Make America Functional Again

Sheep droppings from the loneliest road in the land of hucksters and diabetics.

Forest Ram to Desert Ram.

(Girly upspeak voice) Hi, thanks for calling Hucksters Inc. Just say what you’re calling about. For example, if you’re calling about your—

Customer service agent!

I’m sorry. Did I hear you right? Did you say that you are calling about custom service prices?

Human-Agent! Bitch!

I’m sorry. Did I hear you right? Did you say that you are calling about management plans?

---

Pump n’ Smack

The girl behind the counter wishes she had a boyfriend with a Harley. The way she’s ogling the tattooed bikers who just strutted in, she’s gonna need a shammy at her feet.

She’s young and restless, trapped ringing up diabetics at the top of a hill in the middle of a desert, inside an airconditioned pump n’ smack in get-me-outta-here Nevada.

Pump your gas—fill your tank. Grab your junk smack—fill your waistline.

There isn’t a healthy choice for food within two hundred miles and we’re all out of fruit, nuts, and protein bars. I grab some peppered Jerky cured in Montana. It looks edible and maybe even a rare find. I trust things from Montana.

She looks at the Jerky, and then the T-Shirt I drop on the counter. Army green with black font: “I Survived The Loneliest Road In America.” I’m a sucker for impulse memento buys in unusual places.

We’re just starting on Highway 50 so technically I haven’t survived it yet. The shirts are for those coming up from Vegas with empty pockets.

“The baby blue ones are 20% off,” she timidly tells me while still eyeing the leathered-up rough riders.

The way she says blue, holding the u and e as if humming a tune sounds like she ran away from somewhere in the south.

I shake my head side-to-side. I don’t want to think of her escape, of a potential coming transformation, a rotten stereotype, but it’s the future I see based on her awe for the bikers.

After too much time in Portland surrounded by green-haired gender-indeterminate goblins of groomer lagoon, she’s the first attractive female I’ve seen since passing through LAX a month earlier.

She’s still young and fresh, but once she cracks the escape code to get back at her Daddy, her arms will be filled with dermal maladies they call art, and everything innocent and beautiful about her will be sacrificed for her revenge plot.

What the hell brings us to Nowhereville, Nevada?

“No Problem!”

Some hucksters in the “moving business” have ruined our national parks tour. And some asshole name Mark or Marek or Marcel, a “transport manager” in Seattle who says “no problem” to everything really should be locked in a freezer truck for a week.

“We have all your teeengs in Arizona in two days no problem—no problem.”

“But we were told 7-8 days at the soonest and we planned a trip.”

“No-no. Two days no problem. It goes direct. You will be there yes?”

“But we have a road trip planned for six days Marek, and you want us there in two days?”

“Yes, two days, no problem. No problem. You be there, yes or no?”

We haven’t made any reservations yet for hotels or homes.

“Okay, fine. We’ll be there.”

The entire exotic tour of national parks gets tossed on Marek's deception. No Bryce Canyon. No Monument Valley. No Grand Canyon. No Flagstaff or Sedona.

The F1 route has been called up, but Marcel, or whatever he's called is just another huckster in a long line of them in the “moving business.”

The F1 route?

A Best Western, and a Hilton in Lake Las Vegas to get to Arizona before the truck arrives with our teeengs. We pick up a radar for the dashboard to break speed laws all the way down. Cruise control gets set to ninety, sometimes ninety-five.

Google is tapped for the first time in years for its up-to-the-nano-second urban accident reports and police speed traps. It sends us through Central Oregon, via Prineville, Burns, and the great Steens highway down to Winnemucca, NV for day one.

The last few hours of day one are hairy. 90 mph in the family truckster at night in open deer country. Every eight miles a deer crossing sign.

The odds of hitting an animal on an American highway are one in a hundred and seventy-one.

Too frequent for comfort, yet that figure includes squirrels and rabbits.

Yes, I looked it up on GPT4 prior to departure. I like to know the odds of odd things like that.

The headlights barely cover the highway more than a few hundred yards ahead. The high beams go wide and I search both sides of the remote highway for the shiny eyes of future road kill and an unwanted accident insurance claim.

For a time I slow down to 80 mph to be on the safe side—shorter braking distance and more reaction time. But what does that matter if the deer hits us? Aren’t most of those incidents the deer hitting a slower car?

Maybe I’m better off speeding past the deer.

Maybe the faster I go the less a chance of hitting one.

Fuck it. If we hit one, it was meant to be: The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The accelerator gets more of my foot and it’s up to 95 mph instead.

We check into the Best Western at 1 am after an 8-hour and 29-minute drive. Thirty minutes faster than Google predicted. So much for AI determinism.

Day two to Vegas, but not the “smokey nickel-slots hunchbacks blowing their social security checks” Vegas, we go for the lake near Hoover Dam. The Hilton with no Casino appears on its last leg since ditching it.

Day three to an Airbnb near the new house where our teeengs are supposed to arrive soon, no problem—no problem.

Extortion Racket

A month earlier Mama Citizen slipped up and went with a broker in North Carolina that she thought was a legitimate moving company. They have a shiny website and a phone number, with smooth talkers vomiting false promises and nothing more. They get a 30% cut of the total job for doing jack-shit.

They outsource us to a pack of rats in Jersey—Ernest Moving and Storage—who contract with desperate illegals from all over the world that have recently crossed the border without a single minute of education on customer service or decency.

After the con is exposed we check their Better Business Bureau rating—a solid F. Every review is a disaster story and over the next weeks, we live the exact same nightmare every reviewer describes.

The rats show up late and lie about everything. Overcharge for everything. It’s all too late to contest. The extortion trap has begun. They got you by the balls because the broker already has the 30% deposit for one hour of phone work and the hotels are booked and nonrefundable because Marek drools, “Two days, you be there, yes?”

They send a single Russian rat who has one Somali helper who weighs less than I did in middle school as starting small forward for a two-time AAU Oregon State Basketball Championship team.

They have two Uhauls, both half packed with other people’s junk. Both are too small for our teeengs.

We were promised an 18-wheeler with four hefty movers and the job would be done in four hours.

“I am the captain of your move now.”

They have to return for a second day of loading for roughly 1000 cubic feet of teeengs. The final bill comes to $3500 more than what the broker promised would be the maximum after a detailed list was established.

Brother citizen oversees day two loading as we have no choice but to hit the road before they finish.

We call the brokers every day for a week, and every contact ignores our calls, texts, and emails. They took the cash and are done with us.

Welcome to huckster nation.

Adrienne Curry said it best on a Timcast appearance last summer, “I don’t trust anyone here. Everyone in this country is out to take your money and once they get it they will screw you over.”

The same is true with setting up Internet, TV, and Phone at the new place. In monopoly land, there is only one provider. Take what they give you, or get bent.

Nothing at any point is easy here. There is no sense of loyalty, trust building, or dedication to customer retention. To borrow from the great George Carlin, everything is one gift-wrapped red, white, and blue dildo after another.

For a point of reference, it takes two days to set up a new Internet service in Poland. The same speed as here costs 70% less for installation and monthly payments. To get a SIM card and a new phone line there can be done at the local convenience store with the help of a Polish teenager for 15 bucks per month, unlimited everything, prepaid, no contract. He’ll have it running with a printed code in under five minutes.

I picked up a prepaid SIM with T-Mobile and paid $60 for a month of unlimited everything two weeks ago and it still doesn’t make calls after two hours with tech support and two visits to T—Mobile stores. They said that I might get my money back.

Los Viejos citizens have to switch health care providers after forty years with Kaiser Permanente. Perusing dot gov’s pensioner-provided options is a nightmare. Premiums nearing a thousand a month WITH a $1200 deductible and max out-of-pocket expenses of $13,000. What the hell are they actually insuring ensuring, bankruptcy?

For the foreign Good Citizens reading this, in huckster nation healthcare, also more aptly known as the death accelerator industrial complex charges hard-working Americans (and their employers) tens of thousands of dollars for substandard care, excluding prescriptions that are between 10x and 200x the cost of other western nations with negotiated prescription drug price caps.

For another point of reference, private health insurance in Poland cost $55 per month and that was the premium package with no co-pays, no deductibles, and no maximum out-of-pocket anything. Just $55 per month for care that far exceeded anything available in huckster nation. (That’s nearly the co-pay for Los Viejos for a single visit under their new “plan.”)

The luxury private care insurance in Poland included same-day appointments, even with specialists. No getting dropped off at the RN first, then the fake doctor who didn’t go to medical school before seeing an MD who is wholly owned by the AMA, and Big Pharma.

All diagnostics, surgeries, and physiotherapy were included. Prescriptions were out-of-pocket, but a comparable antibiotic that might be $65 in the U.S. with insurance coverage for a week cycle, would be $7.00 in Poland without it.

It’s not just the big scams that demoralize here. Exploitation is everywhere and the people are shameless.

The Airbnb house we rented is managed by a bunch of half-wits at a company called Vacasa. I ask them to extend our stay until our extortion moving scam is over but without a second cleaning fee or Airbnb fee. They send us a revamped schedule but want $200 more for the six nights than the nightly advertised rate plus taxes. I ask what the hell the $200 dollars is for and three different morons can’t tell me the truth. I get the runaround and then they ask me to call Airbnb.

Tired of all the fucking scams I tell them I found the owner’s name and phone number online and I’ll just pay him in cash and let him know how Vacasa misrepresented him and didn’t want my business. Immediately a new song and dance appears and they’re suddenly able to do it at the advertised rate.

The U.S. is not just a Banana Republic-Oligarchy with a decorative layer of dysfunctional kakistocrats for the DIE (fast) agenda, it’s basically a failed state filled with shysters, hucksters, monopolists, and useless drones.

The realtor got her $14,000 cut so she took a two-week holiday before closing and then failed to get the garage door openers for the main garage and the storage garage. The sellers in New York were supposed to mail them weeks earlier. After threatening to call a lawyer for being in breach of the purchase agreement, suddenly, magically, the openers appear within a half day.

Nobody takes initiative. Nobody follows through. Nobody gives a shit.

Until you threaten to call a lawyer. Huckster nation by design is also a litigious nation. The only winners in huckster nation are the scammers and the lawyers their victims must call to seek retribution.

The Internet company sends open orders to support drones in the Philippines. Most drones are barely comprehensible and every call takes hours to accomplish a few rudimentary tasks—address, phone number, name, and date of service starting. Everything must be spelled out letter by letter and repeated and the drones always screw something up so the process repeats until she gets yelled at by her shift manager for not doing three calls at once.

Please hold sir.

15 minutes of music.

Thanks for calling Century Link, can I have your name, please?

Bitch, we were talking for an hour, are you fucking with me?

The whole shit starts over again.

Phil? Phil Connors?!

The earliest appointment for anything is between two weeks and a month out.

The furniture company has the sofa sleeper we ordered on backorder. Earliest delivery? August 8th. They took the money online and waited a week to tell us it wouldn’t arrive for two whole months. Another hour on the phone with their support drones to cancel and get a refund, with no option to do it online.

“Your money will be in your account in 4-5 business days.”

Of the moving company, realtors, utilities, furniture, ADOT, post office, Internet-TV-Phone, and T-Mobile, the only guy who comes through in record time is a little Mexican landscaper who approaches us when he sees the Direct TV truck parked out front. He wants our business.

He can put the oleanders and lemon trees in right away. He’ll send an estimate soon from his nursery contact nearby, and in Spanish he says, “By the way, your front yard sprinkler has a leak. It’s draining into the street. I can fix it for you right now for $20.” He does it in ten minutes.

In huckster nation, the self-starting guy who barely speaks English outhustles every greasy broker and corporate monopoly only interested in squeezing dollars from your wallet and wasting your life on hold one hour at a time.

For billing press one. For new accounts press two. To hear another forty automated numerical options as you whither and die slowly waiting for a human voice on the other end of this line press three.

Pride and Work

Marek or Marcel, the rat from Seattle who said “Two days no problem!” tells the biggest lie of anyone. After eight days of waiting around at our destination, everything is still sitting in storage, but not in Portland—in Tacoma, Washington.

I put air tags on different items and connected them to Mama Citizen’s overpriced iPhone that only rings when it wants. Hid them in the luggage, in cabinet drawers, beneath bookshelves. I even tagged the family truckster in case it got stolen at one of the hotels.

Nothing has moved from that storage facility near Tacoma. The broker’s account gal from North Carolina finally gets back to us after a week and some legal threats (of course!) and says it’s on the way. We text her a screenshot proof that it’s still sitting where we said, in Tacoma.

“That’s what they told me,” she says.

“They’re lying to you, and you’re passing on their lies. Please find out the truth.”

Truth? Here? Pfffhahhhaah.

No initiative. No accountability. No one cares once they pocket your money.

There are no honest brokers in any brokering businesses. There are no professionals anymore. Nothing is functional or operational in the land of hucksters and lazy diabetics who wouldn’t recognize a day’s honest work from a healthy meal.

Self-reliance is the only option in America. Perhaps it has been for a long time. After sixteen years away I’m truly in awe of what a pathetic shell of its former self this fractured country-in-name-only has become. It’s not just Portland, Oregon, it’s everywhere.

Self-reliance. It’s a threat to the huckster nation model and its government program of deliberate demoralization.

They don’t want people to go that route for anything.

For a 60% discount off the huckster moving brokers, we could have rented our own 26-foot Uhaul and driven it to Arizona at our own pace. We could have hired a few Mexicans at either end to do the lifting and loading for a hundred bucks each and they would have been honored to have a job that pays $50 per hour.

The move isn’t done, and we don’t know when it will be.

We’ve been extorted and signed paperwork and paid thousands of dollars and there’s no way out of it. We just have to be patient and wait until the scam is completed, and our possessions are all unloaded from the truck.

Back on the loneliest road in America, a week earlier the Montana jerky is some of the best I’ve ever had. Peppered nicely. Not too chewy, not too dry.

Some people in some places still take pride in the things they make.

Down the loneliest road to Tonopah, Nevada we know what history lurks in the soil around the mirage that blinds the road.

Tonapah looks like a former Gold prospecting site turned government experimental sci-fi operation, complete with unmarked buildings in the distance with cell towers and shoddy trailers degrading in the endless sunlight.

It emanates with that feeling that just over the nearby mountains, some otherworldly shit is going down, or up, at speeds and angles and to places unknown in ways that defy the premature laws of physics.

And maybe there’s still some remaining film set beneath a sweltering warehouse where they faked those moon landings in homage to the man who proclaimed by the end of that decade the United States would put a man on the moon before they blew his brains onto his wife’s pink outfit, putting the fourth nail in the constitutional republic’s coffin.

Whether you believe they did land a man on the moon or not, at least it was still a time of competent men, with half the technological capabilities as today, who worked harder and accomplished more with less and took pride in their work.

Papa Citizen went to Cal Poly with a slide rule and a pencil. He’s pushing eighty but ran circles around the college engineering graduates he had to mentor in the private sector less than a decade ago before his final retirement. He said they were good kids but lacked focus and discipline, and didn’t pay attention to details or take pride in the work they did.

What remains of the nation now is so thoroughly unrecognizable. The saddest part is most Americans are ignorant of the fact that the rest of the world is light-years ahead in every respectable area. Even former communist bloc nations like Poland and the Czech Republic, and Slovakia make the U.S. look like a third-world dumpster fire.

Most Americans have never been anywhere to live and so they don’t know just how badly they’re getting shafted, across the board. But some older American citizens know because the Aluminum oxide falling from those planes hasn’t yet rotted their memories.

And they remember a time when things…worked.

It’s not that everything was great. It stands to reason that the nation was ever truly great. Its founding principles and documents and men were great, but the nation hasn’t been close to that in our lifetimes.

These American citizens remember a time, as do I when things functioned better and people had a different attitude about business, work, service, and building human relationships, not for the short-term swindle, but for the long-term network-building opportunities.

Trump stole Reagan’s campaign theme in 2016, and Reagan stole it from some nationalist party decades earlier.

But that theme is so absolutely ridiculous, it’s now just laughable.

Assuming greatness as a people or nation breeds complacency, which leads to entitlement. Any great nation will cease being so the second its people acknowledge that greatness.

After a few decades, all that remains is a dysfunctional shell of hucksters and diabetics, thieves and their victims, oligarchs, and debt-serfs.

Perhaps before seeking Greatness as a nation, a more appropriate slogan would be: Make America Functional Again.

Functional? No problem—No problem. I bring you functional in two days. You pay first in full. Yes or no?

NO! We DEMAND Greatness again, Marek.

Okay, no problem—no problem. I bring you greatness in two days. You pay first in full. Yes or no?

We already have.

Paying monthly? Save 17% and get the No Problem-No Problem annual flock package.

Fixed Income Pensioner Discount (honor system)

Student Discount (valid .edu email)

Thanks for sharing.

Visit shop.thegoodcitizen.live

Control Group T-Shirts

Good Citizen T-Shirts

Donate

BTC: bc1qchkg507t0qtg27fuccgmrfnau9s3nk4kvgkwk0
LTC: LgQVM7su3dXPCpHLMsARzvVXmky1PMeDwY
XLM: GDC347O6EWCMP7N5ISSXYEL54Z7PNQZYNBQ7RVMJMFMAVT6HUNSVIP64
DASH: XtxYWFuUKPbz6eQbpQNP8As6Uxm968R9nu
XMR: 42ESfh5mdZ5f5vryjRjRzkEYWVnY7uGaaD