The Zeitgeist Diaries Pt. 2 - Redundancy  

By: Javan Bair 

It wouldn’t be a used truck dealership if there weren’t a steel sign with the company logo in front of the office. In big, brushed metal letters fixed inside of a banner, the company name TTI Trucks is the very first thing you see when you walk inside.  

Like most companies, we place our logo anywhere and everywhere we possibly can. The logo is everywhere you look. Our hats, t-shirts, license plates, trucks, and coffee cups. Everything has a logo on it. For Christ’s sake, I can’t tell you how many times I have been cut off by a truck with TTI mudflaps on my way to work.

So after about a month of working there and seeing this logo on every square foot of my workspace, I realized something. I have no clue what the “TTI” in “TTI Trucks” stands for. I ask Mike what it means, and he tells me he has no clue. He has worked here for five years, and that strikes me as odd. So, I ask around, and no one seems to know. Until I asked Angie, the girl who did our payroll, for a document with our entire company name printed.

And there it was. In all of its repetitive glory, “Turner Trucks Incorporated Trucks.” “Wow. The word “trucks” is in our company name twice. Let there be no confusion that we sell trucks and truck parts. The redundancy makes it undoubtedly funny. (Redundancy: the inclusion of extra components which are not strictly necessary to functioning in case of failure in other components.) The overuse of the word trucks in the company is accurately redundant as it neither aids nor diminishes anything from a money-making standpoint. But it did make for a name that rolls off the tongue nicely. Nicely enough for me to begin answering the phone at the parts desk like “Turner Trucks Incorporated Trucks. This is Trucks. How can I help you find Trucks?”  

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We even had cloth masks made with our secretly redundant logos on them. I’m not sure why we had those made. We wore them one time. Quite literally one time that I can remember. And you would have thought that some of my coworkers were channeling the spirit of Rosa Parks, the way they were fiercely preaching about overcoming oppression and the need for more civil liberties and rights. But unlike Rosa Parks, who was fighting for freedom while living through the brutal realities of racism and forced segregation. These were grown-ass, blue-collar men falling to pieces behind a small piece of cloth.

I am not saying there is no validity to the argument over the infringement of masks on the principles of freedom. But at the time, placing the fabric on our mouths to potentially stop old people from dying seemed quite minimal compared to the state of other things in America. We had the two oldest and least qualified potential candidates vying for the most important job in the world during a key moment in our nation’s history. The streets of most major cities were still riddled with palpable tensions between citizens and police officers. Protests were erupting everywhere, all the time, and about anything. Violent crime had risen significantly since the pandemic began. Drug overdoses were skyrocketing. The masks just seemed a bit redundant in comparison. And despite everything that happened, the “goddamn, pussy, libtard, queer masks” remained a central point of contention.

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If I had to give an estimate, I would say that Gus weighed approximately seven-thousand pounds. He was a morbidly obese cokehead, which I thought was impossible before meeting him. He was a co-worker of mine during this period. He sold used parts at the counter next to Mike. And this dude got COVID so fucking bad that it nearly killed him. He miraculously pulled through and survived. He will be on oxygen for the rest of his life, but that’s incredible considering a virus that targets the cardiovascular system specifically was thwarted by a heart filled to the brim with cholesterol from numerous years of deep-fried tamales and eight balls. Oh, and all the doctors and medicine, which he thinks are liberal propaganda.

He was a full-blown disciple of Qanon, Breitbart, Infowars, and any other conspiracy-driven narrative. He was, therefore, not allowed to admit that COVID was real even after it put him in the hospital for a complete month. He took one round of the vaccine and then read an article that Bill Gates was using it to put microchips inside of people and just never went back for a second dose. We would argue incessantly about politics and COVID over the soft whispering sound from his oxygen tank as it released pressure. That little *psst* sound would serve as a constant reminder that he really did have COVID and it could potentially be life-threatening to high-risk (the old and severely out of shape). If I ever brought this up to him, I was given the same response. “Fuck you” *psst* “You stupid ass” *psst* “Democrat!” *psst* It was like arguing with a walkie-talkie. He would then angrily grab his little oxygen tank and waddle away until I could no longer hear the faint sound of me winning another argument. *psst*    

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All at once, in a large sweeping fashion. Everyone and their grandmothers got COVID at TTI. After Gus, the dominos just continued to fall. Somehow, during my part-time hours spent at work, I never contracted COVID.   

It was just me and another guy, Thomas, who didn’t get COVID. I assume the variants that I was exposed to only affected full-time employees, and Thomas did not get it because he works alone in the far corner of our lot in the back of an old FED Ex truck. But that is a whole different story for a whole different time.

For weeks I would come into work, and there would be three people out of the usual thirty working there. But business did not slow down. Not for one second. I have never been so happy to be a part-time employee anywhere in my life. There would be a sea of angry customers wondering where their truck parts were, and I would just look at the clock and realize, “Oh, look at that! Time for class!” And I would leave and go to school, where I would wear one of the custom cloth TTI masks and spend the rest of my afternoon on what felt like the other side of the planet.  

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I stand by my defense of college. It is not (usually) a socialist brainwashing seminar like Fox News and The Daily Wire would like you to believe. In fact, all those anchors and reporters that consistently shit on institutions of higher education all went to one. They wouldn’t have their jobs if they didn’t. When Ben Shapiro drones on about the alleged brainwashing occurring at colleges across the nation, never forget that he himself is a graduate of Harvard and UCLA. However, there are times that colleges live up to the types of stereotypes that give reporters like Tucker Carlson wet dreams. This was never more evident than when classes were reopened in the fall of 2020.

CU reopened its doors with a no negotiation, one-hundred percent mask mandate, and a very limited number of in-person courses.  

The mandate itself was little to no issue to me. Much like the escape from the mundane nature of the pandemic that I was receiving by working at TTI, the school re-opening served as a similar reminder of regular life. So, if all I had to do was wear a mask to attend classes, then so be it.  

But Jesus H Christ did these young students who had never had any taste of power and got totally shitfaced on the role of enforcing the mandates on others who did not comply. And, of course they did. Most of these young people were consuming media that reinforced the idea that those unwilling to comply with mask mandates were synonymous with the mob of Qanon dipshits trying to rip down 5G towers. While it is true that those people do often stay in the same camp, they don’t usually share the same tent. These misguided liberal children of conservative parents thought they were playing an important role in saving humanity while pissing their Dads off. It was a perfect situation for misguided post-teenage angst. Unfortunately for them, they were just as annoying and as pedantic as the anti-maskers screaming about their religious and constitutional rights to abstain from masks. As they attempted to mock and berate their right-wing opponents, they became the very cannon fodder needed to fill the b roll footage spots on Fox News. The pro-mask policing student bodies on campuses all over the nation were just as terrible as the deranged alt-right religious fanatic shouting at members of their town hall representatives about their local mask mandates. “You cannot force me to cover my mouth. God intended our mouths to be free from sinful oppression. God gave me this hole to breathe from. God gave me this hole, and you cannot control it! That’s God’s Hole!”  That’s not a direct quote, but we’ve all seen the videos at this point, and I'm not that far off.

Admittedly though, the return to in-person classes felt somber. Most of the campus was closed, aside from a couple of different buildings. Sure we had human contact in the realm of education once more, but this felt like human contact Lite. Sure, being around the presence of enough masked faces could make you feel alive again, but it’s just not the same as the full-strength stuff. No one spoke to anyone else in the halls or classrooms. It was just bleak. Everything felt gray. If it weren’t for the complete and total abandonment of the mask mandates at TTI, I probably would have been begging strangers to cough into my open mouth so I could feel alive again.

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“The masks are an infringement on my fucking rights!” I was often yelled at by coworkers that looked like deer in the headlights if you mentioned the Patriot Act. 

“The masks are not a fucking option! If you don’t comply, you are murdering people!” I would often hear similar sentiments being screamed by students who were ironically obsessed with preserving our democracy.

The argument about masks has never been over freedom v. oppression. It has always been about ability v. regulation. And that is the real degree of freedom that we have in this country. We do not, nor have we ever lived in a place with true freedom or unlimited liberties. In America, you have the ability to do what you want until it no longer adheres to an existing regulation. No matter where your allegiance was sworn at this time, you were still not allowed to enter a restaurant and eat food without a mask on. Stop pretending that you are somehow living in a free country. That is a fever dream. We live and operate according to the freedoms allocated to us.

And if I have to wear a mask to go to a brewery and sit inside like a civilized human instead of sitting at a picnic table in the middle of a closed-down street in December like some kind of side character in Grand Theft Auto, then so be it.

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Much like the name Turner Trucks Inc. Trucks, there is a comically valuable level of redundancy in the arguments presented in this piece. The battle that was waged between the hardcore pro and anti-maskers was relevant in terms of their place in time but absolutely fucking useless in terms of assisting our country as it navigated a pandemic. These two groups of people made a massively absurd amount of noise, but they achieved nothing. They were extra components unnecessary to the functionality of our nation. These folks were merely cheerleaders for ideals that were not even their own.  

And at the end of it, both approaches appeared useless. Shortly after everyone at TTI contracted COVID, CU Denver canceled all classes for the next semester and a half because many of our masked student population had also gotten COVID. Looking back, is it fair to admit we had no fucking idea how to resolve the pandemic? It seems that we were simply adding more and more redundant parts to the machine rather than addressing the central cause of all of our problems, an already broken two-party system.  

***Pt. 3 Coming Next Week***