Chimpanzee Read Free

shave?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWell, I just want . . . I don’t want to make the wrong impression, you know? Until tenure.”
    â€œI can grow my beard when you get tenure?”
    â€œBen, come on,” she says. “It just . . . you could just trim it.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œYeah, what?”
    â€œI said ‘yeah.’”

    Repossession is therapeutic , the promissory note to my student loans explains. Painless. Repossessing aspects of associative thought, of “cerebro-ontogenetic development,” will, at worst, result in disorientation and nausea. Other side effects occur in rare instances.
    They can’t take the data out of your head. That’s impossible. They just make it something traumatic. Something to squirrel away in the small dark of your lower consciousness, where it becomes nightmares and suppressed experiences and terrible memories. The brain does the work for them by protecting itself from what’s become unpleasant. It’s like forgetting. Eating the lotus.
    You can’t use what’s theirs if you can’t pay for it, which makes sense. They financed it, after all. Collegiate enrollment spiked after everyone discovered that they were under-degreed to compete for dwindling employment, and several senators won their offices by campaigning for college degrees for everyone. But educating everyone doesn’t necessarily make them any money. Academic accreditation boards put caps on the number of graduates a university could produce in a given year. Because degrees hadbecome so common, so easy to get, they no longer differentiated anyone in the workforce. The Department of Education had no choice but to start using our indices, from our audits. They were maps to a better future.
    Educating everyone doesn’t make the workforce any money, but repossessing degrees makes it for the banks. The moneylenders whose investments in an educated America are underwritten by the government itself. Reclaiming possession of a borrower’s indices is good for research, and it improves the fiscal odds for those graduates who can still make money by increasing the rarity and value of their degrees—those still capable of making their loan payments. The hope is that these achievers will create our new generation of jobs, above and beyond the corporate ladder, and we can all start again next time. With a new generation.
    It’s for the greater good.

    Downtown, I find my loan therapist’s office. The oxidized brass door handles. The nondescript text on the office door. REPOSSESSION THERAPY in clean Helvetica font. My phone vibrates, so I pull it out of my pocket before going in.
    It’s a text message from Sireen.
    Sorry about the beard ;)

CHAPTER TWO
    B EHIND ALL THIS, THE N EW D EPRESSION, THE MEANS OF production are fine. They were never the problem. Of course the workers went on strike. Of course there were Kangaroo Negotiations. Of course tear gas, and arson, and that perpetual image: young men throwing stones—a Biblical act, an assertion of lineage, of community. Justice. They threw them because they could. Because someone had to. Never mind the union men. This was talismanic. A sacred rite passed from fathers to sons.
    The means of production were never the problem. They were the question, begging itself. It’s the production that needs revolution. There are no means to an end.
    I used to teach my students not to beg the question.
    In the end, the ousted workers were invited to produce whatever they damn well pleased with the machinery. With the line assemblies. With the break rooms and warehouses. Because it didn’t matter. No one was buying anything, so there was no producing.
    Of course there were strikes. By that point, there were so many workers gone, so many forming lines, echelons, phalanxes on the concrete fields behind the picket line. It wasn’t even mob mentality. It was herd. Gathering in numbers against the