Thomas Wictor

I’ve been told to not write this, but I’m going to anyway. I think it’s important that a misconception be addressed, and I also don’t like the direction our country is heading. I’ve been there, and you’re not going to like what you’re helping create.

When I say it’s important to address a misconception, I mean only in the sense that the truth benefit my future professional life. I’m indifferent to what most people think of me personally. But if potential readers are misinformed, I need to set the record straight.

Yesterday I figured out why nobody in the media or the publishing industry cares that Mike Albee, Lura Dold, and Becca Pilkington defrauded me and destroyed my career. Plenty of the general public doesn’t care either. It’s because they all think I’m a rich bastard with money falling out of every hole in my fat body, so these envious jackasses indulged in a little Schadenfreude.

“Good! I hope they put him out on the street!”

Why would you think that? For one thing, you’re totally wrong about my situation, as I’ll explain shortly. But even if I were a billionaire, why would you support con artists who break laws and inflict suffering on others? Did your misapprehension that I’m loaded trump the fact that I’m housebound with an incurable illness, crippled with post-traumatic stress disorder, and both my parents forced me to take part in their suicides? I explained all that to every media outlet I contacted, emphasizing that the con artists used these three afflictions to run their sting.

Doesn’t that make you feel even a twinge of empathy, or do people who you think are rich deserve to be tortured and mercilessly abused?

If so, the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville had you pegged in 1835. His book Democracy in America explains what’s going on inside your head.

It is possible to conceive of men arrived at a degree of freedom that should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented.

Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete equality of position, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hands of God, will forever escape the laws of man.

However democratic, then, the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of the community will always find out several points about him which overlook his own position and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction.

My ten years as an interviewer honed my ability to listen, to remember, and to read between the lines. Those who tell me that they’re dedicated to “social and economic justice” also admit without knowing it that they’re materialistic, greedy, status conscious, and want more than anything to be rich. Despite paying lip service to all sorts of noble ideals, Americans value fame and money over everything else.

All those Americans still stuck in 1835 thought I’m rich and famous. It was kind of cool that I “got what I deserved” by being ripped off. Never mind that the people they revere are obscenely rich and famous. I’m now convinced that you can do whatever you want as long as you say the right things. If you toe particular political lines and express your fealty to certain groups and orthodoxies, you can live a life in complete opposition to your stated beliefs. And you can do so openly.

The rich and famous who utter the approved maxims can defecate on their followers’ faces, and the defecatees will still be in love.

My own economic history

From 1980 to 1981, I worked on a shore-support base in Stavanger, Norway, loading and unloading ships that supplied the oil platforms in the North Sea. The money was good, but the government took 50 percent of my paycheck in taxes. Since I was a non-citizen, none of the benefits—such as free health care—were available to me. The cost of living in Norway was unbelievable. A bottle of Bacardi rum went for $70 in 1980 dollars. It was impossible to save an øre.

I graduated from college in 1985 and moved to Tokyo, Japan, in 1986. In Tokyo I taught conversational English, edited technical manuals, and did voiceover work. I made a lot of money, but the cost of living was astronomical. Also, I was an alcoholic who got massively drunk every night.

Though I saved some money, I had to leave the country in 1991 because the Japanese ward tax would’ve wiped me out. Like in Norway I had to pay the country’s taxes, but I wasn’t eligible for any of the benefits.

In 1991, at the request of Carmen the Cardinal Ghost, I moved to San Francisco.

Despite my dislike of Baghdad by the Bay, I agreed to relocate there so that Carmen could be close to both of her sisters. The cost of living was almost incomprehensible. I could find no work as a voiceover artist; not a single query I sent out was answered. My first job was therefore as a paycheck delivery driver. Though the official hours were from 5:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., they kept you on call until 6:00 p.m. Then it was an hour’s drive home.

In order to shower, drive to work, and prepare for the day, I had to get up at 3:00 a.m. The clock started at 5:00, but I had to be there at 4:30. To get my eight hours of sleep, I would’ve had to go to bed at 7:00 p.m. Usually I was still on the road at 7:00. Carmen worked as a baggage handler at San Francisco International Airport. We never saw each other. Since my company didn’t reimburse me for gas, I made just enough for food and the rent we paid for our one-bedroom apartment.

After I quit the paycheck delivery job, I got hired as a field representative for a document-retrieval service. I served subpoenas for records used in lawsuits, and then I made copies with a seventy-pound machine that I carried around with me in a metal suitcase. All day was spent in the company of mental patients, otherwise known as “custodians of records.” They were the most power-mad, nasty, imperious creeps I’ve ever encountered.

The Department of Insurance (DOI) was notorious for its hideously abusive custodians of records. All the field representatives called it this.

Thus I had my money taken but received no benefits from it, I worked under slave-labor conditions, and I was at the mercy of savagely inhumane jerks. All of this took place in two countries and a city that present themselves as models of progressive thinking.

Click here for “A Post I’ve Been Told to Not Write, Part Two.”