#143 Personal Words (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

For the last four years, I was blessed to work for a man I respected and trusted.  A couple of those years were the best experience in my working life.  I'm not saying the company, the school, for which I've worked has been respectable or trustworthy; just the man.  However, it has been a rare enough experience just having the opportunity to work for someone with positive qualities that it has spoiled me for the usual management riffraff.  This man, Michael, quit today.  The school's management didn't think Michael's leaving was important enough to let the rest of us know, but the word spread through the staff like a fire of despair. 

The last year and a half has been tolerable, but in decline.  The people who own and mismanage the school are the usual lot; boy-men who couldn't make a sane decision if their inheritances depended upon it.  But that hasn't mattered for the past twelve years of the school's existence, because Michael could always be counted on to make the important decisions for the organization.  While the owners rattled around in their palatial offices, posing for portraits and polishing their egos, Michael hired staff, distributed resources, settled disputes, and moved the school from a dilapidated warehouse in Minneapolis to a shining new facility in St. Paul.  When every major step was completed, the owners would make a hand-waving appearance and express wonder at their miraculous accomplishments. 

Other than being a bit irritating, most of us didn't mind their ignorance, because Michael knew who did the real work and he made us into the kind of team that rarely exists outside of myth and dreams.  Today, members of that team met in hallways, the parking garage, and at least one bar to mourn the end of a workplace era.  I heard expressions of anger, disappointment, sorrow, and pain from people working in sales, maintenance, administration, and (above all in an educational institution) the teachers.  The loss of no other person in the school could have inspired so much emotion, and we've had some sad losses in the last couple of years.  If both of the school's founders had died in the floods of New Orleans, a bare fraction of that passion would have been generated.  The feeling in the school was similar to what I experienced in 1963, as a school boy, when President Kennedy was assassinated.  Hearts were broken, spirits were crushed, bonds of friendship and common goals were damaged. 

Of course, the mismanagers were oblivious to all of this because they were distracted, as usual, by illusions found in their office mirrors. 

As I sat in a bar with friends, fellow instructors, listening to plans for revolt, alternative business ideas, descriptions of escape routes, and general melancholy, I tried to come to peace with my own future.  Not long ago, I planned to spend the rest of my working life with this group.  For the first time in my adult life, I had been part of what felt like an indestructible force; like an NFL offensive line, and I was watching it dissipate like a beautiful sunset fading to darkness.  For me, the school isn't a serious place without Michael there.  What we do, suddenly, seems pointless without his encouragement, honest faith, and vision for our institution and our students.  Michael believed in what we did, he supported it.  Michael had taught every class we taught.  He understood our industry and our technology.  He recognized and attempted to fix problems before we saw them coming.  Even if the industry we represented is mostly in the past, he believed that we could guide our students into the future, making music and changing lives.  He created the school's mission and he believed in it.

What's left is about money, power, and the usual suspects are in control.  Something extraordinary has been turned ordinary.  It's incredible how easy that is to do.  Destruction is always easier than creation, but it's not as inspiring.

September 2005

When Liars Use Numbers

Don’t ask why, but I was looking at an Amazon customer product review today and discovered that the numbers didn’t “add up.” The review (see right) average of 4.3 out of 5 stars is grossly optimistic. Just looking at the star ratings without any sort of analysis you’d notice that 36% of the reviews are 3 star or worse (“It’s Ok.” or worse). 26% are 2 and 1 star ratings (“I hate it.” and “I don’t like it.”) If you really get critical, even a 4 star rating just means “I like it,” so even a 4 star rating is pretty dismal. How is it possible that this product has earned a “4.3 out of 5 stars” average rating?

So what would actual statistics applied to this particular product return for an average rating? If we go for a simple mean average, the sum of the review scores divided by the number of reviews (and the definition of “average” that most of us assume), we’d end up with a 3.72 star average score (just below “I like it”): not bad, but not somewhere between “I like it” and “I love it.” If Amazon were being totally disingenuous, they’d use the mode average, which would be 5 stars and practically every product would have a 5-star average rating because American consumers tend to “love” everything they buy. Apparently, Amazon’s rating system is based on the median average (the middle number, when they are ranked in order) or something close to that.

The takeaway for me is that I won’t pay any attention to Amazon’s average rating ever again. They and their suppliers are counting on our tendency to trust “customer reviews” and ignore the way those reviews are scored or what they really mean. Amazon has proved, again, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Including me.

#142 Fools are Us (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

So, which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Or, in regards to the subject that I am developing here, did our national business model create our national foreign policy or did the foreign policy come first?  My bet is on the business model.  I suspect that our cut-throat, amoral corporations and the execs that squirm within created the mess that the rest of the world sees as the United States. 

As a nation, our "leaders" have often acted as if the rest of the world, especially the third world, is populated by complete idiots.  Our current government is particularly arrogant in its expectations of the rest of the world, but they are just the logical extension of a long history of overconfident, under-skilled  politicians and bureaucrats.  Ever since the United States began to formulate a foreign policy, that policy has been directed by the assumption that everyone else is an idiot and we are so clever that they won't see through the thin veneer disguising our national purposes.  The fact that our politicians and their henchmen are as transparent as fine crystal has never occurred to arrogant American lunkheads from John Adams to G.W. Bush.  They simply see their malevolence as being so complicated and intricate that no one outside of their inner circle could possibly sense their motives. 

We haven't had a sophisticated Executive, Congressional, or Judicial branch since the early 1960s.  And the intelligent leaders didn't amount to more than a hand full of fingers before that.  Cats can predict the motives of the overwhelming majority of human politicians.  A pigmy child extracted from the depths of the most remote area of Africa could, in seconds, size up any of our federal or state bureaucrats and anticipate their actions.  Our national motives are as simple and impure as those of any villain ever dreamed up by Marvel Comics, "'We want your natural resources, all of them, and we will pay bottom dollar to get them.  We'd prefer to wreak your culture and crush your dreams in the process."  Even if the rest of the world was completely populated by morons, that message wouldn't be subtle enough to fool anyone who doesn't drool a in Texas accent.

Our management class is a carbon copy of our government class.  These "elites" stumble through company meetings, delivering foolish platitudes and grade school ultimatums, assuming that no one foolish enough to be employed by a company so disorganized as to hire them for management could detect deception if it were printed in a frame surrounded by flashing "lies, all lies" signs.  If anyone in the room is stupid enough to accept anything they say as worthwhile, that person is clearly management material.  They lie and cheat and stab each other, and the rest of their countrymen, in the back over power and wealth.  The difference between our executive class and Mafia dons is so minimal that the two swap positions without skipping a beat.  All the while, they assume the rest of us are too stupid to do anything about their crass manipulation and gross corruption.

In a way, they are right.  We take far too much abuse from the 1% who own 90% of our country.  Third world terrorists are quicker on the uptake than US voters.  The average man living on the streets of Calcutta knows more about what goes on in Washington D.C. than does the typical American voter.  It's incredibly embarrassing to admit that my own country appears to be the world's most universally hated and feared villain, but it's better to acknowledge that and fight against the inbred self-proclaimed royalty that owns the United States than it is to pretend crimes are not being committed in our name.  You can't fix anything until you recognize it needs fixing.  A startling majority of Americans seem to be too stupid to know when they ought to be asking for a little lubrication with their shafting. 

It's not like the execs are stunningly clever.  These are not people who are bright enough to learn from history, books, mathematical simulations, or remedial tutoring of the sort provided to the ruling class through their Ivy League institutions of slower learning.  They do not realize that eliminating freedoms, driving the middle class into poverty and servitude, terrorizing the third world, and acting as the planet's corrupt Chicago Police force is a sure formula for mass riot and individual violence.  When people do not have political outlets for their grievances, they are forced to resort to physical outlets.   You can bottle beer, but you can't hold your thumb over progress.  The human race is progressing, regardless of the efforts of the current administration, the U.S. military, or mismanaged multinational corporations. 

From the mismanaged side of the equation, the perception is anything but confused.  Most employees think management is overflowing with idiots.  Decisions are handed down without even the slightest clue as to the cause, effect, or purpose.  Every word uttered by mismanagement seems to be designed to demotivate, irritate, confuse, disorganize, or incite riot among the employees and alienate customers.  As I have written before, in every company I've ever worked, if the top management were to contract a disease that caused them to vanish, instantly, in their offices, it would be weeks, months, or years before anyone noticed they were missing.  Universally, the thing that would instigate a search for the missing execs would be a sudden increase in profitability, efficiency, and morale improvement beginning the moment the dead weight vanished. 

Abusing and destabilizing the countries from whom we depend upon for natural resources has been a terrible, vicious, failed experiment.  New York on September 11, 2001 suffered for all of our sins in that regard.  Allowing ourselves to be similarly abused at work and in our communities has resulted in the depersonalized, culture-of-one society that appears to be so susceptible to degenerative "life style marketing." 

Many of us have resorted to looking for a pill that will counteract our national low self-esteem and non-existent sense of community and purpose.  Pills won't help.  Treating the symptoms only works when you treat the right symptoms.  The cure is revolution in the voting booth.  We'll find a cure when the majority of citizens are taking part in the political system with an educated, motivated, outraged purpose.  Until we are "mad as hell and we won't take it any more," we're going to be stuck in crappy jobs, mismanaged by inbred idiots.  Until we want to honestly respected as "the leader of the free world," we'll be ordered about by fourth generation political hacks who only serve international corporate masters and have no interest in the fate and future of this country.  We either stand up and act like citizens of a free country or fall down and serve as floor mats for the ruling class.  There is no middle ground.

September 2005

#141 The Selfish Class (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I wish this rant was only directed at the ruling class.  I wish the rest of the country was as disgusted and tired of a social system that discriminates against everyone from the handicapped to the working poor to the middle class who bear the burden of every responsibility this nation has taken on.  But it's not.  The real failure of our modern state is because more than half of the country is too damn dumb to think for itself and, on the rare occasion that group thinks at all, it only thinks in the most uncomplicated selfish terms.  Human evolution is the history of people learning to cooperate in the interest of their family group, community, and culture.  The Selfish Class has lost this evolutionary drive.

You could place a little of the blame for this wide-spread cultural suicide on the blitz of marketing that has been aimed at the general public, attempting to convince us that we "need" gadgets, toys, synthesized food, recreational drugs, overpriced personal vehicles and housing, and powerful international corporations to complete our lives.  Marketing has worked to create a society that is solely concerned with individual material solutions to social problems.  A lot of money has been spent in this effort, so you could say that is why we're so selfish.  You could do that, I can't.  I think anyone who buys a new car based on inspiration provided by a television ad is too dumb to vote, make important personal decisions, or breathe without instruction.  The state of modern marketing is so low-brow that it amazes me anyone ever watches an ad or buys a product that was mass marketed.

The existence of a television ad promoting a product means that product's value has been dramatically sacrificed to pay for the ad and the morons who conceived it.  But the Selfish Class is largely driven by the instructions they receive in "lifestyle ads" and those instructions run counter to the best interests of the culture.

The biggest share of the blame for the growth of the selfish cancer is from our lack of national leadership.  Or, to be more accurate, this disease is a result of of their leadership.  Like most degenerate cultures, we have a completely self-indulgent ruling class who are only interested in their own short-term immediate gratification.  The Bush's, the Gates', the Jobs', and our hierarchy of idle and semi-idle (executives, for example) multi-generational spoiled rich children contribute nothing more to the culture than poor role models for the working class and wannabe-rich-middle class.  Everything in society and business is top-down and if the "leadership" is foolish and short-sighted, so goes the rest of the country.

But I digress. 

The modern American average Joe or Joan is a proud member of the Selfish Class.  Mostly, participation in the class is how they are kept in line.  They labor mindlessly under the illusion that "anyone can succeed" and "if you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere."  All kinds of people can't make it here: people with families, people with dependent adult family members, people who have had their lives interrupted by illness, people who have had their jobs shipped overseas for cheaper labor, and the usual cast of characters who fall through the growing spaces in our ever-deteriorating social net.  The Selfish Class doesn't care about the problems of the unfortunate many.  The Selfish Class can barely be bothered to care about problems within its own family and, when the kids become disobedient teenagers, the Selfish Class often "disowns" its own children and tosses them out like stale bread. 

The Selfish Class is particularly incensed when it finds itself on the outside looking in.  When that happens, they are usually convinced that the entire social net has been assembled to ignore their life-style-threatening problems.  Then, they vote to "fix" the system.  Of course, since they're perspective on what's wrong with the system is so narrow and erroneous, they vote ignorantly and short-term selfishly.

A couple of years ago, a conservative Selfish Class acquaintance (redundant, the Selfish Class is always conservative) found himself suddenly unemployed (for the third time in a year) with a ton of debt and no savings.  Unless a member of the Selfish Class has been thoughtfully provided an untouchable trust fund they are rarely able to save for more than a moment's pause in cash flow. After a few weeks of fruitless job hunting, he applied for state assistance and found that the state did not consider him to be particularly destitute.  After all, he possessed a garage full of motorcycles, three new upscale four-wheeled vehicles (for two family drivers), a home (with three mortgages), a house full of modern expensive gadgets, two kids enrolled in a high-priced private school, and a small collection of recreational club memberships.  The state implied that he could do considerable cost-cutting and make a few sacrifices in expenses and belongings before he would qualify for state assistance.  He was outraged.  From his perspective, everything he owned, every one of his activities, every extravagance in his life was "necessary" and justified.  That a lowly state employee could suggest otherwise was an affront to his status and self-image.

Because he is white, young, healthy, well-connected, and possesses a collection of employable skills (all obtained in a Minnesota public vocational education system that is now being abandoned), he was only out of work for a few weeks.  After his experience at the edge of being inconvenienced, he has become convinced that the social net is worthless and should be dismantled.  It didn't work for him in his hour (literally) of need, so it is obviously not working for anyone who matters.  This is a close to a perfect Selfish Class response as anyone could create.  "If it's not all about me, what is it good for?"

The Selfish Class is what put G.W. Bush in power.  G.W. and Co. may not be the brightest lights on the Xmas tree, but they can read these Selfish simpletons like an Archie and Veronica comic book.  All they have to do is act naturally, in fact, since current conservative leadership are the most selfish people on the planet.  To appeal to the Selfish Class, you only have to speak to their immediate self-interests.  The Selfish Class does not care about the fate of life on earth, they care about themselves now, today, this moment.  The Selfish Class has children, but they are supposed to be mirror images of themselves and if those children stop reflecting their parents' they are abandoned as easily as any animal leaves its offspring.  The Selfish Class is willing to sacrifice the health, security, and welfare of the people of the rest of the world for unlimited use of the world's resources.  And yet, they express horror and confusion when the people they have sacrificed strike back with the same weapons and brutality that have been used against them in the interests of the Selfish Class. 

The worst thing about our current state of egocentric self-interest is that it is self-sustaining and regenerating.  A top-down corruption is the worst system failure an organization or society can suffer.  When the entire leadership is corrupt, the majority of citizens simply follow their example.  This isn't anything new, something invented by the new right.  In fact, it's the oldest political system on earth.  It's also the most fragile.  A country mostly populated by lazy, selfish people is easily destroyed by natural catastrophe, internal revolution, external attack, or a combination of these forces.  The lack of community that is the core of the Selfish Class is also the downfall of that same group.  A community without an interlinking support system that protects the less fortunate, educates the ignorant and the young, provides for the common good to equalize opportunity across economic levels, and protects and listens to the canary-in-a-coal-mine voices of dissent is easily fragmented and destroyed.  We have become that kind of community and our vanishing personal rights and growing economic imbalance is just a sign of where that is taking us.

August 2005

#140 Why Do Conservatives Hate the United States? (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

Ok, I admit it.  This rant was inspired by conservative propaganda that begins or ends with statements like "why [Michael Moore/Liberals/The Liberal Media] hate(s) America."  But at the core, I believe that conservatives, especially the radical (is there any other kind?) religious right, hate the United States and the representative democracy that it represents.  I don't mean "dislike," "mistrust," or have a reasonable disagreement among patriots and well-meaning, honest men and women.  I mean hate. 
First, our current herd of neo-conservatives are stupid.  The "America" that they imagine liberals hate doesn't exist.  It never existed.  "America" is a pair of continents; not a country, system of government, or a collection of ideals.  We have North America, of which the United States of America is a part and we have South America where US corporations have a lot of financial interests but no honestly held rights or morally earned privileges.  The bulk of the folks who claim to love "America" don't even know where the United States ends and where America becomes other countries, cultures, and economic systems. 

Even more to the point, I doubt there is anyone living on this continent who hates the soil and the continental shelf upon which they live, liberal or conservative.  "America" is a pair of continents (with an often-contested sub-continent, Central America, connecting the two larger land bodies); not a culture, social or economic system, or a flag-symbolized nationalistic god-fearing corporate prison camp.

Hell, most of the nationalist right-wing "Americans" don't know much about the United States geographically, historically, politically, or in any other critical specific.  They chant about "America, the Christian Nation" and babble their foolish notions of capitalism, taxation, and defending the homeland in exactly the same words (other than the actual language) as did their idealistic predecessors, in Nazi Germany.  When it comes time for them to demonstrate their understanding of the foundations of the nation, the principles of economics or democracy, or their legitimate rights and responsibilities, they are often and usually found to be missing in action.

In modern history, these radicals, misnamed "conservatives" have been on the morally wrong side of every national crisis since before 1776.  Conservatives opposed the Revolutionary War and the concept of representational democracy.  The first conservatives to pollute the New World's political thinking fantasized that Kings and Queens and inherited wealth and power was vested by the gods and mere mortals were incapable of divining the gods' will in matters as complicated as creating a civil and just society.  Dumb-asses, all of them.  Our first conservatives were known, by the country's patriot forefathers, as "Tories."  If you are interested in finding yourself on the morally right side of practically any disagreement in the history of humanity, determine which side the current breed of conservatives has selected and join the opposition.

Following the footsteps of the country's first conservative dolts were slave owners.  They were the second American wave of god-fearing conservative big thinkers and they fantasized that their ability to terrorize other people, initially including other white folks, somehow illuminated their moral superiority.  This pack of inbred hillbillies were willing and nearly able to disassemble the Union in favor of an economically degenerate system based on slaves and serfs with a collective government that mostly resembled Jolly old England from the previous unenlightened centuries commonly known as "The Dark Ages."  Fortunately for us, them, and the rest of the world, the liberals of the 1860's decided that living next to a pack of moral decadents was unacceptable and we had a Civil War that put to the test upon which side the gods actually stood.  Again, conservatives turned out to be on the down-slope of cultural and human evolution and they had their asses kicked by bleeding heart liberals and the power and creativity that is commonly found only in liberal cultures. 

The gods weren't on their side, either.  If gods exist, it's hard to imagine their preference being for evil, selfish, vicious, and simple-minded humans.  I could more easily imagine a god only interested in cats than one who would pick Karl Rove or G.W. Bush as an eternal neighbor. 

However, if conservatives can't do anything else they can breed like vermin and they kept reproducing their progeny, misinformation, and ignorance all over the country, especially in the south and the hillbilly segments of the Midwest and west also known as "the Bible Belt."  Even after having their asses kicked and their ill-founded faith in their gods' will proven to be false, they continued to imagine that white people had some inherent superiority over other cultures.  Shortly after the end of the Civil War, economic and social discrimination against everyone but rich white people became the southern standard. 

The sludge at the bottom of the intellectual pool, dumb poor whites, somehow managed to become convinced that they had some interests in common with dumb rich white people.  Dumb whites dedicated themselves to protecting rich folks from non-white poor folks.  This misdirection resulted in the Civil Rights Movement and we wasted nearly one hundred years in making our national intention semi-coherent.  In the meantime, we have had Civil Rights Acts passed and ignored in 1886, 1957, 1964, and 1991.  All the while, conservatives still battled to preserve discrimination, segregation, and outright hostility toward people of varying races, religions, and political beliefs.  Just another example of how much conservatives hate the democratic intentions of the United States of America. 

World wide conservatives did their best to allow their fellow true believers in Nazi Germany to complete the extermination of Jews and other "undesirables" deemed to be imperfect non-Aryans in the 1930s.  Eventually, liberals became irritated enough at this vicious and inhuman activity and, once again, conservatives had their asses kicked.  A fair number of conservatives are so disturbed by this ass-whipping that they deny the existence of the entire period of history, commonly known as World War II.  Many of these inbred morons wear swastikas on their clothing and body art and claim to be "Americans" while hating the government of the United States of America and doing everything within their limited mental capacity to undermine the process of democracy.  More examples of conservatives hating the USA.

Conservatives drug the nation into Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, twice.  Not in the interest of spreading democracy, but in the interests of the military-industrial complex that desperately needs wars to sell it's products.  Of course, the bonus was international corporate access to Iraq's oil resources.  Hardly a moral issue. 

Every issue with an attached real moral value is, and has been, opposed by American conservatives.  From women's rights to ecological conservation to racial equality to public education to the social safety net, conservatives have consistently come down on the side of international corporations and the interests of the ruling class.  Conservatives, without fail, have fought against progress, justice, freedom, peace, and common sense since the founding of this country.  Most likely, conservatives have argued against all of those things since the first group of cave people decided to band together. 
The great migration of southern whites to the Republican Party, which became blatant during the Carter Administration and resulted in white backlash and Reagan's election and the current radical Republican domination of the federal government, was all about racism and the long, ignorant history of poor white trash whose irritation is easily misdirected by international corporations and idle rich white trash.  You can't fool "all of the people all of the time," but you can fool these dumb fucks without putting up much of a show. 

The "values" represented by the Red States are limited to gun ownership, anti-feminism (thinly disguised as the "life" issue), the establishment of a national religion, and white power.  Not one of these issues could be described as central to the founding of the United States of America.

Conservatives protect the status quo, by definition.  Conservatives do not invent, improve, or initiate anything for the betterment of the country or the world.  They inhibit, repress, and regress at every junction of human, and especially the United States', history.  The reason they hate the United States of America is that this union of citizens, under the banner and protection of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, is liberal by its foundation and nature.  Liberals are progressive, conservatives are regressive.  The United States of America was a progressive, innovative, liberal idea. 

England was conservative in 1776 and still is, today.  The Soviet Union and Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party were conservative.  Iran's Assembly of Experts is conservative and so was Iraq's Arab Baath Socialist Party and Hussein's  Revolutionary Command Council.  These government systems were "loved" by the local conservatives and hated by the same countries' liberals. 

In this nation, when the government is obeying the law and serving the interests of the majority of its citizens, conservatives hate their government and want it changed by any method possible.  When the government is trampling personal rights and representing international corporate interests, conservatives are happy as hogs overdosing on PCP.  American conservatives have never loved the concept of the United States of America.  From the cocaine fields of Columbia to the Aryan Nation's compounds in the Pacific Northwest, conservative Americans have found things to hate about the United States of America.  The ideals they hate are what all intelligent citizens should all love about this country.  Freedom is a liberal goal.  Justice is a liberal ideal.  Equality and prosperity is the result of a liberal culture.  Those are the things conservatives hate all over the world and those are the things liberals must fight to protect. 

August 2005

How Not to Retire

The inspiration for writing this how-not-to instructional essay came to me while I sat on a picnic table outside of the dumbest purchase I’ve made in 65 years, my cursed Volkswagen-powered Winnebago Rialta, listening to Motion City Soundtrack’s “LGFUAD” for the nth time on New Year’s Day 2014. I was cold, frustrated, and stranded and had been all three of those for more than six weeks. If I had imagined retirement would be such unrewarding, complicated, stressful, expensive work, I’d have stuck with my job till I dropped dead from boredom. At work, at least I got paid to be bored. Retirement in an RV is all outgoing cash flow and the only satisfaction I can look forward to is the knowledge that this damn life has a limited warranty. That is, in a nutshell, how not to retire.

For three weeks of our internment in New Mexico, we’ve been doing our best to enjoy the moderate and sunny New Mexico weather. The first three weeks were spent struggling with Albuquerque area “mechanics” and mooching off of friends.  Once we gave up on finding someone who could fix a Volkswagen in Albuquerque and made a desperate dive south for sun and warmth, some of the misery moderated into resignation. The dramatic scenery around Truth or Consequences kept us partially distracted while I struggled with the various incompetent and manufacturer-unsupported power-train problems VW designed into the universally-detested but precisely named “Eurovan.” (Think “Eurotrash” and you’ll know why VW accidentally tagged this heap of junk with a near-truth-in-advertising nickname.)

I handed in my resignation notice and applied for Social Security in July. I spent most of the summer wrapping up my education employment, selling as much of the artifice of my professional audio career as I could find buyers for, and trying to convince my wife that we own way too much junk and should pay someone to empty our house and haul it all to a trash dump. Two out of three ain’t bad, right?

We’ve been on the road since a few days before Halloween and, we enjoyed slightly less than a month where our misnamed “recreational vehicle” served as both transportation and a residence. For the rest of the time, we’ve been living in this thing in the same way hobos live in refrigerator packing cartons or prisoners live in their cells. Our RV is an overweight travel trailer without a hitch or a tow vehicle. The good news is that we managed to limp across eastern New Mexico to Truth or Consequences (TorC), where we have shuffled from Elephant Butte Lake to TorC, trying not to overstay in the park or overspend in town. For the moment, the rolling pile of junk rolls well enough to travel a few miles before self-destructing. That may be as much as can be expected from a German vehicle, based on the comments I’ve heard from New Mexico mechanics regarding all things Hessian. They may be the “Master Race” in their own minds, but the rest of the world rates German vehicles somewhere below cheap Chinese toys.

Being stranded in New Mexico wasn’t our plan. When we laid out our first year of retirement, we imagined ourselves travelling from Minnesota to Texas to California and Oregon through. “Best laid plans” and all that. We planned to completely avoid winter for the first month, but we drove right into a “storm of the century” just west of Dallas. By the time we straggled into Carlsbad, New Mexico, our vehicle had acquired a one-inch layer of ice and our VW’s electronics demonstrated an allergy to moisture and the electronically-controlled transmission developed a “genuine people personality.” From that point on, our recreational vehicle was not that recreational and rarely qualified as a vehicle. Two months later, we’re looking at renting a house or apartment in Truth or Consequences so we can hand our VW over to someone until they can bring it back to life or set it on fire.  This is not what the AAA and ARP travel magazines are talking about when they jabber about the joys of being retired.

However, from conversations we’ve had with other travelers, it turns out that our experience is not unusual. Repeatedly, when we meet other RV-owners, we are regaled with tales of near-bankruptcy, being stranded in awful places, and the trauma of having to abandon the family home (the mobile home, that is) because it died in a place where it was unrepairable. There is no shortage of such places, either. Depending on the vehicle you own, even the most urban locations might be a ghost town when it comes to finding a mechanic who can service a rolling house full of cobbled-together parts and mediocre engineering.

None of this experience comes without emotional costs, either. My wife and I have had next-to-no problems with living in close quarters, but the division of responsibility has been cause for communication breakdown. If yours’ is a typical relationship, where one partner carries 90% of the family responsibilities, and the other is along for the ride, don’t expect that to improve in an RV. Driving an RV is dozens of times more complicated than driving a car and if you are the family driver, you better like driving because you’re going to be doing all of it. If you paid the bills and dealt with “the big problems” when your household was stationary, you are not going to be seeing that division of labor improve on the road. An RV is just a house with the added reliability issues of a vehicle and, usually, the vehicle problems are going to be multiples of what you’re used to from a more purely single-purpose automobile.

The painful fact is that RV’s are second-rate vehicles, at best. Let’s face it, nothing good comes from the territory where most RVs and travel trailers are designed and built; Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, and other seriously economically and socially depressed states. RVs come from the Rust Belt backwoods where there are lots of disposable low-skilled, low-paid temporary laborers, but where no self-respecting manufacturing or design engineer would be caught dead. Nobody goes through four or six years of painful engineering classes thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait to build trailers and motorhomes when I graduate.” This is a career of last resort and only the worst of the worst get stuck with a last resort (Think “nuclear power plant engineers.”)  All of that combines to make the perfect storm of unreliable, low-quality, poorly engineered products.

The little-known-fact about motorhomes, RVs if you will, is that they are nothing more than motorized trailers and, once you’re living in one, you become trailer-trash. By that I mean, you are living in a pile of junk that will need constant maintenance because the morons who design and build this crap think hot glue is the ultimate assembly tool. Everything in your RV will have to be disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled with proper fasteners and adhesives after you have lived in it for less than a year. If you think roving the country in a motorhome is going to be a vacation, you’re clueless. If you are going to stay on the road, you are going to have to be, or become, an expert mechanic, a welder, a mechanic, an electrician, a long-haul trucker, a finish carpenter, and very, very patient. You will probably have to redesign several of your vehicle’s systems, so you need some serious engineering skills or a whole bag full of one-hundred dollar bills.

With that in mind, it’s important to consider how many of any of those skills you are willing to develop and exercise. If you are on the extreme end of the DIY world, it’s probably reasonable to consider poorly supported and unfamiliar power trains from Volkswagen, Mercedes, Renault, and other brands and models that only you will be able to service. If you want to have any hope of getting outside assistance when your vehicle breaks—and it will—you better play it safe and buy something every shade tree mechanic can cobble back together. In the USofA,That means Ford, Dodge, and GM and you better think twice about opting for the diesel offerings even from those car companies because competent diesel mechanics are almost as rare as unicorns.

There is a breed of, mostly retired, people who proudly call themselves “full-timers.” That, in un-obscured English, means “homeless.” These folks live in a variety of RVs, from beat-up old pickup toppers to sixty-foot behemoths lugging more luxury than most mansions, 365 days a year. There is something odd about the “pride in a patch” attitude full timers exhibit. If they lived in trailer courts, many of these people would be embarrassed to describe their homes. Since they hobo across the country, pretending to be “camp hosts” to obtain free campsites and, sometimes fuel and a pittance, they elevate their status to the “full timer” label. Calling them “janitor” would be insulting, but doing janitorial work for sub-minimum wages and the honor of parking in a “camp host” space seems to be some kind of status symbol among the full timers.

The Price of Thankfulness

We have a lot to be thankful for this season. We’re in a home we like, in a town we’ve loved for two decades, with new friends and a close family nearby. Financially, we’re better off than most people our age and who were without any significant kind of inheritance or hand-up from our parents. While I was marveling at our good fortune this morning, some not-so-pleasant memories of how we got here came back to me.

In my 30+ year career in music and manufacturing music equipment, I pretty much broke even, economically. The ten years I burned in medical devices—first with Telectronics in Denver followed by Guidant in Arden Hills—were pretty much the source of our current financial stability. After a move to Indiana to work for Washburn/Soundtech turned to crap, a friend opened the door for me into medical devices. Mostly, I took the job because I’d thought medicine had actually done my father some good when he had a heart attack and several bouts with cancer. In retrospect, I probably misread/misinterpreted that event, too. I jumped into medical devices with both feet and as little head as possible. After a 25 year career in manufacturing and field service, I felt that I had a lot to learn and a lot to give to my new employer. Five years later, Telectronics Pacing Systems was all but dead, due to a series of FDA Class I recalls and stupid management decisions and I was looking for a new employer.

I had, however, learned a lot. I’d been part of teams that studied drug and device clinical trials and helped write Tele’s Implantable Cardio-Defibrillator (ICD) FDA trial and product submission. I’d been tossed into the field to learn how to assist in pacemaker implants as part of a trial-by-fire “training system.” I was included in the Education Department’s line-up of “experts” who trained sales representatives and doctors and nurses on the company’s products. I took a large hit in income to get into a new industry, but my temporary single marital status and Colorado’s cost of living was so far below California’s that I made up for a lifetime of living-on-the-edge in a year. Suddenly, I was a homeowner and had savings. My starting wage at Telectronics was pretty sad, but I made up for it by living cheap and repairing a crap-load of audio gear and selling it until I had a stake for a down-payment on a house.

Five years later, Tele was in shambles but I had a “career,” a substantial salary history in medical devices, and some expertise in Tele’s unusual technology that was marketable. So I marketed it. I hustled myself to several pacemaker/ICD companies and ended up getting a good offer from CPI which was about to become Guidant. There were some glitches; CPI separated from Lilly and the pitched and promised pension vanishing before I arrived was one serious glitch. The company hired me like I was a fairly experienced journeyman AAA pitcher, though. A signing bonus, a generous moving allowance, living quarters assistance, substantial assistance in buying a home in Minnesota, and the kind of income I’d made in California, plus bonuses, minus California's cost of living.

I’ve been poor and I’ve been middle class. My “personal Great Depression years” were long, instructive, and sobering. Anytime I’ve been paid more than minimum wage I’ve assumed that something, sooner or later, will go wrong and I’ll be back on the streets without notice. I may be the most economically conservative person I've ever known. I always assume bad times will quickly follow good, even though that has only occasionally be true for me.

The "something that went wrong" with Guidant was Guidant. The company had a reputation, when it was Minnesota's CPI, of making solid, reliable, long-lasting devices with no flash, a little too much size and weight, and basic features. The new Indianapolis Lilly/Guidant management was—empowered by way of outrageous stock options and bonuses—to drive that staid car over a cliff. They pushed marketing and features over the traditional CPI product and corporate qualities and severed the links between manufacturing, quality control, and product development. I moved departments, a couple of times, and my last assignment—quality assurance engineer—was where I finally realized that nothing I could do would affect any outcome in that homicidal, suicidal, and grossly mismanaged corporation. My last assignment was to decouple a product failure database—that I’d spent two years building from scratch—from component and field failure descriptions. The reason for scrambling my database was to prevent the FDA from easily determining relationships between similar and reoccurring product failures; resulting in investigation and likely product recalls.

The Fortune Magazine article, rating Boston Scientific’s acquisition of Guidant as the “2nd worst deal ever” said this about the company’s misfortune, “Guidant CEO Dollens agreed to postpone his retirement to shepherd the transaction with Johnson & Johnson. But what should have been a victory lap turned into a slog through the swamp. In March of 2005 a 21-year-old student named Joshua Oukrop, who had a Guidant defibrillator implanted in his chest, died of a heart attack while bicycling. The defibrillator short-circuited, failing to release the shock that could have saved his life.

“Guidant had discovered the short-circuiting problem three years earlier and had corrected it in new models. Yet the company never informed doctors that devices already in use carried a small but potentially fatal risk of failure. Oukrop's cardiologist complained to Guidant that it should immediately warn doctors about the short-circuiting problem. With the story about to break in the New York Times, Guidant finally came clean, issuing a recall of the flawed defibrillators in June. ”

As usual, Fortune and the major media got most of the story wrong. That “small . . . risk of failure” was actually pretty substantial in the Ventak Mini I & II devices and the PRIZM I & II “fix” didn’t do much to make Guidant’s later devices better. Guidant’s ICDs failed often and catastrophically, sometimes delivering a fibrillation-inducing shock as the device’s last “act” before battery failure. Every one of those failures crossed my desk and ended up in my database. About the time in early 2000 when I was ordered to de-link those product failures, the database contained just short of 1,000 such failures with an unknown number of related patient injuries and deaths.
(Unknown because no one wanted to know that number.) Not long after I got the order to scramble my database, I had some sort of mental breakdown and lost the ability to read. (No, I’m not kidding. I couldn’t even sort out the text under newspaper pictures. Even sportswriters went beyond my capabilities.) For more than a year, I sat at my desk watching product failure data collect dust in my file cabinet, hoping for one patient-advocate doctor to call and ask “Have you ever seen this before?” Finally, it was obvious to me that I was broken and I went on medical leave for a month; until I terminated my Guidant employment rather than carry on the farce that I could do that work again after I "recovered." If I were to keep doing that work, I would have died in more ways than one.

One of those injured patients was a young woman, a single mother my daughter Holly’s age, who had experienced some sort of cardiac issue that gave her cardiologist an excuse to ablate much of her heart’s electrical system. As a result, she was dependent on the device for her heart rate and had been convinced that the defibrillation feature was also useful. (It rarely is.) She’d experienced one of the Mini I failures (and survived the associated shock) and had received an “under warranty” Mini II as a booby prize. Along with that “warranty replacement” came an additional $100,000+ in debt. The company had added about $20,000 to her debt load, since the Mini II was that much more expensive than her failed Mini I, and the hospital and doctors made up for the rest. She wasn’t really calling to complain, but she was hoping there was something I could do to help her find a way to something more reasonable, debt-wise. We had several conversations, as I collected information on both her product failure and the procedure’s billing history. She was the only patient/medical professional I’d talked to who could verify that the device delivered an unintentional shock before failure.

I called everyone who would talk to me about her medical and financial situation. The doctors didn’t give a shit. The company’s sales rep was downright hostile. The hospital accounting people were clueless. Finally, I lucked into discovering that hospitals sometimes have “patient advocates.” This hospital had one who actually wanted to do her job. We came up with a deal, the hospital would absorb all of the charges except the doctors’ bills if I could get the company do refund the replacement device charges. She went first, so I could use that to shame our accounting/sales assholes into doing the right thing. Finally, Guidant’s bean-counters coughed up the refund. Now, I had an ethical hospital doing the right thing and a let’s-pretend-we’re-humans company doing the right thing, so I went back to the doctors. I got the anesthesiologist to kill his bill and the cardiologist gave back a little of his. That was the best I was going to get, so the $100k bill was down to about $8k. Still way too much for a single mother who’d been kicked in the head with medical problems and expenses, but it seemed pretty good to me at the time.

I called her back and got an older woman on her phone. It was her mother. I explained why I was calling, sort of proud of myself for having done something “good” for the first time in my 10-year medical device career. She listened and said, “Thanks for calling, . . . [she] died last week. She had another heart attack.” Another “heart attack.” From what I knew, the chances were good that her Guidant device had blown itself up and killed her. We talked a little more. I hung up and went home for the day. The next day, I called the sales rep and tried to get him to have the device explanted and sent back for analysis. It had been cremated with her, which happened all the time even though cremating lithium-ion batteries is a really bad idea.

You can’t beat cremation for an evidence destroying procedure, though. The doctors didn’t want to know what had happened, the sales rep sure as hell didn’t care, the company was working hard to be sure its ass was covered, and I felt like I might as well have killed her myself.

Not long after that, I left the industry and wrestled with myself for months before I went back to fixing music equipment and, later, teaching. Every Thanksgiving since, I’ve thought about her and my involvement in her “care.” If you want to know why I dislike and distrust doctors, here’s Reason #1; not one doctor in the hundreds I talked to cared why their patients’ device failed. If they’d have asked, I’d have told them. I have no idea who Joshua Oukrop’s doctor was, but he is the needle in a haystack of careless, selfish, lazy and rich doctors who don’t care about patients any more than corporations like Guidant do. Finding a good (as in “not evil”) cardiologist is harder than finding a moral and honest Republican.

I kept a floppy disk with all of my device failure data until we moved this past year, in hopes that someone might ask for it for the first few years and out of habit after that. Tossing that disk into the trash was almost like a ceremony of resignation. Along with it went my medical device resume and all of the stuff I’d written for that industry over my 10 year career. I wish I could forget it ever happened, especially to me.

The experience broke a few bits of me that will never heal. When my wife and I recognize how lucky we are to be where we are today, in retirement and in our home with friends and family, I can not help but remember what I did to get us here. And who paid for it.

#139 Sexism/Racism Logic (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I've probably written on this subject before.  Look it up.  I don't care if I'm repeating myself.  In present times, there is never enough being said about discrimination and the flawed logic that is applied by the folks who discriminate and believe in a social class system so religiously that they would sacrifice 200+ years of social and economic progress to maintain it. 

This is a subject that is dear and near to my heart.  Both of my children are women and they've experienced more discrimination than they could ever deserve.  Many of my friends are non-white and their experiences tear at my heart and make me ashamed of my country and culture. 

Here's the deal.  If you believe, for example, that white folks are superior to black folks, for example, it's simple to prove or disprove.  If a race is superior, all healthy (non-mentally retarded) examples of that race will be superior to all healthy examples of the inferior race.  Meaning, that every white man will be superior in intellect to every black man.  Any deviation from that rule will disprove the entire argument.  If I can find one black person who is more intelligent, more capable, and more educated than a single white person, the entire racial-superiority argument is defeated.  I think even the dumbest Aryan Nation, KKK cracker will be stuck admitting that there are millions of black men and women who could outwit them and everyone in their family in every test of mental capacity except, possibly, who has memorized the most possum recipes. 

The same test, slightly modified, would apply to sexism.  For example, the statement "women are biologically unfit to be fighter pilots" could easily be put to the test.  Since this is a highly skilled, we hope, technical and physical occupation, the "everyman" test is less applicable.  So, I'll modify it.  Now, what we'll say is if every qualified man is superior to every qualified woman, it's fair to say that women are unfit to be fighter pilots.  To test the premise, you'd need a war.  In peacetime, all kinds of crap ends up in the military.  Criminals, high school dropouts, spoiled little rich kids who want to be "officers," and freaks who can't afford their own weapons filter into the military when a country doesn't need the military.

Once the war gets underway, the "professionals" get killed, run away, or are court-martialed for their usual perverse behavior and are replaced by citizen-soldiers.  That's when the demand for talent overrides the impulse to either be politically correct or to be personally biased.  Or, at least, that's when those impulses should be overridden.   

During that period, women and men, provided with the same training, can establish superiority or equality.  Until then, either position is unsupported by evidence.  Until then, it doesn't matter.  During peacetime, the military is an unnecessary luxury that can experiment in any dumbass behavior that it finds distracting. 

And so it goes. 

I suspect that the most qualified woman will be considerably more qualified than the least qualified man, in just about any technical field and, possibly, any physical activity we can imagine.  I am absolutely convinced that the most intelligent, capable, rational, and inventive black/yellow/red/brown person will possess infinitely more of those traits than the least intelligent, capable, rational, and inventive white man.  Regardless of education or cultural advantages, that proves (to me) that racial stereotypes are useless in evaluating either a race or individual members of that race.  Your mileage may vary, but your evidence is all that interests me.

August 2005

#138 Getting a Close-Up Look (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

When I look at the pitiful state of US politics, it's sometimes hard to understand how we managed to fall so far from the ideals of the "Greatest Generation" or Kennedy's "Great Society" or even my own 60's generation's dreams of a fair and bright future with limitless opportunity for everyone. 

Apparently, I only have to cross the street to get a clear understanding of what went wrong. 
I live in a small suburb of St. Paul.  My house backs up to a tiny "lake" that was cut in half by the Interstate system in the 1970s.  After being partially filled in an attempt to kill the lake entirely, the lake was designated a "watershed" and it's been a dumping ground for street and yard waste ever since.

In 2003, the county watershed folks and the incompetent buffoons from the Department of Natural Resources decided to remove local control of the watershed's average height by installing an oversized drain at the lake's outlet.  Being the lowest of low on the engineering totem pole, civil engineers, they mis-measured the original lake height by more than two feet and turned the lake into a muddy, plant-infested swamp. 

After two years of complaints from residents, they allowed a public meeting to complain about the lake and to propose a resolution.  Not wanting to admit that they couldn't use a level and a tape measure competently, they presented residents with a complicated tale of engineering difficulties that amounted to what we'd all expected; they screwed up a very simple measurement. 

Their "solution" was to allow the lake drain to be raised 12-18" to return the lake to "almost it's original shoreline."  However, that solution could only be accomplished if every one of the lakeshore owners agreed to allow the change; in writing.  They were able to screw up the lake without any consultation, authorization, or checks-and-balances, but they wouldn't fix it unless all the i's were crossed and all the t's were dotted. 

Of course, at least one neighbor was overwhelmed by the power to obstruct and we've been stuck with a mosquito-breeding mudpit for at least one more season.  Like the idiot I am, I decided to find out why anyone would want the lake to remain so low that it was useless for any recreational or scenic purpose.  I got an ear-full of modern American ignorance.  

"The city has been dumping on us since we moved here," was the first justification I got from the female of the house.  Their home is at the bottom of a long, sloping cul-de-sac, and has been since it was built in the 1960s.  When it rains, the water funnels down the slope and ends up in their garage and basement.  No big surprise, water has always done that downhill thing and any idiot would have suspected that a house at the low end of a road might collect some water.  These idiots, apparently, didn't know about water and hills. 

Being true, middle-class, white Americans, they expected "the government" to fix their home's design problem.  When that didn't happen, they became bitter, angry, and stubborn.  Our lake's dilemma was practically an answer to a prayer for them.  Even if it didn't solve their more practical problem, they had found a way to irritate their neighbors. 

Probing further in the mind (to abuse a word massively) of my neighbor and nemeses, I discovered that she had latched on to a sentence that described an alternative, $100,000+ study, process that the county could use to justify raising the lake level.  These fine examples of American citizenry interpreted that to mean that there might be $100,000 available for their completely unrelated problems.  When I tried to explain that this was taxpayers' money that would be wasted on an unnecessary study, the bristled and went into a talk-radio-inspired rant about "the government" and some weird shit that I couldn't connect to our topic in any way. 

In the end, she said that she and her pussy-whipped husband wouldn't allow the lake level to be corrected unless "they [the county] buy our property or guarantee that nothing bad will happen."  From her previous remarks I took that to mean that someone would have to provide her with a written warranty that their lives would be simple, responsibility-free, and profitable.  In other words, she was expecting a handout. 

I've heard a lot about how the Boomer Generation is lazy, selfish, and ignorant, but I've been blessed with mostly associating with the complete opposite examples of my generation.  However, I do everything I can to avoid uneducated conservatives, regardless of generation.  From this little excursion into the mind of a typical American middle-class voter, I am reminded of why no rational, intelligent person would get involved in politics.  The country is over-stuffed with uninformed fools expecting a free ride and they are well represented by the current class of corporate shills and conservative clowns who populate local and national politics.  "We have met the enemy and he is us."

July 2005