I interpreted this as the prelude to a series by Rudy Rucker, but are Barb & Chuck geezers or pheezers?
Speaking to the narrative, strictly from a pure protagonist-antagonist story telling pov, and tightrope walk around victim blaming, but there are two critical pieces of their back story that were left out and would greatly illuminate who they are victims of besides Amazon (at least according to the story). Is it the big banks? Their broker? The shitstem? Themselves? (1) How did Chuck go from selling a McD’s franchise and visions of golf courses until death … to bankruptcy and telling his broker to go self-sodomize? Was it poor planning on his part or was he defrauded. The American Dream was a delusion and he got caught up in it? Overspending? Planning on 5% GDP growth per annum? 10%? Bad investments? Too much a life of leisure? He can be a victim of himself and one can still have sympathy for him, but I think it’s an important distinction that was avoided. If he was able to work his way up from flipping burgers to owning a franchise, Chuck had agency in his past, including going bankrupt. (2) How did the couple get from being “in the middle of nowhere out west” in an old RV on the precipice of washing dishes or turning tricks to pay for the gas they just pumped and couldn’t afford … to the RV that I saw them pictured with? Was that poetic license and not theirs or had the couple upgraded along their journey. Unclear how far post-bankruptcy they are, but is that new one being funded on credit? On SSI? On their Amazon pay? It’s clearly not the same one depicted in the narrative of Barb.
In re: question 1, my guess based on the Wired story is bad investments (probably heavy on risky real estate and mortgage-backed securities) with a bad bank:
Chuck still remembers the call from Wells Fargo that brought the 2008 financial crisis crashing down on his head. He had invested his $250,000 nest egg in a fund that supposedly guaranteed him $4,000 a month to live on. “You have no more money,” he recalls his banker saying flatly.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen if a) the retirement portfolio has been re-balanced to a more conservative one befitting a pensioner on a fixed income (which unfortunately will not deliver a guaranteed $4000/month unless the $250k principal is depleted) and b) if the retiree is checking his portfolio at least once a quarter and talking to his money manager at least once a year to keep an eye on things. So even though the bank didn’t deserve his trust Chuck isn’t completely off the hook here.
In re: question 2, it’s not clear if they’re in a different RV – the interior shot during the interview shows a steering wheel, while the one shown at 1:28 in the video is just a trailer. Their original (and perhaps current) RV is described as a “29-foot 1996 National RV Sea Breeze motor home”, an example of which is pictured here.
If they did buy a different one instead of just upgrading the one they had your question is a good one. $12/hr x2 from a seasonal job plus SSI x2 cab buy gas money and space at a trailer park but not another RV in good condition (especially with the credit rating you get after walking away from an underwater home). It’s been 9 years since 2008 but saving up for a different RV in their already constrained circumstances would still imply some very lean living.
I appreciate your very detailed response. There were some EXT shots of the RV, but it may well have been like that one pictured. Guess RVs don’t show their age as dramatically as other motor vehicles. I wouldn’t think of the one pictured as 20+ years old either.
At least not in superficial appearance, which can remain shiny and clean to a passing glance. It’s the time-battered and ill-maintained underlying infrastructure (the plumbing, the seals and insulation, the wheels, the handling, the performance, etc.) where the rot becomes inescapably apparent. There’s a reason that these RVs are becoming an on-the-nose metaphor for a certain country’s declining state of affairs.
And invisible but toxic pollution from meth cookers or mildew. Florida and Texas had plenty of RVs and campers flooded by the 2017 hurricane season. This has two ill effects: fraudulent sales of water-damaged campers and price increases for good stock because deceased retirees’ campers no longer are available at bargain estate-sale rates. Screwed up a bunch of low-cost survival plans.
Next problem: tiny houses full of mildewed salvage lumber.
My scuentific wild-assed guess is that Nazis et al are being encouraged by Cheeto and admin as an option for eliminating unemployed ethnics first, unnecessaritariat next, once office and manufacturing production are completely automated. Watch for biowarfare instead of camps and chambers, although slavery definitely will be kept as an option by the corpoRats.
American conservatives won’t have to go to the trouble of biowarfare to implement their eliminationist solution to the pesky problem of those they consider surplus humans. They’ll just deny people they don’t like or don’t find useful as indentured servants access to things like healthcare and let nature take its course, forgetting all the while that microbes bop right past doormen and guards at gated communities.
