A Sucker's World

Even though I'm a prisoner on Mars I consider myself to be lucky. Despite the fact that Warden Liz and her Reptilian pals chase me all day long and take pot shots at me with their "discombobulators" and even though I have to graze for green goo and red toadstools or duke it out with other bums for chewing gum and sour balls, at least I'm not being tricked anymore by Madison Avenue and corporate liars and cheats. Earth is a sucker's world. And don't pretend you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Every time you Earthlings buy a 12-pak of toilet paper to save money you think you're getting it cheaper than if you bought the 4-pak or the single rolls. Look again. Do the math. Yep, it's buyer beware, even with shit paper. Being a buyer-beware seller doesn't come any dirtier than tricking people into paying more money to take a crap than they should have to. And nothing tops being a buyer-beware sucker than paying more for 12 rolls in one, big, heat-shrink package than you would if you used both your hands to pull down a 4 -pak three times or twelve single rolls two-at-a-time. Sucker.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The world convinces you that if you don't buy brand name products you're not giving your family the very best. If you don't pay three times as much for quilted TP and you buy the bargain brand you might as well stock the linen closet with outdated phone books (no Sears catalogs anymore) or a basket of leaves, you're such a bad mom. So you play the sucker and get the shit paper that's as soft as a baby's bottom for all your bottoms and then you turn around and buy the store brand of peanut butter to make up for it. Sucker.

Sucker men are all over planet Earth, especially in flyover USA. No male between New York and LA would be caught dead wearing jeans that aren't seen and sold on TV. For flyover dads, wearing anything else means you're a terrible provider for your family, so pathetic that you even have to buy your own jeans at the dollar store. And that would dupe you into feeling like a day-old dog turd instead of a really smart shopper because you have no clue that a lot of dollar-store clothing is made just as good as any brand name. You think you get what you pay for and the truth is that you're paying for the name. Sucker fool.

And teenage suckers are the biggest suckers of all. If teenage boys and girls don't look, dress and act exactly like every other teenage boy and girl they think the world has rooked them big time. (Look up the word "rook" yourself. This isn't a damn English lesson). The last generation in America to value individuality was the Baby Boomer generation and they were hated so much for wanting to be individual and unique that the males were shipped off to Vietnam before they could breed. They were easy to spot. For all their individuality, most college-age Baby Boomer guys looked the same in the late 1960s. Blue jeans, blue work shirt, Army surplus field jacket and sneaks. All the government needed to do was drop a big net on them and hoist it up.

But that was yesterday and today is today. Still, nothing's really changed. Anytime anybody in the world sees anybody else with something that they don't have, getting it becomes the number one reason for being alive. That's when you're such a sucker that you even sucker yourself.

Why do I still bother? All this ranting and raving will only get me more hate email from Earth. Which probably makes me the biggest sucker of all.

The Real Racketeers

I saw the forest despite the trees long before I was prodded and probed and then discarded on Mars by the bubble-headed boobies most Earthlings refer to as the Grays. Long before I had to give up my little Cape Cod house and my Japanese sedan for an appliance carton and a shopping cart. Back when I still roamed Earth as a citizen and, more importantly, as a consumer.

Yep, even as a regular, everyday type of guy, I could see what was really happening in the arenas of buying and selling. Hell, I knew most American businesses and all of the major corporations were run by racketeers. In other words, liars and cheats. But in corporate America, being a liar and a cheat simply means you're motivated. Ever since the 1980s, anyway, when Yuppie corporate raiders ransacked the Fortune 500 companies and anything else they found on the New York board that had "Take Me, I'm Yours" stamped all over their track records. The corporate raiders replaced the heirs of old money and tossed them all out on their ears. "Old Man Clubhouse Power Broker" was put out to pasture and he wasn't even trotted out when they thought they just might need him back. The raiders simply changed the rules and made it a new game. The world was now the oyster of a new generation of liars and cheats, only they were called movers-and-shakers now and they could do absolutely no wrong.

The new "Masters of the Universe" hired Madison Avenue to sell their shit to a consumer market that seemed to thrive on it by the bucketful. They convinced Americans that they actually needed a pill to make them sleep and one to keep them awake. One to make them poop and one to stop them from pooping. A pill so they wouldn't sneeze or have to blow their noses in public. A pill to help men with their tallywhackers when it was time to make a baby or to simply make whoopee.

The Madison Avenue liars and cheats made so much money for corporations and for Wall Street that no one on Earth wanted the lying and the cheating to stop. Americans were so convinced that they needed to be wired-in to their families and their significant others and to stay abreast of the moving-and-shaking world that no one would ever be caught dead without a pager or a cell phone or PDA or iPOD or all the rest of the electronic gizmos that can be replaced by simple foresight and planning. In other words, commonsense.

TVs were tossed out for home theaters costing ten times as much. A personal computer became a life raft if you were to stay in touch and keep up with all the multimedia happenings around the globe. Most of which any fool could do without.

A simple cup of coffee became a two-dollar, high-end, caffeine-injected experience, where the ambiance was not so much in the cup as it was on the cup's label and under the trendy European umbrella where it was imbibed. Cheap little Japanese cars morphed into luxury sedans rivaling anything in America or the best German imports. No one in America wore sneakers anymore. They were referred to by their brand names and their three-figure price tags were quick to be pointed out.

By the new millennium, it was all over. No one on Earth knew the true value of anything anymore. But it didn't matter to them as long as they still tuned in the next reality show on TV, not realizing that reality is what they once had, in full color and in stereo, just by waking up in the morning. And most of it was free.

Compared to contemporary corporate America, the Chicago gangster and racketeer, Al Capone, was just a kid with a lemonade stand.

Man, I wouldn't go back to Earth to take a shit.