Normalizing Aberrant Behavior and an Abusive Workplace

 After seeing the outright fascist and perverted behavior of Musk and Trump over the past month, I wondered (again) “what kind of person is still working for Tesla?”  So, I did a Google search on exactly that question and probably the best description appeared in a Reddit comment from 3 years ago in reply to a question, “Current or former Tesla employees.. Is Tesla really that bad for salaried employees?”  Reading the first response to that question, from an ex-Tesla employee who “left in 2019,” reminded me of a 1999 book by Alan Cooper (an ex-Microsoft executive), The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.  The Tesla environment is what you might expect if all of the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies continued to raise themselves on that island, with the help of a handful of computers and unrestricted access to the most irresponsibly violent video games, and stumbled into a company recently wreaked by a parasitic, spoiled rich Afrikaner who has one of the longest uninterrupted lucky streaks in human history.  Working at Tesla sounds like being in a hellhole of dysfunction surrounded by spoiled boys who’s parents should have practiced corporal punishment; or abortion.

Those of us who have been outside observers of Musk’s lucky path to “the world’s richest man” have, mostly, been treated to all of the evidence necessary that karma is bullshit.  His demonstration of business “leadership” at Twitter/X is right up there with Putin’s Poodle’s casino bankruptcies as an example of “how not to” manage a business.  Tesla has set records for vehicle crashes, repair expenses, unreliability and recalls, and the only Tesla vehicle that Musk had any real hand in developing, the Cybertruck aka Swasticar/Deplorean, is an internet and international joke.   People still imagine that Musk is a genius, especially people foolish enough to gamble on his companies, and that misplaced faith is setting up the United States for the next Great Depression with no fallback plan or responsible adults in charge of any of our institutions. The train wreck that Barak Obama saved us from in 2009 is coming due now and there is no brilliant, responsible, creative “DEI hire” in the wings to stop the crash.

I am in the process of applying to be a volunteer at a local hospital, one that appears to be unintimidated by the MAGA threats regarding DEI policies, and the application process brought home how much this country has benefitted from the years of “diversity (D), equity (E), and inclusion (I).  I went through a 20-minute online training segment just on the value this hospital’s 150 year commitment to diversity has provided Minnesota and the world.  After listening to local and national “news” for the past month, describing the decline and fall of the American Century, this was a breath of clean, fresh air that I really needed.

Here are some highlights of the reddit author’s experience:

·       “Jank [“worthless” or “of poor quality”] rules supreme at Tesla. . . The part of the production line that was featured in tours was the one that Grohmann automation built (who Tesla has since acquired). It looks modern, clean, and futuristic. The other 90% of the factory looks mostly filthy and like a collection of senior projects and robot arms. There are many processes which really should be done in a clean room but are just done in a dirty factory atmosphere next to a few exterior doors that are open to the windy high desert.”

·       Safety?  “Giant forklifts rolling down aisles where you have to squeeze yourself up against a machine cell while the thing rolls past 2 feet in front of you, daily occurrence. Maybe the plexiglass will stop it? People going to the ER because they had a battery module dropped on them? Happened a couple times. If you're in a factory environment you need to watch out for yourself.”

·       “Holidays are all over the place. Engineers worked through thanksgiving, Xmas, and on New Year's Eve. Sometimes you can get out of it, sometimes you can't. If you want to travel to see family just know that your holidays are always subject to change until a day before. Told you you're off but you're actually on? Tough luck. Told you you're on but you're actually off? Too late to buy flights so hope you've got friends in Austin.”

·       “You will watch the value of your stock package swing up and down by tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Usually in response to some Elon tweet. You can really feel the mood change when you walk in one morning and everyone just watched $10k get shaved off their upcoming vest.”

·       “If you're the type of person to pop a monocle because of a lack of professionalism, it may not be for you. I saw more than one production associate (euphemism for factory button-pusher) walking around wearing a graphic tee featuring nude anime girls with huge tits. Nobody seemed to care, and no skin off my back, but if that bothers you.”

·       “If you're the type to have a panic attack and need a mental health day when someone raises their voice at you: it's not the environment for you. Conversely, if you're the type of person that is fucking sick and tired of wishy-washy corpo-happy-speak, you might love it. Anyone who's had a performance review or 1-on-1 who thought ‘Wait, so am I doing well or not’ can relate. . . At Tesla it was very clear: ‘You're fucking up, you did a great job with X but if you don't Y and Z, things will not go well for you.’ Crystal. Also I could get away with telling someone ‘that's a stupid fucking idea, are you serious?" in a meeting, provided that it actually WAS a stupid fucking idea and I could prove it.’”

There is more, a lot more, but coming from 40+ years in manufacturing what I recognized from that last item is that loudmouth, arrogant, extroverted bullies rule at Tesla while thoughtful, analytical, skilled technical people will be buried in a hostile work environment that encourages poor decisions as long as they are made with confidence.  There is, by the way, nothing new about that work environment.  It’s pretty exactly the kind of place that most of US manufacturing was in before the late-1980’s quality movement and that pretty much explains Tesla’s poor product reputation and clockwork recall schedule.   The company’s first level “fix” for customer dissatisfaction is to require an NDA for warranty work authorization.  If you can’t make a decent product, kill the messenger.  That will work, sure. Musk is going to have to buy Consumer Reports, otherwise blowing up NHTSA isn’t going to work.   Like Trump’s MAGA cult, it’s pretty interesting that even with all of the problems, the generally crappy product design, manufacturing, and awful customer service, Tesla owners have been hilariously loyal to the brand until Musk outed himself as an anti-democratic fascist and decent human beings started mocking the Tesla culters.

One comment the reddit author made illustrated the real costs of working for a company as dysfunctional as Tesla, “. . . Tesla is the only place I've ever worked that made me question if I even wanted to be an engineer. I used to do a ton of personal engineering projects, I worked on products I wanted to manufacture and sell, I had a bitchin' EE lab I used all the time, etc. I've done none of that since starting at Tesla and even after leaving, and the lab is still in boxes. It broke something inside me that I'm still trying to fix. . .”  I can relate to that experience.  For some of us, being an engineer is a calling, maybe not at the level of being a medical doctor but at least with the ideal and goal of making the world a better place.  Working at Tesla is all about getting rich quick with stock options, regardless of the damage done to society and consumers.  You can, for a while, delude yourself into thinking you will make up for the damage after you get rich.  The so-called “crypto-capitalists” who massaged their already stunted consciences with pipedreams of spending their fortune “making the world a better place” instead of doing something useful with their lives never seem to get around to doing the useful things.  Musk somehow convinced some seriously gullible folks that he has a goal other than destroying democracy and making himself even more despicably rich in the process.  He might have even convinced himself, but I doubt that. 

Making America Gross, Again

As the country degenerates into the kind of failed empire that fascism always requires, it’s hard not to think about the last empirical crash-and-burn, Nazi Germany, and the similarities between then and now. Bill Murray, in Stripes, best described the origin of America immigrants: “We’re Americans. Do you know what that means? It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse.” When you read the comments from the MAGAots on anything social, intellectual, scientific, or political, you see all of the evidence of that anyone should need to know that we have not improved on that genetic material over the past 250 years. In fact, in rural America we’ve doubled-down on Stupid and tuned it into a fine mist of trickle-down piss.  

European immigrants into North America have a long, vicious history of turning wine into asparagus-scented piss (the worst kind of piss). The Scotch-Irish immigrants who populated the southeastern states in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries were . . . not the cream of the Anglo-Saxon crop, to say the least. They were clannish, violent, racist, and resisted any form of education as if learning something new was akin to succumbing to polio. As Colin Woodard wrote in his book, American Nations, “The founding fathers of the Deep South arrived by sea, their ships dropping anchor off what is now Charleston in 1670 and 1671. Unlike their counterparts in Tidewater, Yankeedom, New Netherland, and New France, they had not come directly from Europe. Rather, they were the sons and grandsons of the founders of an older English colony: Barbados, the richest and most horrifying society in the English-speaking world . . . The society they founded in Charleston did not seek to replicate rural English manor life or to create a religious utopia in the American wilderness. Instead, it was a near–carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity.”

Contrary to the “un-woke” myths regressive Americans tell about themselves, this origin story absolutely fits Murray’s description of “wretched refuse.”  When Southerners are ranting about preserving their precious heritage with statues of slavers and traitors and their blatantly racist Confederate flags, this is the heritage they are preserving.  Those “founders” were terrible people and the legacy they left the country with is one of many things keeping this country from ever being great; or even good.

The Republican Party and the billionaires who dominate that political disaster prey on the uneducated, low-information deplorables by telling them fairy tales about “the woke virus” and how special being illiterate, uneducated, and gullible makes them.  While that tactic is good for short-term wealth gobbling, as the vulture capitalists and 0.1% “parasite class” rapes and pillages the nation’s treasure and resources, it will prevent the United States from being competitive on the world’s economic stage.  Looking at the band of rich white kids populating the current Republican Party’s Executive branch, does anyone imagine that these nitwits would have the slightest idea how to fight off a concentrated cyber-attack on the country’s infrastructure?  If Russsia’s bots and hackers linked up with China’s similar “talent,” what are the chances that Musk’s DOGE nitwits would provide even a microsecond of defense from actual skilled programmers?   Those goobers can’t even tell COBOL from C+ code.  Machine language coding would look as indecipherable to them as it would to Trump’s voters.  You might as well send an army of toddlers against Seal Team 6 as hope that today’s Republican Party is an answer to any modern problem. 

If you were a Bond-style super-villian, you couldn’t do more damage than to stuff the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court Building with exactly the people Republican voters have cursed the nation with for the past 40 years.   Trump and his moron-minions have exposed the festering underbelly of at least half of the citizens of this country to the rest of the world and our international reputation hasn’t been this low since the early 1970s (Vietnam War) and the early 2000s (Afghanistan and Iraq Invasions).  This is exactly what I mean by “making America gross again.”   After one of my earlier essays, a friend from New Zealand wrote, “Let me say firstly that US politicians in particular (not excusing the rest of the world either) have done very little to genuinely advance mankind's wellbeing for many decades, other than to advance the wellbeing of their cronies.”

For an embarrassing moment, I wanted to argue that point.  But at least from Vietnam in the 60s and 70s to invading Iraq, three times, and the absolute mess we made out of Afghanistan, it’s been pretty obvious from inside of this country, that we are not making the world a better place.  During Bush II’s “holy crusade” in Iraq, it particularly irritated me to listen to those international criminals babble about bringing “democracy” as part of their nation-building bullshit.  The same people who overthrew the Florida recount and ignored the majority vote of the citizens of this country in 2000 are going to bring “democracy” to another country?  No possible.  The only consistent contribution Republicans have made to the world in almost 100 years has been in “making America gross(er) again.”  I’d like to hope we’ve hit bottom with this last election, but one thing I have learned in my 77 years is that you should never imagine the bar is finally low enough, it can always go lower.

Guilt and Good Luck

 Believe me, I know how insane it is to be middle class, retired and on Social Security and Medicare, to own my own home and be debt free, and—above all else—white in 2025 America (or as the rest of the “Americans” know us, the United States) and to be incredibly, deeply sad and embarrassed for and by my country, my home, my neighbors, and myself.  Please believe me when I say I am not asking for sympathy.  I realize that I have lived a blessed life and have done very little to deserve it.  Too much of where I am came from luck in the genetic lottery, in the time and place where I was born, and over my lifetime luck is more responsible for my current situation than anything I have done.  I have definitely worked hard and I’ve tried to be responsible, frugal, and practical, but there were several moments in my life where a serious disease or injury to me or anyone in my immediate family would have torn the whole house of cards down.  It was only luck that prevented that from happening, no matter how much effort I put into avoiding it.

Hopefully, without minimizing the pain and suffering other less fortunate people have experienced, I want to say it still has not been a bed of roses, even for me.  My wife and I began our lives together in extreme-to-moderate poverty, certainly well below the poverty line, for almost a decade.  The “education system” in western Kansas in the 50s and 60s was at least as regressive and mismanaged as the right-wing politically-incorrect torture chamber of foolishness we subject kids to today.  Those were the days of corporal punishment, lawless cops without body cameras or anyone avaialble with th equipment to film their abuses, and when bullying was the way large white men and boys were supposed to behave to “get ahead.” 

My father was a high school math and business accounting teacher, but he didn’t know much about either subject compared to the teachers I was lucky enough to experience 25 years later in southern California.  Most of what he tried to pass on to me and my siblings was religious nonsense.  He was desperately short on practical advice and my step-mother was flat-out delusional.  After being given the “live in my house, go to my church” ultimatum at the end of my junior year, I chose to live somewhere else for my last year of high school.  I thought I had a life plan at the time and didn’t see much use for what passed for “education” in western Kansas.  So, my last year of school was mostly spent in study hall (3 units of that) and skipping school entirely (which probably gave me the best education I’d receive in those years).   

The United States has, rarely, been even moderately competent at providing public education, especially for the children of the 99%.  For brief moments in time, California, Detroit, the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and a select few spots in the country have experimented with actually teaching kids useful stuff in the way that kids learn, but the regressives that call themselves “conservatives” always find a way to destroy it from within.  I honestly do not think the average American citizen has any business reproducing, based on just that fact.  We’re just not smart enough to be parents.  Maybe that’s true for the species.

However, being white (Yes, “pink,” Bianca.) in this country in the last 300 years pretty much eliminates any real excuse for personal failure unless serious illness (mental or physical) or injury is involved.  Donald Trump and his minions prove that intelligence, education, skill, creativity, or decency are totally unnecessary if you are white, born rich, and . . . that’s all that is necessary.  Even without the silver spoon full of designer pabulum, being white is a passkey to US middle class with even moderate effort.  As several comedians have noted, if you are white in this country and you are poor, “That’s on you.”  You just didn’t make a half-decent effort.

The MAGA outrage against the “woke virus” is nothing more than white people and other examples of personal failure wanting to bury the fact that every spec of their own personal failures is “on them.”  The fact that Florida Governor Ricky Desantis’ General Counsel, Ryan Newman, could tell a court that “woke” is “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them” with a straight face and no expectation of outright ridicule from anyone able to understand those words says . . . everything.  You have to be a special variety of stupid, vile, lazy, and worse to believe there are no “systemic injustices” in a country founded on slavery and spawned from the offspring of the worst human monsters in history, the Barbados colonizers.  And having lived among rural Midwestern Americans for too much of my life, that has been overwhelmingly my experience of my “neighbors.” 

As Barak Obama famously explained in a 2008 campaign speech, “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

“And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”   As usua, the truth hurts.  Obama took a lot of flack for the “guns or religion” portion of that explanation, but he was dead on the money explaining who those angry, unskilled, uneducated, lazy, and entitled voters are and have been for at least 250 years.  They are the 76M “low information” voters who elected Trump in 2024 and who cursed the country with his pack of vandals in 2016 and they were, sadly, under-represented in the 1,000,000 US citizens Trump murdered during the pandemic.  

Solutions for this undemocratic mess are complicated and highly unlikely to succeed.  The “clear, simple, and wrong” answer  to all of our “complex problems” is fascism.  Democracy’s biggest advantage is adaptability and fascism is a foolish and hopeless attempt to drive a flag in the ground to keep change from happening.  Change happens, regardless of human desires and, today, with the inventory of human knowledge doubling every 12 hours and with that interval shrinking by the year, even a year of wallowing in entitlement self-pity will be enough to set the country back to where it will never be competitive again.  That is the formula for empire collapse.

The United States tried to stop the world from spinning so fast in 1952, electing Dwight Eisenhower on the ultimate low-brow slogan, “I Like Ike,” and a variety of slightly-shaded racism, blatantly dishonest anti-communist dogma, anti-evolution-based public education distortions, and 1%-fueled campaign funded by “businessmen” who wanted the government to serve only the rich and powerful (sound familiar?).  Instead, the working class got an anti-union federal government that started the long process of disassembling the middle class, an education system that produced so few useful technical people that when Russia launched Sputnik, Eisenhower’s response was pitiful at best and embarrassing repeatedly.  K     ennedy launched a national public education push that resulted in the next 20 years of prosperity, ending with Reagan’s dribble-down economics and being dead-and-buried by Gingrich’s “Contract on America.”

But, if you look at that “Information Age” curve, hopefully you’ll see that regardless of US participation, human knowledge is on an exponential curve to who-knows-where? Americans have an overly developed sense of importance, which might have been somewhat deserved after WWII, but Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Lybia, Iraq I, Panama, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Iraq III, Syria, and, now, Trump and his brand of expansionist fascism have made us one of the world’s most unstable and unpredictable terrors.  It wouldn’t take much for the rest of the “free world” to decide to permanently distance itself from the United States, defending Mexico and Canada from us.  As weak as Republicans have made the country in just barely over a month, it’s not hard to imagine this union disassembling itself in a civil war. If you have illusions about how a civil war works, Salvador Dali pretty much nailed it.  It won’t be pretty and there won’t be any real “winners.” If that happens, we’ll all be out of luck.