Portrait of a shitheel

Jason Kottke posted about "I am an American conservative shitheel", a few-paragraph story a guy once wrote on Something Awful. It's told in the first person, from the point of view of a narrator who describes his day, naming a bunch of the state-funded or -run services he uses both directly and indirectly, then wraps up the account by saying that he went to "post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right." A tired point, perhaps, but a lot of people seem to have found it effective.

Predictably, someone responded with "I am an American liberal shitheel", wherein the narrator names the corporations whose goods and service he uses while going about a day that culminates in him "posted on the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about how capitalism is the source of all evil in this country." While both stories are kind of dumb in isolation, I found much conceptual interestingness in mashing them up into this:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock, manufactured by the Sony Corporation and powered by electricity generated by Southern California Edison under the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy. I took a shower in my house, constructed by Centex Homes, sold to me by a Century 21 real estate agent and mortgaged by Citibank, in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on my Panasonic television, which I purchased with a Washington Mutual credit card, to a local NBC Corporation affiliate, one of the FCC-regulated channels. I saw what what their team of hired meteorologists, using their weather radar system and the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

While watching this, I ate my breakfast of US department of agriculture-inspected eggs and bacon, both produced by a local farm and sold to me by my local grocery store, and took my prescribed medication manufactured by Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Astra-Zeneca, and Novartis, which have been determined safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

When my Motorola-manufactured cable set-top box showed the appropriate time as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I got into my Toyota-manufactured, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved Prius vehicle. I set out on roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation to my workplace, stopping to purchase gasoline refined by the Royal Dutch Shell company of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency. I paid with legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank via my debit card issued to me by Bank of the West. I dropped off mail to be sent by the U.S. Postal Service and a package at the local UPS store. I dropped off one of my kids at a public school and the other at a private school.

Having spent another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the company-mandated standards enforced at my workplace and regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, I drove back to my house. It had not burned down in absence because of state and local building codes, the fire marshal's inspection and the high manufacturing quality of the products from which the company built it. It had not been plundered of its valuables thanks to the alarm services provided by Brinks Home Security, and the local police department. I could rest easy knowing that, had this happened, my Allstate insurance policy which would cover any damage and anything stolen.

I then logged on to the internet, developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and financed and run in part by such private corporations as Google, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. I posted on Freerepublic.com and Fox News' forums about how socialism in medicine is bad because the government can't do anything right, and I posted on the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos about how capitalism is the source of all evil in this country.

The result reads, to me, a little like Bret Easton Ellis. Naturally, I also made a few passes through to comb out the grammatical, tense agreement, paragraphification and capitalization-related issues. I know these were just forum posts, but damn.

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[Frank]

"The result reads, to me, a little like Bret Easton Ellis."

Except for the trivial detail that the protagonist doesn't torture-murder an attractive young woman with power tools.

[Colin Marshall]

Yeah, but I said Bret Easton Ellis, not that specific book.