Reg and Syd: Black Knight

“Shocking news out of Colorado, eh, Reg?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Syd.”

“Hmmm?”

“Strong uptick in my media holdings, of course. This news will dominate the networks for days, and since that will be profitable we will, of course, do all that we can to encourage this. But the same thing happens with any disaster. Valuable, yes. Shocking, not so much.”

“You don’t need to undersell this to me, Reg. The ramifications will be lots larger than you’re making them out to be.”

“You’re referring, of course, to the security panic that will doubtless fall on the heels of this, and the windfall profits that any business with the word “Security” in the title will reap. You are, of course, making the appropriate investments.”

“As fast as the Internet will move. And there’s also the gun thing.”

“Ah yes. Amazing how gossip power, aided and abetted by a little carefully-orchestrated media frenzy, can obscure inconvenient facts, for instance that episodes like this are, if anything, declining on a per capita basis. No, the people will think that they have an epidemic on their hands, and they’ve got to do something about it. Like, gun control laws. Gun prohibition laws, even better.”

“So when the government gets control of guns …”

“Sydney. We can afford to remember here that we are the government.”

“Even better. The elected government – elected usually on the basis of the money we contributed to their campaigns – get control of guns, and we have far less to worry about from the newly-gunless as we go about the process of taking command of their lives. And we don’t take any of the heat for this, it’s Obama’s fault. Y’know, if people ever learned to focus on the real issues, instead of simply reacting to what gets put in front of them, we might be in trouble.”

“That’s what we have media for, Syd, to keep people paying attention to gossip and ‘man bites dog’ stories, while we accomplish our goal of mastery.”

“I thought you said we were already the masters, Reg.”

“We can always make improvements, Syd.”

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