Dogs of Orninica (6 page)

What about having the taxpayers provide every corporate executive with a brand new private jet? Ruff Sniff can make it happen. I'll have the media release stories calling attention to the fuel-guzzling, slow moving and frankly hazardous older private jet models our poor austere executives are forced to ride around in, made way back in the stupid ages of five years ago.

Then I'll announce that, to improve safety in the skies and cause a drop in carbon emissions, the government is going to replace all outdated private jets with brand spanking new ones that meet with the new environmental initiatives, free of charge. And we'll even pay you to scrap the old jets, got to keep that recycling initiative going.

There's an important issue I've been asked to address by the chem-cos. Yes, I will be able to guarantee the government will buy as many barrels of oil dispersant chemicals as you can muster up. Whenever the oil barons among you have an excess of oil and the market price is dipping too low, you can arrange for a little offshore oil spill, and I'll do the rest. It'll drive the price of oil right up, and the chem-cos will get paid handsomely for the millions of barrels of dispersant we'll flood into the sea. I even have a way for the government to reimburse you for the oil you lose at the later, post-spill price. It's a win-win-win.

Do you feel the magic here, friends? A vote for Ruff Sniff is all it takes to ensure the future is as prosperous as your wildest dreams. I will have your backs every step of the way. I'll ship in legions of cheap immigrants, take away as many social benefits from the boors as possible, allocate government subsidies to all of your companies, slash taxes on private yachts, mansions, beach houses and private jets, massively increase the forced medicating of unruly welfare pups, triple cyanogenetic inoculations on the poor, allow you to pump more industrial waste into the water-bodies than ever before, fill the prisons with record numbers of inmates for cheap labor, double the drones in the sky, double the spraying of the atmosphere, triple the cancer rates, outsource more jobs, replace the last remaining family farms with corporate biotech operations, increase global warming, expand the sterilization program and finally reach 100% surveillance penetration in every home, on every street and in every head all over the world.

There is no politician on this planet who can make all these promises to you and truly deliver. But you've seen my results so far, you know I will be your loyal ally for the remainder of my political career. I am the best instrument you have available to affect true and lasting change. I will serve you well, and you won't regret choosing me as your political representative in this fucking great nation.

The market is paramount, the market is sacred and unassailable, and I will see to it that the market is completely dominated by your great companies. Together, we will wipe out small business, we will decimate consumer rights, we will conglomerate every trade and service into one all-encompassing international behemoth that you will control. Why, the very notion of competition will be a distant memory. Every captain on my team will have his monopoly secured indefinitely. That's a Ruff promise.

There's a war being declared on you as we speak. The sneaky freeloaders on the Internet are mugging every one of you for every penny they can shake out of your wallets. They call themselves 'privacy advocates' or 'hacktivists' or 'copyright reformists' or 'free and open source software proponents', but we know what these scum-buckets really are, and we know how dangerous they are to the wondrous free market that our very survival depends on.

It will be my number one priority to stamp out Internet freedom. I will push to ensure that no one will be ever dare use the Internet again without paying up for every little click they make. Picture a running meter, constantly demanding payment for every byte the user downloads, reads, watches, plays or listens to. Nothing but your locked-down corporate portals available to browse. This will be the Mona Lisa of my political career.

How will I pull it off? I've recently been able to meet the needs of my good friends in the pornography industry by pushing forward a default government censor of all adult materials on the Internet. It's still in the planning stages, but very soon an announcement will be made, and an immense and constantly-growing blacklist of obscene websites will remove billions of pages from the public Internet.

We will of course use this morality censor to also wipe out piracy, and it can even be extended to target every one of our foes, such as political dissidents, loudmouthed action groups, alternative medicine peddlers and whistle-blowers. If a troublemaker manages to get his voice heard offline somehow, we'll just blame the wider than planned censorship on bugs in the censoring software. As for porn, dogs will just be forced to go back to buying it from under the counter, the old fashioned way. Everyone wins.

Inside these walled gardens, we will ban all non-approved applications from being installed. Each application will need to be approved by the manufacturer of the device, and of course only applications that don't risk damaging your business model will be considered by your technicians for activation.

In this digital utopia I'll shortly bring you, expensive proprietary software will rule the roost once again, everything enclosed in corporate-run walled gardens, that will funnel all user activity to the all seeing eyes of Orninica's surveillance agencies. There will be no more privacy, file-sharing, free speech or any of those dangerous notions that have somehow been allowed to fester in the dark corners of the Internet.

Advertisements and malware will plaster every page. Comment sections on every site will consist of 99% spy agency and industry trade group interns supporting our team, ruthlessly ganging up on opponents, and generally steering discussion in our favor, while encouraging unbridled consumerism, class and race warfare, general apathy, and all those good things. Search engines will only turn up results that suit our agenda, prioritizing commercials for products related to the search and pay-walled results. Every user will be registered, tracked and logged and their trove of data rented out to the highest bidder.

Ruff's Internet will seize the power from the citizenry that has so misappropriated it, and restore it to the great companies that rightfully deserve it. Mark my words, the rivers of profit will flow mightily again. We will kick and beat the Internet into submission.

Computer makers and Internet portals, I plan to triple the allowance you receive to set up and maintain your surveillance networks. I'll put aside around a billion in tax funds every year to direct your way, so for the first time, there'll be a healthy profit in it for you. You'll no longer be the black sheep of the market, I will treat you like equals, ensuring you receive all the benefits you deserve for giving back so much to your country. Every search engine, social networking, messaging and email company that funnels information to our spy networks, and has donated handsomely to my campaign, will be eligible to receive the new perks.

One of my favorite biotech companies has recently developed an amazing new genetically modified rice cultivar that is able to withstand surprisingly high doses of radiation. Thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime scientific breakthrough, your corporate farms will now be able to dose rice crops with steady radiation treatments, killing all weeds and pests without the need for conventional chemicals.

I'll make it my personal mission to ensure this patented rice crop is introduced worldwide, and I strongly encourage other companies to develop radiation-resistant crops. Just think of the possibilities. I'll make sure that the irradiated crops aren't treated any differently by the market than conventional crops, so don't worry about forced labeling. You might even get away with listing the crops as organic, since no pesticides or herbicides will be needed. We might have to rewrite the official definition of 'organic' a little bit when I start the new job.

The side effects from consuming this ingenious irradiated rice are very promising so far. My friends in the cancer industry will be very pleased to see the test studies. You all have me to thank for getting this incredible crop approved for planting nationwide starting next month. I came very close to being defeated, but I persisted and in the end I convinced the majority of my colleagues to vote with me. I also took down the names of everyone that voted to deny the new strain's approval. See attachment.

Those shameless dogs almost cost a great company untold billions in lost revenues, so I plan to weed out these enemies of free enterprise, with your help. We can start by initiating a media campaign to brand them as socialist baby-killers or what have you. Get them voted out before they can do more damage to the economy. If all else fails, we might have to consider less democratic ways of dealing with these liberal tree-huggers. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect our government and its great companies from these sneaky machinates.

It's just unacceptable; the dogs that somehow manage to get appointed to the NFDD food-safety advisory panel. Every voter appointed to that panel should have been a biotech industry expert like myself, with at least five years of dues paid working in the industry. We can't continue to let these ignorant, idealist, science-hating jackasses have a say in deciding vital policy on matters they have absolutely no understanding of. This is Orninica, damn it.
  

Spy

Beautiful Outa, how I've missed you. I sit here in my big empty dwelling, somewhere in the middle of a towering building, sandwiched between hundreds of equally lonesome neighbors I've never met. Sometimes I put my ear to the wall and wonder if they feel as empty as I do in this strange concrete-covered land. Or if it is natural to them, if they feel gladness even, living here in this permanent disconnect.

I don't know if I'll ever feel whole again since my tail was removed. Sometimes I could swear I still feel it, wagging away when I wake up from a particularly good dream of the old country. And this aerosol I'm forced to spray onto my tongue three times a day to stop myself from perspiring is causing me great discomfort. But I must prevail for the good of our tribe. I would give my life in an instant, to ensure your safety from the smug tyrannical Orninicans, my love.

The air in Orninica is clouded with soot, the skies hidden by a swirling white chemical mist ejected by circling airplanes day and night. A foul lingering chemical odor is present at all times. It chokes my lungs to breathe in this place.

Their tyrant security forces stop citizens at checkpoints all over the city, checking their papers and searching them for some imagined weapon that's never clearly defined. And the hapless citizenry, they don't seem to notice or care how broken and trapped they are. They have never tasted clean air, or real food. They won't even dare to look up from their little plastic devices.

Never having been free from the demands of petty tyrants, they are direction-less and single-minded. All that consumes them is the unending compulsion to stock their vast dwelling units with useless ugly things. Things with screens and interfaces, things decorated with fabric and string, things to eat with and things to defecate in. Everywhere there are things. They must throw away more in one week than we'll ever need in a lifetime.

I've yet to infiltrate the upper echelons of Orninica, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to climb further up the ladder and get close to their decision-makers. They're all very hostile towards outsiders, and even with my fur dyed jet black and my years of training, I suspect they can tell there's something foreign about me.

The good news is that I finally succeeded in opening my restaurant, on the affluent Rover Avenue, where all the largest office blocks are located. This is allowing me to listen in on various important-sounding business lunches, even a few involving high-ranking politicians. I am making progress, even if it's not as rapid as I'd like. So far, there's no indication that they're planning an outright invasion of our land.

The only pressing threat right now is the logger-drones they've dispersed around the world to remove all the trees. It's very likely a ploy to fracture our way of life. I hope our warriors will find a way to incapacitate these destructive devices when they reach our shores. If they fail, your survival will be in serious jeopardy, so I very much hope the blueprints I've sent to our leaders will enable them to stop the bots in their tracks.

I will return home some day, when my work is done. We will be together again, I promise you. Every time I write you, I think of the time under the ancient  neutinamu tree when we danced and laughed for hours and fell asleep in embrace. I so long to feel your tongue on my cheek again.

I wish I could write you more often, it's becoming very tricky to get my communications past the state's many eyes. All conventional correspondences are monitored and used to persecute supposed dissenters. Simple liberties we take for granted are non existent in this man-loving state. Everything natural and real has been stripped from these wretched dogs in the name of security and unbridled bureaucracy. They have long forgotten how to be dogs, and I wonder if they can ever remember.

If they woke up tomorrow and their precious plutocratic government were gone, their sneaky nanny corporations vanished, could these sleep-eyed dogs continue to function? When you unplug robots from their computers, do they continue to perform their routines?

Or do they collapse and shut down? I suspect we will find out one day soon. I just hope I'm safely back home when their society does finally and inevitably collapse in on itself. And I hope against hope that they don't get the opportunity to destroy us before they destroy themselves.

But that's why I'm here, living in this nightmare of a world they've constructed to sap the life out of their unquestioning slave-dogs. I am here to quietly watch and report and guard our time-honored way of life for our future generations.

Every now and then, there are some simple pleasant moments to be found hidden in this vast dreary city. Some afternoons, when I find a free moment, I sit on a bench outside the restaurant and watch the passers by go about their lives.