| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 44g the old man to be. Of course, Sam imputed greed as the only possible motivation for this bid for celluloid: something so advanced as a desire to wield reins of power over America's dreamlife seemed far too esoteric an ambition for someone without an advanced degree in creative writing or film study. No mere businessman knew enough to care about stuff like the racial memory and its susceptibility to revision by powerful myths. Sure, the old man could joke and toss around terms like mass mythopoeic manipulation; but one could be certain that someone so successful with the hard, dry realities of commerce would never place any serious stock in such hyperintellectualized stuff and nonsense. - unless, of course, such stuff and nonsense were his very stock-in-trade. And this qualification brought the rat full circle in the maze: the old fucker was an agent now. As for all these secret video monitors and dangerous drugs, these mob-style death threats and armies of murderous zomboids - all so seemingly inappropriate to the author's representative's "gentlemanly business," well, one can't really discount the validity of the old man's claimed professional identity on those accounts alone. One cannot afford to put much past a class of people who would devote their lives to the manipulation of the entire English-speaking world's mythmaking apparatus for cynically exploitative purposes of commercial gain. But, what if his flightiest assumptions about the true, that is to say, deep and ultimate, identity of the old man - those assumptions Sam made in his brightest, most turquoise-blue dreams of liberty - were more paranoid delusions? What if the "inside dope" he'd gotten from his cousins back in |
