The Ones I Knew (Part 1)

There are two groups of people in the news a lot these days, making fools and hazards of themselves and showing the world what a train wreck the Dis-United States has become: cops and Trump-culters. Watching the disaster from the moderate distance of a small town in Minnesota, I can’t help but be reminded of two examples of those two groups I have met and known lately. I think both of those people illustrate what the country is dealing with in every aspect of their natures.

Twenty years ago, I had a part time job working for a public access television station. A lot of the work for the station’s programs was performed by volunteers, of which I was one when I started working there. Some of those volunteers were nerdy high school kids working on pumping up their pre-college resumes with extra credit activities not involving sports or academics. Some of those volunteers had been doing that for at least a decade while their lived in their parents’ basement waiting for their ship to come in. Ted was in the first group. He was a tall, geeky looking, arrogant but awkward kid who had aspirations of going to the UofM in electrical engineering, but was a little too lazy for the demands of higher education. He often took the producer’s chair in some of the high school productions and his main talent seemed to be pretending to be a frustrated perfectionist who would bully the boys and hit on the girls and generally keep the com airways full of mindless noise and pointless criticism.

He was particular fond of the older, obsolete gear in the mobile truck and, occasionally, was helpful to me in figuring out how to jury-rig that gear into surviving a production. So, I got to know him a little. Mostly, I was the truck tech when he was a high school program producer, but later we both worked as truck techs when he was in college. He didn’t quite make it through a full year of engineering classes when he switched to “Law Enforcement’ at a community college. No surprises there. Immediately, he started telling me stories of his ride-alongs with the Ramsey and Hennepin County Sheriffs deputies. Mostly, stories about stopping various minorities and disassembling their vehicles on the freeway looking for “drugs and contraband.” It was obvious that his nerdy bully was really getting let off of its leash with his toy badge and that if he was ever allowed to play with a gun some innocent people were going to suffer.

When Philando Castile was murdered in Falcon Heights, I fully expected Ted to have been involved. The panicky, unskilled, irrational reaction Jeronimo Yanez had to Castile’s explaining that he was carrying a weapon was exactly the kind of scared-chicken reaction I’d expect from Teddy. It would be nice to learn that no police department was desperate or stupid enough to hand Ted a gun and a badge, but I suspect he’s armed and dangerous and out there waiting for his chance to create a disaster.

When we first moved into our retirement home, the place had been furnished with a collection of new, but lowest possible price, appliances by Wells Fargo Bank. The dishwasher didn’t last long, but I hadn’t bought the Maytag extended warranty when it was offered, but when the dishwasher failed a month after the warranty expired, I thought I’d test Maytag’s customer service with an email. I got a call back from Maytag and the customer service person promised a tech would show up and repair the machine under warranty. [Caution: Maytag customer service people make promises they can’t keep.] Wilbur, a local repair contractor showed up in a beat-up van with a scrawled “sign” on the side. It didn’t take him long to point out the fact that the washing machine was out of warranty and to determine the pump was defective (I knew that when I called Maytag.) and to write me a $60 invoice for his time.

After the screwing, Wilbur decided to start proselytizing about the as yet unelected Republican candidate, Donny Trump. His frame of reference was, of course, our last record-setting criminal executive administration; Ronald Reagan. Turned out he was something he called a “mechanical contractor” in southern California during the late-70s and early 80s. He described Reagan’s invasion of Washington, D.C. in terms that were clearly and weirdly religious. He listed a collection of Reagan’s accomplishments that not once touched on reality. It was one of the most insane moments I’ve experienced in Minnesota. Literally, almost everything Wilbur credited to Reagan either occurred under Carter, George H.W. Bush, or Clinton. I was baffled as to how such uninformed passion was created. So, I did some research. Turns out, one of the many promises made by Reagan in exchange for money and support was to construction unions who desperately wanted to avoid having to learn the metric system, since their grip on the US’s SAE mess was already pretty miserable. Reagan dismantled the U.S. Metric Board in 1982: a board created by President Gerald Ford and a national movement that was necessary for the United States to remain competitive in the world of science and industry. For once, Reagan kept his promise to a union, but the cost was enormous to both the US economy and to labor unions.

One of the dumber and self-destructive arguments against metrification was made by labor unions who imagined that switching would make it easier to off-shore manufacturing jobs. Instead, the lack of skilled labor capable of coping with the world’s dominant measurement system forced many companies to off-short their manufacturing facilities. Didn’t think that one out, did you goobers?

So, Wilbur’s dedication to Reagan and, on the rebound, to Trump is and was based on a complete misreading of his own sad economic history. I still don’t know what a “mechanical contractor” is, but in California we used to say “A contractor is an unemployed guy living in a pickup that he keeps moving to avoid the repo man.” I suspect that was Wilbur’s situation in California. The fact is, if you were a white guy who couldn’t make it in the 1980’s southern California federal welfare military-industrial boom, you were either severely injured or totally incompetent. When Wilbur visited our home, he mentioned he’d come “back home to take care of mother,” which is the classic homeless Boomer story when he or she have failed at life and have to move in with a parent to try and glom on to as much inheritance as possible to keep from having to live in a cardboard box.

So, two of my experiences with two of the groups causing so many problems in the Dis-United States are pretty classic: a dysfunctional spoiled white kid with bullying tendencies who wanted to be a cop and an old Trumper who thinks the world owes him a living because he is white. I wish there weren’t so many of those people out there.