Since they’ve been showing promos for Season 2 of the “cult hit” Mr. Robot, we decided to look at the pilot. It was, to be honest, a mixed bag. The lead actor, Rami Malek, is magnetic as a functioning autistic hacker who lives somewhere between real life and morphine-induced paranoia. He works for a computer security firm whose business comes mainly from E-Corp, a conglomerate conflation of Apple and Microsoft. He is recruited by an entity or an hallucination named Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) to assist in the cyber destruction of the entire global economic system. The emotions seem real enough and understandable in the millennial context, but the politics are warmed over borrowings from Occupy Wall Street graffiti. The general hatred of corporations seems to make no distinction between the capitalism that has raised entire populations out of subsistence living to general comfort and the corruption of the current parasitic government-bank cartel. It is, in this nightmare, all equally evil, which we are repeatedly meant to understand the E in E-Corporation stands for.

My wife kind of liked it, I kind of didn’t. I looked up the IMDB user reviews for episode 2:

Like Occupy Wall Street, an idea-less performance act falls quickly off a cliff.

For all you Bernie fans who know no history and have no idea of the difference between capitalism — i.e., creating value and therefore wealth — and crony capitalism — i.e., merely creating the appearance of value to no one’s benefit but your own, I give you…

The Boomer Bible’s Book of Adam.

Today is April 19, the 35th anniversary of The Boomer Bible‘s dedication on South Street in Philadelphia.