I just had a perverse thought: if Bill Frist first becomes majority leader and then runs for President in 2008, would he keep Dick Cheney on as Veep? That way, if Cheney's ticker ran down, there'd be a qualified cardiologist in the house to get it going again. And he might get a discount at any HCA hospitals!

No, there hasn't been an unfortunate smelting accident. I was just super busy, I suppose, with work and all. And the other members of the deadly triumvirate have been silent of late. It was during my reading of Choke that I realized my principle problem with the author, Chuck Palahniuk, is his greatest strength as well: his characters seem to inhabit their respective universes with perfect knowledge of how things work. Really work. Whether it's knowing which household items can be used to make napalm, or what codeword means "there's a shoplifter in aisle seven" in shopping stores, Palahniuk seems to have tapped a secret source of knowledge that revels how this modern life actually operates. When he mentions "Planet Starbucks" or any sort of corporate tie, it's clear that despite his knowledge of the system, there's a certain love/hate relationship to the entire globalization project. What They Don't Tell You is a central tenet to his characters, and although there's no vast conspiracy tying everything together, it feels almost rebellious to fight against the omnipresent commercialization of everything.

In this universe, everything works. Even the poor can game the system if they know how to. It's like those commercials promising "the American dream" and promoting a mid-level pyramid marketing scheme. The idea that people are out there who have gotten ahead through knowledge of how the system works rather than skill or simple nepotism is the Horatio Alger tale of our time. We all want to be this person, whether it's day-trading stocks or "that tip my friend told me" or the prevalance of the Nigerian Letter scam. Seeing wealth, we want it, and wanting it, we feel that there must be a way to achieve it without work. Or hard work, at least.

While nice to live in, though, there's relatively little of the "real" world that intrudes into this universe. While not being a utopian vision, the commercialization of the world, and even of America, isn't as uniform as Palahniuk suggests. I can drive thirty minutes outside DC and find a sleepy community which has remained, fairly static, without a connection to the internet, or a starbucks or a super-walmart. They might have an Exxon gas station, but it could have been originally built in the 1940s. In this area, in the rural America that's far larger than people realize, things aren't so corporate. Translated into the world, America becomes the urban metropolis and most other countries become the sleepy town with no stop lights. People don't seem to realize that we haven't moved fully into the next century. This is where his characters would presumably break down. As a reader, I don't get the sense that if the characters in Fight Club were actually skinning and eating deer, living among the ruins of a once-great city, that they'd either enjoy it, or be good at it. The desire, then, to get back to a simpler time, is a disingenuous one. The fact that I can walk from my house to any number of eating or entertainment establishments, that I can order gifts and clothes from all over the world from my computer at home, is a pleasant one. I can earn enough in a few hours of work a week to actually live off of. The rest, it appears, is fluff. It's money to eat out, or buy useless items, or go to the movies. If I actually knuckled down and stayed at home eating ramen every night, wearing simple clothes and living in the suburbs, I'd have a great deal more money. Granted, I wouldn't be as happy, but even though I don't have a disposeable income, I do earn enough to save a little.

Chuck touches on this a bit in Fight Club with references to the workers that prepare food, clean dishes, etc. But there's still no real connection between the workers and people who have very little. If the workers are uninspired automatons who seek solace in kicking the stuffing out of one another, they can't be too worried about their next paycheck, right? I'd suggest that most people in the service industry aren't so eager to lose their jobs, or to rock the boat. Instead, most appreciate the money. Granted, college kids and those on the Hill may work there for awhile, but they're not supporting a family of five.

And neither are Palahniuk's characters.

They can eschew the ordinary life and embrace risk because they aren't tied down. They can game the system because they know how it works. But they don't strike me as adaptable. Drop them in another age, country or region and they might not be able to hack it.