Read Online Planet Fever by Peter Stier Jr. - Free Book Online Page A

or—after taking pause—decide not to and continue his examination.
    After he highlighted four films, I offered a few cents into the “small-talk machine.”
    “Deciding which film to see, eh?”
    “No—I’ll probably go see about five,” he stated.
    “Like movies?”
    “Yeah.” He paused. “Yeah I do.” He resumed silence.
    “I don’t know, man. I used to like movies, especially when I was a kid. Everything seemed new and original back then. Now they’re mostly shallow and predictable pre-packaged, prefabbed consumer items. I don’t think they’re worth the money and time you gotta spend insulted by the garbage,” I ranted.
    The trucker stared at me, brandishing a consistent, ever-so-slight grin on his face, as if he were simultaneously scrutinizing the inner workings of my mind and contemplating something else of a profound nature. “Well, you’re right. They are, for the most part, getting shallower. And more sophisticated.” He uncapped the highlighter and circled a specific film in the paper. “But they’re a powerful means of conditioning.”
    Intriguing. He was upping the ante: we were pulling our plugs from the “small-talk” machine and plugging into the “somewhat intellectual/philosophical discourse” machine. Having frequented the Diner over the past few months, I had become quite proficient at small-talk: drawing from a pool of general human experience that required minimal training in any discipline—meaning things we all experienced and could loosely opinionate on, like: the weather, the economy, movies and sports.
    Most of the time it boiled down to this: whether or not something was bullshit.
    Often the simple boundaries of “small talk” widened to include more profound conversation. This required time and a certain comfort with the person you were jabbering with. Nobody would turn to a stranger pissing in the urinal next to him and ask, “So—how’s the wife and kids?” And you’d never turn to someone you barely knew in the Diner and ask, “What would your assessment be with regards to the ontology of ‘being’?” unless you preferred your eggs up your ass.
    This duct-tape-booted trucker put forth the demeanor that he didn’t care where the conversation went: he sat there, examining the paper; but he was bubbling inside to share a more profound discourse with me. Such was the nature of many truckers: they spent many hours and days alone in their own rig in their own head and had plenty of time to do nothing but drive and think.
    I offered: “Oh yeah. The thing is, people buy into the hype. They think the better the special effects or bigger the budget, the better the film. Or the more money the film makes, the better it is. They’re like amusement park rides—a quick thrill then forgotten as the next ride begins.”
    “Yup—that’s right. They’re purposely made, packaged and sold that way. Television programs are far more potent an example of weaponized media. You think you’d be ‘missing out’ on something because everyone else watches a certain show. And you wouldn’t want to be ostracized from the herd, would you?”
    I took a sip of coffee and nodded.
    He continued: “You agree a show to be great because the media informs you that everyone else believes in the greatness of it. Though you may not truly believe the show to be great, you go along with them, you see enough of them, and you start to believe the show to be great. What’s really happening is the masses are getting stupefied, or hypnotized—so these shows and films only appear to be great. A kid who barely knows arithmetic would find her older brother—who can do basic algebra—to be a genius. If she eventually gets smarter and learns calculus, and her brother still know only basic algebra, she no longer sees him as math genius. The masses are like the brother—they are being stunted.”
    This guy could really rant.
    “People’s intelligence is devolving: we’re becoming idiots and