The Final Word
by Bruce Bellingham

In the 1967 movie, The President’s Analyst, James Coburn, who plays the psychiatrist, exclaims, “I don’t understand it. All of my patients hate the phone company. Did you know that even the stockholders of the phone company hate the phone company?”
I could say that I also hate the phone company, but if I did, I’d have to take that up with my therapist.

The vast majority of people in the world seem to have to have someone or something to hate. It’s a relentless cycle. Years ago, I heard a story about a woman who hoarded Roosevelt dimes in her closet because she hated FDR so much. When I was a kid, every American hated the Russians. They say that anger is born of fear. It was right and righteous to hate the Russians. Then the wall came down. This passionate contempt shifted to other targets. But I don’t think it really ever danced away from a dislike of the phone company. Yet things have changed. Now there are many phone companies. They still make some people feel powerless and victimized without recourse. This is what deregulation has done for us: created a wide distribution of frustration.

In San Francisco it is fashionable to hate PG&E. And why not? It can shut us down at any time. It’s a huge, mysterious monolith. If the Board of Supervisors succeeds in taking over PG&E, then we can direct our opprobrium at the supes, though I imagine they’ve garnered some already. No wonder Aaron Peskin is leaving office. Do you think he wants to go around town and read the meters?

There are many things we love to hate. 

There’s no shortage of material because everything awful that might have gone away inevitably comes back: tuberculosis … yellow ribbons tied around the old oak tree … Donnie and Marie … the Cold War.

Yes, the Russians are villains again. But I don’t think that lets AT&T off the hook. There’s room to hate everybody in a free society.

The venerable AP reporter Helen Thomas, who has covered nine presidents as a member of the White House press corps, says, “All presidents hate us.”

I hate to tell you this, Helen. The White House doesn’t hate the press. They simply dislike you. You’re the one who asks the tough, salient questions. The only time I saw President Bush lose his temper on TV was when Helen Thomas was badgering him about the invasion of Iraq. Good on you, Helen, for doing your job.

Whatever happened to the Summer of Love? Was there really a Summer of Love? I recall that about that time, some ambitious persons blew up the Bank of America branch in the Haight. Terrorists with flowers in their hair. That was a harbinger of the hatred that was to come in the late ’60s and into the ’70s. All this time, there were efforts by the counterculture to undermine the detested phone company. If you punched a few numbers out of the phone bill, one might disrupt their system. You can see how the phone company was brought to its knees.

I’d continue this treatise but I have to make a phone call. Then I have to send this essay to the editors by way of e-mail, if AT&T kindly lets me continue to use the Internet.
For all of the trouble in the world, isn’t it great to know that we always have someone to blame?

Bruce Bellingham is also a columnist for the Marina Times, and the author of a book called Bellingham by the Bay. He has yet to finish his second book, The Angina Dialogues, but he’s been impeded by outside forces. It’s their fault, not his.