to get up in front of the judge or the jury and yak about what great deeds they accomplished with their ill gotten gains. They all did it – Getty, Carnegie, the lot of them. Gates is just the latest example.”
“But Microsoft’s search engine was an imitation of stuff like Yahoo,” she asked, slightly puzzled, “only that time it didn’t work?”
“Besides its operating system, which was forced on the market through illegal coercion, none of Microsoft’s products have ever been particularly successful. Microsoft’s fatal flaw will be their inability to do anything original themselves,” I predicted. “Now that they have huge amounts of illegally obtained cash, they’re switching from stealing tools to buying the companies that have them, but Microsoft has never, ever come up with anything innovative on its own. That’s because their corporate culture is like a religious cult – nothing truly innovative could possibly happen in an environment like that.”
“Okay,” Veronica mused, considering my analysis, “my stock broker says Microsoft will either pay me cash or give me Microsoft stock. Which should I do?”
“Take the Microsoft stock.”
“How can you say that,” Veronica implored, “when you just got through telling me that Microsoft is a bunch of lying, thieving, cheating, amoral, greedy, inhuman scum bags?”
“Veronica, this is the United States of America. With the exception of short period of reform that lasted about forty years during the last century, the entire history of this country has been nothing more or less than the work of lying, thieving, cheating, amoral, greedy, inhuman scum bags.”
“Which means?”
“That, given the chance, you should always go with the lying, thieving, cheating, amoral, greedy, inhuman scum bags. Do that, and you can’t lose – it’s the American Way.”
“I’m so happy,” Veronica sighed with obvious relief. “I thought that only worked in Hollywood.”