UNITED STATES—The poster went up on a telephone poll in Hollywood:
If I die
Unhoused
–Forget
Burial–
Drop my body
On the steps
of L.A.
City Hall
So, this is how Miller connected to Pratt, and over lunch of calamari they talked about the concept of the mini-houses, and Pratt, who’d made a campaign promise to deal with homelessness was whistling in the wind. He didn’t have a plan; it was embarrassingly evident.
Heretofore Pratt had dedicated to building theme shopping malls and luxury apartments, fantasy worlds for the classy masses, where the profit-margin was so much higher. Meanwhile, Miller got to be a very eager beaver as Inspector General, overstepping borders. He got to be an information junkie, and helped coagulate a functional tax roll sought of the border which was, generally lax, and he used it to shakedown U.S. citizens by birth or naturalized to shake down those who had some property, usually modest emblems of their American dream realized across the border, and syphoned off more money—all for the public good. Then, Miller acted with further zeal, and spawned the program to further enrich the city, the people’s funds, using a data base of people who owned their own house. TBC
The very white Frat-Boy Pratt, after meeting with Miller and sharing ideas, visions started acquiring vast tracts of desert wasteland and building villages for the unhoused on the bald dry hillsides beyond Lancaster and Victorville. The man with a sledgehammer. Noise invaded the desert wastelands. Good morning said not the sun, but the pounding of mallets, the keening of electric grinders shooting sparks, the whacking of crowbars on steel drums, the whirring of a circular saw. . . it was a symphony in the key of racket.
It made the prairie dogs run, the hawks flee, the trapdoor spider hide. Pratt was lauded for his vast humanitarian gestures and his billions turned to zillions.
Meanwhile a new and contrary motto was rising: ‘’The $ signs I despise” a new human type, that shunned lucre and thrived on being a volunteer. The tax collector on whom the bloody cogs and bloody wheels of government ran, couldn’t roll, parsnip eyed, and there it was: the means to goods and services, health and wellbeing. A nation of unpaid interns, who enjoyed the benefit of jobs without the incentive.
Graydon Miller got appointed by the president of a party now out of power to be the Inspector General to get the ideas to function in reality. Off the grid. Concordia, the first of the settlements on the Bureau of the vast Interior tracts. Graydon Miller took to his task with all the dogged devotion befitting a new four-star general, after all he was inspector general. This position gave him the power to persevere and give back to people not power but peace. Obnoxious ambulances, police and fire truck sirens could be fined now if they did not adhere to the edict to lower it by ten decibels. Ultimately the sirens would be replaced by something similar to an amplified bicycle bell.
To be continued…
