As addictive as cocaine.
I used to be highly-motivated to succeed, and by ‘succeed’ I mean the traditional American interpretation of success: having money. I started my own business when I was 13. No joke. You see, I identified a niche market: after-hours candy sales at my boarding school. We called junk-food ‘tuck’ and ‘tuck’ was only sold by the matrons (the ladies in charge of the dormitories) from 7-7:30 pm. Demand for tuck exceeded supply.
Being an American, I was also able to get a monopoly on the supply of certain goods, like Oreos, which were not yet widely available in Britain. I loaded my suitcase with cheap Wal-Mart bought goodies and by three weeks into term, I’d made a couple hundred dollars profit. I knew that there was no rule against what I was doing. I also knew that, for some reason, the matrons wanted to control tuck sales. Better to beg forgiveness.
And then the inevitable happened. One of the other girls in my year didn’t like the idea that I was selling tuck after hours, so she told me that she was going to report me to the headmistress. Why she told me before she tattled I’ll never know, probably a power-trip, but she gave me a half hour notice. What to do?
Go to the headmistress myself first, of course. So that’s what I did. There was no rule against what I was doing, but the head asked me to stop and I complied. She didn’t make me give back the money though, and when the rat showed up at the head’s office a while later, she left deflated. And she avoided me for some time.
What’s the point of this story? If you know something unpleasant is going to come out about you, it pays to prime the audience in your favor. Even better if that unpleasant information can be FIRST leaked by someone you trust to give it the best possible spin.
What if there are a series of ugly truths about to come out? Let’s say, for example, that instead of just selling junk food, I’d branched out into Body Arts, plying my services with one of those DIY home-piercing-guns. A sort of a.nolen-vice-multinational.
The most damaging thing to rat me out on would be the body piercing, obviously. If the rat waited until one of my customers developed an infection, then she might even have gotten me expelled– she’d never have to see my profiteering mug again! Buhahahaha!
And let’s say that the rat went straight to the headmistress this time, no B-movie pause for villainous gloating. a.nolen’s piercing the other girls for profit! Little Alice’s belly ring is really swollen!
Well, in that case, the powers that be would have to convene to decide my punishment. This would probably be done at a meeting, after which, if I did nothing, I would be expelled.
But what if I appeared at the meeting and made this startling revelation: “The rat is a twerp,” I would say, “but I also sold Oreos.”
What a bombshell! No, not really. :) Though the school board may have to convene one more meeting, next week, to decide if separate punishment was needed for the unauthorized tuck sales. I would also appear at that second meeting, breaking the news that Twizzlers were involved too. Another meeting! We’d work our way downwards: Twinkies, Sno-Balls, Wrigley’s Gum… I could talk lots and lots and lots…
I might even get a friend to write a letter informing the school board that cigarette sales were involved. This would be a lie that I could debunk in due time.
As you can imagine, after the gum and false start on underage tobacco sales, the board might be tired of hearing of my lesser crimes, and Alice’s infection would have healed… “So maybe,” thinks the school board, “the whole thing was blown out of proportion after all”. Maybe all that a.nolen needs is a more constructive outlet for her ‘talents’. Better management.
Hell, if I was really organized, I might even set up some insurance policies against getting caught. I could go to the economics teacher and say something like: “Daddy wants to give GBP 10k to your department, what do you think of my entrepreneur idea?” Then, if need be, I could get the economics teacher to testify at the board meeting that there was scholastic merit in my endeavor.
Or, I could have paid another student to befriend the rat and feed the rat the story about cigarettes. Then, if the rat DOES rat me out, I’ll be able to debunk the cigarette story in front of the school board and discredit the rat!
There are all sorts of things I could do to distract everybody from the fact that I was doing home-piercings for profit on school property, provided I had money or some other useful incentives.
Now imagine the following and re-read this post:
“home-piercings” = “spying on innocent people thru US firms”
“Oreos, Twizzlers, Sno-Balls” = “spying on France, Mexico, Brazil”
“headmistress” = “general public”
“a.nolen” = “NSA et alia”
“rat” = “Snowden”
“bought friends” = “loudmouth tool Greenwald, military intelligence Appelbaum, CIA Poitras, does he even know Assange”
It would be super-cool if I could put the rat in cold storage while the school board convened, Putin. And I sure as hell would try to stop the rat from taking Bill Binney’s advice and not releasing any more information.
