A Crack in Job Hell and How the Light Gets In

If you are working poor, you are not alone

      In her odyssey across the landscape of the working poor in America — Nickel and Dimed — Barbara Ehrenreich didn’t find any university graduates to write about. (Does Bait and Switch make up for that omission?) It was the first thing I noticed about Nickel and Dimed, because one of the things I found in my own miserable experience as a college grad working at low-wage jobs was that I was never alone; college graduates were everywhere I went—young, old, single, married, including some with advanced degrees.
      Rebecca N____ and Chet N____ are good examples; they were a married couple who had been teachers for many years, then gallery owners, and then, when that failed, eight-dollar-an-hour customer service representatives, which was where I met them.
      Equally common in my experience were the day-to-day, petty humiliations and reminders of one’s powerlessness, served up by supervisors and bosses whose own lack of education seemed to be irrelevant. That is, power, and the enjoyment of it, has no educational requirements. Once you get there, you’re good to go.
      Way back when, I worked for a guy I thought must be the sinister incarnation of Ichabod Crane—tall, gaunt Bob W____. Bob once said to me, with a malevolent smirk on his face, “You’re a socialist, aren’t you?” It was a rhetorical question. And it was an insult, since the world according to Bob had socialists as among the most vile of the vile. Not that the assertion came as a surprise to me; after all, this was the same boss who introduced me to his wife on my first day with this odd —and wrong— parenthetical “compliment” about me: “...and she is ‘pro-life!’” which should have been my cue to offer a parenthetical middle finger to the ass and go find another job. But I was desperately needy for work —he knew it— and rendered cynical by experience; given the job scene in my area, San Diego’s North County, who was to say my next job would be any less populated by wackos, ghouls, and ethical polliwogs? This was pot-luck, and I would have to take it.
      Yes, I should have been stronger and more courageous, but by then such positives had been lost to necessity; you get to a point where you must have compassion for yourself and do what you have to do to survive—which is another version of courage, it seems to me. So, there I was, working for a fundamentalist Christian patriarch, a small business owner, who often shamelessly demonstrated his racism and discriminatory behavior, and who had the freedom to try to shame me with the label of “socialist,” or hover over me, pressuring me to go faster, and various other indications of the perverted nature of his mind.
      Well, he had the power. Businesses are not democracies, not organizations dedicated to “liberty and justice for all,” and I had checked my civil liberties at the door when I took the job—I had no freedom of speech. There would be no honest rejoinder to his “insult,” such as, “No. I am a small-d democrat. But you, Bob, are a fascist, right?”
      Ah, retro-visions of truth and glory...
      I did manage one happy moment of triumph in my trek through job hell. One sales manager, a squat guy with a skinny mustache and slicked-back hair, told us that if the “numbers weren’t up by Friday,” his manager said he might have to “change the oil.” So, when on Friday the numbers still weren’t up, I marched up the stairs to the manager’s office, opened the door onto a meeting, interrupted and said to the manager, “The next time you decide to change the oil, maybe you should take another look at the dip stick.” Then I walked down the stairs, out the door to my car and drove home, happy as can be.
      Funny, I ran into that former boss sometime later. He laughed about it and said that from that day on, he was referred to by everybody in the building as “Dip Stick.” This is the saddest thing about job hell—most folks have good souls; it’s just that the whole system is designed to undermine our best qualities and replace them with our worst. You start out as a loving person with a desire to contribute good works, and then one day you hear yourself saying to your underling, “You were one minute late. You know the rules. You’re fired.”
      That’s because the basic frame governing the work place is that workers are dishonorable people, fundamentally and as a class. According to the frame, workers were born bad, and they will die bad, and so you have to motivate them with threats and intimidation. Regardless of the enlightened frames found in management training courses, most American businesses operate according to the conservative model.
      Which reminds me—in a wonderful book with the awful title, Man for Himself, Erich Fromm writes this: “We are concerned with man’s character not with his success...but what is 'power'? It is rather ironical that this word denotes two contradictory concepts: power of = capacity, and power over = domination... Power = domination results from the paralysis of power = capacity. 'Power over' is the perversion of 'power to.' ...Where potency is lacking, man’s relatedness to the world is perverted into a desire to dominate, to exert power over others as though they were things. Domination is coupled with death, potency with life. Domination springs from impotence and in turn reinforces it, for if an individual can force somebody else to serve him, his own need to be productive is increasingly paralyzed.”
      I should have posted that one on the bulletin board at my last job in the composing department of a major publishing company, where the frame “workers-are-evil-spawn” governed all employer-employee relations.
      First came the drug testing, as it was required for employment; then came the time clock, modified eventually for a hand scan, so that they could keep track of your hand’s comings and goings, to the second, and have proof if your hand was one second late, three times in a row, which mandated your being fired on the spot.
      Given that the publications we produced had advertising, with text and images, the company placed a high value on accuracy; any ad that went out with a mistake meant that the client would get the ad for free. Thus, not only were individuals tracked and records kept on those of us who worked on ads, but the entire department’s error rates were mapped on graphs, graphs which were pinned to the wall directly adjacent to the time clock, where we could admire our mistakes as we waited by the clock to leave for the day. These graphs would show our progress, month to month, and some would give numbers as to the amount of profits lost to errors.
      Keep in mind that this was a company that would hire anybody off the street who expressed an interest in Photoshop and experience with Macs, not necessarily a proficiency in Photoshop, or even a fluency in the English language, for that matter. The pay was minimum wage, with a three month probation, after which Blue Cross benefits kicked in; full health care coverage was the main reason to put up with the negatives, of course. Still, the probation period was rough; you had to be a quick study and able to dodge the myriad, petty opportunities to be fired. I stayed there ten years, managing eventually to earn a whopping $10.50 an hour.
      We had to attend yearly “climate survey” meetings, where we were encouraged to vent our complaints and suggestions without fear of reprisal. The company always engaged in heavy PR to the employees about how they bent over backward to be a great employer and how lucky you were to work there. Everybody knew the real purpose of the meetings was to manage morale in the department and to snuff any possible threats of law suits. They rarely made changes based on our complaints, except in one instance, after my comments to the upper management guy about the “stick” we always received for mistakes. I wanted to know where was the “carrot?”
      This was something I said in a conversation I had with our personnel manager and him after the meeting. I also said that if we were going to be shown graphs with our mistakes and profit losses, we would also like to see graphs comparing company profits over the past twenty-five years, as well as graphs showing employee wages and department profit losses from mistakes over the same time period. Would they show us those graphs?
      Well, soon after, all the graphs came down, and we were never again humiliated in this way over our mistakes.
      Could it be that I was onto something? Given that the company had always paid its employees at the minimum wage (cost of labor), but over the years the cost for ads had most likely risen exponentially (profits), well, just how badly was our department, with our little mistakes, costing the company? And how much were company profits enhanced by our low wages? If we had been able to see charts revealing just how bogus management’s complaints about our mistakes were, and, more importantly, just how badly we were being cheated out of a fair wage, one that kept up with inflation, how long could the company control the “climate” of our discontent?
      Sadly, the company continued to enforce its rules about mistakes. I will never forget Joe, a hugely over-weight but perennially sweet Mexican guy, who was a “closer,” the last person responsible for checking ads before they went to print. He missed three mistakes in one week. Though he’d been with the company for years, he was fired. Joe visited us a few months after his firing, and I hardly recognized him, for all the weight he had lost. I asked him how he’d managed to lose so much weight. He said, “I’m not eating. Can’t afford it.”
      Our supervisor, the one who had fired Joe, a woman who believed in ghosts and the paranormal, once expressed to me her disdain for Mexicans— “they move into your neighborhood, and before you know it gangs are everywhere.”
      She and I didn’t get along very well, needless to say. But that’s story for another time.

The Crack and the Light:

      Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem, gives us these lines: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.” Those words came to me the other day, as I drove down I-15 listening to KPBS, and heard a report about the city’s winning “the first case against a company for violating the city’s Living Wage Ordinance.”
      Hello? Living Wage Ordinance? Wait a minute—the city of San Diego? Amazing. The city of San Diego managed to let some light get in through a tiny crack in its conservative reputation, apparently. Could this be true?
      It is true. The ordinance was passed in 2005, when I wasn’t paying any attention. So now, any company contracting with the city must pay its employees either $12 an hour or $10 plus health insurance. How cool is that? Of course, there was a big battle over it. Obviously, corporate welfare queens prefer keeping their workers in poverty, while they reap the excess profits.
      Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Congress would now pass a similar law, a national, living wage law?

—L.M.

In “Good Faith” With Telecom Companies and Lawless Bush Administration, Senate Passes FISA:

A message to Senate supporters of HR 6304

To Pro-HR 6304 Senators:

      Today, with the passage of HR 6304, I mourned the death of the 4th Amendment to our Constitution, and I grieved for the loss of any conviction that I am a citizen of a democratic republic, governed and secured by the principle of the rule of law. Today you forced me to realize, once and for all, that I am not free, not a citizen with inalienable rights; today you disabused me of any trust I had in my government, by showing me this: whatever an administration and corporations want to do to me will be supported by you, as long as they act in “good faith” with each other, as opposed to acting in good faith with the American people and the Constitution of the United States.
      Today I grieve over your abandonment of the notion of government of, by and for the people, in favor of government of, by and for criminal corporations.
      Watching you over the past two days, as you defended your position in support of HR 6304, I grieved as your hearts bled for the telecom companies; as you pretended 9-11 was a legitimate and factual excuse for the President’s warrantless surveillance program, even though you knew he had begun the program immediately after his first month in office; as you granted unprecedented legal authority to the executive branch to violate the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, fixing the executive branch as the sole judge of its own behavior and removing the judicial branch as a check on executive power; as you sided with the likes of Kit Bond (R. Missouri), who framed telecom immunity as “liability protection” and bemoaned the possibility of holding to the rule of law as “penalizing the companies” with “frivolous lawsuits.” What is the matter with you that you approved such garbage?
      I grieved, and my stomach turned, as the bill passed, with only twenty-eight good Senators voting against and holding fast to the Constitution and the rule of law, a mere twenty-eight true patriots, compared to sixty-nine lumps of Senatorial cowardice and shame.
      I have to ask of Barack Obama and his Democratic comrades who voted for the Feingold-Dodd Amendment, which would have removed telecom immunity from the bill, but failed, and then went ahead and voted for the bill itself, which contained telecom immunity —a profound contradiction— why would you do that? So, your distaste for telecom immunity was a whim of the moment, which changed for the final vote? Or, was it the other way around? No. You knew what you were doing. Clearly, you wanted to have it both ways, so that you could say, “Well, it’s too bad about immunity, but I want conservative voters to know I’m tough on terrorists.” Sir, you have no moral compass, no profound or ethical position to offer as reason to vote for you. You are lost. I, for one, will never forgive you, never vote for you again.
      The most frightening aspect of this dark moment is that of precedence—you, Senators, have set the stage for what? What’s next after this? You have now established that a mere executive-branch say-so can be sufficient justification for lawbreaking on the part of a company, so, why should not the Bush administration, or any other administration, use other private companies to do further harm to our liberty, our privacy, our fundamental human rights? Now that you have given Bush, as well, license to gather up whole masses of communications between Americans without warrants, in violation of the 4th Amendment, why should he not go whole hog with his vile intentions against freedom, democracy and the rule of law and break more laws than he already has?
      Today you have done what Al Queda could not have done with all their miserable, ragged might, without your help—you have taken the essence of American freedom and liberty and subtracted it from the body politic; you have injured the soul of America.
      Shame on you!!!

—LM

ACLU on this subject

Judge Walker

Comic relief: Mark Fiore on the subject

Obama's "Change" Offers No Hope for Civil Liberty

His new position on FISA, in effect: as long as we are safe, we don’t need to be free.

      Yesterday, June 28, Barack Obama spoke before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Referring to the immigration issue, Obama made the point that McCain “deserves credit” for the work he did alongside Obama on behalf of comprehensive immigration reform. There was a problem, however, according to the Democratic candidate: “When he [McCain] was running for his party’s nomination, he walked away from that commitment. He said he wouldn’t even support his own legislation, if it came up for a vote. Now, if we’re going to solve the challenges we face, we can’t vacillate; we can’t shift, depending on our politics. You need a president who will pursue genuine solutions, day in and day out, in a consistent way. And that’s my commitment to you.”

      Beautiful. Apparently unhampered by self-examination, he stood there, making a promise not to vacillate, not to shift, but instead to be consistent with his commitments—this, while my built-in crap detector clanged over the contrast between what he had just said and the fact of his newly adjusted position on telecom immunity.
      I guess we were supposed to forget his previous position on telecom immunity, his earlier stated commitment to the rule of law, as well as the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. To wit:

Then:—Barack Obama, February 26, 2008: “The American people must be able to trust that their president values principle over politics, and justice over unchecked power. I’ve been proud to stand with Senator Dodd in his fight against retroactive immunity for the telecommunications industry. Secrecy and special interests must not trump accountability. We must show our citizens – and set an example to the world – that laws cannot be ignored when it is inconvenient. Because in America – no one is above the law.”

Now: Barack Obama, June 26, 2008: “...the issue of the phone companies, per se, is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people.”

      That was in answer to the question as to why he was going to support the FISA bill that will be voted on in the Senate after the July 4th holiday, the bill that grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms.
      So, sometimes it is okay to vacillate? Sometimes it’s okay to shift your commitment?
      Certainly, when it comes to one challenge, the one where he expressed, in January and February, a strong commitment to the ability of the American people to “trust their president to value principle over politics” and justice over “unchecked power,” then it’s perfectly okay to turn tail and make a beeline for political expediency.
      The challenge of the rule of law, and the basic civil liberties of the American people, is not important; it does not override security. Hello? As long as we are “safe,” we don’t need to be free?
      So what else is new? Did you expect a politician to stick to his stated principles?

      It is interesting to watch the struggles with cognitive dissonance now being experienced by the Obama faithful—poor Keith Olbermann, for one. He thinks everything’s going to be okay, since John Dean said the bill didn’t preclude prosecution of telecom companies by the Justice Department, after Bush leaves office. Obama has a secret plan...
      Oh brother.
      Plus, Olbermann thinks Obama did himself proud by not “cowering to” the Left, a retreat from Olbermann’s own powerful statements against granting telecom immunity. As if the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law were left-wing issues and not values all Americans should hold dear. No. What we’re seeing is how people go into denial to be able to accept the shameful behavior of someone they wish desperately to admire.
      C’mon, Obama has not done himself proud, and neither has Olbermann, for that matter; after all, to betray one’s own principles is about as shameful thing a person can do.

      Whatever protections for our civil liberties are granted in the FISA bill, they become meaningless, as long as telecom immunity is granted as well. After all, the original FISA legislation had those protections, but the Bush Administration ignored them, with the help of the telecom companies. The bottom line is that the telecom companies broke the law; to grant them immunity from civil suits now is an invitation to this lawless administration, and the next, to ignore the law again. WHAT CONSEQUENCES FOR LAW-BREAKING DOES AN ADMINISTRATION FACE, IF CONGRESS GRANTS IMMUNITY TO LAWBREAKERS? The message becomes this: as long as the government gives a company a piece of paper, with instructions to break the law, warrantless spying on Americans can go on as before. Congress will always grant immunity.
      Wishing and waiting for prosecutions by the Justice Department is naive, a self-delusion. It won’t happen. It’s a “war on terror” without end; we can kiss our civil liberty good-bye, without hope for its return, ever.
      To vote for this FISA bill, with immunity granted, is a betrayal of the American people. And I am far more threatened by lawless executive and legislative branches of our government than by al queda, by far.
      I doubt Obama would abandon his corporate friends or the ruling class once in the White House. It would not fit his pattern: when courting the Democratic electorate for his Party’s nomination, he spoke like a civil libertarian; once secure as the nominee, he abandoned the civil liberty stance and caved to the fear factor. This is not behavior that deserves an optimistic, hopeful, trusting response from us. It is "change," alright, but not change I can believe in.

—L.M.

UPDATE: My comment to Keith Olbermann's Special Comment of June 30th: Sorry, there's a problem with Keith's logic: Obama's voting against the FISA bill would not preclude his also prosecuting the criminals, once he gets into office. We should have both—civil AND criminal litigation.

There's NO excuse whatsoever for Obama to vote for the bill, and no solace whatsoever in the distant and doubtful promise of Obama-presidency prosecutions. And who is to say Obama is going to win the presidency, anyway? Think about the fix we'll be in then, when McCain is in office, and we don't even have the option of civil litigations!

Tonight's Special Comment failed—too much bending over backward to make an Obama betrayal of the Constitution and the rule of law okay. It's not okay. Civil litigations are how ordinary people hold corporations and the government accountable. For the Federal government to remove them as an option is a hideous act of betrayal against one democratic means of redress.

Shame on Obama, if he doesn't vote against the bill; shame on Keith Olbermann for making excuses for him.


PREVIOUS POST ON THIS SUBJECT: If Obama Votes Yes

The Human Bond of Duh

And how I miss George Carlin

      Arrogance is the first form of stupidity. I love to say that.
      But, hold on. I also have a distaste for hierarchy—so, can we say one form of stupidity should out rank any other? Aren’t all of us equally stupid, in our own, special way? After all, whether you like it or not, everybody, each frail and faulty human, has moments of duh, where the duh factor engages despite all our pathetic efforts to the contrary. But I promise you, your moments of duh are no worse than mine, and vice versa. This is the human bond of duh.
      I won’t mention my most egregious acts of duh, the disastrous ones. Those, I call deep duh. The relatively harmless ones have to do with math and technical stuff. I mean, forget it. I’m never there, when I’m there. Those fall into the category of congenitally ill-equipped duh—it can’t be helped. And then there’s the inevitable daily duh, like walking down the street to pick up my mail, then remembering it’s Sunday.
      George Carlin would have appreciated this. In one of his stand-up routines he said, “You ever notice how all day Wednesday, you keep thinking it’s Thursday?” He had led up to this comment with an introduction that began, “I’d like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities, instead of our differences...but I also like to know I can come back to these little things we have in common, little universal moments that we share separately, but things that make us the same. They’re so small we hardly ever talk about them.
      Do you ever look at your watch, and then you don’t know what time it is? And then you have to look again, and you still don’t know the time. So you look a third time, and somebody says, 'What time is it,' and you say, 'I don’t know?'"
      Our human bond of duh—right, George? Are you with me here?

      The big problem is that as a species our collective duh is coming close to ending us. Our world is in such a fearsome condition we’re finding our very futures in jeopardy; more and more, each day that the powerful among us ignore the signs—after all, those guys deny the duh that compels them— things fail to work on our behalf, and on behalf of the planet.

      It’s like this:
      What values best support us?
      Duh...those of laissez-faire capitalism?
      Duh...masculinist values?
      Duh...authoritarian values?

      What is our hierarchy of values?
      Duh...profit first, before anything else?
      Duh...whatever my authority says?
      Duh...me first?

      How do we fix what is broken?
      Duh...privatize everything?
      Duh...de-regulate?
      Duh...drill, blast, bomb, torture, deny?

What a loss George Carlin isn’t here to make us laugh about it all, to get things straight and clear, to distill sanity from the fruity din—if you will pardon my duh.

—L.M.

If Obama Votes Yes on FISA Bill

Tell me why I should vote for him and not Ralph Nader?

      The Blue Dog Democrats have done their hangdog business in the House again this week, cowering on the floor to hand over yet another wet-dream of a bill into Republican hands. ( Greenwald )
      To sum it up, my understanding is that if the Senate passes the bill, the telecom companies will receive immunity for their law-breaking, which essentially means the rule of law in America is meaningless. The excuse the hangdog Dems are giving, such as Diane Feinstein, is that in the hysteria of 9-11, it was understandable for the telecom companies to want to help the government. Isn't that so generous to the telecoms! What these Democrats are ignoring is that the spying went on for years; the companies have massive legal budgets and plenty of lawyers who could have explained the law; and at least one company, Quest, managed to reject the Administration's attempts to seduce them into breaking the law—they said NO!
      The Republicans refer to the law-breaking companies as "patriotic." Somehow they've forgotten what it is to be patriotic—that is, to protect and defend the constitution of the United States, as they pledged to do.
      All this is happening against a background, where the government can name any citizen whatsoever as an “enemy combatant,” detain any citizen whatsoever, and render —disappear— any citizen whatsoever to Syria to be tortured.
      To give the telecom's immunity, is to give it to the Administration as well, as far as future prosecutions against the Administration are concerned. And, how the Administration will be cautioned against breaking this new FISA law, to again conduct warrantless spying, is beyond me. Where's the downside for them?
      Amazingly enough, Barack Obama might vote for this FISA bill. So much for his background in Constitutional law.
      Thus, I see no reason whatsoever, if Obama goes ahead and votes for this bill, or doesn’t try to stop it, why I should not go ahead and vote for Ralph Nader, who is closest to my heart, anyway.

—L.M.

UPDATE: June 29 post

Conventional Wisdom, Common Sense, Uncommon Patriotism

In gratitude for Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler’s defense of democracy

      The Florida Sun-Sentinel recently posted an editorial criticizing Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler for their calls to impeach G.W. Bush. The editorial began with an enumeration of our current national ills —wars, unemployment, Americans going without health insurance, gas prices— and then somehow failed to connect any dots whatsoever as to who is responsible for our sorry situation and how crimes were committed to get us here.
      The editorial would be laughable, if so many innocent lives and national treasure had not been criminally wasted by the very hand of the person the editorial board defends in its opinion.
      This is the Pelosi-inspired, denial-based, conventional wisdom now: calls for accountability for the most egregious, obvious and blatant crimes by officials of the government in American history are to be treated as if they are tantamount to the hysterical and whiney demands of toddlers. “You don’t like Mommy and Daddy’s rules? You want to make noise? You are grounded for wasting our time.” Or, more to the point, it is as if Daddy has been sneaking into bedrooms at night to molest his children, Mommy knows it, but stopping him is off the table—Sh-h-h-h-h!.
      We are supposed to think that it’s only common sense to dismiss impeachment as an option— “it’s too late; it’s a distraction from important issues; we don’t have enough votes, etc.” But it isn’t common sense; it is common campaign strategy. Underneath the excuses is this truth: the Democratic leadership thinks impeachment hearings will alienate the electorate —they are wrong!— and so they want to play a waiting game. And conservatives love it. Their guy is getting away with it.
       I am thinking of another kind of common sense, the kind of common sense that built this nation, the common sense of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the common sense that created a great Constitution, where the exact remedy for the sort of crimes George W. Bush has committed was put there, so that America could breathe free of would-be tyrants and empire-builders like George W. Bush. I have to wonder what happened to this kind of patriotism. Is it tucked away inside the namby-pamby back pockets of editors and journalists, pundits and politicos across the nation, where it is sat upon and smothered to death beneath their lackadaisical butts?
      Reps. Wexler and Kucinich have accomplished an uncommon thing: they have managed to retain their patriotic common sense. It is the shame and tragedy of this nation that such patriotism is so rare, now that we need it so badly. We are in jeopardy of enabling a tyrannical epoch in American history, but we are surrounded by fools and cowards.
      Albert Einstein's familiar quote, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds," comes to mind here. Wexler and Kucinich are great spirits, and they will be remembered in history as such; as for the editorial board of the Florida Sun-Sentinel—their opposition to such greatness is apparently all they can manage, given who they are.

      Personally, I think impeachment is not nearly enough; the thugs should be prosecuted for murder. Apparently, I am not the only one who thinks this.

—L.M.

Torture by Photo Op

Say No to Four More Years of It


      Among the worst lies George W. Bush has told is the one where he insists, “we do not torture.” That was a doozy.
      I don’t know where he gets that. I mean, he tortures me every time his goofy self appears on television. All it takes is the sight of his bow-legged cock-strut across the White House lawn, and my face goes twitchy, just like Clouseau’s torture victim, Chief Inspector Dreyfus. Then, as soon as he opens his mouth, and his words wrangle their way toward my ears, hinting of a sloppy, sottish past (is it past?) —”Thish is an impresshhive crowd -- the havezsh and the have morezsh. Shome people call ya th’ elite -- Ah call you mah bayshe.”— well, I’m in agony. It is so-o-o painful.
      I don’t know if I can make it to January 20, 2009, without some kind of intervention. Like impeachment.

      Help. Please, all you voters out there, bring us a President who at least honors the office of the Presidency —for a change— with eloquence, a resonant voice, and, even if he isn’t going to bring us Medicare for all, even if he supports “clean” coal and “free” trade, at least he has the ability to think on his feet and speak coherently.
      I think you know who that is. It is NOT John McCain.
      McCain. Think about that. It’s bad enough that he is painfully uncomfortable in his own skin, that is, physically and metaphorically, meaning his ethics, values and opinions, but the spector of McCain in the Presidency is nearly as horrifying as that which resides there now; we’re talking asymmetrical, puddin’ face, stiff-joints, a nasal tonality and an inspirational deficiency that simply will not improve with time. It’s only gonna get worse, Folks. You vote for McCain, and it will be nothing but four more years of Bush crimes against our aesthetic sensibilities. Don’t do it.

      What it boils down to is this: do you want four years of goose bumps, or facial tics? The choice is clear.

JOHN MCCAIN MEDICAL RECORDS REVEAL EMBARRASSING DETAIL

by Mistee Laurie, C.P.I.

Questions about McCain’s suitability for the Presidency surfaced again today, after it was revealed during a cursory look at his medical records that he still wets his bed.

A.P.’s Jeff Mungo verified the story, saying, “Despite my having only three hours to fan through 400 pages of his medical records, and not being allowed to photocopy anything, I did see urologist Leikkur’s note of December 14, 2004, which stated, ‘John complains about incontinence, especially while sleeping...wets bed on a regular basis.’”

Although McCain scoffed at the story and wheeled out his 96-year-old mother to back him up, he bristled when Hillary Clinton threatened to fuel speculation, with the claim McCain had revealed to her at a dinner party that he laughed so hard “he nearly peed his pants!”

McCain’s bed-wetting habit continued to reverberate in the latest news cycle. A spokesman for the campaign accused the “liberal media” of “trying to stigmatize a condition which millions of Americans suffer from and making John McCain the poster-boy for Depends.”

Thus, the slow-motion scandal of McCain’s secrecy over his medical records fast-forwards, as his campaign continues to withhold documentary evidence of his ability to bomb Iran without wetting his pants.

Dr. Leikkur was unavailable for comment.

American Burqa

Thoughts on the hiding of American womankind, behind the veil of uniformity

     A family member once told me his wife “is going to need a face lift soon.” I had responded, “No she isn’t.” But he was adamant.

     I happened to come across a B movie the other day, one starring Melissa Gilbert in a role requiring her to speak in a foreign accent. Melissa, to my fascination, was nearly as unidentifiable in this movie as the accent she used. In fact, I am not exactly sure how I managed to recognize her, given how drastically some porcine-pawed plastic surgeon had transformed her face since the last time I saw her. This was not the Melissa Gilbert I knew, whose thick eyebrows and quirky, unique features had distinguished her from the pack. Instead, here was a generic female type, pretty, but somehow reduced, somehow absent.
     Here was a nose I call snout-nose, eyebrows reduced to near-nothings, and lips some critics of plastic surgery have described as “trout pout.”
     Trout is not the fish metaphor I would choose. But this one, to the right, whatever it is, seems an apt choice.
     To you plastic surgeons: this is NOT the look you want to give your patients.
     But they do. One web site advertises the lip-job their plastic surgeon performs as “Paris Lips!” “You can “plump up thin lips for as little as $475!” On the same website, we are treated to a before and after, where a middle-aged, intelligent-looking woman has been transformed into a middle-aged, startled-looking dim-wit.

     These are anecdotal examples, but they speak to something I have noticed in many different places. Something is happening to the image of womankind, as it is portrayed in the media, and it reflects the entire culture, even while it infects it.
     Consider an example from Fox’s House, M.D., where Hugh Laurie plays a genius diagnostician in a hospital, among a mixed cast of characters, both men and women. Well, it’s a good show. But that doesn’t keep me from noticing the something I am thinking of, which is revealed in the difference between the male characters and the female characters, that is, between the male doctors and the female doctors. Here is the difference: the males are interesting actors whose looks vary from bordering on ugly —Dr. House, in particular— to decidedly unattractive but intelligent looking, to one young doctor who is nearly pretty, he is so cute; but the female characters are ALL pretty, in conventional ways —you won’t see an Ava Gardener or a Meryl Streep there— and, if they weren’t cast as doctors, you wouldn’t think of them as especially intelligent ladies. They’re just pretty women, lacking any particular uniqueness or variety in their looks. That is, they are uniform in their bland, ordinary prettiness.
     What’s up with that? Why are the men allowed to be ugly, to be different, to be intelligent and interesting —to be free?— but the women are not? Why do the female characters seem so generic and without character?

     Leaving the complex analysis to those who enjoy such activities, I will sum it up this way: what we’re dealing with is the American burqa.

     American culture did not need a bearded patriarch to come at women with a stick, to enforce our second class status on us. No Taliban mantra was inflicted on us, to berate us, our nature, our unique selves. Physical bullying, corporal punishment—none of it was necessary to beat us into submission. Only a sexist reality was required, though a less stupidly expressed one than that in Taliban society, where the value of a woman is found only in her appearance, an appearance that must conform to a standard, a male-defined idea of feminine beauty, or she is without value. The eyes should be just so far apart; the nose just such a shape and size, within strictly defined parameters; the mouth must be “full,” “sensual;” the chin this and not that; forehead so high, so wide. She must be only so old, and no older. Should she stray outside this contemporary, American standard of beauty, she will not only be rejected in certain areas of life, but she will gradually learn to hate the way she looks and want to change, to hide, to become someone, anyone other than herself, even if it means becoming a nobody with an anybody face, a generic American female.
     Our culture did not require celebrity women to wear cloth burqas to hide themselves. Instead, culture provided casting directors who only cast according to the standard; then came the plastic surgeons to fix the errant, lidded eye, or the rebellious, fierce nose, those fully trained and conditioned doctors who would find the Barbie in the face and body of every patient, those who could render them invisible, behind the American burqa, a face and body distinguished only for its lack of individuality and uniqueness.
     The sickness is not restricted to celebrities. Somehow my family member experienced no shame in declaring his wife to be in need of lifting up, while gravity would be allowed to have its way with him all the way to his grave. It was the culturally acceptable thing for a husband to require, in fact. Apparently, he should not have to endure life married to a woman who looked her age; but he could look as old as he liked, and did.
     Another guy I know said he decided to marry the woman who eventually became his wife, because he could see all she needed was a make-over and new clothes. I guess she was a sort of fixer-upper.

     Once, while waiting in the doctor’s office, I heard two little boys talking about the details of a poster they were standing near. The poster contained photographs of boys and girls. Pointing to a child in a photograph, one boy said to the other, “Is this one human, or a girl?”
     Is it possible a boy could grow up in our society, believing that males are human, but females are not, that females are another thing outside the notion of humanity, like animals?
     Does a woman acquiesce to such a belief, when she decides to have a facelift?

—L.M.

Love Your Mother—Earth

Killing the lawn and other Earth-loving endeavors.

      I grew up in the 50’s in the suburban neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley —North Hollywood, Van Nuys, Panorama City, Woodland Hills— where lawns were as ubiquitous as the tract homes they adorned, or the dog poop in the clover. Something like that.
      Anyway, the fact of lawns was not something I questioned as a kid, except to grumble when it was my turn to mow the grass—pushing and pulling our reluctant, rusty lawn mower over stubborn, overgrown clumps of grass was not something I wanted to do on a Saturday, and neither was scraping dog poop off the wheels. That lawns were everywhere, like clean air and plentiful water, made them invisible as issues, as concerns. We never gave it a thought; we played on our lawns, that’s all, trading cards, playing Simon Says, cowboys and Indians, or horsie, rearing, bucking, grazing green grass like real horses.
      Everything happened on the lawn: our male dog, Buck the Airdale, got stuck for an hour in my uncle’s female dog, Leesha the Boxer, while she investigated the lawn, nose in the grass, oblivious of her panting caboose, while I ran to the adults, sounding the alarm about Buck’s predicament, and while the adults worked hard at ignoring me; Buck —there’s so much Bucklore— raised his leg behind my girlfriend’s clueless brother and took a piss on his pants (now a real-estate attorney), while we sat in the grass and giggled; I smoked a cigar I found there, a cigar my step-father had lost during one of his meandering, upside-down treks across the lawn on his hands, and I smoked it until nausea put a stop to my smoking days, once and for all.
      Still, as I remember one neighborhood in Van Nuys, our lawns were never kid heaven, compared to the vacant lot down the street. Well, it wasn’t really vacant; in fact it was overgrown with tall trees, bushes, and, best of all, hip-high (on a kid) grass, which we yanked up and out of the ground for our dirt-clod wars and for weaving into the sides and tops of our forts, for privacy. Of course, this was before home-owner associations, when nobody cared if there was a neglected plot in the neighborhood; it was also before the current days of paranoia, TV addiction and video games, when children could disappear for hours and nobody worried, when children actually played outside. (In my neighborhood now, I rarely see children playing outside, though children do live here.) It was the vacant lot, with its nooks and crannies, paths, jungle terrain, forts and faraway feeling that did the trick, allowing for stories to emerge—plot, character, adventure, places for childhood imagination, where all things were possible.
      The point is this: children and other living things do not need lawns.

      Now, here comes today. The air is unclean; water is now a finite, contaminated resource. Gasoline is finite too, as it is dirty, as we have come to understand; we are shocked, and some are ruined, by the price of gasoline. We buy our produce from super markets, or small, family-owned markets, or even local farmer’s markets, but many of us haven’t tasted a real, home-grown tomato in years, if ever; we are shocked at the price of organic produce. But lawns are as ubiquitous as ever, regardless—no matter the upkeep, no matter they require an egregious amount of water, gasoline to run power mowers, Round-up to kill the weeds and other unwanted things like birds, insects and human beings (cancer), fertilizers, so the green grass can grow all around, all around, so the green grass can grow all around. No matter that this miraculous soil is capable of growing everything, but it is allowed to grow only one thing—grass.

      I am certainly not the first to write about this. Far better thinkers than I have discussed how we are going to have to change to love our mother, Earth (links, below); but many of us are doing what we can for the sake of the environment: minds are changing, and habits are changing; some of us, those who can afford it, are going cold turkey, ending bad habits and “going green” in various ways; others are moving incrementally, while some still drag their feet, in denial but finding less and less support for such folly.
      As for me, I try, though I cannot afford to put solar panels on the roof or buy a hybrid car, and I haven’t much room on my little lot for growing vegetables. I do have two large pine trees —oxygen makers, carbon holders— and a variety of plants, mostly overgrown, a garden with indigenous plants, succulents, ice plant—but, no lawn. Some might say my pond is a problem, that is, running a pump constantly; I say I make up for it, not driving much and planning my errands and visits with conservation in mind, being a vegetarian, and recycling practically everything, etc.
      Lucky for me, my son and daughter-in-law in Normal Heights (we call them “the Normals”) in San Diego County, have decided to kill their lawn. Well, decided might be the wrong word. They have toddlers, and keeping the lawn watered was not a priority in the past few years; let’s put it that way. Let’s say the lawn died a slow, natural death, and the soil is in the process of returning to its original state, as you can see. But, the beautiful part is that they have decided to turn their substantial yard into a vegetable garden, not one with rows and regimented sections, like Puritans, but one with meandering paths and “rooms,” one with an organic design and shape, and one where there will also be space for the children to play.
      I say “lucky for me,” because, you know, they’ll probably produce more than they can eat, and that’s where I’ll step in...but then, they’ll probably have more work to do too, more than they can possibly manage, and, no doubt, that’s also where I’ll have to step in, which is fine by me, since I won’t have to mow the lawn.

      Happy Mother’s day.

—L.M.

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