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.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)