I Most Likely Will Back Down (and so will you)

A friend’s comment about Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down” came at an interesting time for me. A few weeks ago, I was describing to some acquaintances how roughly 60-years ago I had decided to quit being a punching bag for every bully in western Kansas who’d flunked one of my father’s math classes. Petty’s song came up in that discussion.

I am a high school math teacher’s oldest kid. Every half-wit who failed one of my father’s tests and classes went hunting for someone to pay back for that insult and I was usually that someone. By the time I was 12 I’d learned how to straighten my own broken nose after some high school bastard had bent it for me. In my 40s, living in Colorado, breathing through my mouth became a problem due to the dry air and I signed up for nasal reconstruction surgery. After the surgery was done, my doc dropped in to the recovery room to see how I was doing and she said, “If I’d known how many times you nose had been broken, I’d have booked the surgical theater for a couple more hours.” I wish she had, too, because a few days later one of her patches hemorrhaged and a lot of her work was ruined by the inflatable Foley catheter that was inserted to stop the bleeding.

When I was somewhere between 16 and 17, I made the personal decision to never be in another “fight.” If I was forced to fight, it would be a war. And the war wouldn’t be over until one of us was dead or completely incapacitated to the point the fight could not ever be restarted. I had been picked on and pounded so many times that I was at the point that I no longer cared if I lived or died during the next assault. I just wanted to know that fight would never occur again and to make it clear that I wouldn’t quit until either I or the other guy was incapacitated. I didn’t mean at that moment, either. I planned on going back repeatedly until there was a final resolution. Picture the Monty Python Black Knight from The Holy Grail as an example of my 60-years-ago decision.

Almost immediately after coming to that decision, I was assaulted by some asshole railroad worker on my way home from work. I had to cross Dodge’s railroad tracks on my way from school or work to where I lived at the time, a trailer in south Dodge. Pretty much every day, I had to put up with some redneck asshole shouting “Is that a boy or a girl?” or worse. This time, I was out of patience and in a bad mood and I shouted back, “Why don’t you find out, asshole?”

An oversized human beach ball dropped down from one of the flat cars and started waddling toward me. He was probably 40-something, about my height and about wide as he was tall. Due to his weight and character, the man stomped toward me as bow-legged as a real cowboy. When he got within punting range, I drop kicked his nuts most of the way to his throat. I left him squealing and writhing on the tracks between north and south Dodge. I never saw him again and never again heard the usual catcalls when I walked home. For the next 30 years, every squabble I was ever in ended without fists or dropkicks. Some were close to violence, but none went that far. But I’m old now and don’t have whatever it was that created that kind of resolve to win or die. Today, I’d likely back down and/or look for an escape route.

In a similar story, my friend Scott Jarrett has been “a musician” his whole life, from 15 to now, when he is 70. His life-long commitment to be a musician at all costs is no longer something he can manage. For some years, he’s complained that his ex-students were getting the gigs he used to almost automatically get. Now, they aren’t even asking him to try out and that is partially because he is no longer all-in-competing for every paying job. It’s not that he doesn’t need the income, he just can’t find whatever motivation that is required to go balls-out trying to win those gigs/fights. Life is competitive and most of the competition is won by the young, simply because they have less to lose and way more resources to commit to winning.

That “Won’t Back Down” thing is only credible as a young man’s declaration. First, as an old fart the odds that I will survive any sort of physical confrontation vanishes rapidly into my ancient history. Which is why it is so funny to watch all of the decrepit Trumpers thump their chubby chests in faux-defiance of “the system” from which they are so dependent. Most of those lilly-white entitled toddlers are as far from being fighters as they are from being intellectuals. Take away their Social Security or disability checks and they are homeless and begging for spare change. But they won’t know who they are until they pass the moment-of-truth when it is too late to turn back.

Work vs Jobs vs Mission

A lot of young people in tech jobs have recently discovered how little loyalty their previous employers held for their employees. As usual, a lot of millennials think they are the first group to experience this horror. Kiddies, you aren’t. I doubt there has ever been a generation who was happily surprised to discover their masters were willing to make sacrifices to keep the minions fed. Modern government jobs are probably the closest thing to that kind of situation, but that is only because in a socialist system everyone in the system shares in the funding of the system. In a public education system pension, for example, if the retired teachers don’t get paid the retired bureaucrats don’t get paid. In business, except the CEO and a few other C’s who will always get their golden parachutes, there is no such thing as “us” or “them”; it’s just “me” and everyone else. When you work for a corporation, it is a gross mistake to imagine “we’re all in this together.” Corporations, by design, are everyman and woman for themselves.

I do have sympathy for all of the young people recently dumped from their “dream jobs.” Been there, done that, and worse. The “worse” was being middle-management and being told to layoff my employees. The firs time in my life I was drunk was when I was in my early 30s, in the late 1970s, and I had just finished the slow painful dissolution of my test engineering department at Valmont Industries. For three months, the company mismanagement kept telling us “this will be the last layoff” and, a week later, we were handed another list of employees to get rid of. For me, this was the first of a fairly long list of engineering jobs but for several of my friends and coworkers it was the end of the brief rise in their career paths. A couple of weeks later, my boss laid me off and, later that day, he was handed his notice.

I had no “mission” at Valmont. It was just a reasonably well-paying job near a reasonable tolerable Nebraska small city where my wife had picked our next house. The economy in Nebraska and all of the country’s agricultural areas was in rapid decline and our small city, Fremont, was especially hard-hit when Valmont laid off 1,600 employees, Campbell Soup closed their canning facility, two packing plants shutdown and moved to non-union states, and the city practically closed down for the duration of the recession (well into the 90s). There was no Reagan “economic miracle” or any other kind of miracle to save us. We managed to “sell” our house for a substantial loss, including giving the “buyers” $5,000 under-the-table for their down-payment. I took another awful tech job in Omaha, which lasted until my new employer asked me to layoff my best employees because the were “overqualified.” I quit, instead, and wrote this song the night I decided to leave that job, “I’m Gonna Quit.”

Over the next 40 years, I went through 11 employers and discovered whatever “mission” my life was going to have in the process. Like soldiers in battle, there is no such thing as patriotism or fealty to king and country, there is only loyalty among peers and “the unit” within the organization. Having any kind of emotional attachment to any larger entity is foolish and in most organizations (using that term loosely) you have to watch your back even around your peers. Functioning teams are a rarity. Most departments are organized around defending management from responsibility and unnecessary (anytime the buck can be passed) effort.

I think mostly by accident, I have been blessed to be part of a half-dozen teams, probably amounting to a total of 15 years out of my 50-year career. The other 35 years were spent earning a living in a “job.” In many ways, I learned more useful lessons in the jobs than in the functioning work situations: sometimes seeing how not to do a job is more valuable than examples of excellence. I believe the key to that whole “mission” thing is to have one for yourself, totally separate and even isolated from your job. I have always advocated “The best time to start looking for a new job is when you start a new job.” Your “career” and your “mission” are to constantly be updating, improving, and fine-tuning your skills and taking care of yourself. Your employer almost certainly holds no loyalty to you other than the expectation that assigned work will be completed as expected. You should also expect fair and reasonable treatment, but you should not be surprised if that ends suddenly, unsentimentally, and without notice. Corporations, contrary to foolish assertions by our Extreme Court, are not people although they may be psychopathic and sociopathic.

Banned by Amazon’s Robocops

April 10, 2023 This past Friday I received an email from Amazon titled “Unusual Reviewing Behavior.” The message inside was, “We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon.  If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email community-help@amazon.com.” If you’re bored enough to follow that “community guidelines” link you’ll discover it is almost as helpful as FEMA under a Republican administration. That description applies to all of the communications I’ve ever seen from Amazon, too. The company is so big that it no longer feels any need to communicate with its customers.

In the past twelve months, I’d received two notices from Amazon’s “bot algorithm” claiming that “You  have repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines (available at http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines) or Conditions of Use ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508088).” There was no indication of where I had “repeatedly” violated anything and since I used to regularly review music, books, and occasional products I was in the dark. I responded to their “community-help” robot with “If you don’t have a system to help identify what you call a violation for users, how do you expect anyone to self-correct?” And that has been the end of our “communications.” Of course, in the lazy-robo-programmer tradition, there was no way for me to identify what review Amazon’s robot was objecting to, so examining what it was that the bot objected to was impossible. . However, as an obvious “libtard” I suspect the actual objection came when some wingnut “reported” one of my book or movie reviews and inappropriate or some other typical snowflake objection.

For a fact, I know that Amazon’s ‘bot wasn’t activated by an excessive number of positive reviews. I almost never give anything a 5-star review and I almost never think anything, product-person-or-organization rates an “excellent” rating. Likewise, I rarely give 1-star ratings. Again, not many things are outright awful. I do review a fair number of books that I’ve checked out of my local libraries through Kindle. So my “verified buyer” numbers do not correlate to my book reviews. But after the first Amazon threat of banning, I have contained my book and movie reviews to the Minneapolis Public Library system.

Amazon is obviously overwhelmed by the outcome of their AI review “analysis” and banishing pogrom. It seems that there should be a substantial backlash to the company’s actions and I suspect there has been. There has been a sudden rash of complaints about this robocop-crap and you’ll find an almost unlimited number of people wondering what is going on at Amazon on diverse sites from the  amazonforum.com to forums.macrumors.com to quora.com to reddit.com to businessinsider.com to Amazon’s own vendors who complain about informative reviews disappearing.

For me, this forced a self-admission that I have been lazy and this has been a wake-up call. A little on-line searching and I found all sorts of substitutes for Amazon’s dismal service including Rakuten.com, Walmart.com, AliExpress.com, and for a few extra pennies I started going direct to some of the vendors I’d bought from through Amazon in the past, especially my subscription services. This wake-up call comes at a pretty interesting time for me, too. Looking back at my last year of Amazon purchases I discovered that I’ve returned about 1/4 of the semi-major purchases I’ve made with the monolith due to defects, obviously previous use, and gross mislabeling either by Amazon or the vendor. Electronics from Amazon is almost consistently a bad bet.I have had far better results with electronics from NewEgg.com. NewEgg's customer service is terrific and the people who do customer reviews on NewEgg are technically competent.

This is an example of damaged or
used stuff Amazon's Chinese vendors
ship to US customers. I had to cancel
payment through my bank to get
Amazon to refund this purchase.

I’d suspect that a lot of Asian vendors are dumping their junk inventory on Amazon under the safe assumption that Americans who are lazy enough to buy online are also too lazy to complain when their purchases are defective or damaged or even “previously owned.” 25% defects is a terrible batting average and a friend who gave up on Amazon a few years ago swears that the stuff he gets from AliExpress is consistently better quality and far cheaper than any similar products coming from Amazon. It makes sense, since almost everything Amazon sells is made in China and the things that aren’t made in China are available directly from those companies. 

Again, why wouldn’t Chinese companies dump their junk through Amazon and sell their good stuff directly through their own outlets? That is how the long, sad history of vanishing American manufacturing has gone since the 70s and, now, we may be seeing the same thing happen to American retail. If I were in their shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. I makes no sense to be building a brand for another country or business. Remember Superscope from the 1960s? I didn't think so. 

Living without Amazon is a lot easier than I suspected. I gave up on Prime a couple of years ago because their video selection was pitiful and I almost never got anything in less than 3-4 days, regardless of their 2-day shipping promise. There are all sorts of articles about ditching Prime: "How to Officially Break Up with Amazon" is a terrific primer on how to wean yourself from Amazon's clickbait. Buying from Amazon is bad for your local economy and the company treats its employees like crap, so everything about Amazon is bad karma. Like dumping Twitter and Facebook, the longer I stay away from Amazon the better I feel about that decision. I think this is going to be a beautiful non-relationship.

CEO Salaries vs Value and Competence

A few weeks ago, I stumbled into a bizarre discussion about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2023 salary “cut” (from $83 million in stock awards, $12 million in incentives and $3 million in salary to $49 million in total compensation for 2023). I argued that it would be impossible for one person to be worth anything near Cook’s 2023 income, let alone the insane compensation he received in 2022. A couple of “CEOs” (“Chief Extortion Officers”) argued that Cook should be compensated based on Apple’s performance (Since “Cook took over as CEO in 2011, Apple stock has returned 1,212% versus 290% for the S&P 500”). One self-described CEO wrote, “When you look at how much his salary is compared to the worth of the company, he's being paid a small % of the worth of the company he's leading and his guidance and decisions are what drives the company and shares.”  Hilarious.  Anyone stupid enough to believe a CEO has ANYTHING at all to do with a company's performance deserves to be beaten to death with a handful of wadded-up preferred stock.  

Cook has been compensated with well over a billion dollars since 2011. I would argue that, mostly, the company’s performance represents how repressed the engineers and designers had been under Jobs’ deranged “leadership” and general megalomania. As for stock value, Apple stock is valued at 10X it’s 2011 price which is impressive but not anything close to exceptional for tech companies during that period. I’ve known and “worked with” (in quotes, because none of the CEOs I know ever did a moment of productive work) a solid dozen CEOs from $20-50M/year to $500,000,000/year corporations and I have yet to see any of them do anything that would positively effect the company’s bottom line.

I am entertained by the idea a CEO’s compensation should be based on the company’s performance or value. It’s pretty obvious that the flotsam and jetsam that bobs to the top in the sewers of corporate politics never make that argument when their companies’ stock tanks. This is just more of the Harvard MBA “pull credit up and push blame down” tactic. If there were a financial connection between CEO performance and income, there would be a bunch of ex-CEOs littering the nation’s homeless camps.

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lines in a Silicon Valley Startup tells a different kind of story about the kind of halfwit who floats to the top of corporate toilet bowls. Assuming you don’t believe that Elizabeth Holmes exerted some kind of magical witchcraft on the susceptible minds of executives from Safeway, Walgreens, the US Army’s General James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, the DeVos family including Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises, Carlos Slim Helú, Larry Ellison and several dozen tech-venture capitalists, a passel of idle rich wannabes, and way too many technical employees who should have known better, it’s pretty obvious that most rich people got that way through luck. Holmes only “qualification” as a biotech entrepreneur was her physical attractiveness and some pretty shaky presentation skills.

50 years ago, I was a young, gullible electronics tech who fell for the promises of an employer who eventually ripped me off for several tens of thousands of dollars. For a couple of years I worked closely with this character, following him to trade shows, county and state fairs, and on-site watching him con all sorts of customers (all rich farmers and ranchers) into equipment they didn’t need and would never figure out how to use. Often, at the fairs, my boss would wander around the other vendor booths and he’d buy the dumbest shit. In the end, I realized that (like most salespeople) he believed his own bullshit and when he heard the same lines from someone else he’d fall for it every time. His main “skill” was being in the right place at the right time with a big pile of cash his father had handed him in hopes that he’d find his idle way in the world.

As I read Bad Blood, I saw my small town boss over and over again. Except now he was wearing handmade Italian suits, driving overpriced Eurotrash cars, and taking meetings where he’d hear presentations from other rich people who didn’t know what they were talking about.  But that wasn’t a problem for him because he never knew what he was talking about, either. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed out of the hands of these rich farmboys (and girls) into the hands of a couple of con artists pretending to be sophisticated biotech engineers. Worse, they weren’t even doing a good job of pretending to be engineers or biologists.

George Santos is another example of how easily the so-called “sophisticated” crowd can be fooled. It wasn’t just the usual bimbo Republicans who fell for that bumbling con artist. The so-called, self-styled sophisticates of New York’s Long Island were easily duped by a dude who couldn’t sell watches in a Midwestern shopping mall. So if you are intelligent enough to realize that you were conned by Ronnie Reagan, G.W. Bush & Co, or Maralardo, don’t feel bad. You’re in the “good” company of the nation’s oldest, richest, and most educated “talent.”

An un-surprising postscript about the Theranos scam is that neither Holmes or her chubby Indian co-conspirator, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, have spent a day in jail, as yet. Supposedly, Holmes will surrender to prison authorities sometime in April for an 11 year sentence. In the meantime, she’s puking out her 2nd baby and living the high life at her $135 million Silicon Valley estate. She supposedly married William "Billy" Evans, an idle rich heir to the Evans Hotel Group, and they’ve spawned two pups. She used her 2nd spawning to put off her trip to prison after she and Evans failed to pull off a one-way trip to Mexico before sentencing.

Republicans–The Cult of the Unremarkable Boys

In an excellent Atlantic Magazine article titled “The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men," lays out a pretty good description of the kind of sour-grapes losers who have been overpopulating the planet and coalesced around the Republican Party since Goldwater was electorally slaughtered by L.B.J. The Karl Roves, Fox Views talking-heads, Dick Cheneys, Rush Limbaughs, Jerry Falwells, Jack Kemps, and Oliver Norths grew up to become the spoiled boys’ elder-faux-statesmen. Those angry old men spawned the current crop of non-achieving boys who chant “you won’t replace us” at least 25 years after their ilk was replaced by everything from educated working women and immigrants to robots to ditch-digging and farm equipment. There has never been much of a need for excess quantities of Y-chromosomes but the over-populated, high-technological world of today has less need of cannon fodder than ever before in human history. And cannon fodder is all this kind of male (and some females and female impersonators, Marjorie Taylor Greene for example) are capable of being at the "best." Anyone dumb enough to think a mask is supposed to be worn like a gag is clearly on the far left side of the IQ distribution curve.

If these uneducated, unskilled goobers aren’t being mindlessly thrown at an opposing hoard of equally useless characters they are causing destruction, instability, and pointless violence against people who do have a purpose. Of course, they don’t need and shouldn’t have anything more dangerous than sharp weapons and a flag to wave as they mow each other down. This pack of mommas’-basement-dwelling goobers are littering up the landscape and causing infinitely more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

Sadly for the country and, likely, the world, these spoiled children found their leader in an equally childish Toddler-in-Chief Trump and he has become the role model for losers, whiners, failures, and angry children everywhere. It’s hard to see a way back from this over-population derivative without some serious assistance from nature or an engineered pandemic and the goober-resistance to medical and scientific advice. Their infestation is beyond politics and rational behavior is just wishful thinking.

STP–The Canaries in the Coal Mine

Back in 2014, when we first moved to Red Wing, we joined the local YMCA. It’s a fairly nice facility for a small town and it seemed to be welcoming. That was typical of my experience with Minnesota Twin Cities (YMCA of the North) organizations. I had been a downtown St. Paul YMCA member, transferred to the Roseville facility, since we moved to Minnesota in 1996 and, as of 2013, my Medicare health insurance Silver Sneakers benefit began to pay for my membership. So, it seemed logical to transfer my membership to my new residence. The paperwork went smoothly and in late November we began to enjoy our new facility . . . for about a month. In late December, the Red Wing YMCA quietly announced (louder for those of us who were effected) that it would no longer accept Silver Sneakers payments and even acknowledged that it was the only YMCA in the state to make that move.

At least in our situation, the only real benefit to the Red Wing YMCA was the swimming pool. We have a small gym in our basement, complete with an excellent treadmill, stationary bicycle, weights, and resistance bands. We have no reason to leave our home for those things, which I discovered by transferring my Silver Sneakers membership to the local Anytime Fitness where I used it a couple of times and let it lapse.

For a bit, I attempted to carry on a dialog with the Y’s management (Tom Burke, Martha Harris, and Mike Melstad) and a member of the board (Barb Haley) who all claimed to have a solid, demonstrable financial reason for the Silver Sneakers decision, but were all completely unable or unwilling to produce any of it. I suspect when they learned I have a background in manufacturing accounting, ROI justification, and quality management they decided to keep their “secret calculations” secret. I was supposed to believe they’d done a thorough financial analysis which had provided justification for their decision. I am rarely inclined to trust any kind of management decision logic, based on my long history with incompetent, lazy, uninformed, overpaid, and mostly-useless management types.

This past December, the Red Wing YMCA management decided to re-evaluate and reverse their Silver Sneakers decision. They were pretty quiet about it, but I lucked into the inspiration to ask on January 1, 2023 and discovered they’d be allowing Silver Sneakers compensation starting the next day. While I was either getting registered, watching my wife get re-enrolled, or watching a half-dozen other old farts get signed up under the new policy, I heard the same pool-schedule spiel fed to each of us: the best time to swim and to avoid crowds was between 2PM and 4PM. So, I’ve been taking advantage of my new membership fairly regularly for the last 3 weeks. Yesterday, I showed for for my routine and discovered, thanks to a tiny sign printed on the door to the pool (after changing and showering) that the pool hours would be limited 4:15 to 8:30PM. I wasn’t the only surprised bait-and-switch victim, as there were two other new members in the dressing room who were at least as pissed as me.

I thought about bitching about yet another snow-job experience from the Red Wing YMCA, but I decided it is no longer worth it to me. Mrs. Day and I have been discussing the pros and cons of staying in Red Wing and Minnesota for the last couple of winters and I’m just going to put the local YMCA in the “cons” category and let someone else worry about it. “Fixing” systems, organizations, and processes was my career for 50+ years. I’m retired and don’t care enough to fix much of anything now.

This all reminded me of a conversation I had with the Washburn quality manager in 1991, during my 30-day moment of unhappy employment with that company. I wrote about this in a 2015 essay titled “Quality in A Disposable World” after a similar conversation with a Red Wing Southeast Technical College instructor. In that essay, I wrote, “Like a lot of small business people, my instructor was under the delusion that customers will naturally complain if they are disappointed with service or product quality. Many larger companies are equally happy to pretend that they are getting 100% ‘compliance’ from dissatisfied customers. The fact is that most customers simply log their dissatisfaction and tell themselves they will remember to never buy that particular company’s product or service again. Most company executives are perfectly happy with that outcome.”

The Washburn service manager explained to me that the company’s complaints system dealt with customers fairly ruthlessly (efficiently?). He said, “the company shipped product with a known 50% defect rate, based off of the internal random inspection data from a few years back (Since they quit inspections after a few months, product quality had probably gotten worse.). From a suspected 50% defect rate, about 1% of the company’s customers complained, expecting some sort of warranty response. If they stonewalled that first complaint, about 1% of the first 1% would come back for more abuse. No special inspection was done for warranty replacement instruments, so at least 50% of the replacements were also defective out-of-the-box. According to the manager, that 1%-of-1% routine applied to warranty replacement complaints.” So, with a known 50% defect rate, Washburn only provided some kind of warranty service (the first time) on 0.5% of shipped product.

In a similar vein, someone who was once involved in Red Wing’s city management explained how the city’s civil service bureaucracy blew off citizen comments and complaints with an acronym, "STP = same three people.”  The arrogant, simple-minded idea was that the few members of the public who contested or complained about the top-down city management decisions could be dismissed with this delusion. Red Wing is a very small town, 16,000 people and steadily shrinking (especially in average incomes), with a huge budget and a voracious appetite for insane growth through mindless annexation (41.41 square miles, so far). Minneapolis, with 425,000 residents, is contained in 57.51 square miles. Red Wing city management also has an outsized view of the “value” of city employees, based solely on what the city employees can get away with (often by ignoring the STP). Xcel’s Prairie Island Power Plants are the city’s main property tax contributor and those plants are likely to be phased out in the next decade. Eventually, that unrestrained spending will result in exorbitant local taxes and a rapid Atlantic City-style evacuation of the area by everyone who can afford to take a loss to find a more secure place to live. (Remember the rule, the first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim.)

Like the Washburn quality manager and the Red Wing YMCA management, the Red Wing city bureaucrats labor under the delusion that the 3 or 4 citizens who regularly comment and/or complain about the city’s services, expenses, or decisions only represent themselves. In fact, that small group is very likely representative of at least half of the local residents. They are consistently the “canaries in the coal mine.” The poor treatment they receive from the bureaucrats likely keeps the rest of the locals from voicing their opinions, until they vote with their feet and give up on the city. Red Wing’s growth has been anemic, at best, for the entire 163 year life of the city, falling far behind the national population growth and that of the state’s major cities. That failure isn’t for lack of natural resources,opportunity, or even representation in state and federal government.

Going Outdoors

A few day ago I disposed of some of my 50-year-old camping gear (all still in excellent condition, if well-worn) as a gift to a friend. While we were sorting through the gear he asked, “When did you start camping?”

The answer depends on what you call “camping.”

His definition was “Sleeping outside, overnight, in a tent or on the ground.”

That would be my answer, too, but that puts my solo camping age at about 13. My parents were fairly fundamentalist Methodists and insisted that their motley hoard of kids and step-kids to go church every Sunday for a minimum of 3 painful, pointless, irrational hours. I was functionally an atheist from about 9 on, after my mother died painfully and terribly from liver cancer at 34. I particularly disliked my parents’ church because the members were absolutely cynical about the contradiction between the “money-changers in the temple” and the cars, appliances, houses, and other crap that was being bought-and-sold before,during, and after the services. Kansas Christians are, at best, a confusing lot.

Not long after my family moved to a new development in the north end of town (the far north at the time), I discovered that the two “adults” in our family were what I would later learn are “classic Republicans.” They had, literally, no sense of proportion; especially when it came to punishment. From being beaten to being grounded to losing various privileges (of which there were few-to-none), the punishment was pretty much uniform relative to the crime. Leave a sock on the laundry room floor, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Skip school for a day, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Run away to Kansas City for a long weekend to watch jazz bands on 13th Street until the cops caught me, called my parents, and put me on a bus back home,get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. I learned fairly early, might as well go big if I’m going at all.

There were a collection of the remnants of abandoned and demolished buildings, from the Saint Mary of the Plains College that was destroyed by a tornado in 1942, across the highway from our development. One side of the highway was a bunch of middle class houses and the other was a field with some scrubby cottonwoods and lots of weeds and a scattering of exposed basements from whatever building was there before a tornado ripped it down to ground level. Once I discovered those hiding places, it was only a matter of time before I decided to risk the uniform-punishment-treatment for a peaceful evening and a day without religious nonsense. My room was in the basement and I could easily scramble out my bedroom window late Saturday night, shut the window from the outside, sneak into the garage and snag my Boy Scout sleeping bag, my binoculars, a flashlight, and a canvas tarp/ground cloth, and run down the street and across the highway where I hopped the fence and headed for one of the basements that I’d previously made ready for habitation. Earlier in the week, I’d scavenged a short wooden ladder and an end table from a neighbor’s trash and a bunch of candles from our garage and had set out a pile of comic books for entertainment.

I’d spend the night reading comics until I fell asleep in my bag. The sun or cold would wake me up in the morning and I’d watch the street in front of our house until the family station wagon rolled out of the driveway and headed south to church. After a safe margin of time, I’d sneak back home, put away my gear, have breakfast, mess around for a couple of hours, and go to bed and pretend to be asleep when the crowd came home. When one of the “adults” wandered down to look in my room, I’d get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. Sometimes there would be an additional chore added to my long list of tasks. No matter what the punishment, it was never as bad as going to church would have been. Over the years it turned into a game, but I could usually outwait my father; and my step-mother didn’t really care if I ever came back. Eventually, they gave up, allowing me to stay home if I cooked Sunday dinner; usually fried chicken.

The summer I turned 15, I had found a farm job that gave me a whole summer’s cover and a place to stay for the first few weeks of spring. I’d be at the farm for winter wheat harvest and spring planting and guys from the band I was in could come by around mid-May and pick me up for the summer’s tour. During my senior high school year, I stayed in a collection of places from my step-grandparents’ basement to the 20’ trailer I rented when I was working road construction, to a lean-to I built about 5 miles west of Dodge on the Arkansas River. Being underage, I was occasionally hauled back to my father’s home by the cops, but I wandered off fairly quickly and found a new place to hide out during the brief hours the cops would bother looking for me. After my senior year, everyone quit worrying about me and I was on my own from then on.

“You can fix it.”

This morning in a conversation with an old friend, he brought up a question, “How many people do you think affected through your life?” L.A. “Arnold” Stevenson¹ was my first real employer and, probably, a mentor of sorts. He would have hated that label and I’m not particularly fond of it. Before Arnold, I had held several jobs from age 13 to 23, but my employers and bosses made no more of a mark on me than would have assorted drunks I might have met in a bar. Most of the people I worked for, before Arnold, knew no more about the organizations (loosely using that word) they led (laughably using that word) than anyone on the street at any given moment. Not only would I have not considered them mentors, they were mostly just obstacles to be gotten around in the process of doing my various jobs.

After about 5 months in a mediocre Dodge City Community College technology program, I realized that the instructor was out of things to teach me and, supposedly, there were 1 1/2 more years of classes that I needed to take for my associates degree. About the time I came to that realization, my wife announced that she was unexpectedly (to me) pregnant. She’d been listening to an unholy collection of Kansas idiot-relatives, both on her side and mine, and decided that having a baby would solve the problem of having to make adult decisions about what to do with her life. Of course, since someone had to take up that slack my own adult decision process went into overdrive.

I’d been working as a part-time electronics technician for a small manufacturing company in Dodge while I went to school and as soon as that employer discovered that I was sending resumes to competitors they offered me a slight salary bump and a large increase in responsibility and increase in hours. While I’d only been at that job for a few months, I was already the department’s “expert,” which was scary on multiple levels. The first level would be that I didn’t know squat about much of anything. I ignored that offer as long as possible and, eventually, my resume landed on the desk of the manager at Oswalt Industries in Hereford, Texas. He passed it on to Arnold, who was running the division’s electronic scales department and who was looking for a technician to handle the office and shop duties while he performed the field service responsibilities. After a brief interview, I was hired and we spent a day locating a place to live and went back home to gather our meager belongings, quit my job, say “goodbye” to our relatives and friends, rent a small U-Haul van, and move ourselves to Texas. I was barely 23 years old and had been on my own for 8 years and the sole support of our family-of-two for 4 years. And life was about to become incredibly complicated.

For starters, while my new employer had made a big deal out of their benefits, including health insurance, they didn’t bother to point out the fact that my wife’s pregnancy was “a pre-existing condition” that wouldn’t be covered. That would be a several-thousand dollar debt which I’d be paying off with my $2.35/hour salary; which meant a short work-week would be at least 60 hours and more often 80 to 90. Secondly, while I was a “star” with my previous employer I was a rank beginner with Arnold. About a week into my new job, he told me, “If I’d have known how little you knew when I hired you, I’d have never hired you.” I really didn’t know much, either. My previous employer had no service information for the products I’d been repairing and installing. I’d made one attempt to convince our prime supplier that I needed schematics and calibration information which had gotten me a reprimand from both my employer and the supplier’s CEOs. Arnold, on the other hand, had everything I’d asked for and a lot more for every electronic device we serviced. I’d hand-traced schematics for most of the circuit boards and while my drawings were better than nothing, they weren’t absolutely correct and some of my troubleshooting assumptions were wrong as a result. After a rough start, during which I expected to be fired practically every time Arnold came near me, I began to be useful and even got a small raise.

Once he decided that I wouldn’t be a waste of his time, Arnold became a constant education. His mantra was something like “Anything any engineer can design, I can improve on.” `That applied to everything from the components we used in circuit repair work to the processes we used in rebuilding electro-mechanical devices to the cable and wire routing on the equipment we installed and repaired. Arnold got his electronics training in the 1950s Air Force, where state-of-the-art electronics met mission-critical applications and at least one technician, Arnold, who never wanted a pilot to die because of something Arnold could have prevented. My on-the-job training with Arnold ended after about a year, because our idiot division manager had made Arnold’s life miserable by scheduling him in several places at the same time, often hundreds of miles apart, and by cluelessly undermining his decisions and authority. Arnold quit and started his own business and after a short pause, hired me to do his in-house repairs in my spare time. Almost immediately, my “spare time” began to produce a lot more income than my day-job. I started to avoid the telephone on weekends, so I could concentrate on the work Arnold gave me instead of the low paid work from my “real job.”

On occasion, I’d even do a field job with Arnold, even taking fake “sick days” to free up the time. One of those occasions was when he got a call from one of his customers to look at a newly installed “automated elevator system.” The system came from one of our worst vendors, C-G Systems (Colton, CA), who had installed a complicated half-analog/half-digital system that was intended to monitor, weigh, and deliver premixed cattle feed to feed trucks. Literally, none of the system worked when the C-G engineers packed up and left in the night, abandoning the feedlot owner with a million dollar non-functional system. Arnold brought me along for a walk-through of the new, deader-than-a-doornail facility and he immediately started identifying sections that he thought could be brought to life fairly quickly. This was 1972, when the most advanced digital “technology” available was TTL in 14 and 16-pin DIP packages and A-to-D circuits came from a very few, very expensive manufacturers. Neither Arnold or I had ever worked on digital logic to that moment. So, we took a bunch of notes and went home to do research. We both bought Don Lancaster’s TTL Cookbook, The RTL Cookbook, and Walt Jung’s National Semiconductor Applications books. And we spent a couple of weeks reading and experimenting with these circuits. Then, we went back and, section-by-section, we brought most of that system to life. There were areas that wouldn’t be practical or possible for at least another decade, but the grain mill could at least move grain, measure it, and deliver it by conveyor to the trucks.

Hereford, Texas was a tornado magnet and when the city got clobbered by tornado just past midnight on April 19, 1971, Arnold decided his family needed a tornado shelter. (The edge of the tornado passed by the house I was renting by less than 150’ and we slept through it.) So, Arnold grabbed a shovel and dug the outline of the foundation and walls a couple of days later. He and I dug holes for the walls and he lined those holes with plywood frame work and poured the concrete himself. Then, he rented a backhoe and dug out the basement, poured the floor, reused the wall plywood as a frame for the ceiling which he braced massively, and poured the ceiling and buried the structure. Over the rest of the spring, he finished that new basement/storm shelter into a terrific family entertainment room with food and water storage. Throughout the construction, the city inspectors harassed him for not using “approved” contractors. Every time they tried to ding him for a code violation, he demonstrated that he’d exceeded code by a wife margin and they backed off, pouting all the way.

Texas was never going to be a place where I’d be happy and even less so for my wife. Before our 2nd daughter was born, I’d started looking for a way out of that armpit, only a few miles from Dalhart, Texas where the “Willie and Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin once told a Rolling Stone reporter “If they ever give the world an enema — Dalhart is where they’ll put the tube.” Bill was wrong, Dalhart was much nicer than Hereford and Dalhart had a tiny fraction of the multiple sorts of pollution that Hereford generated. Arnold went above and beyond to help me relocate. First, he strongly recommended that I start my own business, like his, in Guymon, OK. We wanted to go further from Texas than that, so he put in several good words for me with a large equipment dealer in Central City, NE and that was the job I took. As part of that research we did for the grain mill, I had started working on a small mobile electronic scale of my own design and Arnold connected me to a friend of his in Garden City, KS who was running a larger scales servicing business and a small manufacturing operation. It took me a few more years to finish the design and when I did I handed it off to Arnold’s connection who produced it for a few years. A few years later, that resulted in a life-saving large royalty check at a critical time in my unemployed life and career.

I learned countless things from working with Arnold Stevenson. I owe him my career and, likely, the best parts of my life. From early on in my experience with Arnold, I started looking at every piece of electronic equipment as something that was probably designed by half-hearted, mediocre engineers and that could be improved along with being repaired. I learned that doing a job as well as possible was its own reward. I learned that just having a job isn’t enough; financially, personally, and security-wise. I learned that as soon as I got a job, I should be looking for the next one and getting myself ready to be able to do that next job. I learned that management is more often than not, useless and incompetent. I learned to depend on myself for education, training, security, and to always be looking to be ready for what comes next. I learned to collect educational resources from any place I find them and to assume that any education I get that is worthwhile is going to come from my own effort; often without any school’s assistances and totally from my own research and study.

Arnold died in 2006, back in Hereford after some time in his hometown of Garden City. When I passed through Hereford on my way to California, Arnold was in Garden City and I missed seeing him. The next time I was in Hereford was 2014 and too late. It is possible that I had talked to Arnold once or twice since we left Hereford. I know I certainly thought of him thousands of times between 1973 and . . . now and beyond. Anyone who has gone through a massive change in perspective, ability, experience, and insight has to owe several people for all of that. In many important ways, I think Arnold had more effect on my life than did my father. As a result of working with Arnold, I rewrote practically every life-lesson I’d absorbed between birth and age 26 when I left Texas. I had a lot more lessons to learn, but all of them were built on the 3 years I worked with L.A. Stevenson.

¹ L.A. "Arnold' Stevenson Garden City Telegram, The (KS) January 20, 2006

Feeding the Bears for Centuries

One of faux-conservatives’ favorite analogies and war-chants is the idea that “feeding the bears” and welfare are some sort of population drivers, while (of course) pretending to be pro-life and anti-abortion. Since faux-conservatism is rampant in rural areas, it’s a pretty funny “pot calling the kettle black” comparison.

Rural areas have been intentionally overrepresented, propped-up and subsidized by urban welfare, and have whined about being the underdogs while getting far more resources and support than their economic or social contributions deserve since the founding of this nation (propped up on the back of low population, rural state slavery). In the vein of :”it takes one to know one,” I suspect there is a sliver of self-knowledge behind this argument being made by people who absolutely can not take care of themselves and consistently have larger families that they can’t support than urban averages. Rural people are consistently easier to fool, which makes tossing them a few bones occasionally outrageously profitable.

The Dunning-Kruger arrogance of this bunch of ignorant rubes is always stunning. Without even basic the most simple K-12 science and mathematics to support their goober-beliefs, they will loudly and proudly argue against scientific consensus about man-made global warming, disease and epidemic management, the solar system and universe, evolution and biology, psychology and neurology, and, of course, even the freaklin’ shape of the planet.

The solution, eventually, will likely be the urban economic centers simply cutting off the money flow to rural areas. As populations continue to move toward urban areas, that will become increasingly easier. At any point in the past 100 years, it would have been painlessly easy to simply convert states like the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and most of the southeast back into territories without federal representation. Their only threat would be to withhold paying federal taxes which would immediately be countered with zero’ing out federal payments and investments in those territories. The same could be done inside larger population states with equally dependent rural areas. Personally, I think this is more likely than the splitting of the nation into several smaller nations, but either way rural areas will quickly discover what it’s like to be “a dependent population unable to take care of themselves.”

 

Tortured Beyond Death

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

The music therapist only knew this patient from visits to entertain his wife when she was in hospice the previous year. The man’s wife died, after suffering terribly from cancer, and her last weeks were in a drugged coma to either alleviate her suffering or, at least, make it seem like she was suffering less to the husband, their family and friends, and the caretakers. The therapist sang Christmas songs for the wife and the man abruptly left the room after providing the therapist with a list of songs he thought his wife might enjoy. She died early that year, right after the New Year, and their house was inconspicuously decorated with memorabilia from their lives, pictures of two kids and three grandkids, and some art on the walls and shelves the therapist knew, from earlier visits, had been created by the wife.

The therapist was a retired school music teacher making extra money entertaining, or distracting, hospice patients. She had been at this job, part-time, for almost a decade. It was often draining work, but she felt like she was still making some kind of useful contribution singing and playing piano for people in their last days of life. The therapist looked like a retired public school music teacher, too. She was short, plain which was made more obvious by her black framed glasses, the fact that she was a little overweight, her short bangs were obviously died a dark auburn, and her voice was Midwestern mousy and a little nasal. If you noticed her in a crowd, you would think “middle-aged grade school music teacher from the Midwest.”

When it happened, the stroke hit him like a ton of bricks. One minute he was emptying out an unused room in his house and the next he was paralyzed in the back of an emergency vehicle, sirens blaring and a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. He had been wearing a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) dog tag for several years and had a very specific DNR order in place with his physician. The EMTs ignored it, hit him with their damn defibrillator paddles, after several attempts they shocked his heart back into rhythm, slapped an oxygen mask on him, and jacked some kind of drug into his chest with a long needle that hurt like hell but hurt a lot more when the stimulant hit his system. Now, a month later nothing worked but his sight, hearing, and bits of his brain. He wasn’t breathing on his own, a respirator did that for him on a regular interval. An EEG saw lots of brain activity, but little-to-none of that resulted in physical movement or apparent awareness to outside observers.

That day the husband had become the music therapist’s patient.  The patient was in his middle-70s, he had a long grey ponytail and a neatly trimmed beard.  His wardrobe appeared to be 80s grunge, or just Midwestern working class, with a closet full of worn-out jeans and plaid flannel shirts. The therapist noticed an electric guitar on the wall in a sun room and assumed it was owned by her current patient. There was no stereo system in the house, no records or CDs in the living room or bedroom, The bedroom clock radio was tuned to NPR. She looked at the man, his home, and that Gibson SG hanging on the wall and was convinced she knew what to play for him.

The therapist set up her electronic keyboard, opened up a music program on her tablet, and selected what she believed would be the perfect setlist for this client. The first chords tentatively rang out and she began to sing, “Michelle, my belle. These are words that go together well. . . “

He couldn’t smell anything but the inside of the damn respirator. For some damn reason, they had him flat on his back so all he could see was the bedroom ceiling. His eyes would focus, but he couldn’t control their movement. If someone closed them, it would take hours for them to autonomically open again. No matter how much he wanted to see what was happening it was not under his control. He could feel his feet and hands, they stung like they’d been severely burned, but he couldn’t move anything. But he heard everything they all said, even when they stepped out of the bedroom to congregate in the living room and talk about his condition and care.

“No, fuck no. Not the goddamn Beatles! Torture me with anything but those simpering British Backstreet Boys and their underdeveloped teenage drivel.” He beamed hate at the music therapist and the song with which she was torturing him, but all that anger was absorbed before it left his head. If you knew him well, you might have been able to decipher the intense hatred he was trying to aim at the source of the music he despised so much. His daughters had been visiting earlier that day, but they had gone back to their homes and families. Everyone who had known him knew how much he hated the Beatles and almost everything that spawned from the 60s and 70s “British Invasion.” No one who had known him was in the house, so there was no rescue forthcoming from any direction.

The dreaded “Michelle” ended and in the blessed silence he heard the therapist humming another Lennon and McCartney dirge. She was obviously cuing up another three minute torture for his listening agony. He scrolled through the possibilities and kept coming back to the obvious follow-up to the first musical abortion, “Yesterday.”  And almost the moment he had tried to square himself up for that misbegotten piece of McCartney’s foul mind, it began; “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. . . “  Followed by the nauseating, sappy timbre of a vibes patch from the keyboard and that clichéd descending chord progression.

No good memories were generated by Beatles’ music. His days as a musician, years ago, was occupied with soul or rock or fusion and the soulless, plodding and predictable Beatles were the antithesis of any of that. He couldn’t plug his ears, but he could try to distract himself by cataloging the Beatles’ songs that he hated: #1 on the hate parade was the dreaded “Let It Be,” #2 “Good Day Sunshine,” #3 “Blackbird,” and the list went on almost including every record the British bubblegum band ever made. The mind is a powerful thing and by the time he’d recalled every hated song the Pimps of Pop had recorded, the therapist was packing up her equipment. He had, somehow, managed to block out the noise with distain and bad memories of mediocre music.

As the therapist was about to exit with her equipment, one of his friends arrived to take a turn by the bedside. He asked, “How is he today?”

She replied, “About the same. That angry look never left his face. I played a few Beatles songs and he seemed to relax a bit.”

The friend grimaced, “I doubt that. He hates that shit.” As he spoke, the man sat a small portable speaker on the table next to his friend’s bedside and tapped on his phone for a moment. “I try to put together a playlist for him once a week and leave the speaker here for the hospice folks. Someone knocked the speaker off of the table last week and I had to buy a new one.”

The therapist wasn’t very familiar with jazz, but she recognized “A NIght in Tunisia” when she heard it, although the song was being played on acoustic guitar the introduction was unmistakable.

“Next time, you might try some or some Miles, Brubeck, Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, or Marvin Gaye, Dr. John, Steely Dan, or even Alicia Keys or Dave Mathews or John Mayer. Anything but 60s Brit crap. You might get a smile out of him, if there’s still one in there.”

She was surprised and a little angry at being told how to do her job. Then she noticed that her patient was, in fact, smiling, his previously angry face was relaxed, and his eyes were closed.

Putin’s Patience

There have been thousands of confusing things about the political alliances of the past 40 years: #1 has to be the close friendship between Republicans and their supposed arch-enemy the Russians. 80-years of pretending to hate communism and socialism (except when it can be used to shore-up stupid decisions by their 1% masters) and suddenly the craziest, far-rightest (and wrong-est) Republicans like batshit insane Russian spokeswhacko Liar Tuck, Margie Taylor Greene, Humpty Trumpy, and the rest of the MAGAt clown car practically worship Putin and his totalitarian style of “government” to the point that they repeatedly wish out-loud and in public that the US was more like Russia. Their political position, apparently, represents the minority of Americans but the majority of Repuglicans: “The level of support among Republicans for the US giving military aid has also declined: 55% were found to be in favor compared to 68% in July and 80% in March. Similarly, 50% of Republicans backed the US giving economic assistance, down from 64% in July and 74% in March.” [2022-12-20 Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll]

Putin isn’t known for putting up with either failure or dissention. In his rage at the incompetence of his overpaid, low-skill military and the Ukraine invasion “plans” that so obviously were drawn up in crayon by demented children, Putin is lashing out in lots of directions, including purging members of the Party’s in-house media. In the past, Putin has shown little restraint when it came to wiping out his past associates, including his billionaire buddies who either failed to properly support his insanity or just pissed him off for random reasons.

Which brings me to my point. After the millions invested in getting Donny Trump elected in 2016 and even more wasted on the 2020 election, why is Vladimir being so patient with his useful idiot and the rest of that rat pack of MAGA morons today? You’d think, after ruthlessly running Russia for more than 20 years with the kinds of jackbooted brutal tactics he’s so well known for, why is Vlad being so patient with his Repuglican nitwits? The man is clearly on his way out, even his US spokes-idiots at FOX know he is about to bail. The boy is either going to be locked up or will make a run to retire in South America, Trotsky-style, according to an assortment of Russian insiders. [That last option and reference is ironic, since Trotsky was a Ukraine-born Russian Revolution democratic-socialist founder whose parents were Russian-Jewish.]

You’d think, while he still has the tools available, he’d take out at least a little of his frustration on the MAGA idiots who screwed up so badly that they cost Putin the 2020 election and, as a result, the Ukraine invasion. Let’s face the facts, if Trump hadn’t been such a fuckup, the odds are pretty good that he could have at least beaten Biden in the anti-democratic Electoral Congress. If the pack of NewsMax/Fox goobers and the other Republican nutjobs hadn’t gone so far into Crazyville that they turned off the never-Trumpers so badly they either didn’t vote in 2020 or actually voted for Biden, Putin would have had help in invading Ukraine. Trump and his fascist MAGAts would have (and are) cheered the invasion and relished the downfall of a democratically elected government in eastern Europe. They might have even provided Russia with military and financial assistance in the invasion. Why isn’t Putin at least a little pissed out that? Based on his history, you’d think Donny would have fallen out of a hospital upper floor window, fallen out of a luxury private ship and drowned, hung themselves or committed some other suspicious suicide, or been overdosed or mugged and knifed in a Florida alley. Why is Vlad so tolerant of idiot Repuglicans and so pissed off at his fellow Russians who had a lot less to do with Russia’s failure in Ukraine?

Missin’ This?

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 “You think I’ll miss all this?” He pointed out the window of his Fitzsimons General Hospital room. It wasn’t much of a window, but it wasn’t much of a room, either: white tiled, white ceiling tiles, even a white metal door and just enough space for his hospital bed, some medical equipment and two friends to sit in folding chairs near the bed. His window looked over a parking lot across miles of Denver rooftops to the west, but most days the view of the mountains was right there, filling the window through the Denver haze. We were, all three of us, young and from western Kansas and the mountains were a rare sight. Any kind of variation in the earth’s topology was rare, for us. I wasn’t sure the mountains were what he meant, though. For the purposes of this story our hospitalized friend’s name will be “David,” for several reasons.

It had been a rare spontaneous trip across the Kansas desert into the Colorado foothills and a blizzard just a few miles outside of Denver for Don and I. We had been in a band together, but the Vietnam War was winding that down for us. Don, the band’s drummer, and Ed, our lead singer, guitarist, and my songwriting conspirator were both going into the Army in a few months. I’d flunked the Navy physical exam, due to asthma, early that spring. So, I was “free” from military service, but that meant I had to grow up on my own without any of the social guardrails some of my friends would meet in the Army. There were a few gigs booked, but not for me, it would turn out. I was registered to start classes at a fly-by-night computer school in Texas in a few months.

The reason Don and I were in Denver was Don had heard that a kid who had been a neighbor of mine a few years earlier and who was a Catholic school classmate and friend of Don’s was back from Vietnam, struck in a hospital room in Denver, but who would soon be released from both the hospital and the Army with full disability veteran’s benefits. Neither Don or I understood the implications of the full disability designation, but we knew it must be something serious.

My memory of the seriousness of our friend’s illness is sketchy, more than 50 years later. Other than being extremely thin and pale, he looked pretty much as I remembered him. For a more perceptive kid, that should have been an obvious clue since I hadn’t seen him since we were both 13 years old. He was upbeat, smiled a lot, was anxious to “get back home,” and seemed glad to see us. We thought he had it made, a few months in the Army, a trip overseas, a plane ride back to Denver, and he was financially set for life. That’s what we, especially me, thought.

A few years later, Don and I would be in a band again. Me back from a hippy urban-survivalist adventure in Dallas and him back from a tour of Vietnam, a mental breakdown, and a general discharge from the Army for not being able to hold up his end of terrorizing a third world country as an in-country sniper and, later, a CID spy in Germany. Don would definitely not have it made with his general discharge. In getting reacquainted after three years of mutual absence from our “home” town, Don was back in school, in a community college electronics technician program and trying to be a good citizen. The stigma of his general discharge would follow him for the rest of his short life. While I occasionally took some heat as a “draft dodger,” that slowly went into the background as the nation quietly tried to forget about Vietnam and our unimpressive showing as “the most powerful nation in the world.” But Don’s general discharge stuck to him until he died. In one more act of kindness, Don convinced me to join him in the electronics program which kickstarted the rest of my life.

Back in ‘67, the three-hundred-and-fifty mile drive from Dodge to Denver and the hospital had been an adventure. Just barely after we made it to I70 a few miles outside of Aurora, Don’s ‘57 Chevy died on the side of the freeway in a white sheet of a late spring blizzard. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, so he knew what to look for first; the fuel pump. We’d left Dodge on a seventy-degree early summer day, dressed accordingly for poor kids in 1966, and landed in the plains of Colorado, freezing temperatures, snow falling practically in clumps, traffic blasting by us while we soaked ourselves taking turns trying to get the fuel pump off of that godawful car. There was a filling station, still open, about a half mile back east of where our transportation had become a mediocre shelter from the storm and we hiked back for a telephone and heat. The station was going to close for the night at 11PM, but the guy running the place let us pile a bunch of pallets and other flammables at the end of the driveway, near a fifty-five gallon steel barrel, and Don called a relative in Denver for help. We were almost penniless, so it wasn’t like the station attendant was refusing us service, we couldn’t afford anything he could offer. We set the trashcan on fire both for warmth and as a signal fire for Don’s rescue vehicle. For what seems like several hours today, we took turns warming up and stoking the fire and hiking back to the car to keep at the fuel pump service.

I don’t remember how the vehicle rescue happened. From that flaming trash barrel to a night on a couch to sitting in that hospital room envying David’s financial situation, it’s all a blink and a blur. We made the fuel pump repair, in a warm dry garage, drove to the hospital, and negotiated the usual hospital maze in a series of flashback photos in my memory. But, now, I am back in that room, admiring the view, wondering about my future, David’s medical situation, and thinking about the drive back home and the odds of ending up frozen to death in another blizzard. And I said, “Miss what?”

David grinned at me, “All of this. Us, the hospital, the mountains, the blue sky, this crap in my body the docs say they can’t figure out and can’t kill, being alive. Do you think I’ll miss it?”

My mother died when I was nine-years-old. The next couple of years of having bullshit like “God works in mysterious ways” and “everything happens for a reason” securely pounded the atheist nail into my personality. 

Don was a lapsed Catholic, partially because when playing basketball for a Catholic college he injured his knee and the college voided his scholarship and booted him out, not because he was a poor student but because they recruited him to play basketball and he couldn’t. Later, after returning from Vietnam one of Don’s career phases was as an evangelical “minister” in a small Kansas town. Between being an evangelical minister and an Army sniper, Don had been a carpenter, a cabinet maker, and a drug dealer who spent some time in prison. At one time, he answered his phone with "Praise the Lord this is . . . " I don't know what Don believed, but I think he desperately wanted to imagine there was some kind of point to his journey.

Don’s response to David's question was, “Anytime you want you can relive any part of your life.” I think he was serious, too.

I tried to skate the question, but several times David asked, “What about you?” Meaning me.

“Nope. You won’t miss it or anything else. None of us will”

About six months later, David died at home from some kind of untreatable bacterial or chemical infestation he’d received in Vietnam. “Set for life” took on a new meaning for me. Ten years later, Don died of a drug overdose, alone in a shabby rental unit in a small central Kansas ghost town.

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Rigged Against Them?

I watched a little of Dave Chappelle’s SNL opening last night (Yeah, I know it’s “Saturday Night Live,” not “Sunday Streaming.”) and his remarks about his poor (not really), dumb (really), Republican-voting, Trump-loving Ohio rube neighbors struck me as totally clueless. I’ve been hearing whining rural and urban underachievers bitch about the “system” that is “rigged against me” since I was a kid 70 years ago. Out of every group of this pitiful group of losers will come several people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a whine-free life, blowing the hell out of the “rigged against them” argument.

Genetics are what are rigged against them. Like Larry McMurtry said

“He’s [Trump] is very loved. The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an ‘honest liar’. . . That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged,’ he said. And across the stage was a white woman, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama saying ‘No, it’s not.’” Of course, that is a fairly perverted observation of what happened in that debate and the resulting national argument about electing a con artist and known mobster to national office. “Another con artist,” would be more accurate, since the whole Republican establishment has gone over to the darkest of the dark side.

Chappelle’s political and social analysis is, of course, as goofy as most of Dave’s career of funny over-simplifications. Those “poor white people” in Ohio have seen hundreds of Trump-like “honest liars,” Trump was not only not the first but not even the 1,001^st. They see and hear them every Sunday in their fundamentalist churches and on television where they pour money into the pockets of televangelists in the equally insane and gullible hope that if they can’t make it in this world they’ll make it in the next by following their pennies and dollar bills into heaven. And, of course, Trump was lying (as always) about being a billionaire, but there has never been a shortage of bullshit artist millionaires and Ohio has more than a few of those characters.

But low brows like Chappelle’s neighbors (who “love” him because of his money and tolerate his color) and Dave himself conveniently neglect to mention the reason Republicans hate Hillary Clinton with a passion. She tried and failed (thanks to the people she was trying to help) to start a first step at a national health care system in 1993. She tried to start unravelling the worst part of our rigged system, 60% of US personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and a fairly conservative estimate means at least 650,000 medical bankruptcies occur every year which would mean about 18,000,000 personal bankruptcies are due to the Republican effort to squash national healthcare. Currently about 1 out of 6 Americans are carrying significant medical debt.

And they voted for that fucked-up system, repeatedly. You don’t get to bitch about a rigged system when you keep voting for the riggers. Worse, your whining rings false when you fall in love with a con artist who has failed at every business he’s started, even with an $800B head-start in life, left a long trail of ripped off customers, vendors, and business partners (including almost every major bank in the western world), and had an obvious conflict of interest with his Russian “business partners’ and the job of US President. That’s who you think is “telling the truth?”

The problem with Trump’s whining lovers isn’t that the system is rigged against them. The problem is that they are too dumb to know what “rigged” means. Start with this definition from Webster’s, “manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest means." Trump’s fans manipulate themselves and purposely choose the people who obviously lie to them without restraint. When you are in the driver’s seat and you choose to drive off of a cliff, you are not being manipulated or controlled by anything but your own foolishness.

Cults Here, Cults There, Cults Everywhere

Humans are a herd animal. You can’t avoid the evidence, it’s everywhere. Even out on the open highway, in a remote area with nothing but wide open spaces all around you (like 99% of every where west of the Mississippi), humans crowd into herd. I’ll be cruising along, alone, and in the review mirror I’ll see a crowd of vehicles, all practically bumper-to-bumper, approaching at some speed well over the limit, huddling together as if being in a pack of vehicles is protection from wolves or marauders. That wave of vehicles will pass and I’ll get a few moments of peace and sanity before the next wave of idiots arrives. I used to wonder what that was about, but no more.

Today, there are cults for everything from the clothes or shoes we wear to the religion or politics to which we ascribe. The wingnuts all herd together, listen to the same 2 “news sources,” wear their self-identifying MAGA hat uniforms, and call everyone else “sheeple.” Like the crazy right, the crazy left only accepts “news” from the proper incredible academic sources, which can only be verified by other equally cynical academics, none of whom have ever held a position of responsibility or accountability in their lives. Both sides hate “the mainstream media” as if only the nuttiest commentators are worth listening to. There are vintage car and motorcycle and, probably, golf cart cults. There are guitar, golf club (and golf club memberships), football and basketball and soccer team, and racial cults. Tesla owners desperately cling to the delusion that making Musk “the richest man in the world” has made the planet a better place, while glibly signing off on an NDA to get routine maintenance performed on their homicidal and unnecessarily complicated and expensive vehicle. And religion, of course, is the ultimate cult. The United States and the rest of the Third World is overwhelmingly religious (71% in the US, at the last count) and the easiest path to becoming wildly rich with no verifiable skills or originality is to be a nutjob cable television “Christian minister.”

Cults are the ultimate herd statement. Nothing says “I can’t think for myself” like a cult membership. Cults need “leaders” and followers and “others”; the enemy, the rest of the world that the cult has bonded together from whom to defend itself. Inclusiveness is the furthest thing from the point of a cult. If you don’t have a larger group of people to feel superior to, the whole point of a cult vanishes in a “puff of logic.”

There are all kinds of resources explaining why so many humans desperately need cults, from "10 Psychological Reasons Why People Join Cults" to "Why Do So Many Adults Join Cults?" (a loose definition of "adults," in my opinion) to my favorite “Why People Fall for Cults – the Church of God International.” In that last one, the author states “some people fall in with a cult due to their intelligence or lack thereof. Some people are too young to know better or not very experienced with life. On the other hand, intelligent people who fall in with a cult may be too smart for their own good. The more intelligent cult followers think they are smarter than the average person and privy to special knowledge than the average person.” Being “too smart for [your] own good” has been a prime reason that the ruling cult of the moment has burned at the stake, disemboweled, banished, and drawn-and-quartered cult doubters since humans started “banging the rocks together.” The one thing that article probably got right was this, “everyone is programmed to be part of something larger than themselves." By “larger,” we usually mean a like-minded community of people, probably led by someone with an agenda that is probably destructive to the group but beneficial to that leader.

Being in the minority is not a requirement for cultism, but it helps. More eyes, more opinions, and more voices is usually the way a cult collapses. As of 2014, 70.6% of US citizens professed to be “Christian,” with evangelical protestants being the larger of that group at 25.4%. Of course, that evangelical protestant category contains a ton of very independent cultish groups, most of which are led by someone raking in the money in barrels full. Even Catholics, the next largest group at 20.8% are widely segmented from traditional members to activist groups like Pax Christi. Then there are the 5.9% of non-Christian faith cults and, finally, the 22.8% “unaffiliated” “nones” who include atheists, agnostics, and the majority “nothing in particular” folks who have better things to do than worry about magic and bullshit. If the slowly growing group of “nones” give you some hope for human intelligence, it’s worth commenting that 80+% of US citizens are absolutely certain to fairly certain believe in the Christian God. The Christian cult is almost as strong as ever in this declining empire. Religion and superstition has always been the path empires take on their way to oblivion.

“Where Did They All Go?”

In a discussion that turned weirdly (hysterically similar to the stuff that used to go on in my parents’ home whenever they suffered any kind of cognitive dissonance sneaking inside their very conservative western Kansas news-blinders) an acquaintance shrieked “Where did they all go, then?” and “nobody wants to work anymore.” This was at the end of an interminable last-of-its-kind (I hope) dinner where pretty much everything finally went off of the rails with little hope of reconciliation. That had been a long time coming, but when it arrived it was a little startling. Still, the conversation (screaming match?) inspired some investigation into a topic I’ve wondered about.

A lot of “where did they all go” question is old news for me. Friends working in a dozen different industries have kept me sort-of-in-touch with manufacturing tech, and support work after I retired in 2013. All of them, by the way, are making more money in today’s dollar than I ever did at my peak income. Pandemic and supply lines stuff aside, people with skills are in huge demand and everyone else can, at least, find a job if they want one.

Tech and other sorts of parts in the supply lines were coming unglued in lots of manufacturing in early 2018 as Trump’s “trade” fuckups scared some of our economic partners, like Canada’s forestry production, into finding more predictable/rational trade partners. At least one guitar manufacturer in California started using “urban forestry” to supplement their diminishing access to “tone woods” like red and yellow Canadian cedar. Lots of the raw materials we used to get from South America is now going, first, to China, Japan, and the EU. Those infamous ”chip shortages” that suddenly appeared in the media as “lost in the supply chain” during 2020 and 2021, were actually vanishing about mid-2019, again thanks to Trump’s trade off-again/on-again weirdness with China, Taiwan, and India where almost all of that stuff has been made since Reagan purged the US of manufacturing investment in the 80s with his bizarre and foolish Dribble-Down Voodoo Economics. If we didn’t want it, lots of other buyers did. Now, we’re nobody’s preferred customer. When you’re building (or working in) a service economy, many of these problems appear insignificant. In manufacturing and engineering, they are show-stoppers.

As far back as mid-2018 a friend who was working for a company that supplied most of the automotive industry with design and production of high-tech headlights complained about the fact that Chinese suppliers no longer felt obligated to stick to their price quotes for manufactured parts for which they knew the US (and EU) could no longer provide alternatives. Not long after that, the company began shutting down the parts of their production that relied on semiconductor manufacturing and my friend was prewarned that he’d need to get out while the getting was good. It took him less than a week to find a better paying job in medical tech and he left Detroit in early-2019 for Minneapolis.

As for “nobody wants to work,” justifying that claim with our current 3.1% unemployment takes some hard work or simple denial. Our acquaintance chose denial, which made for an entertaining song-and-dance and an amazing display of ignorance when it comes to how employment works. It helped that neither of these folks were ever skilled labor (Unless you call being a junior college adjunct anthro “skilled?”) and neither have any sort of employment record worth talking about. If you haven’t been involved in chasing this country’s economy from one area crash to the next during the past 50 years, it’s hard to explain job hunting. I, on the other hand, have never experienced the kind of job opportunities available to today’s employment-age workers. I’m getting hit up at least a dozen times a month, through my LinkedIn page, for jobs I’m qualified for and some that aren’t even in the vicinity of my experiences.

Oddly, this Chamber of Commerce article, ”Understanding America’s Labor Shortage,” is surprisingly informative (for a group sadly known for its corporate propaganda output and disconnect from much of reality). Thanks to a variety of issues—from early retirements to Covid deaths and long-term Covid effects, to the long-standing child care problems—“in 2021, employers ended up adding an unprecedented 3.8 million jobs. But at the same time, millions of Americans have left the labor force since before the pandemic. In fact, we have more than three million fewer Americans participating in the labor force today compared to February of 2020.” That isn’t including what anyone who has followed numbers in national disasters knows will be a much larger than the reported 1,2M US citizens dead from Covid.

Speaking of killing us with Covid, thanks to the MAGAt nitwits and their “fearless leader,” almost 20% of the US healthcare workforce quit during the pandemic and another 12% were laid off, about 1.7 million professionals gone from hospitals and clinics, The people left in that overstressed, underpaid industry are considering quitting, too: 31% of them, in fact. They are not having any problems finding alternative work, either.

The Chamber’s survey found that of the many people who have yet to return to the workforce, “Twenty-seven percent indicated that the need to be home and care for children or other family members has made the return to work difficult or impossible. More than a quarter (28%) indicated that they have been ill and their health has taken priority over looking for work.” That survey found that many of those folks are not returning to the workforce because they are “concerned about COVID-19 at work, indicate that pay is too low, or are more focused on acquiring new skills and education before re-entering the job market." Some of that last group are taking advantage of the fact that many skilled labor unions are providing free and paid education for highly paid skilled in-demand jobs such as electrician and plumbers.

Retirements are kicking the workforce’s ass, too. That same article stated, “As of October 2021, the pandemic drove more than 3 million adults into early retirement.” At the other end of “ where they went,”Over the last two years, nearly 10 million new business applications were filed and in 2020 alone more than 4 million new business were started.“ This is exactly the kind of economy, except for the booming job market, where I started my Wirebender Audio Systems business after a layoff in 1980 and various good and bad times kept that going until a few months before I retired. So, good for them.

And that is where they all went. Any questions?