Deregulation and Decompensation

Here’s something that occurred to me the other day. What do today’s paranoid manic-depressives do for a personal conspiracy theory? The paranoid of yesteryear had the phone company at his or her disposal, but with the break up of large carriers and the proliferation of the cellular companies, the “phone company” doesn’t carry the paranoid punch that it used to. Sprint, Cingular, Verizon – sure, they’re big, and have a lots of customers, but nothing to build a conspiracy theory around. Same with the internet service providers. It simply doesn’t ring true to complain that “My ISP is spying on me.” Doesn’t really mean anything.

Granted, there are all kinds of other options for conspiracy nuts, witness the suddenly ubiquitous 9/11 conspiracy people. But that’s really a passing thing, kind of a Kennedy assassination lite. And, in any case, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 and the like are at bottom something very different, more the stuff of way-out, usually extreme left, political theories than bona fide psychosis. The old fashioned telephone company paranoid was, so to speak, in it for himself in a way that a political conpiracy theorist never can be .

A distant relative of mine had such an intense fixation on the phone company, made such a fuss about it, that the company finally assigned a specific operator, “Operator 23" if memory serves, to whom her frequent calls were automatically transferred. Some years later, when the calls had slowed a bit, an unassuming middle aged woman walked into a shoe store in the Bronx. Overhearing a familiar, piercing voice talking to a customer, a cold surge went down her back. Alarmed, she quickly turned to another member of the sales staff and asked whether "that is Mrs. Benjamin.” Fate had brought Rosemary Benjamin together with her long-time nemesis, Operator 23.

This amusing little vignette cannot happen today because, even if Rosemary Benjamin could be recreated, Operator 23 could not. For one thing, the shoe store would have to be in New Dehli (I didn’t say that, did I?). But more to the point, and here’s the irony of it, the phone companies are much smaller today and there are so many of them, but the relationships we form with them are so much less personal, or at least they seem that way.

Maybe I’m remembering the old phone company paranoid fantasies more fondly than they deserve. Rosemary probably had nothing like a personal relationship with her phone company, but somehow it felt that way to her. For whatever reason, that cannot happen in the post-industrial 21st Century and I think we’re all a little poorer for it.