Dear diary,
You live in the United States? Ha! I pity you. As for me, I’m lucky: I live in BryanLand, where everything is fine. You people in the U.S. are still trying to figure out a health care system and proper wealth distribution; most of your populace is imprisoned; and…
This is too blank of an intro, but I really did want to explain why life in my country is so good. It’s because daily my sweetheart and I wake up to find a brand-new car in our garage. It’s a different car, every day, and it’s always brand-new: there are only two miles registered on its odometer, because we live two miles away from the dealership; so that’s how much the car had to be driven, to deposit it at our home. When we go to bed each night, the owner of the dealership personally drives another new car and parks it in our garage, while we sleep, and he drives the old car away (the one that was brand-new yesterday). He brings the outdated vehicle to the giant crusher, where it’s crushed into a cube, and then the cube is melted down into its basic elements: metal and plastic. The metal is then recycled into handrails for all the canyons, because BryanLand is riddled with billions of canyons, which are all very dangerous to walk near. And the plastic that was melted away from yesterday’s discarded vehicle is thrown in the ocean.
So that’s how we remain happy. Wouldn’t you be happier if you woke up to a new car in your garage every day? Think about it. Nothing bad could happen that wouldn’t be outweighed by the knowledge that a brand-new vehicle is waiting for you to possess it. All those levers that have never before been pulled, and all those buttons that have never before been pressed (except when the dealership’s owner had to position the car initially). Even if your parents both died during the night, so you went to bed sobbing, mourning their loss; or if you suffered your third miscarriage in three years, you’d find it impossible to be sad for long: cuz you’d just imagine smelling that new-car smell, and it would put a smile on your face.
If this sounds too blank, I’m not trying to be blank — I’m not trying to make a point about materialism, or the shallowness of car culture. I’m sincerely intending to say that the tragedies of this existence would be less devastating if we all had some flashy new possession to anticipate inheriting, each day of our life.
And experts say that when you own an item, you take better care of it; compared to when you only share the item with your community. That’s why places like the U.S.A. are inevitably unhappy: for the folks who live in any given neighborhood must share one single bus between them all. The bus therefore eventually gets spray-painted with obscene pictures, which depict either the male reproductive organ or large feminine breasts, because none of the neighbors feel that they really and truly have ownership of the communal vehicle, and they’re all sex-obsessed perverts. But in BryanLand, every citizen gets a new car, daily, for free, delivered from the nearest local dealership, and there’s paperwork on the dashboard that’s all up-to-date and official; so you’re truly that vehicle’s legal master.
Yet here is the point that I’ve been trying to make all along: This idea that a citizen will care more deeply for the things that he himself owns than for the items that belong to the public commons — I think it’s not 100% accurate; because I myself don’t ever take good care of my car. I wake up and find the latest model of Ferrari is waiting for me. I open the driver-side door & take a seat — as usual, the keys are with the paperwork on the dash. I test out the windscreen wipers; then I switch on the turn signals, one at a time. Finally I open the garage and drive out onto the street, take a right, go up the hill, and leap out of the car just before it speeds into the canyon. (There are no handrails installed yet, at this canyon near the place where I live.) Then from up top, near the rim, I watch the beautiful vehicle cascade thru the air and explode in a ball of fire on the rocks at the bottom. Then I spend the rest of the morning calling tow-truck companies, & they haul the remains of the demolished vehicle back to my house, where the mess remains until tomorrow, when the owner comes to make the next exchange. Of course, in my case, the owner cannot drive yesterday’s vehicle back to the dealership, since its frame is all twisted and burnt; so he orders a wrecker from the junkyard to come pick up the remnants and melt them down as explained above; and the driver of the wrecker usually can give the owner of the dealership a ride back to his lot, so that he can continue to deliver the rest of that day’s fleet to the populace. So he spends about an hour extra dealing with my case; but this happens almost every day with me, so he simply pencils my aberrations into his schedule ahead of time.
And if you’re wondering what I myself do with the remaining hours of each day, after figuring out the logistics of retrieving the corpse of my exploded vehicle from the canyon and getting it back into my garage, here’s your answer:
I take a helicopter to the U.S.A. and land in a neighborhood of my choice (each day I select a different locale to visit), and I sneak into that neighborhood’s public depot and spend the afternoon washing the graffiti off the communal bus. I also do a full check-up on the vehicle’s engine, air up its tires, give it a paint job, perform a number of safety tests, and make sure it’s in immaculate condition — by the time I’m done with all my maintenance, the vehicle looks and drives even better than if it were new. And the reason I do this during the afternoon is that this is the only hour when the whole population is either at home napping, or at their various businesses having their mid-day meeting; in other words, it’s the only time that the bus can be found parked in the depot; for, all the other hours, it’s in use, driving people to and from hospitals and sports events. Even in the late evening, and all thru the night, the bus remains in operation, because of all the drug dealing that must get accomplished. Only during noontime is any shared bus afforded a rest. So that’s the time when I fix it up.
In conclusion, I hope that, having learned how a superior form of government can work, the people of the United States will finally implement a proper recycling program for their metals, because, barring this, the cost of new cars goes thru the roof, which might have a detrimental effect on economic solidarity, & that’s something we definitely do not want.
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