It's that time again.
Time to take to the streets, hit the stores, crawl the malls, and search high and low for the perfect gift for your significant other, parent, or offspring. Plus some not-so-perfect gifts for the family-adjacents and six-degrees-of-separation relatives who are nonetheless too close to be placated with a generic card from Dollar Tree. Not to mention the great deals that will end up in your gift closet for unexpected guests and birthdays throughout the year (full disclosure: no way am I that organized!).
Oh, and it's also time to buy yet another round of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, pies, and...hey, wait a sec. Didn't we just do this last month? Yep, but there aren't enough leftovers to feed the crowd we're expecting, so...yeah, this is happening again.
Yes, once again, it is time to go Christmas shopping. And as you go, you will encounter many other people who are doing exactly the same thing.
(BTW...if anyone reading this is Jewish...how do you folks manage with Hanukkah? One day out of the year is grueling enough--but eight nights? Sorry, but consider this shikseh's mind completely boggled...)
And as you make your hunter/gatherer way through any given store, you will most likely encounter...a sales clerk. That's the person who tells you where you can find the cordless shavers, points the way to the restrooms, and takes your cash or processes your plastic. Not to mention wrapping that special something so your Little Angel doesn't realize she's getting the Giganto Lincoln Logs Barrel for Christmas (she whispered it to Santa, but you were close enough to hear).
Now, as I said at the beginning of this blog, my job title is menial. But mine is a small outfit, so at busy times of the year, it's Whoop! Whoop! All hands, battle stations! Especially Christmas. And though I am very knowledgeable about our store after (censored) years of working there, there are still things that I may not know. And any temps hired are probably going to be a little iffy about store layout, return policies, gift wrapping, or other procedures. And all of us are being pulled in several directions by different simultaneous customers and tasks. This can be enormously frustrating for shoppers. I--we--understand that.
But you know what doesn't help? Yelling at us. Especially if it's something that isn't our fault, like if we run out of a popular item 25 minutes after we opened the doors on Black Friday. Or if it's something unreasonable, like when we're asked to gift wrap an item you bought from our competition. Or if it's an act of God, like (heaven forbid) a network crash that has us hauling out the old hand-held credit card machines and hoping that somebody remembers where we stored the carbons that go with them.
And if it's something we can do something about, like exchanging a coat for a different size or correcting the price on an item that is supposed to be on sale, a normal voice and your mother's politeness words will get things done much more effectively than your anger.
So sorry, yelling won't accomplish a thing...except to raise everybody's blood pressure and turn nearly every clerk you meet into a Grinch. And if an earlier customer has already tried yelling at the clerk you are now angry at, the Grinchiness only gets worse. I have a lot of clerks as friends and acquaintances, and it's the same every season: they all gird their loins and grit their teeth and do their best to exude sparkles and brightness...and when Christmas is over, they all look like they were run through an industrial taffy-pulling machine. (Yes, me too...it usually takes me until Epiphany to recover.)
This, mind you, is when we make it through without yelling back at a customer. Or making a snarky remark just loud enough for them to hear. Or completely breaking down and screaming like the female lead in a horror movie. Clerks who do any of those things usually disappear--either to the boss's office for a reprimand, or permanently.
Ah, I hear a customer somewhere saying, "Huh. Serves them right."
Fair enough. But...I wonder, do customers ever realize that we, too, are human beings? That being harangued, abused, or yelled at should not be part of our jobs as service personnel? That if they keep calm and have a little patience, they will make it out of the store with their parcels and gift receipts and such? In short: If workers have no right to yell at customers, then they, in turn, have no right to yell at us.
(And speaking of social media...If a worker were ever to disrespect a customer online, he would be fired if he were caught. Yet customers feel perfectly free to name names or describe workers and tell out their sins for the entire Internet to hear. That's miles away from a bad review on Yelp; it's just plain vicious.)
What I'm really saying here is, show some respect. It's our job to help you, and really, we like you and want to help you. So please...help make our holidays merry by smiling at us, even if we don't smile back. (That cashier is sweating bullets because you just handed him 18 hundred-dollar bills to pay for your husband's new high-end power tools, and his authenticator pen just ran out of juice, and where is that floater with a new one from Supplies?!) And by not being offended if we don't use the approved farewell for your religion's holiday. (Should we just name them all and hope one of them creates happiness?) Oh, and remember those politeness words! (We love to hear them, especially from little kids!)
Be kind. Be polite. We'll do the same. Deal?
Great. Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy Kwanzaa! Hope I didn't miss anybody... :)
Sunday, December 9, 2018
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Ursula: A Celebration
One of my favorite authors died this year, and I just found out.
And it wasn't even recently--it was all the way back in January that Ursula K. Le Guin passed away. But I'm not fully wired in to the 24-hour news cycle, and since a daily paper now costs roughly the same price that I used to pay for a paperback book...well, is it any wonder I sailed through this year in blissful ignorance?
By any measure, Le Guin was awesome. She wrote well and she lived well, and kept doing both pretty much until she died. Her writing produces (at least in me) a sort of "woke hypnosis"--I finish a story of hers, and find myself hyper-alert to the doings in the world around me, rather than zoned out and daydreaming. Nothing wrong with a trip up into the ozone, but we all need a good, gentle shake-up now and then. Ursula was just the lady to do it.
And her life? Well, she knew several languages, and translated a number of literary works into English, and wrote poetry and non-fiction as well as the fiction she is best-known for. And she was married to the same man--Charles Le Guin--until she died; they had three children. Along with this, she was a feminist--not one of the militant ones who carried signs advising women to go on strike against their husbands, but the sort who thought that if women wanted to go out and do something, they should just get out and do it, no histrionics necessary. She opposed the Vietnam War, the ugliness being wrought by misuse and abuse of the environment, and fascism of any stripe (this often showed up in her stories). Also, she was a Taoist. Maybe that's why she seems so gentle; the Tao is just as much about not doing as it is about doing...perhaps more so.
So yeah, I'll miss Ursula. But rather than mourn or weep, I think I'll just introduce you to a few of my favorite Le Guin stories and novels, and you can see for yourself what I mean....
The Lathe of Heaven
Hands down, my favorite novel. A man, George Orr, has the ability to change the entire universe when he dreams, and the ability terrifies him so badly that he fraudulently acquires prescription drugs to try to keep from dreaming at all. Caught and sent to a dream specialist for therapy, his ability is discovered, both by the doctor, William Haber, and by a female lawyer named Heather Lelache whom Orr hires to make sure Haber isn't monkeying around with his head. Of course, Haber is doing just that--he's convinced that if he guides Orr's special dreams, the world can be made a better place. But there's always a dark side to those "improvements," as George tries to warn Haber--like overpopulation being solved by a pollution-spawned plague, or racial tensions disappearing because everyone in the world is, and always has been, gray-skinned. I can't really say more without spoilers. Read it, and you'll get what I mean. There were two movies made of this book; the best one is the PBS adaptation from 1981.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
This story is based on a very simple premise: a perfect society which is only perfect because a single person is continually made to suffer. If you knew about this single sufferer, and knew that the only reason you get to have such a wonderful life is that this person is suffering--and worse, any attempt by you to alleviate that suffering would destroy the entire society--what would you do? Would you look, and then go on with your life; go ahead and rescue the scapegoat, society be hanged; or...would you walk away? Despite crediting the idea to William James, Le Guin says that the real inspiration came from a half-remembered reading of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and from reading a road sign backwards (the road sign in question I leave as an exercise for the student).
The Dispossessed
Subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia," this is one of Le Guin's most famous novels. Its Odonian society on the semi-arid moon called Anarres is modeled on the real-world concept of pacifistic anarchism, in which all cooperate for the good of the entire society. It isn't Communism, for there is no central state; if an Odonian wants to get something new going, he just finds a group of like-minded people and forms a syndicate. But what if what you want is to do physics...a kind of physics that needs data from Anarres' sister world Urras, rejected long ago by the Odonians? On this, the entire plot hangs; there are triumphs, conflicts, culture shock, and eventually homesickness. Odonian society is a sort of anti-Ayniverse, but it's not perfect. Ursula warned us right up front, remember?
Changing Planes
Airports suck.
We all know it. Confusion, long waits, missed connections, security hold-ups, horrible food...and all this was before some crazy thought it was the will of Allah to crash passenger airliners into buildings!
But what if all that misery could be put to use? As in, to help you really get away from it all? According to Sita Dulip of Cincinnati, the proper miserific state, plus a "slipping twist and a bend," will enable you to go somewhere else entirely--a bright, tropical paradise like Djeyo, or the perfect world of the Nna Mmoy, whose language is so complex it's like an evolving life-form, or Hegn, where everybody is royal and the one family of commoners are celebrities.
What a fun idea! Which is why this is my favorite collection of Le Guin's short stories. One of them in particular, "Great Joy," is a Christmas tradition for me--its undertone of satire, plus the hilarious dialect given to Cousin Sulie, plus the ironic ending...it doesn't sound very Christmas-y, but trust me, it is...at least, the way most Americans celebrate it...
Sur
Nine South American women mount an expedition to Antarctica, "to go, to see"...and to reach the South Pole if they can. They don't want fame; they just want to see if they can do it. And in order not to bring unwanted fame or embarrassment to their families (or disappoint any explorers that come after them), they keep their accomplishments a complete secret, except for some documents and maps hidden in a few South American attics! It's not a haphazard undertaking, and all the women are well-off, which, along with the backing of an unnamed benefactor, grants them the freedom to do such a seemingly-crazy thing. Altogether a wonderful story of the triumph of the sisterhood...feminism, Le Guin-style.
It would be cool if the U.N. could agree to give one of the mountains in Antarctica a name from the ladies' maps in this story--you know, as a way to honor Ursula. I would be thrilled to see real maps with an Antarctic mountain called "Bolivar's Big Nose." Or what about "Throne of Our Lady of the Southern Cross"? Is there a U.N. committee that oversees these things? Let's get a letter campaign going!
Catwings
A series for children about a strange mutation that produces a litter of kittens who have wings and can fly! Of course, there are grownups who want to exploit the Catwings, but the bad guys get thwarted by some kids, who take the Catwings out to a farm where the kittens will be safe (although the mice certainly won't be...).
There were four books in the series: Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander And the Catwings, and Jane On Her Own.
And, there you have it...
Just a few of the great writings of Ursula K. Le Guin. Go find a book shop at once...an indie one if you can. You'll have better luck finding her works there. Hey, you might even find a first-edition copy of Rocannon's World.
Enjoy!
And it wasn't even recently--it was all the way back in January that Ursula K. Le Guin passed away. But I'm not fully wired in to the 24-hour news cycle, and since a daily paper now costs roughly the same price that I used to pay for a paperback book...well, is it any wonder I sailed through this year in blissful ignorance?
By any measure, Le Guin was awesome. She wrote well and she lived well, and kept doing both pretty much until she died. Her writing produces (at least in me) a sort of "woke hypnosis"--I finish a story of hers, and find myself hyper-alert to the doings in the world around me, rather than zoned out and daydreaming. Nothing wrong with a trip up into the ozone, but we all need a good, gentle shake-up now and then. Ursula was just the lady to do it.
And her life? Well, she knew several languages, and translated a number of literary works into English, and wrote poetry and non-fiction as well as the fiction she is best-known for. And she was married to the same man--Charles Le Guin--until she died; they had three children. Along with this, she was a feminist--not one of the militant ones who carried signs advising women to go on strike against their husbands, but the sort who thought that if women wanted to go out and do something, they should just get out and do it, no histrionics necessary. She opposed the Vietnam War, the ugliness being wrought by misuse and abuse of the environment, and fascism of any stripe (this often showed up in her stories). Also, she was a Taoist. Maybe that's why she seems so gentle; the Tao is just as much about not doing as it is about doing...perhaps more so.
So yeah, I'll miss Ursula. But rather than mourn or weep, I think I'll just introduce you to a few of my favorite Le Guin stories and novels, and you can see for yourself what I mean....
The Lathe of Heaven
Hands down, my favorite novel. A man, George Orr, has the ability to change the entire universe when he dreams, and the ability terrifies him so badly that he fraudulently acquires prescription drugs to try to keep from dreaming at all. Caught and sent to a dream specialist for therapy, his ability is discovered, both by the doctor, William Haber, and by a female lawyer named Heather Lelache whom Orr hires to make sure Haber isn't monkeying around with his head. Of course, Haber is doing just that--he's convinced that if he guides Orr's special dreams, the world can be made a better place. But there's always a dark side to those "improvements," as George tries to warn Haber--like overpopulation being solved by a pollution-spawned plague, or racial tensions disappearing because everyone in the world is, and always has been, gray-skinned. I can't really say more without spoilers. Read it, and you'll get what I mean. There were two movies made of this book; the best one is the PBS adaptation from 1981.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
This story is based on a very simple premise: a perfect society which is only perfect because a single person is continually made to suffer. If you knew about this single sufferer, and knew that the only reason you get to have such a wonderful life is that this person is suffering--and worse, any attempt by you to alleviate that suffering would destroy the entire society--what would you do? Would you look, and then go on with your life; go ahead and rescue the scapegoat, society be hanged; or...would you walk away? Despite crediting the idea to William James, Le Guin says that the real inspiration came from a half-remembered reading of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and from reading a road sign backwards (the road sign in question I leave as an exercise for the student).
The Dispossessed
Subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia," this is one of Le Guin's most famous novels. Its Odonian society on the semi-arid moon called Anarres is modeled on the real-world concept of pacifistic anarchism, in which all cooperate for the good of the entire society. It isn't Communism, for there is no central state; if an Odonian wants to get something new going, he just finds a group of like-minded people and forms a syndicate. But what if what you want is to do physics...a kind of physics that needs data from Anarres' sister world Urras, rejected long ago by the Odonians? On this, the entire plot hangs; there are triumphs, conflicts, culture shock, and eventually homesickness. Odonian society is a sort of anti-Ayniverse, but it's not perfect. Ursula warned us right up front, remember?
Changing Planes
Airports suck.
We all know it. Confusion, long waits, missed connections, security hold-ups, horrible food...and all this was before some crazy thought it was the will of Allah to crash passenger airliners into buildings!
But what if all that misery could be put to use? As in, to help you really get away from it all? According to Sita Dulip of Cincinnati, the proper miserific state, plus a "slipping twist and a bend," will enable you to go somewhere else entirely--a bright, tropical paradise like Djeyo, or the perfect world of the Nna Mmoy, whose language is so complex it's like an evolving life-form, or Hegn, where everybody is royal and the one family of commoners are celebrities.
What a fun idea! Which is why this is my favorite collection of Le Guin's short stories. One of them in particular, "Great Joy," is a Christmas tradition for me--its undertone of satire, plus the hilarious dialect given to Cousin Sulie, plus the ironic ending...it doesn't sound very Christmas-y, but trust me, it is...at least, the way most Americans celebrate it...
Sur
Nine South American women mount an expedition to Antarctica, "to go, to see"...and to reach the South Pole if they can. They don't want fame; they just want to see if they can do it. And in order not to bring unwanted fame or embarrassment to their families (or disappoint any explorers that come after them), they keep their accomplishments a complete secret, except for some documents and maps hidden in a few South American attics! It's not a haphazard undertaking, and all the women are well-off, which, along with the backing of an unnamed benefactor, grants them the freedom to do such a seemingly-crazy thing. Altogether a wonderful story of the triumph of the sisterhood...feminism, Le Guin-style.
It would be cool if the U.N. could agree to give one of the mountains in Antarctica a name from the ladies' maps in this story--you know, as a way to honor Ursula. I would be thrilled to see real maps with an Antarctic mountain called "Bolivar's Big Nose." Or what about "Throne of Our Lady of the Southern Cross"? Is there a U.N. committee that oversees these things? Let's get a letter campaign going!
Catwings
A series for children about a strange mutation that produces a litter of kittens who have wings and can fly! Of course, there are grownups who want to exploit the Catwings, but the bad guys get thwarted by some kids, who take the Catwings out to a farm where the kittens will be safe (although the mice certainly won't be...).
There were four books in the series: Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander And the Catwings, and Jane On Her Own.
And, there you have it...
Just a few of the great writings of Ursula K. Le Guin. Go find a book shop at once...an indie one if you can. You'll have better luck finding her works there. Hey, you might even find a first-edition copy of Rocannon's World.
Enjoy!
Sunday, November 18, 2018
How Do You Miss A Urinal?
Wow. I did it! If this doesn't make me a shoo-in for Grand Flushmaster, I don't know what will...if they let me tell what I know...oh, wait. You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?
Okay, let me explain....
At the last conclave of the Ancient and Honorable Order of the Chamber Pot (our founders emptied the ones both in King Solomon's chambers and those of his immense harem), I was formally promoted to 34th-Level Janitor, with all rights and responsibilities thereof, including a golden crossed-plunger-and-mop signet ring, an exclusive variant of the secret handshake (always performed while wearing rubber gloves), and a key to the Sacred Supply Closet, should my tasks require more esoteric cleaners than mere Pine-Sol and Toilet Duck.
My main responsibility is to carefully study all of the Seven Janitorial Mysteries, and if possible, find a solution to one of them.
The one that truly bothered me most (although "Just what is that gummy black junk that magically appears on floors and you have to use a razor to scrape it up?!" came close) was "How does a man miss a urinal?" Because urinals are made to catch all that whizz. And what could be simpler than to unzip, aim at the porcelain, and shoot?
And yet...guys miss it. A lot. If you, too, are a member of the Potsies (as we are commonly called), and you have ever drawn the chore of cleaning a men's restroom, you know exactly what I mean. At times there is more urine on the walls and the floors than there is in the actual urinal (and I know that because another thing many men can't do is flush), and the really weird thing is that if one man misses the urinal, the next man to use it will not rat out his fellow by telling someone that there is "a mess" in the men's room! In fact, he will step in said mess and then track it out of the restroom altogether rather than admit that a mess exists!
Which is when I finally got mad as hell and decided to solve that Mystery once and for all.
And that's where we came in. Because, by golly, I solved it!
First of all, in a few cases, there is no Mystery. Old men get a bit shaky as they age, so it's no wonder that they miss. Little boys often can't aim high enough (though why a parent isn't there to help them is yet another Mystery), so they'll probably miss, too. And if a man has a disability, well, yeah.
But the guys I'm talking about are the healthy, young-to-middle-aged men who should have no trouble with either their personal equipment or the porcelain fixtures graciously provided for them by numerous establishments across this wonderful nation (even modern Porta-Johns have urinals! Is this a great country or what?!). Connecting the two should be as easy as 1, 2, 3...or at least 1. And yet, the messes continue to appear, and if we Potsies weren't there to scrub them away, the liquid would keep growing deeper, the smell would be declared a poison gas, and the uric acid would eventually eat through the tile and stain the ceilings of the floor below. Now why would any thinking man want this?
My first thought was that these men don't think. But that's not true. Many of these men are clever. Some of them are hunters, which I really don't get--you can hit a deer at a hundred yards with a rifle, but not a urinal at half a yard with your own willy? Please!
But one day I was reading about the scent-marking habits of various furred animals in the wild--such as wolves and dogs, as well as cats both domestic and wild--and I got it.
The men miss on purpose!
And they're doing it for the same reasons that your dog sniffs and marks every tree, bush and post on his "walkies," or your cat grimaces over the used sofa you bought, then raises his tail and sprays it...they're communicating.
We ladies have long known that men don't like to verbalize. If we try to get them to do it, they grunt a bit, hide behind their newspapers, and stuff their faces with food. If we go too far, they retreat into their Man Caves and watch sports, which involves as its main means of communication teams wearing pictorial icons and numbers, more numbers indicating that a team has accomplished something, and gestures from officials watching to make sure a team doesn't break the rules.
But men still have things to say to other men; so they use the Sacred Male Urine Code. All we women smell when a man urinates is "pee-yew!" But to another man, it's like a Facebook entry. In fact, it's just like what your dog smells when he's got his whole head buried in the neighbor's wisteria vine--he can tell who's been there, what they ate for dinner, how healthy they are, and even some emotional cues.
And men can tell the same. Who got the promotion, who's dating whom, who got food poisoning from that new restaurant, who's moving to Alaska...it's all there in those nasty yellow droplets and puddles. Which is why the next man in line tries to track it out with him--to make sure some other man can scent-read the messages before the blasted Potsies clean them up!
So there you have it. Mystery solved. Of course, now I'm in terrible danger, both from acolytes of the SMUC and the Potsies. You see, revealing secrets from the 34th Level to outsiders carries the punishment of having a thousand paper cuts applied to one's hands and bare feet, then having them dipped in Purell. Yikes. So I won't be going to our next conclave; instead, I will mail my solution from an undisclosed post office box and find some wilderness to hide out in until I receive notice that all is forgiven.
And with a solution this brilliant, they'll forgive me. Guaranteed.
Okay, let me explain....
At the last conclave of the Ancient and Honorable Order of the Chamber Pot (our founders emptied the ones both in King Solomon's chambers and those of his immense harem), I was formally promoted to 34th-Level Janitor, with all rights and responsibilities thereof, including a golden crossed-plunger-and-mop signet ring, an exclusive variant of the secret handshake (always performed while wearing rubber gloves), and a key to the Sacred Supply Closet, should my tasks require more esoteric cleaners than mere Pine-Sol and Toilet Duck.
My main responsibility is to carefully study all of the Seven Janitorial Mysteries, and if possible, find a solution to one of them.
The one that truly bothered me most (although "Just what is that gummy black junk that magically appears on floors and you have to use a razor to scrape it up?!" came close) was "How does a man miss a urinal?" Because urinals are made to catch all that whizz. And what could be simpler than to unzip, aim at the porcelain, and shoot?
And yet...guys miss it. A lot. If you, too, are a member of the Potsies (as we are commonly called), and you have ever drawn the chore of cleaning a men's restroom, you know exactly what I mean. At times there is more urine on the walls and the floors than there is in the actual urinal (and I know that because another thing many men can't do is flush), and the really weird thing is that if one man misses the urinal, the next man to use it will not rat out his fellow by telling someone that there is "a mess" in the men's room! In fact, he will step in said mess and then track it out of the restroom altogether rather than admit that a mess exists!
Which is when I finally got mad as hell and decided to solve that Mystery once and for all.
And that's where we came in. Because, by golly, I solved it!
First of all, in a few cases, there is no Mystery. Old men get a bit shaky as they age, so it's no wonder that they miss. Little boys often can't aim high enough (though why a parent isn't there to help them is yet another Mystery), so they'll probably miss, too. And if a man has a disability, well, yeah.
But the guys I'm talking about are the healthy, young-to-middle-aged men who should have no trouble with either their personal equipment or the porcelain fixtures graciously provided for them by numerous establishments across this wonderful nation (even modern Porta-Johns have urinals! Is this a great country or what?!). Connecting the two should be as easy as 1, 2, 3...or at least 1. And yet, the messes continue to appear, and if we Potsies weren't there to scrub them away, the liquid would keep growing deeper, the smell would be declared a poison gas, and the uric acid would eventually eat through the tile and stain the ceilings of the floor below. Now why would any thinking man want this?
My first thought was that these men don't think. But that's not true. Many of these men are clever. Some of them are hunters, which I really don't get--you can hit a deer at a hundred yards with a rifle, but not a urinal at half a yard with your own willy? Please!
But one day I was reading about the scent-marking habits of various furred animals in the wild--such as wolves and dogs, as well as cats both domestic and wild--and I got it.
The men miss on purpose!
And they're doing it for the same reasons that your dog sniffs and marks every tree, bush and post on his "walkies," or your cat grimaces over the used sofa you bought, then raises his tail and sprays it...they're communicating.
We ladies have long known that men don't like to verbalize. If we try to get them to do it, they grunt a bit, hide behind their newspapers, and stuff their faces with food. If we go too far, they retreat into their Man Caves and watch sports, which involves as its main means of communication teams wearing pictorial icons and numbers, more numbers indicating that a team has accomplished something, and gestures from officials watching to make sure a team doesn't break the rules.
But men still have things to say to other men; so they use the Sacred Male Urine Code. All we women smell when a man urinates is "pee-yew!" But to another man, it's like a Facebook entry. In fact, it's just like what your dog smells when he's got his whole head buried in the neighbor's wisteria vine--he can tell who's been there, what they ate for dinner, how healthy they are, and even some emotional cues.
And men can tell the same. Who got the promotion, who's dating whom, who got food poisoning from that new restaurant, who's moving to Alaska...it's all there in those nasty yellow droplets and puddles. Which is why the next man in line tries to track it out with him--to make sure some other man can scent-read the messages before the blasted Potsies clean them up!
So there you have it. Mystery solved. Of course, now I'm in terrible danger, both from acolytes of the SMUC and the Potsies. You see, revealing secrets from the 34th Level to outsiders carries the punishment of having a thousand paper cuts applied to one's hands and bare feet, then having them dipped in Purell. Yikes. So I won't be going to our next conclave; instead, I will mail my solution from an undisclosed post office box and find some wilderness to hide out in until I receive notice that all is forgiven.
And with a solution this brilliant, they'll forgive me. Guaranteed.
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Why I Am No Longer A Republican
Now that the mid-term elections are over but for the weeping (or gloating, depending on whether your favorites won or not), I feel calm enough to write about how I ended up jumping ship and becoming a Democrat.
The first thing you must understand is that the state I live in is as dyed-in-the-wool conservative as you could want, and always has been. But that means something very different now than it did when I was a child. When I was a kid, your Democrat neighbors were still neighbors, and when all was said and done, we found a way to work together, even when we didn't agree.
Not anymore.
Now, being blue in a red state is akin to being a Chicago Cubs fan back during the interminable "goat years"--we're something of a laughingstock. But we are also, more and more, being portrayed as the enemies of various American freedoms, and even of democracy itself. So my changeover has nothing to do with wanting to be on the winning side, or the most popular one, but rather the one which was the more right about things.
So here, for better or worse, are the main reasons I switched parties.
1) The Mean Girls (And Boys)
Remember when there was no Rush Limbaugh? No Fox News? No Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, or Jonah Goldberg? I do, and it seems that the news and how it was reported was a little calmer back then. (I once read of an editor who growled at one of his stringers, "I don't care if your mother said it's true--get two corroborative sources!") Now we have a whole raft of so-called "right-wing" news and opinion outlets, and they are meaner than a spitting cobra with a case of hemorrhoids. From Rush's infamous "White House dog" pic (nope, Rush darling, you will never live that one down); to Bill O'Reilly's out-of-his-ass assertions with no regard for truth (the real "O'Reilly Factor"); to Jonah Goldberg's bizarre statement after the devastating Haiti quake that sending aid to that country would do them no good because the people there seemed to have no desire to better themselves (in this case, Jonah could have saved himself a world of embarrassment by reading the Britannica entry on Haiti's history--the wrongs we have done to that little country entitle it to more than we can ever repay); to Michelle Malkin's diatribe against Peter Yarrow's anti-bullying program "Operation Respect" because Yarrow apparently was a pot smoker back in the day and because what kids really needed in these warlike times (this was just after the second undeclared Iraq War had started) were self-defense lessons so they could give the bullies what-for; to pretty much anything Ann Coulter has ever written or said--wow. I grew more and more horrified by what "my side" was saying.
But I could have written all that off if the same sort of rhetoric hadn't started appearing on campaign flyers, in TV ads, and even in the halls of Congress. I blame Newt Gingrich for that; his meanness was so effective that the GOP put out a pamphlet full of words which you could use either for or against a person or cause. They were all words and phrases that Gingrich had used in his campaigns. And along with Gingrich came a wave of "new Republicans" (Molly Ivins wryly called them "pod people" for their lockstep adherence to their party line) with no respect for the compromise model of government. Nope--it was their way or the highway, and it's only gotten worse since then.
2) Let Them Eat Cake!
(Note: there is a great deal of doubt as to whether Marie Antoinette actually said this in response to the news that the poor Parisians had no bread to eat; I am simply using it in its traditional sense. Thank you.)
The "new Republicans" love supply-side economics. It used to be called "trickle-down" economics, but once it became obvious that what was actually trickling down to the common worker was considerably browner and smellier than money, some spin doctor came up with the new name. And it's more accurate: the bulk of the tax breaks go to the corporations and the uber-rich, not to the poor or middle-class worker. The magical thinking behind this is that when the rich get more, they build more factories, hire more workers, and pay them better.
Uh-uh.
Corporations--large ones especially--who get more money pay their stockholders more, and their CEOs...but unless they're union, the common line workers probably won't see much of that, and if they do, it's a bone with most of the meat cut off compared to what the suits upstairs get. Adding insult to injury, it's possible for a corporation to pay no US income tax if they use all the loopholes they're entitled to...loopholes not available to the lady up the street who runs her own little bookkeeping/tax service, or to the self-employed retired guy who trims trees and mows lawns. (Next time you see one of those huge Walmart supply trucks on the highway, think about the wear and tear on the infrastructure, and then remember who's not paying their fair share of upkeep on it.)
Meanwhile, good-paying factory jobs have been disappearing for decades, not because nobody here can do them, but because those same corporations discovered that they could make their stuff cheaper by opening factories in China, Honduras, Bangladesh, India, etc., etc. And since safety regs aren't as stringent there, and the minimum wage (if any) is very small, well, then, everybody wins--except for that former Rival floor manager who now drives past her old factory building on her way to her part-time minimum-wage convenience-store job. (I wish I were exaggerating, but my own city once housed at least five different factories. Now there are two. A small assembly plant and a distribution center for a discount store have opened since then, but they have not been able to absorb the people who were displaced by the loss of those other factories.)
Oh, and the safety net? You know, unemployment, food stamps, ADC, Medicaid/SCHIP? Thanks to Gingrich and his Norquistian successors, both on the federal and the state levels, these things have become harder to access and easier to be expelled from. On the federal level, you can be on ADC (now TANF--Temporary Aid to Needy Families...well, at least they ditched the "no man in the house" rule) for no more than five years, but in many states the limit is much lower--less than four years here. Same with unemployment--in my state, the maximum time you can collect benefits is 20 weeks (26 weeks if you qualify for an extension). And the benefits aren't much--you couldn't keep up an average apartment and feed yourself on what you'd get, and woe to you if you're supporting a family.
And why is this? To get lazy people off their butts and into the work force! But if you can only get a crappy job because the factory jobs have mostly gone overseas, and the crappy job pays little and has no vacation or medical benefits, and you still have to pay for child care for your kids when there's no school...well, that sounds a lot like "let them eat cake" to me.
(Go to college? Get training? Move to where you can get a better job? Sure. Only...your money, your time and your energy are all going toward keeping your family housed, clothed and fed. There's no extra. The reason there's so much debt among the poor is that their average salary doesn't quite make ends meet, and it's easy to fall for scams like payday loans when you're desperate.)
3) War Pigs
Last year, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, we spent $610 billion on defense. According to their chart, that's more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the U.K., and Japan, combined. (Let it be noted that according to Business Insider, we sold weapons to 98 countries in 2017, including Saudi Arabia--in fact, we're the world's largest arms dealer!) That is a lot of money. If we cut out a bunch of those corporate loopholes, we could fund part of our present military and free up some funds to fix the infrastructure and maybe even let needy families stay on food stamps a while longer. And if we quit selling weapons to other countries, we might not need new stuff so often, and we could shrink that military budget without sacrificing pay or vet benefits. Ya think? I bet Harry Truman would've thought so.
But the GOP doesn't. They love military spending, and Harry Truman would have been branded a traitor today for speaking out against the waste he saw. Obama took heat for it in his time, and he's got the gray hair to prove it.
4) The Abortion Disconnect
I don't like the idea of abortion. The death of a helpless child, whether in or out of the womb, is a tragedy. Republican pols will scream themselves hoarse about how Dems are the party of abortion--in fact, many conservative voters will choose their candidates only on that issue.
But...
Once the child is born, his mother ( often poor, and for some reason, the dads seem to get off free and clear) is faced with that Incredible Shrinking Safety Net. She can get WIC and SNAP for a while, and Medicaid, and TANF...but even in the most generous of our states, she can only get those things for 5 years at most. The housing and child-care credits have become block grants--meaning she might not get any if she's too far back in line--and preschool education isn't as accessible as it would be for a child with wealthier parents. Once that mother is knocked off the safety net, she'll have to get whatever work she can, and out-of-pocket child care is costly.
All of this is to illustrate that if the GOP really cared about children, they would be more careful about helping take care of them not only before they're born, but after. And yet, those poor mothers and their children are regularly described by right-wingers as lazy, entitled burdens. And if the GOP says it isn't the government's responsibility to take care of those children, well...maybe it also isn't the government's responsibility to dictate whether an abortion should occur. Horrible as it may sound, a rape or incest victim might very well not want to carry her pregnancy to term...and only God should be her judge.
5) Meddling With The Primal Forces Of Nature...
Only not like in "Network." I'm talking about our physical world.
Did you know it was a Republican President who started the EPA? It was. Nixon, of all people. He was a tremendous asshole in many ways, but he was behind the EPA! (He signed an executive order to do it, BTW...people respected those in the old days.)
40-odd years later, my Congresscritters were objecting to some new water regulations by telling an audience at the State Fair that "the EPA is not your friend." And now, the EPA's power to do anything has been pretty much gutted.
And we keep spewing filth into the sky and the water, and putting God knows what into the food...but the GOP's line on this is that none of it can possibly be affecting the climate, or our health, or the welfare of ecosystems the world over, when even careful lay observation says otherwise (and scientists the world over have been coming to these conclusions for years now).
Think about this:
You have a computer program that you know nothing about, other than that it works. Would you dare to mess with its coding if you didn't know what you were doing? I'm betting not. Yet we keep doing stuff to the environment in the name of business and profit, as though those two words would defend us against melting ice caps, disappearing rain forests (and the species supported by them), and increasingly-unpredictable weather patterns (and the resulting destruction and lost crops). Not to mention the increase of pollution, which causes its own brand of health problems. We know so little about how the Earth works...and yet we meddle, and then we deny that it hurts anything. We have sown the wind (we started long ago), and now we're reaping multiple EF-5 whirlwinds, not to mention killer hurricanes.
Yet when Al Gore began speaking out on these things, the GOP branded him a whack job, and they and their media allies continue to pooh-pooh the idea of human-influenced global climate change. All in the name of industry. It's an import from the Ayniverse. It would be nice if we could slap a punitive tariff on that!
Epilogue: Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong
If I sound a bit angry right now, you're reading me correctly.
You see, none of this happened suddenly; I've spent years trying to fit my square-peg mod-GOP self into the increasingly-round alt-right hole my former party has become. I never agreed with the conservative idea of big military budgets, but I endured it. I approve of the pro-life plank, but hated Gingrich's welfare "reform" package. And the hate speech just made me want to go put on headphones and listen to classic prog for hours on end (in fact, that's still my go-to for that...way better than systolic hypertension).
So, finally, I switched.
I can't say I'm really happier, or that I agree with everything the Dems say; but I agree with them more than I do the GOP, which is the best I can do for now.
But there's one thing the Dems seem more willing to do than the GOP, and that is compromise. It's not a dirty word; sometimes you have to meet in the middle on things you don't agree on. The secret is that you don't stop there--you continue to work together until you can find a better solution. But to do that, you have to actually listen, with respect, to what the other side is saying. Republicans don't seem eager to do that right now, but I keep hoping.
I mean, c'mon--an eagle needs both a right wing and a left in order to fly. And if our two wings don't start working together, our nation is going to crash and burn.
And if we crash hard enough, we may never recover.
The first thing you must understand is that the state I live in is as dyed-in-the-wool conservative as you could want, and always has been. But that means something very different now than it did when I was a child. When I was a kid, your Democrat neighbors were still neighbors, and when all was said and done, we found a way to work together, even when we didn't agree.
Not anymore.
Now, being blue in a red state is akin to being a Chicago Cubs fan back during the interminable "goat years"--we're something of a laughingstock. But we are also, more and more, being portrayed as the enemies of various American freedoms, and even of democracy itself. So my changeover has nothing to do with wanting to be on the winning side, or the most popular one, but rather the one which was the more right about things.
So here, for better or worse, are the main reasons I switched parties.
1) The Mean Girls (And Boys)
Remember when there was no Rush Limbaugh? No Fox News? No Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, or Jonah Goldberg? I do, and it seems that the news and how it was reported was a little calmer back then. (I once read of an editor who growled at one of his stringers, "I don't care if your mother said it's true--get two corroborative sources!") Now we have a whole raft of so-called "right-wing" news and opinion outlets, and they are meaner than a spitting cobra with a case of hemorrhoids. From Rush's infamous "White House dog" pic (nope, Rush darling, you will never live that one down); to Bill O'Reilly's out-of-his-ass assertions with no regard for truth (the real "O'Reilly Factor"); to Jonah Goldberg's bizarre statement after the devastating Haiti quake that sending aid to that country would do them no good because the people there seemed to have no desire to better themselves (in this case, Jonah could have saved himself a world of embarrassment by reading the Britannica entry on Haiti's history--the wrongs we have done to that little country entitle it to more than we can ever repay); to Michelle Malkin's diatribe against Peter Yarrow's anti-bullying program "Operation Respect" because Yarrow apparently was a pot smoker back in the day and because what kids really needed in these warlike times (this was just after the second undeclared Iraq War had started) were self-defense lessons so they could give the bullies what-for; to pretty much anything Ann Coulter has ever written or said--wow. I grew more and more horrified by what "my side" was saying.
But I could have written all that off if the same sort of rhetoric hadn't started appearing on campaign flyers, in TV ads, and even in the halls of Congress. I blame Newt Gingrich for that; his meanness was so effective that the GOP put out a pamphlet full of words which you could use either for or against a person or cause. They were all words and phrases that Gingrich had used in his campaigns. And along with Gingrich came a wave of "new Republicans" (Molly Ivins wryly called them "pod people" for their lockstep adherence to their party line) with no respect for the compromise model of government. Nope--it was their way or the highway, and it's only gotten worse since then.
2) Let Them Eat Cake!
(Note: there is a great deal of doubt as to whether Marie Antoinette actually said this in response to the news that the poor Parisians had no bread to eat; I am simply using it in its traditional sense. Thank you.)
The "new Republicans" love supply-side economics. It used to be called "trickle-down" economics, but once it became obvious that what was actually trickling down to the common worker was considerably browner and smellier than money, some spin doctor came up with the new name. And it's more accurate: the bulk of the tax breaks go to the corporations and the uber-rich, not to the poor or middle-class worker. The magical thinking behind this is that when the rich get more, they build more factories, hire more workers, and pay them better.
Uh-uh.
Corporations--large ones especially--who get more money pay their stockholders more, and their CEOs...but unless they're union, the common line workers probably won't see much of that, and if they do, it's a bone with most of the meat cut off compared to what the suits upstairs get. Adding insult to injury, it's possible for a corporation to pay no US income tax if they use all the loopholes they're entitled to...loopholes not available to the lady up the street who runs her own little bookkeeping/tax service, or to the self-employed retired guy who trims trees and mows lawns. (Next time you see one of those huge Walmart supply trucks on the highway, think about the wear and tear on the infrastructure, and then remember who's not paying their fair share of upkeep on it.)
Meanwhile, good-paying factory jobs have been disappearing for decades, not because nobody here can do them, but because those same corporations discovered that they could make their stuff cheaper by opening factories in China, Honduras, Bangladesh, India, etc., etc. And since safety regs aren't as stringent there, and the minimum wage (if any) is very small, well, then, everybody wins--except for that former Rival floor manager who now drives past her old factory building on her way to her part-time minimum-wage convenience-store job. (I wish I were exaggerating, but my own city once housed at least five different factories. Now there are two. A small assembly plant and a distribution center for a discount store have opened since then, but they have not been able to absorb the people who were displaced by the loss of those other factories.)
Oh, and the safety net? You know, unemployment, food stamps, ADC, Medicaid/SCHIP? Thanks to Gingrich and his Norquistian successors, both on the federal and the state levels, these things have become harder to access and easier to be expelled from. On the federal level, you can be on ADC (now TANF--Temporary Aid to Needy Families...well, at least they ditched the "no man in the house" rule) for no more than five years, but in many states the limit is much lower--less than four years here. Same with unemployment--in my state, the maximum time you can collect benefits is 20 weeks (26 weeks if you qualify for an extension). And the benefits aren't much--you couldn't keep up an average apartment and feed yourself on what you'd get, and woe to you if you're supporting a family.
And why is this? To get lazy people off their butts and into the work force! But if you can only get a crappy job because the factory jobs have mostly gone overseas, and the crappy job pays little and has no vacation or medical benefits, and you still have to pay for child care for your kids when there's no school...well, that sounds a lot like "let them eat cake" to me.
(Go to college? Get training? Move to where you can get a better job? Sure. Only...your money, your time and your energy are all going toward keeping your family housed, clothed and fed. There's no extra. The reason there's so much debt among the poor is that their average salary doesn't quite make ends meet, and it's easy to fall for scams like payday loans when you're desperate.)
3) War Pigs
Last year, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, we spent $610 billion on defense. According to their chart, that's more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the U.K., and Japan, combined. (Let it be noted that according to Business Insider, we sold weapons to 98 countries in 2017, including Saudi Arabia--in fact, we're the world's largest arms dealer!) That is a lot of money. If we cut out a bunch of those corporate loopholes, we could fund part of our present military and free up some funds to fix the infrastructure and maybe even let needy families stay on food stamps a while longer. And if we quit selling weapons to other countries, we might not need new stuff so often, and we could shrink that military budget without sacrificing pay or vet benefits. Ya think? I bet Harry Truman would've thought so.
But the GOP doesn't. They love military spending, and Harry Truman would have been branded a traitor today for speaking out against the waste he saw. Obama took heat for it in his time, and he's got the gray hair to prove it.
4) The Abortion Disconnect
I don't like the idea of abortion. The death of a helpless child, whether in or out of the womb, is a tragedy. Republican pols will scream themselves hoarse about how Dems are the party of abortion--in fact, many conservative voters will choose their candidates only on that issue.
But...
Once the child is born, his mother ( often poor, and for some reason, the dads seem to get off free and clear) is faced with that Incredible Shrinking Safety Net. She can get WIC and SNAP for a while, and Medicaid, and TANF...but even in the most generous of our states, she can only get those things for 5 years at most. The housing and child-care credits have become block grants--meaning she might not get any if she's too far back in line--and preschool education isn't as accessible as it would be for a child with wealthier parents. Once that mother is knocked off the safety net, she'll have to get whatever work she can, and out-of-pocket child care is costly.
All of this is to illustrate that if the GOP really cared about children, they would be more careful about helping take care of them not only before they're born, but after. And yet, those poor mothers and their children are regularly described by right-wingers as lazy, entitled burdens. And if the GOP says it isn't the government's responsibility to take care of those children, well...maybe it also isn't the government's responsibility to dictate whether an abortion should occur. Horrible as it may sound, a rape or incest victim might very well not want to carry her pregnancy to term...and only God should be her judge.
5) Meddling With The Primal Forces Of Nature...
Only not like in "Network." I'm talking about our physical world.
Did you know it was a Republican President who started the EPA? It was. Nixon, of all people. He was a tremendous asshole in many ways, but he was behind the EPA! (He signed an executive order to do it, BTW...people respected those in the old days.)
40-odd years later, my Congresscritters were objecting to some new water regulations by telling an audience at the State Fair that "the EPA is not your friend." And now, the EPA's power to do anything has been pretty much gutted.
And we keep spewing filth into the sky and the water, and putting God knows what into the food...but the GOP's line on this is that none of it can possibly be affecting the climate, or our health, or the welfare of ecosystems the world over, when even careful lay observation says otherwise (and scientists the world over have been coming to these conclusions for years now).
Think about this:
You have a computer program that you know nothing about, other than that it works. Would you dare to mess with its coding if you didn't know what you were doing? I'm betting not. Yet we keep doing stuff to the environment in the name of business and profit, as though those two words would defend us against melting ice caps, disappearing rain forests (and the species supported by them), and increasingly-unpredictable weather patterns (and the resulting destruction and lost crops). Not to mention the increase of pollution, which causes its own brand of health problems. We know so little about how the Earth works...and yet we meddle, and then we deny that it hurts anything. We have sown the wind (we started long ago), and now we're reaping multiple EF-5 whirlwinds, not to mention killer hurricanes.
Yet when Al Gore began speaking out on these things, the GOP branded him a whack job, and they and their media allies continue to pooh-pooh the idea of human-influenced global climate change. All in the name of industry. It's an import from the Ayniverse. It would be nice if we could slap a punitive tariff on that!
Epilogue: Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong
If I sound a bit angry right now, you're reading me correctly.
You see, none of this happened suddenly; I've spent years trying to fit my square-peg mod-GOP self into the increasingly-round alt-right hole my former party has become. I never agreed with the conservative idea of big military budgets, but I endured it. I approve of the pro-life plank, but hated Gingrich's welfare "reform" package. And the hate speech just made me want to go put on headphones and listen to classic prog for hours on end (in fact, that's still my go-to for that...way better than systolic hypertension).
So, finally, I switched.
I can't say I'm really happier, or that I agree with everything the Dems say; but I agree with them more than I do the GOP, which is the best I can do for now.
But there's one thing the Dems seem more willing to do than the GOP, and that is compromise. It's not a dirty word; sometimes you have to meet in the middle on things you don't agree on. The secret is that you don't stop there--you continue to work together until you can find a better solution. But to do that, you have to actually listen, with respect, to what the other side is saying. Republicans don't seem eager to do that right now, but I keep hoping.
I mean, c'mon--an eagle needs both a right wing and a left in order to fly. And if our two wings don't start working together, our nation is going to crash and burn.
And if we crash hard enough, we may never recover.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
Misadventures in the Ayniverse
A few years ago, I felt the need to re-read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I had read the book back in high school, but that was (ahem, ahem) years ago, and the only character I could remember by name was John Galt himself. But then, somebody made a movie out of it, in three parts, and I watched the first two parts and was totally lost. Plus, Rand's principles were gaining some renewed traction in the real world, particularly among corporate execs and tea-party pols. So I thought that if I read the original again, I would have a better understanding of what I was hearing and seeing.
The Story, Such As It Is...
Well, first off, this is a very long book--about 1,100 pages in the paperback edition--and over half of it is various characters brooding and having sudden epiphanies about life, the universe and everything. If all that were gone, the story would have been a much more pleasant read. There is a railroad mogul named James Taggart, who is a tool in more ways than one; his unmarried sister Dagny is a vice president of the railroad, and is the real brains of the company (in a flashback we find out that she sneaked away as a teenager to get a railroad job; as a result, she knows just about everything there is to know about how it all works). The government is trying to tell them how to do business, and it's hurting the company's profits and irritating Dagny no end.
Elsewhere we have Hank Rearden, a steel magnate who has just invented a new type of alloy, which he calls Rearden Metal. It's better in every way than conventional steel, and is therefore expensive. The government wants Rearden to share his formula with other steel-makers, and they've passed a law to make him do it. This irritates Rearden no end. Adding to his woes are a controlling mother and a parasitic brother, both of whom live with him and his wife (who, of course, doesn't love him or understand his enthusiasm for his craft, but does love his money and the lavish lifestyle it provides).
As lesser characters we have Francisco d'Anconia, a free-wheeling playboy who actually has a pretty shrewd business sense; Wesley Mouch, who is supposed to be Rearden's "man in Washington" (lobbyist), but who goes quisling and thereby gets a good start up the greasy pole of politics; and Ragnar Danneskjold, an honest-to-goodness Viking who has been a latter-day Terror of the High Seas...but only to government shipping.
Hiding behind the scenes for most of the book, we have John Galt, an inventor who disappeared years ago. But somehow, his name has crept into common parlance: when asked a question for which there is no answer, the average man will shrug and reply, "Who is John Galt?"
Dagny meets Rearden at a party; she also meets Rearden's wife, who is wearing a bracelet made of Rearden Metal. After Dagny admires the bracelet, Mrs. Rearden gives it to her--not as a friendly gesture, but because she doesn't like it; it's not made of real precious metals, after all! Dagny and Rearden click, and they make a deal for Rearden Metal to be used on one of the Taggart rail lines. One thing leads to another, and they have an affair. Rearden would like to divorce his wife, but for some reason, this is nearly impossible; but after she betrays him once too often--honestly, I can't remember what that last straw was, but Rearden orders his lawyers to find a way to ditch her, no matter how much it costs him, either in money or reputation.
Francisco misleads a bunch of investors into a copper-mining deal that was designed to fail (they're all "looters," so they deserve it), but he makes sure to warn Dagny not to get on board--but James ignores her warning and loses a bunch of money, irritating Dagny yet again!
Meanwhile, an oil baron named Ellis Wyatt has his dander up because the government is interfering with his business, and he's had enough. So he disappears...but before he does, he sets his latest oil well on fire; it burns both night and day and gains the name "Wyatt's Torch." That's when Dagny begins to realize that the real creative people in every field have been dropping out of sight for quite a while, and the whole country has been going to pot ever since.
(The rest of the world has pretty much gone Communist--every other country you hear about in Atlas Shrugged is now a "People's State of Such-and-so." The USA is better off than all these other countries...but not by much, and not for long!)
Dagny and Rearden head for...I think it's Pennsylvania, in search of Galt's invention: a machine that harnesses the static electricity in the atmosphere so it can be used to power machinery. Such a machine would solve America's energy woes, but the two lovers never bring it back. I can't remember why--eleven hundred pages, remember? But I do remember that Dagny was horrified that in this depressed area, the only horsepower to be found came from actual horses, and that Rearden looked admiringly on an open field and said that what it really needed was for someone to build a big factory there!
Ragnar Danneskjold meets up with Rearden on a dark road, tells him that he has been robbed, and offers him a bar of gold "about the size of a carton of cigarettes" as a partial payback for what the "looters" and "moochers" have stolen. When Rearden, horrified by this self-styled pirate, refuses the offer, Ragnar drops the bar and leaves. (I should point out here that although Rand did her research on railroads and the steel industry, she never bothered to find out what gold in that quantity would weigh. If it's a standard-sized cigarette carton, a gold bar of that size would weigh over a hundred pounds! And Ragnar was just holding it out in one hand, no strain! A similar error is made later in the book, when Dagny is paid with a small gold coin that feels "weightless" in her hand.)
Meanwhile, the government has discovered that Rearden Metal can be weaponized in a very nasty way; so, since Rearden has refused to share the formula, they start buying it all up. James Taggart sells the metal that was used for rails in one of the company railroads in order to gain some extra money for the company. He also meets a shop girl who thinks he's grand and brilliant, and this impresses him so much that he marries her. She later regrets the union once she sees what a creep James really is, and she flees his house, rejecting the world around her and committing suicide.
Francisco now comes to Dagny and tells her that he will now be "disappearing" as well; she can't come because she's not ready yet, but he implies that her time will come. She doesn't get it, but she finds a clue and follows someone else who is apparently "disappearing" as well, and when she sees his plane actually disappear, she follows, and lo and behold, she finds herself in a hidden valley called "Galt's Gulch" where she meets John Galt (and immediately falls in love with him, only to discover that he has been angling for her as well) and some of the other creative folk that have gone missing (who proclaim that they are "on strike" and call her a "scab"). Galt sends Dagny back to the outside world, telling her that he is going to reveal his agenda soon. And he does: he takes over the airwaves, and for the next 60-odd pages, John Galt proclaims his philosophy to the world. (I started skimming after 10 pages--I was perfectly able to get the gist of it that way.)
Galt's broadcast causes chaos, both in the government and among the ordinary people; this, coupled with various failed government policies, causes American society to pretty much break down.
Agents of the government capture Galt and torture him, but Dagny and Rearden rescue him (even though he had warned Dagny to stay away). Rearden realizes that Dagny has found her soul mate in Galt, and releases her with no apparent regret. And the end of the story has the three of them looking out over a devastated country, ready to come back and remake it into a new Objectivist utopia.
That's the story, pretty much. I'm surprised at how much I have forgotten...but even more so, I'm surprised at what I remember, and why. For example:
Dagny is travelling on one of her high-speed trains, and as she's walking through a corridor, she finds one of her conductors ousting a stowaway. The train is on a tight schedule, so they will not stop to let the man off; he will have to jump, and it will probably kill him. Dagny stands uncaring as the man prepares to jump...but she notices that even now, he clutches his bundle of belongings as though they were worth everything. This causes Dagny to spare the man and let him stay; she even feeds him and talks with him, and this stowaway just happens to know the untold story of the failed auto company where John Galt worked! What struck me about this was just how Dagny's mind worked; she was ready and willing to let a human being die, just to preserve her company's profits, until she saw that he valued his possessions! I just think that's a weird reason to have compassion on anybody.
One of the tramp's stories about the auto company stuck with me, as well. The company has gone socialist in the extreme, which means that everyone is paid the same amount no matter what his job is or how hard he works. But there are times when someone might want or need something extra, and then the entire company gets together and decides whether to allow the extra expenditure or not. According to the tramp, there was an old man there who liked jazz, and wanted to buy some jazz records, but at the same time, another worker wanted braces for his daughter's teeth. (Rand makes sure that we know that this is a most unpleasant child; in the Ayniverse, one must truly be worthy of help, or he/she is just another moocher!) The daughter gets the braces, and the old man, stung by this injustice, turns to the bottle for solace (why he didn't save the booze money to buy his records, I don't know). One night, while walking drunk down the street, he meets the girl, and he punches her in the mouth! Which, of course, knocks all her teeth out. The whole thing sounded horrifying to me, mainly because a child should not be blamed for the decisions of adults.
Oh, and then there's the beggar (moocher) to whom James Taggart gives a $100 bill. The man snarls at Taggart instead of thanking him, but the weird thing to me was the bill itself. Was Taggart giving him that much money to be generous, or because inflation was through the roof?
Why The Hell Did I Start This, Anyway?!
This was a very tough read.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not afraid of long books. I can gulp down a good one in a matter of days--less if I'm on vacation. But Atlas Shrugged took over a month to finish, mainly because it's badly written. It's so jingoistic it makes your teeth hurt, none of the characters is even remotely likable, and even the love scenes are cold and unfeeling. Everything is all about logic and reason, and although Rand doesn't appear to espouse eugenics, the philosophy of the Ayniverse is social Darwinism in the extreme. And the system of government that her protagonists are ready to implement is actually plutocratic fascism. Francisco d'Anconia voices this perfectly when he says that a society is doomed to fail when the bulk of its money is in the hands of non-producers. Of course, you wonder how anyone's going to be able to buy what is produced unless they have money, but oh, well, that's life in the Ayniverse.
There are also invisible--or nearly so--elements in the book. There are no disabled people in Atlas Shrugged, so I don't know how Rand felt about them. Children are mostly either shadowy hide-behind-mama's-skirts types, or they're vandals...except for two children that Dagny meets in Galt's Gulch. That pair sound like they stepped out of a Hitler Youth poster! The elderly are either broken people, or they're bitter. The Ayniverse is clearly not for any of these.
I had to keep reminding myself that I started reading the book so that I would understand the "new" politics being espoused by the corporate wogs and extreme conservative politicians. Well, when I finished, I did. It all boils down to...
Supply-Side Economics--Giant-Sized Package
The only reason I don't think Reagan got his ideas for Reaganomics from Atlas Shrugged is that I don't think he could have slogged through it. After all, it's not a Western, and there are no monkeys in it...okay, just kidding. But even Reaganomics is kind and gentle compared to what Rand was proposing. She hated unions, child labor laws, and government regulation of any kind on business. That would include environmental controls. The book was written before the effects of DDT on birds' eggs were discovered, and before industrial pollutants were causing the Cuyahoga River to catch fire, and even before smog became a real issue; but even if she had known about all that, I don't think Rand would have cared.
Just as battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, so no philosophy survives unscathed when practiced in real life by real people. And supply-side economics of any stripe goes wrong almost at once, and the longer it is practiced, the worse things get. We have been practicing SSE for almost 40 years now, and the results speak for themselves: jobs sent overseas, leaving fewer living-wage jobs for Americans; wealth concentrating into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people; control of the government going to those with the most money to spend on campaign contributions. We have become, in practice if not in name, a plutocracy. Neither party can be held blameless for this--NAFTA was passed during the Clinton administration, and although it looked good on paper, Perot turned out to be totally correct about that "giant sucking sound."
But bad as this all is, the Ayniverse would be even worse. No unions allowed--which means every business would be like Walmart. And what if an employer's idea of your worth isn't the same as yours? Well, you quit and go somewhere you'll be appreciated, right? But if you have a family to support, you can't just hit the road with your pack on your back. And even if you're single, you won't have enough money to just up and move!
Your child, young adventurer that she is, might decide to become a welder at 13. She might even be good at it...at least until she forgot a crucial step (as kids do sometimes--ever eaten a kid's batch of cookies with the wrong amount of flour, or no sugar?) and ended up blinded, crippled, or dead. But that was the kid's decision, right?
And you can forget about clean air or water, or food safety, or indeed any sort of limit on the way businesses operate. If people get sick and die, well, they were the weak ones. Anyone who protested would be a whiner, not worth listening to...and the government would always be on the side of the businesses.
Is This Scaring You Yet?
Or maybe it sounds like paradise.
My bet is that the way you react to Atlas Shrugged reflects your attitude toward several things: money, self, and industry. Rand, you see, idolized them all. People in the Ayniverse have no intrinsic worth; they must prove themselves to be worthy before they are acceptable, and the worthiest of all are the ones who can make money by creating something. Those who work for the creative ones are still worthy, but lower in class; and lowest of all would be those who either can't or won't work. Every society has its lazy people, and in the Ayniverse their fate would be grim--they would be allowed to starve. Well, serves them right...but remember the invisible disabled people I mentioned earlier? Do they deserve to starve? How about orphans? Oh, but without child labor laws, they can be put to work, right?
So yeah, I'm scared. Because if the Ayniverse comes to pass, it will truly be the end of the world as we know it...but no one will feel fine for long.
Because even a producer can't survive without clean air, water and food. And gold isn't edible.
The Story, Such As It Is...
Well, first off, this is a very long book--about 1,100 pages in the paperback edition--and over half of it is various characters brooding and having sudden epiphanies about life, the universe and everything. If all that were gone, the story would have been a much more pleasant read. There is a railroad mogul named James Taggart, who is a tool in more ways than one; his unmarried sister Dagny is a vice president of the railroad, and is the real brains of the company (in a flashback we find out that she sneaked away as a teenager to get a railroad job; as a result, she knows just about everything there is to know about how it all works). The government is trying to tell them how to do business, and it's hurting the company's profits and irritating Dagny no end.
Elsewhere we have Hank Rearden, a steel magnate who has just invented a new type of alloy, which he calls Rearden Metal. It's better in every way than conventional steel, and is therefore expensive. The government wants Rearden to share his formula with other steel-makers, and they've passed a law to make him do it. This irritates Rearden no end. Adding to his woes are a controlling mother and a parasitic brother, both of whom live with him and his wife (who, of course, doesn't love him or understand his enthusiasm for his craft, but does love his money and the lavish lifestyle it provides).
As lesser characters we have Francisco d'Anconia, a free-wheeling playboy who actually has a pretty shrewd business sense; Wesley Mouch, who is supposed to be Rearden's "man in Washington" (lobbyist), but who goes quisling and thereby gets a good start up the greasy pole of politics; and Ragnar Danneskjold, an honest-to-goodness Viking who has been a latter-day Terror of the High Seas...but only to government shipping.
Hiding behind the scenes for most of the book, we have John Galt, an inventor who disappeared years ago. But somehow, his name has crept into common parlance: when asked a question for which there is no answer, the average man will shrug and reply, "Who is John Galt?"
Dagny meets Rearden at a party; she also meets Rearden's wife, who is wearing a bracelet made of Rearden Metal. After Dagny admires the bracelet, Mrs. Rearden gives it to her--not as a friendly gesture, but because she doesn't like it; it's not made of real precious metals, after all! Dagny and Rearden click, and they make a deal for Rearden Metal to be used on one of the Taggart rail lines. One thing leads to another, and they have an affair. Rearden would like to divorce his wife, but for some reason, this is nearly impossible; but after she betrays him once too often--honestly, I can't remember what that last straw was, but Rearden orders his lawyers to find a way to ditch her, no matter how much it costs him, either in money or reputation.
Francisco misleads a bunch of investors into a copper-mining deal that was designed to fail (they're all "looters," so they deserve it), but he makes sure to warn Dagny not to get on board--but James ignores her warning and loses a bunch of money, irritating Dagny yet again!
Meanwhile, an oil baron named Ellis Wyatt has his dander up because the government is interfering with his business, and he's had enough. So he disappears...but before he does, he sets his latest oil well on fire; it burns both night and day and gains the name "Wyatt's Torch." That's when Dagny begins to realize that the real creative people in every field have been dropping out of sight for quite a while, and the whole country has been going to pot ever since.
(The rest of the world has pretty much gone Communist--every other country you hear about in Atlas Shrugged is now a "People's State of Such-and-so." The USA is better off than all these other countries...but not by much, and not for long!)
Dagny and Rearden head for...I think it's Pennsylvania, in search of Galt's invention: a machine that harnesses the static electricity in the atmosphere so it can be used to power machinery. Such a machine would solve America's energy woes, but the two lovers never bring it back. I can't remember why--eleven hundred pages, remember? But I do remember that Dagny was horrified that in this depressed area, the only horsepower to be found came from actual horses, and that Rearden looked admiringly on an open field and said that what it really needed was for someone to build a big factory there!
Ragnar Danneskjold meets up with Rearden on a dark road, tells him that he has been robbed, and offers him a bar of gold "about the size of a carton of cigarettes" as a partial payback for what the "looters" and "moochers" have stolen. When Rearden, horrified by this self-styled pirate, refuses the offer, Ragnar drops the bar and leaves. (I should point out here that although Rand did her research on railroads and the steel industry, she never bothered to find out what gold in that quantity would weigh. If it's a standard-sized cigarette carton, a gold bar of that size would weigh over a hundred pounds! And Ragnar was just holding it out in one hand, no strain! A similar error is made later in the book, when Dagny is paid with a small gold coin that feels "weightless" in her hand.)
Meanwhile, the government has discovered that Rearden Metal can be weaponized in a very nasty way; so, since Rearden has refused to share the formula, they start buying it all up. James Taggart sells the metal that was used for rails in one of the company railroads in order to gain some extra money for the company. He also meets a shop girl who thinks he's grand and brilliant, and this impresses him so much that he marries her. She later regrets the union once she sees what a creep James really is, and she flees his house, rejecting the world around her and committing suicide.
Francisco now comes to Dagny and tells her that he will now be "disappearing" as well; she can't come because she's not ready yet, but he implies that her time will come. She doesn't get it, but she finds a clue and follows someone else who is apparently "disappearing" as well, and when she sees his plane actually disappear, she follows, and lo and behold, she finds herself in a hidden valley called "Galt's Gulch" where she meets John Galt (and immediately falls in love with him, only to discover that he has been angling for her as well) and some of the other creative folk that have gone missing (who proclaim that they are "on strike" and call her a "scab"). Galt sends Dagny back to the outside world, telling her that he is going to reveal his agenda soon. And he does: he takes over the airwaves, and for the next 60-odd pages, John Galt proclaims his philosophy to the world. (I started skimming after 10 pages--I was perfectly able to get the gist of it that way.)
Galt's broadcast causes chaos, both in the government and among the ordinary people; this, coupled with various failed government policies, causes American society to pretty much break down.
Agents of the government capture Galt and torture him, but Dagny and Rearden rescue him (even though he had warned Dagny to stay away). Rearden realizes that Dagny has found her soul mate in Galt, and releases her with no apparent regret. And the end of the story has the three of them looking out over a devastated country, ready to come back and remake it into a new Objectivist utopia.
That's the story, pretty much. I'm surprised at how much I have forgotten...but even more so, I'm surprised at what I remember, and why. For example:
Dagny is travelling on one of her high-speed trains, and as she's walking through a corridor, she finds one of her conductors ousting a stowaway. The train is on a tight schedule, so they will not stop to let the man off; he will have to jump, and it will probably kill him. Dagny stands uncaring as the man prepares to jump...but she notices that even now, he clutches his bundle of belongings as though they were worth everything. This causes Dagny to spare the man and let him stay; she even feeds him and talks with him, and this stowaway just happens to know the untold story of the failed auto company where John Galt worked! What struck me about this was just how Dagny's mind worked; she was ready and willing to let a human being die, just to preserve her company's profits, until she saw that he valued his possessions! I just think that's a weird reason to have compassion on anybody.
One of the tramp's stories about the auto company stuck with me, as well. The company has gone socialist in the extreme, which means that everyone is paid the same amount no matter what his job is or how hard he works. But there are times when someone might want or need something extra, and then the entire company gets together and decides whether to allow the extra expenditure or not. According to the tramp, there was an old man there who liked jazz, and wanted to buy some jazz records, but at the same time, another worker wanted braces for his daughter's teeth. (Rand makes sure that we know that this is a most unpleasant child; in the Ayniverse, one must truly be worthy of help, or he/she is just another moocher!) The daughter gets the braces, and the old man, stung by this injustice, turns to the bottle for solace (why he didn't save the booze money to buy his records, I don't know). One night, while walking drunk down the street, he meets the girl, and he punches her in the mouth! Which, of course, knocks all her teeth out. The whole thing sounded horrifying to me, mainly because a child should not be blamed for the decisions of adults.
Oh, and then there's the beggar (moocher) to whom James Taggart gives a $100 bill. The man snarls at Taggart instead of thanking him, but the weird thing to me was the bill itself. Was Taggart giving him that much money to be generous, or because inflation was through the roof?
Why The Hell Did I Start This, Anyway?!
This was a very tough read.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not afraid of long books. I can gulp down a good one in a matter of days--less if I'm on vacation. But Atlas Shrugged took over a month to finish, mainly because it's badly written. It's so jingoistic it makes your teeth hurt, none of the characters is even remotely likable, and even the love scenes are cold and unfeeling. Everything is all about logic and reason, and although Rand doesn't appear to espouse eugenics, the philosophy of the Ayniverse is social Darwinism in the extreme. And the system of government that her protagonists are ready to implement is actually plutocratic fascism. Francisco d'Anconia voices this perfectly when he says that a society is doomed to fail when the bulk of its money is in the hands of non-producers. Of course, you wonder how anyone's going to be able to buy what is produced unless they have money, but oh, well, that's life in the Ayniverse.
There are also invisible--or nearly so--elements in the book. There are no disabled people in Atlas Shrugged, so I don't know how Rand felt about them. Children are mostly either shadowy hide-behind-mama's-skirts types, or they're vandals...except for two children that Dagny meets in Galt's Gulch. That pair sound like they stepped out of a Hitler Youth poster! The elderly are either broken people, or they're bitter. The Ayniverse is clearly not for any of these.
I had to keep reminding myself that I started reading the book so that I would understand the "new" politics being espoused by the corporate wogs and extreme conservative politicians. Well, when I finished, I did. It all boils down to...
Supply-Side Economics--Giant-Sized Package
The only reason I don't think Reagan got his ideas for Reaganomics from Atlas Shrugged is that I don't think he could have slogged through it. After all, it's not a Western, and there are no monkeys in it...okay, just kidding. But even Reaganomics is kind and gentle compared to what Rand was proposing. She hated unions, child labor laws, and government regulation of any kind on business. That would include environmental controls. The book was written before the effects of DDT on birds' eggs were discovered, and before industrial pollutants were causing the Cuyahoga River to catch fire, and even before smog became a real issue; but even if she had known about all that, I don't think Rand would have cared.
Just as battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, so no philosophy survives unscathed when practiced in real life by real people. And supply-side economics of any stripe goes wrong almost at once, and the longer it is practiced, the worse things get. We have been practicing SSE for almost 40 years now, and the results speak for themselves: jobs sent overseas, leaving fewer living-wage jobs for Americans; wealth concentrating into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people; control of the government going to those with the most money to spend on campaign contributions. We have become, in practice if not in name, a plutocracy. Neither party can be held blameless for this--NAFTA was passed during the Clinton administration, and although it looked good on paper, Perot turned out to be totally correct about that "giant sucking sound."
But bad as this all is, the Ayniverse would be even worse. No unions allowed--which means every business would be like Walmart. And what if an employer's idea of your worth isn't the same as yours? Well, you quit and go somewhere you'll be appreciated, right? But if you have a family to support, you can't just hit the road with your pack on your back. And even if you're single, you won't have enough money to just up and move!
Your child, young adventurer that she is, might decide to become a welder at 13. She might even be good at it...at least until she forgot a crucial step (as kids do sometimes--ever eaten a kid's batch of cookies with the wrong amount of flour, or no sugar?) and ended up blinded, crippled, or dead. But that was the kid's decision, right?
And you can forget about clean air or water, or food safety, or indeed any sort of limit on the way businesses operate. If people get sick and die, well, they were the weak ones. Anyone who protested would be a whiner, not worth listening to...and the government would always be on the side of the businesses.
Is This Scaring You Yet?
Or maybe it sounds like paradise.
My bet is that the way you react to Atlas Shrugged reflects your attitude toward several things: money, self, and industry. Rand, you see, idolized them all. People in the Ayniverse have no intrinsic worth; they must prove themselves to be worthy before they are acceptable, and the worthiest of all are the ones who can make money by creating something. Those who work for the creative ones are still worthy, but lower in class; and lowest of all would be those who either can't or won't work. Every society has its lazy people, and in the Ayniverse their fate would be grim--they would be allowed to starve. Well, serves them right...but remember the invisible disabled people I mentioned earlier? Do they deserve to starve? How about orphans? Oh, but without child labor laws, they can be put to work, right?
So yeah, I'm scared. Because if the Ayniverse comes to pass, it will truly be the end of the world as we know it...but no one will feel fine for long.
Because even a producer can't survive without clean air, water and food. And gold isn't edible.
Sunday, October 21, 2018
The Apocalyptic Rock Fight, Part I: A Shot Across the Bow
I will never forget the day I accidentally got caught in the middle of the war between Religion and Rock.
My mom had bought me a Rush t-shirt for my birthday--I loved the band, and although they were a little too heavy-metal for her, Mom always respected my musical choices, and she did like their lyrics (I showed her a couple of the gate-fold inserts). So I walked into my high school gym class wearing this shirt sporting the logo from the album "2112"...and my gym teacher, a middle-aged dude who also taught psychology, took one look and said, "That's a Satanic group."
Yeah, seriously!
The man knew nothing about their music, which I considered brilliant (and still do), or their lyrics, which were intelligent and talked about things like Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kublai Khan," and being responsible about the way we use technology and science. Nope--the only thing he saw was the star inside the circle, which he said was a demonic symbol.
(If you're wondering how he could get away with lecturing me on religious matters during school hours, well, all I will say is, it was a very small town, and you've just read one of the very good reasons I will never go to one of my class reunions!)
In vain, I tried to tell the guy that he was wrong, that the symbol was not a pentagram in a circle as he thought, but instead an open star (right-side-up, too!); but he was convinced he was right, and when you are faced with facts and still won't change your mind, you've crossed the border from simple ignorance to obscurantism, which is basically sticking your fingers deep into both ear canals and singing "la, la, la, la" whenever you hear something you don't like!
Needless to say, I never wore my Rush shirt to gym class again; but all of a sudden, I started hearing some weird stuff--how people were spinning rock'n'roll records backwards and finding demonic messages (I tried that once; sorry, just gibberish), and how some bands made deals with the devil to make them successful, and so on. That was when Christian rock was getting more publicity (the Jesus Freaks had been making their own pop and rock for over a decade before this all exploded), and even they were accused of Satanism!
But I also noticed that some of the accused bands fought back. Probably the easiest example to hear on the secular side is the rebuttal by the Electric Light Orchestra. On their album "Face The Music," they not only portrayed themselves with red eyes and slightly-sinister smiles, they also planted a real backward message at the beginning of the first track, "Fire On High." Along with a creaking door and some ominous mood music, you hear a string of gibberish, which, when spun backward, says "The music is reversible, but time is not; turn back...turn back...turn back...turn back." Which means, "You're wasting time you'll never get back by doing this." Nice one, Jeff.
The Christian rock band Petra did rather the same thing: right before the song "Judas' Kiss" on the album "More Power To Ya," they planted a message in the blank space that ended up saying "What are you looking for the devil for when you ought to be looking for the Lord?" Good question!
I wasn't much into religion at the time, but some of that stuff scared the crap out of me. I got rather paranoid, in fact; when you're a teenager, you still sort of trust the elders in your life, and since I was hearing so much of this "rock is of the devil" stuff, I began to be afraid it might be true. But I, too, fought back. The fundamentalists might say that I was clinging to my idols, and maybe that's correct; but the music I was into was complex and wonderful--not just Rush with their prog-metal sound and thoughtful lyrics, but also Yes, whose lyrics were like one long e.e. cummings poem and whose music (I discovered later) derived from the Romantic period in classical music...the Moody Blues, who were so gentle both in words and music that I couldn't imagine them as demonic tools...and even ABBA, the Swedish quartet who were still making hits even in the new-wave 80's, and who also seemed too harmless to be plotting against God.
By the time I got to college and was exposed to other viewpoints than the culturally-inbred ones I'd endured all my life, I had pretty much decided that I had to go with what I knew from experience, rather than what others told me. I'd been told that rock led to fornication, drugs, and devil worship; since I did none of that, then it followed that what I had been told was at best badly mistaken and at worst a slanderous lie. I think it's...well, miraculous...that none of the accused bands ever sued any of the televangelists who spewed out those lies. That, or those bands were more forgiving than I would have been.
Actually, I just think musicians have better things to do than listen to TV preachers. Like make music.
My mom had bought me a Rush t-shirt for my birthday--I loved the band, and although they were a little too heavy-metal for her, Mom always respected my musical choices, and she did like their lyrics (I showed her a couple of the gate-fold inserts). So I walked into my high school gym class wearing this shirt sporting the logo from the album "2112"...and my gym teacher, a middle-aged dude who also taught psychology, took one look and said, "That's a Satanic group."
Yeah, seriously!
The man knew nothing about their music, which I considered brilliant (and still do), or their lyrics, which were intelligent and talked about things like Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kublai Khan," and being responsible about the way we use technology and science. Nope--the only thing he saw was the star inside the circle, which he said was a demonic symbol.
(If you're wondering how he could get away with lecturing me on religious matters during school hours, well, all I will say is, it was a very small town, and you've just read one of the very good reasons I will never go to one of my class reunions!)
In vain, I tried to tell the guy that he was wrong, that the symbol was not a pentagram in a circle as he thought, but instead an open star (right-side-up, too!); but he was convinced he was right, and when you are faced with facts and still won't change your mind, you've crossed the border from simple ignorance to obscurantism, which is basically sticking your fingers deep into both ear canals and singing "la, la, la, la" whenever you hear something you don't like!
Needless to say, I never wore my Rush shirt to gym class again; but all of a sudden, I started hearing some weird stuff--how people were spinning rock'n'roll records backwards and finding demonic messages (I tried that once; sorry, just gibberish), and how some bands made deals with the devil to make them successful, and so on. That was when Christian rock was getting more publicity (the Jesus Freaks had been making their own pop and rock for over a decade before this all exploded), and even they were accused of Satanism!
But I also noticed that some of the accused bands fought back. Probably the easiest example to hear on the secular side is the rebuttal by the Electric Light Orchestra. On their album "Face The Music," they not only portrayed themselves with red eyes and slightly-sinister smiles, they also planted a real backward message at the beginning of the first track, "Fire On High." Along with a creaking door and some ominous mood music, you hear a string of gibberish, which, when spun backward, says "The music is reversible, but time is not; turn back...turn back...turn back...turn back." Which means, "You're wasting time you'll never get back by doing this." Nice one, Jeff.
The Christian rock band Petra did rather the same thing: right before the song "Judas' Kiss" on the album "More Power To Ya," they planted a message in the blank space that ended up saying "What are you looking for the devil for when you ought to be looking for the Lord?" Good question!
I wasn't much into religion at the time, but some of that stuff scared the crap out of me. I got rather paranoid, in fact; when you're a teenager, you still sort of trust the elders in your life, and since I was hearing so much of this "rock is of the devil" stuff, I began to be afraid it might be true. But I, too, fought back. The fundamentalists might say that I was clinging to my idols, and maybe that's correct; but the music I was into was complex and wonderful--not just Rush with their prog-metal sound and thoughtful lyrics, but also Yes, whose lyrics were like one long e.e. cummings poem and whose music (I discovered later) derived from the Romantic period in classical music...the Moody Blues, who were so gentle both in words and music that I couldn't imagine them as demonic tools...and even ABBA, the Swedish quartet who were still making hits even in the new-wave 80's, and who also seemed too harmless to be plotting against God.
By the time I got to college and was exposed to other viewpoints than the culturally-inbred ones I'd endured all my life, I had pretty much decided that I had to go with what I knew from experience, rather than what others told me. I'd been told that rock led to fornication, drugs, and devil worship; since I did none of that, then it followed that what I had been told was at best badly mistaken and at worst a slanderous lie. I think it's...well, miraculous...that none of the accused bands ever sued any of the televangelists who spewed out those lies. That, or those bands were more forgiving than I would have been.
Actually, I just think musicians have better things to do than listen to TV preachers. Like make music.
We Are The Worms...
Back in the 80's, when "We Are The World" was clogging everyone's radio with sticky saccharine, somebody did a parody of the song, called "We Are The Worms," all about the night crawlers that end up on the sidewalk and get stepped on after it rains. Blech, right? But it occurred to me recently that the parody actually resembles the original in that they both are talking about creatures that nobody really notices until something happens to make them visible to us...like lots of people going hungry due to widespread famine. Or earthworms being flooded out of the ground by heavy rains.
In that respect, there are people who are "worms" too. I'm one; I work a menial job that is noticed only when something goes wrong in my area (or when I screw something up). I know lots of other things--in fact, my most recent tested I.Q. is 142--but most customers don't know that. They see my uniform and my tools, and presto, I'm just a worm! And I've been stepped on a few times, too.
But in spite of all the crap I've endured, I have never lost hope. I work hard, and while I'm not a one-percenter, I do okay. But in my opinion, nobody on my level gets much of a public voice except on spaces like this. So I've started this blog to tell it like it is from the viewpoint of someone who's always getting "a better look at your big shoe" (from the parody).
Sooo, what will I talk about? Well, my job, obviously, although I will change names and places to protect the innocent (okay, and the guilty...I'm not their judge, after all). But as I said, I know a lot of stuff, so I'll write about all that, too. I will try to use appropriate category headers, so if you see a title and think, "Oh, no, not this again", then you can skip it!
So let's get started....
In that respect, there are people who are "worms" too. I'm one; I work a menial job that is noticed only when something goes wrong in my area (or when I screw something up). I know lots of other things--in fact, my most recent tested I.Q. is 142--but most customers don't know that. They see my uniform and my tools, and presto, I'm just a worm! And I've been stepped on a few times, too.
But in spite of all the crap I've endured, I have never lost hope. I work hard, and while I'm not a one-percenter, I do okay. But in my opinion, nobody on my level gets much of a public voice except on spaces like this. So I've started this blog to tell it like it is from the viewpoint of someone who's always getting "a better look at your big shoe" (from the parody).
Sooo, what will I talk about? Well, my job, obviously, although I will change names and places to protect the innocent (okay, and the guilty...I'm not their judge, after all). But as I said, I know a lot of stuff, so I'll write about all that, too. I will try to use appropriate category headers, so if you see a title and think, "Oh, no, not this again", then you can skip it!
So let's get started....
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