How Not to Retire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Price of Thankfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#139 Sexism/Racism Logic (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it goes. 

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

August 2005

#138 Getting a Close-Up Look (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2005

#137 Fixing the Future (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

My big bitch about modern politicians is with their total lack of vision and leadership abilities.  In the last forty years we've either had cowards and crooks like the Bush clan and Nixon, fools such as Reagan and Ford, the distracted and egocentric underachieving Johnson and Clinton, or Carter's well-intentioned, but incapable micro-management.  The country and the world need and deserve more. 
Take Bush's current fake emergency, Social Security.  An obvious way to fix the possible disaster that could land on our children's shoulders would be for the about-to-retire generation, the Baby Boomers, to . . . not retire.  We could ask, or force, our government to be responsible with the money we turn over to them and we could build an idyllic future for our children.  We could behave responsibly and make sacrifices so that our children could have a better, more secure future. 

"Sacrifice."  What a nasty word.  However, the only way this world is going to resemble the science fiction future we'd hoped for in the 1950's is if we rearrange the world's priorities; especially the United States' priorities.  We need to take charge of our government, make plans for the future, and build a world that resembles something we'd want to hand over to the next generation. 

In the 1960s, the ruling class created the Vietnam "crisis," the 20-year recession, and manhandled the working classes to create a "growth economy" that only provided economic benefits for the leisure class.  Because it looked like working class kids with good educations might be a lot harder to manipulate, they smashed our economy, disassembled the public education system, and promoted the fantasy that "growth is good and necessary" when all evidence points to the contrary.  Population boomed, middle and working class income shrank, working class quality of life shriveled to a miserable bare existence, and science and technology have barely provided a single useful cultural improvement in 40 years.

Yeah, computers are smaller and cheaper.  That hasn't proved to be a terrific social improvement for anyone but the richest and most educated in society.  Cars are practically the same boring, noisy, polluting, and consumptive vehicle they were 50 years ago.  Planes are barely faster, a little noisier, and barely more efficient than they were in the 1960s.  Trains and public transportation are virtually identical to their 1950s versions.  In the modern world self-proclaimed "leading economy," 2005 looks a hell of a lot like 1960. 

All of this happened, or didn't happen, because society and, especially, our government decided on quantity over quality.  It's time to try a different tact. 

Republican "leaders" are advocating opening the boarders for "skilled labor."  Bush claims that there are lots of "jobs that Americans won't do" out there and that we need to import millions of laborers from the third world to fill those positions.  Welders, roofers, computer programmers, and call center operators are among the "jobs that Americans won't do."  We won't do those jobs for minimum wage, especially a minimum wage that isn't even close to a living wage.  That isn't the same as not being willing to work.  Every necessary job in this country could be filled with a current resident if we made the sacrifice to rebuild education, limit immigration, and forced our ruling class to live by the same rules they apply to the majority. 

All things begin at the top.  Morality is a top-down leadership-drive cultural quality.  So is education, motivation, honor, justice, and every other trait that United States' citizens take pride in possessing.  It has been decades since the country has had moral leadership.  Maybe it's time to begin a new American Revolution and to take back the direction of the country before we hand off a worthless shell of a nation to our children.  We can begin that revolution by making sacrifices in our comfort for the good of our children and grandchildren. 

July 2005

#136 Gonzo is Dead, Long Live Gonzo (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

"Doctor" Hunter S. Thompson, the King of Gonzo Journalism, died by his own hand this week.  The eulogies and anthems and homilies began the moment Thompson's son discovered the body and reported it to the Aspen City Police.  This rant has been a bitch for me to write.  I've written it, posted it, removed it, rewritten it, and re-posted it at least four times.  I usually don't rethink my thoughts all that often.  The Doctor made me rethink my thoughts often throughout my life. 

One of the best reviews of Hunter Thompson in life was an article written for, of all places, the Wall Street Journal by Tom Wolfe.  Wolfe and Thompson attracted major league attention to their writing through books about the same general crowd; the Hell's Angels and the freaks who ran with Ken Kesey's Cool Aid Acid Tests.  Wolfe went mainstream almost as soon as he recovered from his Acid Test hangover.  Thompson couldn't find a mainstream with a map and a guide and GPS and a well-marked path.  Hunter Thompson was so completely polarized to oppose the mainstream that he was magnetically drawn off the worn trail, away from conventional wisdom and "common sense," and into the middle of tributaries that ordinary men considered too ferocious and uncivilized to be useful. 

Even in death, Thompson went his own way.  At 67, he apparently shot himself with one of his many weapons.  "Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head," was his son's statement to the local press.  The Doctor had a long history with guns, explosives, fast motor vehicles, drugs and alcohol, and life on the edge of a long, deep, dark precipice.  Recent portraits show a man who put a lot of miles into those 67 years.  Some photos illustrate a man who looked nearly twice his actual age.  He was recovering from complications of a fall, including back pain and a broken leg, which would be enough to make a lot of 67-year-old folks cash it in.  His friends and family saw a collection of warning signs that Thompson was depressed and considering a final exit.  Still, part of me wants to believe that Thompson wasn't as selfish and egocentric as his final moments appear.

Part of me wants to be convinced that The Doctor was something better than human.  This is the age of paranoia and I have yet to see a depth that the neo-Nazi-conservatives won't fall.  Maybe I'm seeing the Gestapo under every unhappy event, but I think the Bushies would torture and kill Christ, Santa Claus, Mother Theresa, Ray Charles, and the Easter Bunny to fatten their portfolios and increase their power.  So far, there hasn't been a report of a suicide note, which seems a bit odd for someone so chronically inclined to write about everything that crossed his mind.  If you do a web search on Hunter Thompson, you'll find articles on everything from politics to the XFL to assassinating rabbits that dared to venture into his "compound" to an in-depth analysis of the Bushies and their sycophants; Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.  Thompson was eternally interested in practically everything that happened in his world.  And he wrote about those things constantly.  Why he wouldn't choose to put down a few notes about his final thoughts is, at least, curious.  That's what I'd like to believe.

Whatever the final story of this benchmark in American literature, I'm going to miss him as much as I miss George Harrison, Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Bertrand Russell, and the growing hoard of people who have changed my world and left it with increased knowledge and wisdom.  Because of Hunter Thompson, I have a different definition of "evil" and "terrible" than the simple concept my father provided for me.  I don't know who has the true fix on those values and terms, but I know which one works for me and I have my experiences enhanced by Hunter Thompson's words to thank for that.

But, man, the thought that the great Hunter Thompson could blow his brains out so that his son and six-year-old grandson would hear the shot and find him and his residue splattered all over the room is beyond distain.  Thompson tended toward egomania more often than not.  He spent most of his life posing as a little boy waving his arms, yelling "Hey, look at me!" He was one of the few people who could control the center of attraction by claiming that he didn't want to be the center of attraction.  Like many dope-inspired artists, Thompson had delusions of worlds revolving around his center of gravity.  At the end of his life, he gave up wrestling with the devil and became one to the family members who cared the most for him. 

For a man who hoped to be so familiar with courage and honor, he failed to die to his own standards.  I have a lot of respect for those who go down in flames, but you have to drag demons into the fire not the people who love you.  Gonzo may have just been ego and that may be the legacy that Hunter Thompson leaves us when all the weights and measures are balanced.

Killing yourself is a bitch, though.  Anyone can talk about doing it, only the truly desperate can do it.  I doubt that Thompson had any fantasies of "crossing over to a better world," so he was giving up on life.  I suspect, that when life becomes so painful that he could make all of the moves necessary to end his life, he had to seize the moment regardless of how inconvenient the moment was for those around him.  Thompson's life was all about seizing moments of all sorts and his death was probably just another such moment.

June 2005

#135 Trade Show Logic (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

You hate to kill the golden goose when the goose is spewing eggs in your direction, but it's a lot easier when the goose is in someone else's yard.  One of my all time favorite geese, when I was in industry, was the trade show.  It's practically impossible to imagine an easier gig for any salesperson, or any other working person, than staffing a trade show booth.  Execs, of course, see trade shows as "hard work," but that simply re-establishes the obvious fact that execs are unfamiliar with the whole "work" concept. 

Trade shows have become consumer product shows in the last couple of decades.  It only makes sense that vendors and show management would want to increase their profits by drawing consumers to their demonstrations.  It makes a little less sense that consumers would want to see the newest stuff as soon as the manufacturers have it ready to be seen.  What doesn't make sense is the idea that consumers would be willing to pay top dollar to experience the same sales pitch they'd receive in a store. 

This past weekend my wife worked her first trade show; a home products show.  The turnout for the show was abysmal, a disappointment even for the trade show management but a complete bust for the vendors.  Over a holiday weekend, barely 500 customers bothered to make the trip to half-alive downtown St. Paul, suffered the outrage of $15 "special event" parking, and coughed up $7.50 for the privilege of having a few hundred salespeople try to sell them stuff they didn't need.  In the end, even the large vendors wondered why they bothered with the show.  There were more vendors on the floor at any time during the show than there were customers. 

While I think that it's interesting perspective, it's even more interesting that so many trade show organizers think the American public is so stupid that we'll pay to be exposed to salespeople and their pitches.  From cars to computers, there are "shows" that are little more than small-time state fair vendor booths hawking their wares to a self-captured audience foolish enough to pay for the privilege. 

Why anyone would pay to be pitched is beyond my comprehension.  As we've all seen over the years of my publishing the Rat Rants, many things are beyond my comprehension.  Cable television, for example.  Originally, cable TV was sold as a way to escape ads by paying for the service directly, instead of indirectly through the irritation of 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes of television programming.  Today, however, dumbasses pay to be pitched and television executives are laughing all the way to the bank.  The bank where they store their golden parachutes.  On the occasion that I find myself in a cable-ready motel room, I'm always amazed at the dearth of interesting programming and the wealth of advertising to be suffered on cable TV.  More evidence that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public; American or otherwise. 

May 2005

#134 Bashing the Ecology in Fiction (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

Way back in my simple youth, one of my favorite science fiction authors was Michael Crichton.  One of the things I like the most about Crichton was his ability to write straight-up science fiction while avoiding the dreaded "spaceship" tag in libraries.  Other than a couple of mediocre social statement books, Crichton has always written SF but he's never been pigeon-holed into that demeaning little corner of our local libraries, next to "detective," "romance," and "western" novels.  I think that's a fairly amazing achievement.  Other, far more technical, more consistently excellent writers, writing far more scientifically and socially valid books, have languished under that nasty space ship curse while Crichton has flourished on the general-fiction best seller lists as straight fiction. 

I still find time to read Crichton's books, within a few months of publication.  I don't enjoy them as much as I did when I was a lot younger, but he usually provides an interesting diversion.  Crichton's newest book may be a little too revealing of from whence he comes.  In State of Fear Crichton releases a moderately scientific ire upon environmentalists.  Somehow, he has decided that environmentalists, who have been mostly irrationally pacifist in their actions to date, are about to become well-heeled, large-scale eco-terrorists.  Is this more evidence that as men age they become timid conservatives?  Maybe, maybe not.

As usual, Crichton's hero is a geek; an MIT-academic who saw the light and fights against the terror of environmentalism.  Somehow, this geek has become an action hero in his spare time, something Crichton is typically short in explaining.  In his most recent books, Crichton has grown short on anything other than lecture space.  In fact, Crichton books feel considerably shorter in page length and seem larger in text size than the average detective novel.  The upside to this tendency is that his books don't take long to read.  The downside is that I often feel a little cheated about the time I am spending on the pages of a Crichton novel; in the same way that I feel cheated when I have the flu, can't read, and waste a day watching television.  The best description I can provide is that it feels like I've allowed someone to pop the top of my cranium and take a dump in the vacant hole. 

If you'd like to read some of the contradicting info to Crichton's fable and pseudo-science, check out The Earth Institute News' "Michael Crichton's State of Confusion."  Take a look at RealClimate.org, while you're in a research mode.  Science isn't Crichton's bag in this book.  He's really writing in the ever-popular liberal-dissenter-bashing genre that's always popular in conservative literature.  Which is interesting because he is a fairly scientific sort of writer and, on general principles, has been about as conservative as Ralph Nader.  In fact, he recently said "When did 'skeptic' become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?"  In a recent speech defending his position opposing global warming and other environmental issues, Crichton went so far as to compare environmentalism to religion, stating that religion has been notoriously useless as a problem-solving tool throughout the history of humanity.  Not a very conservative position, unless you're supporting the primary conservative position that opposes the majority of the evidence science has accumulated. 

The critical flaw in Crichton's logic is that he argues that the majority of folks are tree-huggers.  Therefore, an environmentally conservative position is the "safe" and ordinary position.  His anti-environment position is the "skeptical" and more revolutionary position.  Imagine G.W. Bush as a scientific revolutionary and you'll be able to "feel" Crichton's argument.  However, the overwhelming majority, the consensus, in the United States is far from environmentally concerned.  In a high-energy-consuming, SUV-driving, urban-territory-expanding, corporate-driven-government nation, the average citizen thinks of everything but the environment, first.  "Fear" makes the dubious claim that the national consensus is that the world environment is in danger and that governments should do anything necessary to protect us from eco-catastrophe.  How Crichton derived this conclusion in the face of reality escapes me.  Americans, especially, appear to be less interested in the world ecology and the fate of their children in a world of vanishing resources than any people in the history of the world.  We, in fact, do everything we can to hurry the end of the world's natural resources, including air and water. 

This strange fiction doesn't really seem to be Crichton's personal belief.  Once escaped from the confines of a fictional world of his own creation, he's considerably less conservative.  In a lecture at CalTech ("Aliens Cause Global Warming"), Crichton keeps pounding at religion and faith, calling SETI  ". . . unquestionably a religion," for example.  Defining the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and ecological conservation as flaws in logic, which he defines as "faith" rather than science, Crichton makes a useful point or two.  And he defines faith "as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof."  The CalTech lecture is especially interesting, because Crichton takes on a lot of his pet peeves.  He also sounds more rational than he did as the author of "State of Fear." 

In fact, most of Crichton's CalTech rant could be read as a condemnation of all sorts of religion, including various scientific specialties that approach religious conviction.  He attacks global warming (as he did in "State of Fear"), nuclear winter, SETI, over-population, and Scientific American magazine for their religion-like dedication to limited facts and lack of scientific rigor.  Maybe his real reason for writing a piece as inflammatory as "State of Fear" was to be allowed a forum to express his real irritation, which isn't with environmentalists at all, but with scientists and their false articles of faith.  Unfortunately, he's taken on a collection of his own religious fallacies as evidence against the scientific establishment. 

April 2005

#133 The White Collar Crime Party

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

GeeWiz Bush's close friendship with "Kenny Boy" Lay (ENRON) and a large collection of recently convicted and accused corporate criminals is pretty good evidence that Republicans are closely linked with white collar crime.  Ronald Reagan hardly knew anyone who wasn't a corporate criminal and presented the nation to a close experience with several of those crooks in his cabinet and administration.  As a result, a record number of Reagan Presidential associates were accused, fined, or went to jail during that seriously flawed Presidency. 

The first edition of President George Bush smoothly slipped from hanging with oily white collar criminals to the Presidency and back to his high life with Fortune 500 mafia cronies.  Fahrenheit 9/11 showed us GB 1's close relationship with corporate oil criminals in a scene with a crowd of oil executives and Saudi royalty. 

Here in Minnesota, our current governor Pawlenty was "employed" doing nothing for a year, at $4500/month by his "advisor" and Access Anywhere pay telephone exec Elam Baer.  Pawlenty had this gig for a year running for the highest state office and "serving" in the state legislature. Pawlenty's big money backer asked absolutely nothing from his Republican pool boy for two years, while the candidate established his candidacy.  In exchange for nothing, Pawlenty received at least a $54k "consulting fee" and his backer received "future considerations" (as they say in Republican doublespeak).  Even before the election, the money guy was saying that he'd "received fair value" for his investment in Pawlenty.  We're still waiting to see the pictures of what Pawlenty did to earn $54k.  Access Anywhere and its subsidiaries have been fined for a variety of consumer fraud abuses by several states.

These fine examples of Republican amorality are nothing new for the GOP.  Since Grant, most Republican candidates have been crooks first, politicians second, and Americans behind every other entertainment.  Eisenhower was a slight departure from the norm, but he waited until his last moment as President to, uncharacteristically, lash out at the white collar criminals heading the "military-industrial complex."  Otherwise, his term of office was decorated with scandals and abuses of power and weeks of vacationing at the nation's finest golf courses.  Republicans are nothing if not expert at relaxing and ignoring they job they've been elected to perform.

This year, though, the Republicans are coming out of the closet with the kind of confidence that could only belong to a party that does not fear losing the next election.  They have a right to feel fearless, now that they have fixed national and local elections so that they can "win" any office they decide to fill.  Being unafraid of the whim of democracy, their first act is to provide the same kind of immunity to their white collar criminal buddies.  So, "tort reform" has risen to "the most important problem the nation faces," according to Republicans and their $4,000 suit cohorts. 

"Tort reform," if you haven't been paying attention, is directed at a specific, very narrow aspect of civil law; the part that allows the rest of us to strike back at the abuses of big business and other white collar criminals.  Real tort reform would embrace all aspects of legal time-wasting, including the overwhelming number of frivolous business-to-business lawsuits.  But Republicans, on the rare occasion they develop any practical skills, are occasionally corporate lawyers.  And business law is one of the few places where large companies can beat small companies.  So, this pretense of "tort reform" is only aimed at limiting the capability of class action lawsuits.  Because the last thing a Republican wants is for his gravy train to be taken to court, shown to be as criminal as we all know they are, and deprived of millions of dollars that could be better spent putting a well-connected Republican into political office. 

Forbid the thought that a poor or middle class person might find a way to strike back at a corporation that caused loss of life, limb, or means of survival.  Republicans believe that our courts are reserved for whatever purposes the really evil white collar criminals believe they are best served.  "Tort reform" is intended to protect big tobacco, bigger oil, drug manufacturers, polluters, inside traders, creative accounting executives, and the long list of incredibly rich and powerful white collar criminals. 

The arrogant bastards who are promoting this think you don't have the brains to know what they are doing.  So far, all of their decisions have been based on the assumption that the average US voter is too dumb to know what's good for him.  They're probably right.  The world is still waiting to hear about the first scumbag to go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

April 2005

#132 So Now that You Can't Vote, What Can You Do? (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I predict that the violence this country suffered during the 1960's will return.  In fact, I predict that political assassinations and kidnapping will begin to occur at a state level in Florida and Ohio.  Since Florida and Ohio suspended voter rights to further the neocon Republican agenda, it only seems logical that the violence would begin there.  I could be wrong, maybe people won't care which state politicians they attack, but I think it's inevitable that politicians and the government will come under attack. 

For all practical purposes, Republican power mongers have eliminated the right to vote in the United States.  In most states, Republican radicals have physically taken over the voting machinery and, now, the act of voting is an unnecessary and pointless exercise.  The outcome is predetermined and there is, politically, nothing individual citizens can do about it; nothing democratic. 
Voting is a non-violent, relatively painless way to affect political change.  When fair and honest elections are unavailable, the only method left to affect change is civil disobedience violence.  L.B.J. and Tricky Dick created a similar non-responsive political system in the late 1960s and their political ineptitude spawned the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and the Symbionese Revolutionary Army along with a generation of political activists who often considered violence along with traditional political action. 

The problem with non-democratic political systems is that they have to be totalitarian and viciously self-protective.  The mythical benevolent dictator is an impossible fantasy.  As Phillip Dick wrote, "Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."  I suppose that explains suicide bombers.  When citizens have no way to change their political system other than through violence, violence becomes a valid and effective political option.  If you can't vote with a ballot, you can always voice your opinion with a bullet, a bomb, or by kidnapping the nearest politician's family members. 

Of course, whoever the powers that be, who are The Powers That Be, will call that response "terrorism."  Terrorism is defined as " the use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create a climate of fear in a given population."  When the "given population" is a group that wields a grossly disproportional amount of power and controls an overwhelming portion of the nation's assets and has worked hard to create a "climate of fear" in the general population, the definition still stands but it doesn't elicit anywhere near as much sympathy for the "terrorized" population. 

The response of many Americans to the Oklahoma City bombing was surprisingly neutral, until the media focused on the injured and murdered children of the federal employees who were attending the government-provided childcare in the federal building.  I was regularly surprised at middle-Americans who felt sympathy for "the kids" and apathy toward the adults who died in that act of terrorism.  These were not just right or left wing extremists, but unbelievably ordinary, middle-class working folks from all areas of life.  Americans, apparently, are incredibly disassociated from their government and the people who work for that government.  So isolated, in fact, that we have a hard time deciding who to root for, the bomber or the bombed, when a U.S. government is blown to bits. 
The current political system is creating an atmosphere ripe for revolution.  In forcing the middle class to carry the weight for the rich, our government is destroying the economic system that created the nation's wealth.  David Cay Johnston, the author of Perfectly Legal, The Covert Campaign to Rig Our tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everyone Else and a New York Times reporter, describes how we suffer under "the only government in the world that is pursuing a low wage strategy."  Our tax system is designed to export middle class jobs, to transfer wealth from the middle class to the rich, and to provide economic security only for the rich; especially the inherited rich. 

If there is a perfectly worthless, deadbeat class in America today, it's the inherited rich who believe they have a right to their sloth and destructive traditions.  You'd think that Americans would be repulsed by the existence of a class of citizens who are "royal" and powerful simply because of their parentage.  We aren't yet, but that doesn't mean we won't get there damn soon.

Without the bright lights and sparkly distraction of television and video games, I suspect that we'd be in the middle of a revolution today.  As it is, most Americans haven't noticed that their children are sliding into an international third-class status as uneducated, unskilled, minimum-wage laborers.  With the deadly combination of religious hallucinations and credit cards, they can distract themselves from the painful facts that should be faced, sooner or later.  But that doesn't mean those distractions will put food on the table or a table under a roof or a roof over a family. 

Society's usual canaries in the mine are already beginning to show the strain, though.  Revolutions are not carried out by the masses.  Only 1% of the population participated in the American Revolution.  Fewer than 1% of the 1960s kids fought against the Vietnam War and Nixon's corrupt administration.  The overwhelming majority of every population is cowardly and conservative, but change doesn't depend on the majority's participation.  Change is driven by a innovative, energized, creative few.  The rest of the human sheep simply follow the flow or hide and watch.  When one mechanism for change is removed (voting rights, for example), another will take its place.  If the United States' government no longer interested in guiding and protecting democracy and freedom, another entity will take its place.  This country's power comes from the middle class and the energy of the middle class won't be contained as easily as the Bushies hope.  Bush should be careful about dismantling the systems of democracy. The tools for change won't vanish, but they will change.  Sometimes, when the tide changes, more than just sandy beaches are washed away.

March 2005

#131 Fat People on Welfare (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

Nothing stripes my ass faster than getting stuck behind fat people in the grocery line, trying to pay their grocery bill with food stamps or a Minnesota EBT card.  I don't have a problem with welfare for people who need it, but it's obvious that fat people don't need help finding food.  I'm not buying the hormone excuse, you get fat because you eat too much crap and exercise too little.  Someone on welfare or food stamps should be working way too hard to get fat.  Usually, the cherry on top of the pissed-off donut is the newer-and-far-more-expensive-than-mine, over-sized, typically-American car that the welfare recipient stuffs his and/or her groceries into.

I'm equally incensed by pretty much anyone who abuses public assistance.  Smack on top of my list is every sort of corporate welfare.  Fat cat corporations who are not contributing anything exceptionally valuable to their communities do not deserve public funding.  Sports teams ought to be paying for the privilege of polluting the airways and local traffic with their meaningless "entertainment."  Even asking for concessions on the concessions at pro sports events ought to grounds for public humiliation for those fat cats.  Apparently, politicians are below any threshold of personal honor, since it's never hard to find a crooked pol to sponsor yet another publicly financed gladiator stadium.
Corporate welfare is the norm in this country.  Ethanol, for example, is a spectacular source of welfare in the US.  "Family farmers" are just corporate farms, so protecting that "national tradition" is as stupid as worrying about protecting the last of the slave plantations.  It takes somewhere between 1 and 1.5 btu's of energy to produce a single btu of ethanol, counting manufacturing, processing, and transportation.  My inability to pin down the range of inefficiency is mostly because the folks who create this corrupt pork barrel don't want the average taxpayer who receives absolutely no benefit from ethanol to know how bad they're being screwed.  However, if foreign oil independence is a national goal, wasting 1 barrel of Arab fuel to produce 3/4 barrel of mediocre corn gas isn't going to achieve that goal.  What it does produce is easy welfare money for unproductive Midwestern farmers. 

I think that anyone ought to have exhausted all possible sources of income and sold off all excess property before even considering asking for public assistance.  Welfare is for the poor, not the lazy, not folks who feel inconvenienced by normal business hours, and, especially, not for people who simply can't manage their lives competently.  

A few years back, an acquaintance who had managed to lose a half-dozen jobs in a two year period found himself out of work in the heart of the Bush II recession.  He was already inclined to be an uninformed "conservative," but his experience with the Minnesota public assistance system tipped the scales for him.  He'd been fired, with cause, from his last two jobs and had been in those positions for less than three months.  He wasn't qualified for Unemployment.  He applied for welfare.

In his mind, he "really needed" public assistance.  He was astounded to discover that the state was unconvinced.  Maybe it was the brand new, gas-guzzling double cab 3/4-ton pickup that he drove to the welfare office.  Maybe it was the fact that his wife earned a little above the poverty level at her job.  According to the welfare folks, his problem wasn't that he was poor.  His problem was that he managed money about as competently as George Bush manages the English language.  For some reason, they expected him to give up a little luxury and excess before they were willing to start tossing public money in his direction.

He's no different that corporations who want to tap into the public finance vein.  They're making buckets of money, but they can see that competition might, someday, put an end to their success.  So, they buy a politician, write a bill that provides them with a pile of tax money, and manipulate the system so that they get paid not to work.  It's the American Way. 

Our current tax system is wall-to-wall welfare for the rich.  The rich and crooked get rich on the backs of the middle class.  They elected a deadbeat dope addict to further their agenda and move the cost of maintaining an elite class to the working middle class.  They want to dip their crooked fingers into the national economy and be protected and subsidized while they do it. 

Fat people on the public dole are only slightly more irritating than fat people trying to get onto the public dole without even a half-reasonable cause. 

March 2005

#130 Looking for King George (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I've heard at least a zillion explanations for why executives are worth the humongous salaries they're paid for doing the mediocre work they usually avoid.  Not a one of those justifications makes a lick of sense. 

The dumbest is the comparison between professional athletes and executive salaries.  The story goes that if an uneducated street kid who happens to be able to run fast, throw a ball hard, jump high, and/or coordinate his hand and eye at a superhuman level is worth X-million-dollars a year, it should be obvious that the CEO of a Misfortune 500 Company deserves even more money for whatever the hell he does.  Sort of an if X=Y, then Z=$6,000,000 kind of logic. 

First, we have some standard of comparison for the athlete, even if it's totally irrational because some dumbass CEO is the fool who decides what the athlete is "worth."  At least the athlete has to be able to do his job well enough to produce points or prevent them from being produced before some silly executive will assign a value to that job.  Second, it's indirectly possible to pretend that there is a marginally direct link between an athlete's performance and the dollars spectators will spend to witness that performance.

No such logic exists for executive salaries.  An exec can completely suck at his job, providing no leadership, no technical skills, no Big Picture insight, and no useful reason for his or her existence and that exec can still drain big bucks from the corporate till.  Any half-competent corporate researcher can find examples of thousands of execs who have mismanaged their company into oblivion and walked away with a magnificent golden parachute.  Sometimes those parachutes can be directly attributed to the company's death and that doesn't seem to phase anyone. 

No, I think the reason American companies pay such ridiculous salaries for non-performing execs is because we're looking for King George. A paltry 1% of the original citizens of the United States participated in the American Revolution.  The overwhelming majority were perfectly happy with taxation without representation and a class system that stifled England into 3rd world status in the next 200 years.  A disgusting number of the elite who participated in the creation of the Constitution wanted a government similar to the one the country had just defeated, many of them urged George Washington to become King George Washington.  Today, most Americans are doing everything they can to return to the social structure and economic system that killed crushed the life out of Jolly Ole' England. 

We're happily and stupidly electing an inherited political system, setting ourselves up for years of inbred Bush family-screw-ups.  We've created a class system of upper crust, Ivy League morons who float to the top of almost every corporate institution, in spite of inability and lack of imagination and infected by the age-old ruling-class-total-absence-of-ethical-standards. 

Humans are an incredibly simple-minded animal, at the core.  We're desperately hoping that there is more to life than . . . life.  We want "meaning" to be applied to this painful and degrading existence, but we don't want to work for that significance.  We want someone to impart it upon us.  Since gods are notoriously absent during times of trial and turbulence, we hope that the gods will speak to "special people": the inherited ruling class.  As stupid as that theory is, it's as old as human society.  If you can find a single example of a king being anything but a drain on his culture or a queen being anything but a useless figurehead sucking the lifeblood away from the folks who do actual work, I'll be astounded.  But I won't be convinced that your one example establishes anything but an incredible example of dumb luck in a single moment in time. 

The best companies are more democratic than autocratic.  The most successful companies in modern history have a structure that is dramatically more flat that pyramidal, decision and salary-wise.  Not that anyone cares.  We're more interested in being comfortable than in being productive.  Apparently, most of us are more comfortable when we're being ruled by a royal class whose inheritance is decreed by non-existent gods.  P.T. Barnum must have been thinking of this trait when he said "there is a sucker born every minute."  The only thing wrong with this sentiment, in 2005, is that suckers are born at a much faster rate. 

February 2005

#129 Imagine This (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

This strange . . .  parable(?) was sent to me several months ago by a Kansas family member.  I hung on to it for weeks, considering sending a "reply to all" as a correction to the many logical flaws in this irrational rant, but decided that the Rat is a better place to "publish" my response.  The "letter" is highlighted by lines beginning with ">" and my response is found in the bits without that weird punctuation.

• Imagine this happening to you...
• One Sunday morning during service, a 2,000 member congregation was
• surprised to see two men enter, both covered from head to toe in black
• and carrying submachine guns.  One of the men proclaimed,
• "Anyone willing to take a bullet for Christ remain where you are."
• Immediately, the choir fled...
• the deacons fled...
• and most of the congregation fled....
• out of the 2,000 there only remained around 20.
• The man who had spoken took off his hood...
• He then looked at the preacher and said "Okay Pastor, I got rid of all
• the hypocrites... Now you may begin your service. Have a nice
• day!"
• And the two men turned and walked out.

This foolishness was described as heavy" by the sender.  Heavy was once a hip term that described an idea requiring considerable contemplation for understanding.  This message is considerably below the hip standard.  Usually, my email filters catch this crap and auto-deletes it.  When that fails, I figure it out pretty quickly and delete it, manually.  That day, it just tripped a trigger and I couldn't let it pass without comment.  This whacked-out author asks us to believe in the judgment of the 20 dimwitted, terrified, or petrified folks who were convinced that two jerks with machine guns would represent God.  Why would anyone expect holy inspiration from any one who OWNS an automatic weapon, let alone hauls one to church?  Is there something that conveys sanctity when gun-toting clowns add black masks to their costume?  If that's true, I wonder why we all aren't bowing and scraping when Islamic women parade by in their black tent suits?

• Funny how simple it is for people to trash God ...
• and then wonder why the world is in the condition it is today....

Funny how a powerful majority religion can be so paranoid about its status in a country that it clearly rules with fear and repression.  Even non-believers are afraid to express disagreement in the current climate.  Like Islamic fundamentalists in Iran or Saudi Arabia, neo-con Christians continue to push their agenda on everyone who thinks like or unlike them.  When anyone questions their ethics, honesty, fantasies, or superstitions, they cry "persecution!" and act like "freedom from religion" is the worst crime Jefferson perpetrated against humanity. 

Even worse than owning slaves. A psychologist might diagnose this as either paranoia or megalomania.  From my perspective, it seems more like the kind of insecurity that has driven religious despots since the beginning of human communities.  Vicious historic actions like witch hunts, the Inquisition, England's purge of all churches other than the Church of England (not long before the American Revolution attempted to separate politics from such oppression), and Hitler's purge of Jews and other non-white, non-Christian citizens in 1945 are examples of this insecurity in action. I'm unconvinced that a significant number of people in any culture "trash God."  However, it's obvious that all people do not believe in the same gods.  Or the same ideals from a shared God.  If that's trashing God, I guess my last paragraph explains this statement.  If the writer hopes to create a unified human mind, she's living a drug-addled superstitious fantasy.

• Funny how we believe what the newspapers say...but question what the Bible says...

Again, it's not like Christianity is a consistent source of information.  There are almost as many bibles as there are countries.  Counting the versions of the bibles from the variations of religions, there might be as many bibles as there are newspapers.  From about 800AD we've been blessed with the Wyclif Bible, Luther's German New Testament,  William Tyndale, Coverdale's, Matthew's, Taverner's, The Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, Douay-Rheims, King James, William Whiston's Primitive New Testament, John Wesley's New Testament, Griesbach's 2nd Greek New Testament, Griesbach's last Greek New Testament, the Apocryphal New Testament, Young's Literal Translation of the Bible, Tischendorf's 4th Greek New Testament, Tregelles' Greek New Testament, Alford's New Testament for English Readers, Rotherham's English translation of Tregelles' text, Eberhard Nestle's Greek New Testament, the American Standard Version, the First edition of Weymouth's New Testament, and the Twentieth Century New Testament which takes us to the beginning of the last century, when biblical editions really exploded.  From then on, a version of the Bible appeared practically every two years for the next 100 years.  This site lists 100+ versions of the Bible (http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Scriptures/), pick one that makes you happy. 

 The history of this often-edited book is anything but clear and unambiguous.  Which makes it easy to pick and choose what you want from the version that most suits the crime you want to commit.  Depending on the section and the edition it's not difficult to find arguments for "loving your neighbor" or "killing the heretics."  The argument you choose probably says more about you than it says about your faith.  Aside from Christianity, we have the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Torah, the sacred documents of 60-some Indian (not Native Americans, India Indians, you dolt) religions, the Buddhist Bible, and only the gods know how many other religious documents exist. 

There is no shortage of gods to celebrate and everyone seems to think the believers of other gods are heretics.  Personally, I don't have time to sort out who's right.  Living in the here and now is tough enough without inventing and justifying the "next life."  People of faith have used the Bible and other famous religious books to justify slavery, genocide, infanticide, homicide and assassinations, war, theft, greed, selfishness, and every other human fault.  How, exactly, do you know when a person is acting in good faith or in self-interest? 

 Obviously, Christians are not particularly good at making that determination, since they picked a marginally recovered drunk and drug addict who swindled his home city for his share of the $7.5 million dollar debt for a publicly financed baseball stadium.  Choosing a man who executed 250+ people, while claiming to be "pro-life" is equally inconsistent.  Bush's list of un-Christian acts would go on for pages and pages, but he's just one piece of evidence that life is, apparently, more complex than defining the hereafter.  As for the claim that "we believe what the newspapers say," most people rarely believe much that newspapers say.  The press has a credibility rating that is considerably beneath used car salespeople.  Maybe that's because so much of the press is dominated and owned by the same folks who want us all to bow to the same religion?  Rupert Murdoch and Sun Myung Moon own right wing newspapers that are regularly quoted as "unbiased Christian sources."  Right.  If the Klan is unbiased, so are those sources.

• Funny how everyone wants to go to heaven...
• provided they do not have to believe, think, say, or do anything the Bible says.

That word "everyone" is overused by almost everyone.  Some of us, hundreds of millions of Buddhists for example, would be satisfied with not having to return to life.  Believe it or not, everyone has a different concept of what heaven might be.  The male Islamic heaven, with its 27 virgin slaves, sounds hellish to many women, for example.  Everyone would not be interested in the heaven imagined by everyone else.  I, for example, would rather go almost anywhere than be where a chorus of shrieking Midwestern protestants are howling their out-of-key, rhythm-less "praise."  Heaven is not a universal concept and it's absolutely not a universal vision. 

 Having read a good bit of the Christian Bible, I think it's impossible to not "do anything the Bible says."  The Bible can give justification to just about any act, if you look for a specific justification.  Murder ("an eye for an eye"), genocide, incest, it's all there.  The Old Testament, in particular, is specially ruthless and wide open for interpretation.

• Funny how someone can say "I believe in God"...
• but still follow Satan (who, by the way, also "believes" in God).

Having watched the results of the last Presidential election, I am amazed at how true that is.  How Pro-Life Christians can vote for a man who executed more than 250 people and, by his own words, has a clear conscious, is amazing.  But not funny, it's scary.

• Funny how you can send a thousand 'jokes' through e-mail and they
• spread like wildfire... but when you start sending messages regarding
• the Lord, you think twice about sharing. 

Apparently not.  I have received no shortage of this kind of message.  To trap and dispose of internet preachers, cheap Viagra sources, and body organ enlargement systems, I have constructed a half-dozen email filters and, still, most of the junk slithers its way into my mailbox.  I only wish this last erroneous statement were true.  Jokes and porno are much easier to filter than superstitious claptrap.

• Funny how the lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene pass freely through
• cyberspace... but the public discussion of Jesus is suppressed in the
• school and work place.

If by "suppressed" the author means that fellow workers, especially management, are not allowed to forcibly harangue other employees about their "faith," I suppose this is true.  If she means that public schools, paid for by all of our taxes, are not allowed to promote a national religion? Again she's right.  But you're living in a fantasy world if you believe that "public discussion of Jesus" does not happen in schools or at work.  It's practically impossible to escape from cubicle evangelists pushing their special perversion of religion.  But, I guess, if they can't force it on us by power of law and gun, religion is being repressed.  So much for Christians being fed to the lions: Christians are the lions.

• Funny, isn't it? Funny how someone can be so fired up for Christ on
• Sunday... but be an invisible Christian the rest of the week.

Again, look to the White House for a wonderful example of Sunday Christians.  Drop bombs Monday thru Saturday, worship the Lord (and drop bombs) on Sunday.  Steal from the needy, the uneducated, the disabled, and the dying Monday thru Saturday,  and ask forgiveness on Sunday.  Why would ordinary citizens behave differently if the folks at the top get away with murder and still, apparently, float into Heaven?

• Are you laughing?
• Funny how when you go to forward this message...
• You will not send it to many on your address list because you're not
• sure what they believe...

Less funny, you who do send it on won't care what others believe.  They believe that their particular take on their specific offshoot of Catholicism should be universal and all other versions of "the truth" should be suppressed.  They don't worry about offending people with different views because they believe the law should pick our position and force it on us.  Possibly, like Rev. Jimmy Swaggert, they believe god is so dumb and unobservant that He wouldn't even notice their murdering another human, as long as he lied, convincingly, to Him.  With that kind of arrogance, no wonder shipping religious propaganda to everyone they know seems inconsequential.  They might even imagine that they are doing the rest of us a favor.  

• or what they will think of you for sending it to them. *Funny how I
• can be more worried about what other people think of me...... than what God thinks of me.

Strange use of repetitive periods, wonder if there is some underlying Satanic meaning to six periods separating a statement?  This six period thing occurred several times in this message.  Care to interpret? Inspirational messages are universal and they are always welcome.  Religious propaganda is less welcome, regardless of the source or the motivation.  Considering the feelings of friends and relatives is not immoral or heresy.  Forwarding a poorly written, irrationally considered, irritating cant that is as likely, or more likely, to offend as it is to inspire is not a religious act; it is a political act.  It used to be that religion, politics, and sex were off limits for general discussion in polite company.  America is not a polite society, maybe it never was, but we're so divided today that we may be on the verge of a second Civil War.  Like the first Civil War and the Revolutionary War, this will be parent against child, brother against brother, friend against friend, and it will be a waste of time and energy because nothing will change when it's done.

• Are you thinking?
• Will you share this with people you care about?
• Or not?

Normally, no.  I'd just let it go as another of the thousands of attempts to mind-control.  This election and the radical right wing that controlled it has ruined my civility.  The less quiet the radical right is about it's dream for a "New Christian America," a return to the theocracy we escape during the American Revolution, a government similar to that suffered in Iran, today, the less inclined I am to quietly suffer the disrespect intended in this kind of message. 

 January 2005

#128 What's an Executive Worth? (2005)

During a recent NPR business-babble program, Weekend Edition, Bill Catlin asked numbskull "expert, Jim Sillery, an executive compensation consultant, if executives were "worth" the idiotic salaries they receive for mismanaging over-stuffed American Misfortune 500 disaster zones.  This brilliant question was inspired by the recent Fannie Mae accounting mismanagement fiasco, which was preceded by ENRON and a few hundred similar incidents of gross and corrupt mismanagement in the last few years.  Of course, Sillery assured Catlin that boards of directors only pay what they "need" to pay to get the "talent" their companies require.  Talent?  Need?  What would a couple of stuffed suits who never worked an honest day in their lives know about talent or need? 

NPR's "business" program morphed into an equally silly discussion between Scott Simon and Fortune magazine editor Joe Nocera.  They continued the fanzine babble over the wonders of executive inspiration.  Spoken like the true outsider he is, Nocera pronounced Steve Jobs to be the 2004 Business Man of the Year.  Somehow, Nocera fantasized that Jobs was the Apple "founder" who's technical wizardry turned Apple into the poster-biz for rags-to-riches.  Catlin listened to this BS as uncritically as GeeWizz Bush receiving a lecture on world affairs from his puppet master, da Veepmeister. 

I would wager a good piece of spare change that neither Catlin, Sillery, Simon, or Nocera have worked on a production line, been a part of a product design team, or spent time in customer service.  At best, these four spoiled children might have had a summer job flipping burgers or pretending to be country club lifeguards.  There is no way that people with such limited useful business experience could know what a CEO "contributes" to a company, its products, the company's morale, inspiration, or daily function. 

Jobs is about as far from a tech-wiz as GeeWizz Bush.  Steve Wozniak provided the technical skills that created and still inspire Apple.  Jobs chased Wozniak out of his own company with power plays, back-stabbing, and by turning a cool, creative company into a tech sweatshop.  Jobs' claim to fame, in every Apple product, is the quickly dated "look" of Apple products.  With the same trendy vision that new cars look like old cars in two years, Jobs cranks out plastic boxes that look 50 years old by the time the next generation of products appears.  Jobs might be a marketing wiz, but he's no Woz.  He is not a technical innovator, an inspiring manager, or a creative force.  He's a political animal and there is no shortage of those in these United States.  The best analogy I've seen of Wozniak and Jobs compared them to the Beatles: Jobs was McCartney, a self-promoting pop icon with limited skills but lots of unfounded sex appeal, Wozniak is Lennon, multi-talented, ahead of his time, and completely dedicated to music and making the world a better place to live. 

Leadership is a grossly misunderstood quality.  For some reason, humans want to imagine that leaders are something you can breed and grow like pedigreed sheep.  For centuries, human cultures have gravitated toward promoting the most useless, least visionary, least talented men to the highest positions in the country.  We all know this isn't reality.  Hollywood and historians have made a living out of retelling the story that we all know to be true; that our leaders are distracted and incompetent and, without the constant assistance and supervision of critical middle management, they will drive us to ruin.  Crooked and doped up politicians, dimwitted kings and CEOs, loudmouthed but foolish bosses, sexist and clueless managers, and the long list of people in power who don't have the capacity or motivation to do the leading their job implies they should provide.  That's the universal stereotype for "leadership."  Writers and comedians have been working with that material for centuries. 

Cultural and corporate heroes are always the rare born leader who spends his time leading and doing the work that needs doing, instead of politicking, stuffing knives into backs, and avoiding useful work.  The fools who rise to the top of the corporate and political ladder are excess baggage with ambition.  They don't care who they hurt, how much damage they do to their culture and associates (they rarely have friends), or what happens to the business or country they mismanage after they receive their golden parachutes or are assassinated (politically or actually). Claiming that these men are critical to a company's success is as clueless as imagining that Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union or that Bill Clinton created the Information Society.  Just because they were sitting at the top of the pile when those things happened is no evidence that they were any part of the cause or the effect.

The myth survives because, rarely, a real leader actually ends up on top of the heap.  When that happens, the lucky heap is massively stronger than other heaps.  Microsoft is that kind of company and we all know how popular that company's leader is.  Human herds do not like people who actually are smarter than the average dull upper-crust wit.  But when a company or a culture does well, that isn't an indication of that kind of luck.  It's most often a different sort of happenstance.  The kind that is driven from somewhere less visible but more typical.  Most companies can get along fine without any of their deadbeat executives, but no company can survive without middle management, customer service, and the rest of the folks who actually do work.

January 2005