“Where Did They All Go?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is where they all went. Any questions?

Where They Are the Same

Do you know where you can’t tell the far left from the far right, other than the level of crazy? They are both humorless. Before you put both feet in your mouth and spout out your asshole, look at the left wingnuts' comments on Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, Stephen Cobert, and even George Carlin (who pissed off everyone).

You can also make a case for both groups lacking introspection (and the associated humility that comes with self-examination). The furthest lefty I know, so left he calls himself an “anarchist” which is also how Libertarians often self-identify, calls himself “a really smart guy” so often I wonder if he isn’t pretending to be Donny Maralardo. I know a few really smart people and I have yet to hear one call himself that in public. At those far polarities, both groups often seem to lack empathy, also. But the absolute lack of humor is astounding and practically a carbon-copy of each end of the political and social spectrum.

Being the fool I am, I drug Mrs. Day into an evening with a couple we have known since we moved to Red Wing. He is a retired adjunct community college social anthropology instructor and she is an artist and a gardener. They have lived on a small hobby farm in Wisconsin since the 70s and have had an interesting relationship with their mostly-cultish Trump Republican neighbors. Covid hasn’t nurtured or matured those relationships. We often have heated discussions because he’s convinced I’m a malleable kid who just hasn’t been jabbered at long enough to be indoctrinated. For years, Mrs. Day and I thought his wife was the family adult, but last night was worse than a Day family reunion.

Every time I tried to inject a bit of humor and to slow down the pace of attacks and non-stop lecturing, I got bit. It took me until this morning to recover enough from that awful evening to realize that while they often sneer, I can’t remember either of them ever laughing or even smiling in an open, friendly manner.It probably happened at some time, but it was so long ago I don't remember it.

For at least 50 years, after my brief experience with the Texas SDS and anti-Vietnam movement of the 60s, I have said, “The best we’re ever going to get in a political leader is someone who both the right and left hate.” Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden qualify by the measure. The rest have been train wrecks. I can't think of a single instance of a radical left political leader making it beyond even local U.S. politics, so we don't have any examples of that to compare. What the crazy right calls "socialists" any reasonable person would call "moderately liberal." Of course, fascists have thought liberals are the Devil's Spawn since the first bully got yelled at for beating up the first nerd. 

The differences between the far right and the far left are still pretty substantial. Wingnuts will quickly point to the momentary spots in U.S. history when anarchists, radical left rich kids, and minorities have spun out-of-control and taken to violence not so much to imagine they might affect change as to expel frustration at a mindless system that revels in waging expensive, high-tech war on Third World countries or hires high school bullies and racist goons to provide "police protection" to keep brown people from thinking they also have rights. As we've seen in the past 250 years or more of North American history, conservatives are quick to grab a gun (or a hammer) and attack anyone who challenges their preconceived notions of reality. And conservatives will always vastly out-number radicals and, even, moderate liberals. Comparing race riots and the moments of Weathermen radical student violence to the past 250 years of racist violence across the nation, north-to-south and east-to-west, is insane and mathematically inept.

Natural distribution defines how both our national intelligence and our political proclivities will lie (literally). Half of every population will be of below-average-intelligence and that is not a hard bar to beat. We're just not a particularly bright animal, on average. However, that curve does not accurately define the conservative-progressive split because the overwhelming majority of any animal will be afraid of change (the primary definition of "conservative"). So, combine a half-stupid population with a nine-tenths (being optimistic) conservative population and you have what has kept humans from becoming "the rational animal" for as long as we've been on this Earth. One of my favorite science fiction writers from the 50s and 60s, Theodore Sturgeon, said "90% of everything is crap" and I've always thought he was a starry-eyed optimist. In the curve above, at best, the population from 115 and up are who have been dragging the rest of this trainload of deadbeats toward a better world while the other 90% are either non-destructive but not particularly helpful or outright wrecking balls of mindless human flesh and meat. 

So, radicalization does seems to either take or create a particularly humorless sort of personality. In the United States, our history demonstrates that Marx might have been on to something when he claimed that a society has to pass through all phases of the idiocy of capitalism before it is adult enough to head toward socialism. Although some of the European nations made that passage a lot faster and more efficiently than we've managed. There is no "good people on both sides" stuff here. There are no good fascists. None.

"Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!"

Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 book, Timequake, used a quote that Vonnegut credits to jazz pianist Fats Waller, “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy.” That thought hit home hard with me.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece marveling at my recently deceased friend’s attitude toward preserving his life as long as possible, “I want to see what happens next.” I did, and still do, love that attitude, but I don’t share it. I suspect Keith had some kind of unfounded (in my opinion) faith that everything will somehow miraculously “work out for the best.” I love that attitude in anyone, but I suspect it is not much less insane than the intense desire for chaos that plagues much of the world, especially the so-called “conservative” populations all across this planet. My friend believed that human beings, under the right kinds of incentives (impending extinction, for example), could and would band together to stave off the death of the species; largely because he had a complex and convoluted intense love for nature and our planet, which included the species most likely to destroy it all in a fit of ego, arrogance, and stupidity. I am totally with him on the first part. I wholeheartedly love the planet we call “Earth” and everything living on it, except humans. And I am totally baffled by the logic or rationale that led to his faith in our species. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m saying I don’t understand or share that faith in humans. From my observation deck, it looks like more than enough humans worship chaos and imagine that, if you toss the world into instability, all the quarters will flip in their favor and they’ll end up rich and powerful. That experiment has been run repeatedly throughout history and it always produces the same sad outcome.

Vonnegut's Timequake also included a made-up biblical bit that should have been included in at least one of the 2,000 versions of the so-called "Christian Bible." Adam and Eve informed God, "that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime." Even better, would be knowing when. Everlasting life might be ok if it were just going to be Adam and Eve and the flora and fauna of the planet. But once those 930-year-old progenitors started puking out their 9 to 1,000 or so offspring, they had to become hoping for an end to the chaos and foolishness. Like me, I suspect those imaginary founding humans probably just hoped that they were having fun when the balloon popped. Suffering for what either is or feels like an extended period before dying sounds, to me, like the worst possible way to go. Those rich guys who are found dead with a half-suffocated prostitute pinned under the lard asses probably went out as happy as they ever were. How is that not ideal?

In Timequake, Kurt also wrote a succinct analysis of evolution, human beings, and the kind of crazy crap that random selection has produced on this planet, "I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly." Kurt desperately tried to generate a personal philosophy of optimism, but he was a realist and reality kept dragging his hopeful-self back to the dirt. When Kurt was well into old age (at 83), he told Rolling Stone Magazine he wanted to sue the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, “And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me." A few years earlier he told a Progressive Magazine interviewer the reason he chain-smoked Pall Malls was “I’m trying to die, but it’s not working.” He was clearly hoping someone would kill him while he was feeling good. It didn’t happen, though. Kurt died at 84 as a result of brain injuries from a fall at his home, and it took a few weeks for that injury to do him in. I would bet he wasn’t happy when he died.

Optimistic people baffle me. Mrs. Day keeps telling people she is having so much fun at this point in her life she wants it to go on like this forever. It won’t, of course. Our declining empire will continue to crumble, the crazed wingnuts will do everything they can to blow up anything that resembles decency and civilization, the media and the lucky quarter-flipper billionaires will finance it all hoping to get even further on top, and it will all continue to swirl around the toilet bowl of disaster and extinction. But for right now, this short unsustainable moment, For my money, this is as good a time as any for "somebody shoot me while I’m happy!" Actually, almost anytime between 2001-05 would have been perfect. 2008 was the last gasp of the old Musictech College as an educational facility and the beginning of the Age of McNally Smith College of Making Doug, Jack, and Harry rich. Before that downer moment, the school was a hotbed of creativity, academic direction, and cooperation. The downward slide to the school’s eventual despicable demise was rapid and predictable and no fun to be around. I retired in 2013, but the lights had long gone out of the building before then. During the summers, I was wallowing in the luxury of the brief moment when the Motorcycle Safety Center’s training philosophy was “adult learner centered” and offered a lot of room for creativity and individual instructor personality. But, if I had a moment to reflect and react, if a school shooter had appeared at any time during that amazing period of my life I’d have gladly stepped between everyone else in the Musictech building (except Jack or Doug) or any of my motorcycle students and taken one for the team. I would have absolutely died happy, assuming it was a quick death. Any other kind voids the inspiration for this saying.

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 1 of 2)

“Yup, it’s true. The virus was ‘engineered.’ In an unscientific, mostly-illiterate way, you whackadoodles were right all along.” In about a dozen words, the microbiologist, who Tucker Carlson had been interviewing for the past half-hour, confirmed practically every unhinged Covid myth the Moscow Mouthpiece had made during the past four years.

All of the ridicule Tucker had received from liberals for his anti-vax position throughout the years of the pandemic was momentarily shut down. Tucker had asked, "How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccines?" And the experts replied with numbers and facts that had no effect on Friar Tuck’s position. Tucker had literally shrieked, "EVERYONE IN AUTHORITY WANTS YOU TO GET YOUR VACCINE" and hinted at the undisclosed deaths caused by and the ineffectiveness of vaccines. And he was right that the “authorities” he ranted against were scientists and healthcare professionals who absolutely recommended that everyone be vaccinated.

The CDC responded with "Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history," which just inflamed Tucker’s agitation further arguing that the CDC, MSNBC, NPR/PBS, and CNN, the ex-employer from whom he was “involuntarily terminated” and Fox’s arch-media-enemy, cannot be trusted. Even some of Tucker’s co-workers at Fox betrayed him. Jonah Goldberg ridiculed Tucker’s logic with, "FACT: Every single person who ever died blinked before they died. The vast majority — like 99% — blinked mere seconds before death. And yet, no one talks about this silent killer." Carlson’s hero, Donald Trump, was almost his only ally in his crusade against science and vaccinations, but when Trump “lost” the 2020 elections poor Tucker was out on a limb with only a few million (73 million in the USA, to be precise) marginally-literate supporters.

But now, Tucker’s wildest paranoid dreams were being confirmed by an epidemiologist loosely connected to the World Health Organization, Dr. Simon Turenne. Turenne had agreed to go on air, live, with Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson on the Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show after nearly three years of a world pandemic that had, supposedly, taken at least 20 million lives, world-wide and almost 2 million in the United States alone. Dr. Turenne was a thin, well-dressed, angular man of indeterminate ethnicity who seemed unusually comfortable in the company of a man who clearly, loudly, and often spoke of his disdain for anyone involved in science or the reality-based world. In fact, the Fox News crew had been generally hostile to the scientist from the moment of his arrival and he hardly seemed to notice, let alone be offended or nervous. When Tucker asked questions in his usual snide, smirking style the doctor smiled back at him and calmly answered each question as if the arguments were being presented by a rational, intelligent person. That act of acknowledgment seemed to push Carlson further over the edge of the cliff from which he had long since jumped; his wrath was no longer even slightly contained.

“’Yup!’ That is what you have to say for creating a disease that killed millions and has cost nations countless coin and stability?”

With that infuriating smile still plaster to his face, Dr. Turenne replied, “’Yes’ seemed a little formal, considering present company and your audience, but if ‘yes’ makes you feel better the answer is the same. The original SARS-CoV-2 and almost all of the variants that followed were man-designed or human-evolved. Actually men and women did the “designing,” since it was a cross-national and unisex effort.” That smile, again, this time a little wider bordering on outright happiness.

Tucker looked as if he’d been slapped or had seen an actual naked woman. Years of pretending to be outraged at his own conspiracy inventions had left him unprepared to be honestly outraged. You could see the steam building as he sputtered his way toward a response. But before he got there, Turenne continued, “It was an experiment. There was a lot of argument among the design community as to how a response, especially among First World countries, would play out. We were, honestly, impressed with how the USA reacted with both a collection of well-reasoned precautions and effective vaccines far sooner than we imagined. Scientists not in our loop created an assortment of vaccines and testing processes that will set the standard for however long the species continues to survive. Which, by the way, is estimated to not be much more than one hundred more years, at best, with the current climate degradation well underway.”

Tucker’s small narrow mouth and vanishing lips quivered and those strange looking puppy ears seemed to stick out even further than usual as they turned beet red. His cheeks inflated and deflated as he drew in the necessary air for a typical screaming response. “What the hell were you people thinking!” Tucker finally managed to shriek in his shrill, barely-understandable imitation of an upper-class, educated white man with little tolerance for opinions that do not mirror his own. “You intentionally murdered two million Americans [Obviously an accidental slip of the tongue, since up to this point Carlson had insisted that only a few thousand US citizens had died from the Trump Plague.] as an EXPERIMENT?” His pitch had raised nearly an octave above normal by the last word. “What kind of monsters are you?”

Despite being practically drenched with spittle from Tucker’s frothing, spluttering outburst, Dr. Turenne remained calm and looked clearly amused by Carlson’s emotional response. “A more rational and responsible question would be ‘Why would you engage in an experiment that had this radical an outcome?’ The answer is that it appears to be the only way to solve many of the problems the planet is facing, with or without humans participating in either the solutions or contributing more to the problems. It was an experiment to test the world governments’ capabilities, the individual countries’ populations, and mostly a test to see what portion of the world population a real pandemic would most affect. As a test, it succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We have collected more data in the last four years regarding all of the issues and political systems and human responses than we expected to obtain if the pandemic had gone on in experimental form for at least another decade.”

[To be continued]

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 2 of 2)

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 2 of 2)

[Continued from Part 1]

You could almost hear and see the steam escaping from somewhere under Tucker’s carefully sculpted toupee. A burst of unintelligible noise escaped that, eventually, turned into a series of insults, raving astonishment, and disconnected partially formed statements and questions. Dr. Turenne waited patiently; removing a handkerchief from his jacket with which to remove Tucker’s expelled saliva from his face and clothing. After the fake-newsman/entertainer’s expletives and hysterics wound down to sputtering and nonsense syllables, Dr. Turenne interrupted with, “Sorry. I couldn’t identify anything that I could respond to in all of that, so I’ll continue explaining the experiment’s results.

“What we learned was that in most undeveloped countries, if a vaccine was available the overwhelming majority of residents in those areas would take it immediately. In countries that most citizens in the United States might identify as ‘socialist,’ those citizens mostly trusted their governments to do a reasonable job of testing and distributing vaccines and information. Both of the first two types of societies, under-developed and ‘socialist,’ were able to vaccinate nearly 100% of their populations as soon as vaccines were available. And we worked quite hard to ensure that vaccines were made available as quickly as possible, including ignoring patent rights and corporate profits whenever possible. In the West, certain groups were also likely to obtain vaccinations immediately and those groups quickly learned the necessary skills to prevent infection.

“Other groups, your audience for example, tended to gravitate toward the worst possible information sources, like yourself, and remain unvaccinated and generally averse to taking any other precautions even four years into this experiment. First world countries in the west have done a particularly good job of segregating intellectual haves from have-nots; geographically and socio-politically. That reaction was particularly helpful for the purposes of our experiment.”

Tucker’s mouth, now wide open, failed to respond. Dr. Turenne  continued, “The kinds of people who will not make the slightest effort to protect their families and communities are also the people who will be unwilling to change their behavior regarding global warming, racial and economic inequality, ending nuclear armament and wars in general, and any number of issues that will result in the extinction of the human race and serious damage to almost all life on this planet. Their self-image and imagined self-importance is the only value they worship and that has turned out to be a spectacular advantage in ‘culling the herd.’” Turenne punctuated the end of that statement with finger quotes.

Finally, Tucker found his now hoarse and somewhat squeaky voice, “Culling the herd? What the fuck are you talking about?” At this point, Tucker was somewhere between outraged and terrified. His beady little eyes had narrowed to pinpoints and his lips had vanished entirely. There was no sign of his characteristic smirk.

Turenne’s smile returned in full force, “Thanks to influencers like you, our experiment has ended early and the conclusions are irrefutable. Our trial virus was a total and absolutely unpredictable success. I am here, primarily, to thank you and your misinformation colleagues for making it happen so quickly and moderately painlessly. Initially, there were more healthcare workers infected and even killed than we would have hoped, but for the most part they learned how to protect themselves. After the initial months if the pandemic, the few healthcare providers and first responders who were fatally infected were among your disciples. Of course, more than one million physicians and nurses left the US healthcare system in the first two years of the pandemic.

“However, the experiment is over, the data has been collected and analyzed, and the resulting actions have been taken.” Dr. Turenne’s smile dissolved into a more serious expression.

“What actions?” Tucker not only looked confused, he looked nervous and his question was barely audible.

“The last variant has been introduced and within a few hours of this broadcast, the world will begin the nasty job of cleaning up the real outcome of pandemic’s final form and getting on with the important work at hand. Depending on your perspective, and I suspect you will be around to have one since it is clear from your dissembling on the subject that you might be fully vaccinated, although I won’t be surprised if you haven’t kept up your booster regimen. If so, that will be unfortunate for you but no loss for humanity.” And the smile returned.

At the end of Dr. Turenne’s response, Tucker began to look terrified. A long pause ensued as Tucker tried to formulate a response under what had become a flood of information and an overload of doubt and suspicion. Finally, his rasping and hesitant voice returned to him and he asked, “What are you talking about? I thought the pandemic was over. Even Biden said . . . “

Now, Dr. Turenne laughed out loud. “Now, that has been your mistake from the beginning. You keep pointing your fingers at US ‘bleeding heart liberals’ and Democrats, but this ‘engineered pandemic,’ as you so cleverly deduced, is not a product of the US government; and certainly not the Chinese government or any government. This is an experiment and a world population solution that was engineered by a collection of concerned scientists and physicians across the world. The initial Covid variant and the evolutionary variants that followed were just a biological and data-collection trial balloon. Everything from the distribution and spread of the virus to the misinformation response to vaccines and preventative measures have been collected, assessed, and evaluated. Once the data and tactics were correlated, the testing phase of the experiment was complete and we are confident that the finished design will be at least 99% effective. The only undetermined variant is how quickly and efficiently the clean-up will be managed.”

Tucker’s usual quick, inaccurate, and snide response failed him and he squeaked out, “Clean-up?”

“Of course, here in the United States we anticipate approximately 140 million deaths in the next 24 hours. That will create approximate 10.4 million metric tonnes of human waste that will have to be disposed of quickly. Countries like Russia, England, Ireland, and Australia will have relatively similar clean-up problems to contend with, since those countries have comparable ‘conservative’ unvaccinated populations. ‘Vaccinated,’ by the way means having the initial vaccination and all boosters as of at least 30 days ago when vaccinations had been available across the world for at least 120 days. If you have the usual Covid early symptoms, you might want to get your affairs in order quickly. As Edward R. Murrow used to say, ‘Good night and good luck.’”

While Turenne beamed that irritating smile at the camera, Tucker coughed and began to look frantically around him at the Fox News familiar faces all breaking out in a sweat, many heading for the exits. 

[The End, Literally?]

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 

Don’t Blame Me

A local shanty in one of our old, more run-down neighborhoods proudly displays a buttload of ignorance and lack of responsibility in his (I assume) front yard: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for TRUMP.” He also has a cute piece of “art” depicting President Biden as the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow. I guess that’s what passes for humor among the humor-deprived fascists these days. Not enough people falling down stairs, being shot by cops, or suffocating in a pandemic to keep them entertained?

1,000,000 Americans dead from Covid, thanks to this nitwit’s irresponsible politics, but he’s convinced it’s “not my fault” and “you can’t blame me.” They put our political system on the edge of collapse and chaos thanks to Der Orange Führer’s inciting an insurrection and civil unrest among the well-armed right wing crazies and their favorite fake news sources getting their marching orders from Vladimir Putin. Trump’s incompetent handling of the beginning of the pandemic put a spotlight on the supply chain problems, but dependent industries, like automotive and robotics,  began to see delays in semiconductor and chip deliveries a year before that. Trump’s uneducated and unintelligent and barely-employable white power extremists have been set loose to vent their frustrations and demand their entitlements. Police believed they were going to deal out racist violence and corruption, backed by a President who wanted the country to return “to the good old days” when cops had no more responsibility than street thugs. Trump voters blithely ignore their responsibility in creating this national disaster, but they are wrong. We can and we do blame them.

You can’t blame me, sure the killer was my son,
but I didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun.
It’s the killing on his TV screen.
You can’t blame me, it’s those images he’s seen.

“Cookie Jar,” Jack Johnson

This small, semi-rural Minnesota town is like most of rural America, more than half-stupid. 50.3% of my county voted for Trump in 2020 and 54.6% voted for that moron in 2016. If you were a glass-half-full kind of person, you might take some solace from that slim margin and the tiny improvement between 2016 and 2020. I’m not. As my wife says, “Every other person here is a fascist.” 

When half of a population is proudly below average intelligence and education, I think the area is headed downhill with little-to-no chance of improvement. I have immense faith in the power of down-breeding. If, for example, the character proudly posting those two idiot statements in his yard reproduced, I’d bet the offspring are even dumber. It’s not like the odds are good that a substantially more intelligent person would breed with an idiot, even by accident.

From here, it’s hard to see a way back to sanity in the country. Trump and the white power idiots have started a fire that was had to be extinguished with a Civil War the last time something similar happened in North America. We’ve jumped well past “the tipping point of stupid” and, for many, it appears that they can not risk having to admit defeat, incompetence, or anything resembling a personal intellectual failure. They would rather die or live in a authoritarian shit hole than be wrong and drag the rest of us into it with them. As Mark Leibovich described them, “the former president has mainstreamed an authentic collection of cranks, bozos, and racists.” As part of the fatally flawed 2020 census, my area fell out of District 2, which included a bit of the Twin Cities, and was swept into one of the dumbest US congresscritter districts, a solid-red District 1 where all of our Republican candidates are election-results-denying, pro welfare-for-rich-farmers and screw everyone else, under-achieving, uneducated half-wits who are no more capable of contributing anything useful to the state or nation than is their timid Maralardo “fearless leader.” If it weren’t for the Rochester bright spot, District 1 would be a train wreck of dropouts, Proud Boys still living with Mom, single moms on welfare, and “farmers” completely dependent on their federal support checks growing crops no one needs or wants.

We had barely been in our retirement home for a year when most of our neighbors were overwhelmingly and foolishly lead by their noses to vote for Trump in 2016. We’d left an area of St. Paul where 85% of our neighbors were not complete fools. Mrs. Day immediately wanted to pull up stakes and move back to civilization. The fact that almost half of our neighbors were not fascists and fools was not a convincing argument. Outside of Rochester, Minnesota’s District 1 is home to many of the state’s dumbest cities, which is pretty amazing since most of the “cities” in our district are vanishing into ghost towns (under 5,000 population).  Worthington is proudly the state’s undisputed dumbest state for a collection of reasons including the fact that 3 out of 10 residents couldn’t manage to finish high school. As a friend said before the 2016 election, “Half of every population is below average intelligence and half have below average education. They are not the same group and they amount to more than 50% of the population. They are all voting for Trump.” (If they manage to vote at all, that is.)

Like many of the people in Minnesota’s District 2, we’re old. We retired and moved here, which mostly means we moved here to die. Lots of young people are here dying, too. The most common story I hear from people who grew up here is “I moved to the Cities when I graduated and failed miserably there. I moved back in with my parents (usually to “take care of my Mom”) and haven’t left.” 10% of the district live below the poverty line. The district’s average income is about 90% of the state’s average. 80% of the district drives 20 minutes to get to work, mostly in the Cities or Rochester. The district’s property values are about 3/4 of the state average. College graduates are about 80% of the state’s average. The district’s veteran population (poverty draft) is about 10% above the state’s average. If Rochester weren’t in the district and the Twin Cities weren’t in moderate commuting distance, none of those numbers would be anything but dramatically more dismal. In almost every way, Minnesota’s District 2 resembles Lauren Bobert’s Colorado District 3, except they are less educated, poorer, older, and more likely to be veterans and US native-born.

The odds are good that we’ll end up being misrepresented by Brad Finstad (who won the interim election earlier this year against a far more qualified Democratic candidate). In his short time in the House, Finstad has voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, opposed the president’s student loan debt forgiveness plans, . blamed Democrats for inflation and for the spike in crime that began in the middle of Trump’s term. Like most of the current Republican herd, Finstad was anti-Trump until the wind blew in another direction. Other than being a “famous local (small town) baseball player” and a mediocre state Representative and a Trump appointee to the Department of Education, Finstad is what you’d expect from a rural Republican candidate, exceptionally unqualified, uneducated, and uninspiring. Weirdly, Finstad is so uninteresting that even the wingnuts don’t know what to think of him. Of course, they think Tim Pawlenty is “radical left,” so “think” is probably not the right word for describing their garbage spewing.

Whatever happens, I suspect Mrs. Day will become more adamant in her desire to move someplace less stupid and nuts. As a life-long Midwesterner who wishes he wasn’t, it will be a one-sided debate.

“I Want to See What Happens Next”

August 30, 2022

A friend died two weeks ago, Keith Beseke was, I believe, 75. Usually, when someone is said to have “fought” cancer, I try to nod politely. It is hard to think of a way for a patient to actually actively participate in the fight against his own cancer. But Keith did fight his cancer with every ounce of his being. He stayed incredibly active for almost all of the 3 years he fought that battle. The general life expectancy estimate for "stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients [is] about three to five months, depending on the condition of the patient." When Keith was diagnosed, in July of 2019, he was in pretty amazing condition, a long distance runner, an avid bicyclist, and an active outdoorsman (hunting and fishing). Keith jumped through every hoop to stay alive. For most of the past 3 years, his attitude was considerably better than mine. He often told me he wanted to live as long as possible because “I want to see what happens next.” He was actually excited about the future. He did manage to outlive Donny Trump’s reign of corruption, incompetence, stupidity, and banality, which I’m sure was satisfying. Many of his friends and relatives were mindless Trump cult followers, which seriously confused and disappointed him. He and his wife, Sue, were strong supporters of Joe Biden in 2020 when I was certain Trump’s fascist handlers would steamroll Biden if Joe made it past the primaries. I was wrong, they were right and I’m glad.

As Sue wrote the morning she told friends Keith had died, “Pancreatic cancer won.” But cancer didn’t win easily and it was an unexpectedly (except to Keith and Sue) long fight.

I am very different from Keith. He was, mostly, an optimist; a grouchy optimist but he had some kind of powerful faith in the possibility of good outcomes. He spent almost all of his life in Minnesota and loved the state and the area as only an outdoorsman can. He was a project engineer for the Department of the Interior and most of his working life was spent creating bird habitat on the upper Mississippi River. I suspect you have to be an optimist to imagine positive outcome for a river so abused as the Mississippi has been for as long as white people have been pissing and shitting in the river. While those hard-won outposts of waterfowl rest and rehab are under constant threat and blatant damage from industry, farming, and the small and large towns that drain their sewers into the river, the valuable remnants of Keith’s projects still provide birds, fish, and other wildlife a place to stay on their seasonal trips north and south. I learned a lot from his example, although I suspect my basic nature is fixed to a negative pole.

When we first met, I think in early 2016 or late 2015, Keith was the only adult student at the local music “school.” All of the other students were 16-and-under, many of them way under. Keith told me when he retired, at 55 from the Interior Department, he was either going to go back to school and study mathematics or learn to play lead guitar. Keith was never much of a lead guitarist, which always made me wonder how well he’d have done as a math student. He had a strong, rich voice and wrote interesting songs and was always generous and fun to play with at jam sessions and open mics. In the last couple of years, he and Sue had a fair number of jam sessions at their beautiful home in Welch and I got to meet some wonderful people there.

Unlike Keith, I’m not excited to see what comes next. I fully expect the US and too much of the rest of the world fall into the mindless fascist easy chair of compliance and obedience. I don’t feel any need or desire to see any of that. Keith, however, would have tried to look through the smoke and mirrors and bullshit to see what the people who are always trying to do the right thing for the right reasons are doing now. He would have found them, pointed them out to me, and reminded me that things that are broken can be fixed.

Rural and Old

An interesting aspect of my McNally Smith College of Music experience was the fact that a small city, St. Paul, attracted an outsized population of rural students. I don’t think I ever heard any statistics from our marketing/recruitment department, but I would be surprised if more than 10% of our student body came from cities of more than 10,000 people. Unfortunately, the school’s recruiters went hard after a fair number of inner city victims/students and while their tastes were at least 21st Century they mostly couldn’t afford either the “education” or the business. The music business has long passed the moment when ordinary people can hope to earn a living either as a musician or a technician.

The point I’m hoping to make here, though, is that rural people fairly consistently live in the past; often a fantastic non-existent past. The kids who came into that music school were almost universally 1960-1980 music fans, what should have been their parents’ or grandparents’ music genre. Weirdly, they are not even aware of how strange that is.

Having retired to a rural small town, I’ve discovered that people from my own generation in this area are fans of their parents’ or grandparents’ music genres; mostly really old country music or 1940s and 50s pop crap like Frank Sinatra or worse. Weirdly, they are [also] not even aware of how strange that is. [Remember, retiring to some place is exactly the same as picking a place to die. Nobody with a lick of sense in my age group expects to see the next decade and that makes for very short term planning.]  I have never been around so many people my age who know almost nothing about 1960s pop music. When they play a popular song from their own youth, they play it like it is an act of either defiance or extreme hipness. There is nothing hip about 60-year-old music. I often feel like I’m surrounded by reincarnations of my parents’ generation.

When liberal politicians talk about closing the gap between rural and urban voters, they are either dreaming or have a plan to dumb-down urban voters. Part of the attraction to rural areas is the lack of competition, low tech job demands, and a “more simple life” (read dumber and lazier). It is, literally, impossible to make silk purses out of sows’ ears and you can’t invent an education system that will thwart the low standards, superstitions, and fears of rural parents. In the 1950s and early 60s, the federal government made a strong push toward encouraging teachers to go to less desirable communities; rural and poor urban areas. The result was improved test scores, more of those kids finding their way into higher education and professions, but the push-back was fierce. A surprising number of parents do not want their kids to live better lives than their own and a high percentage of those parents are rural.

Today, we’re going the opposite direction. Rural and red state education has become an oxymoron as teachers abandon rural schools and many are closing or shortening their hours. “Teaching to the test” has been the state of K-12 “education” since Bush II’s “No Child’s Behind Left Unmolested” and the tests are getting dumbed-down every year. The complaint that “Half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level” does not include the fact that the 8th grade level reference point has been slipping for 40 years. The average American reads at the lowered 7th to 8th grade level, which means they might be able to read a “young adults” book if they really concentrated. These are Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” A pitiful 12% of Americans are “proficient” readers; meaning people who could be useful employees or even business owners and professionals. This is the “demanding” criteria for “proficient”: “Click to the second page of search results from a library website to identify the author of a book called Ecomyth.” The top category, Level 5 and the most literate 2% are able to “Identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable.” Holy crap! We’re toast.

Keep in mind, these are the people, the lower 88% for whom Republican politicians are making their MAGA pitch. They couldn’t make a 1st grade classroom great, or even slightly more intelligent, if their lives depended on it. When you read for the bottom, you don’t have to work very hard to accomplish your goals.

The Rat’s Rules: #6 If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying

““If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying” is probably one of the most misunderstood business rules in a long, long list of misunderstood business rules. Too many mismanagers mistake that phrase to mean the growth is the agent that keeps the business alive. That is not what the phrase means, or should mean.

It’s more important to stay alive than to grow, ask any number of short people or many exceptionally long people. Concentrating on growth allows lazy mismanagers to pretend to have their eye on the target while looking at easy stuff that could be handled by an intern: a stupid, unmotivated intern. Growth mismanagers worry about advertising/marketing, paying the sales force more to develop more sales, reducing costs (like R&D, manufacturing, or employee development), and juggling the books to provide the appearance of growth. None of those things are likely to create long term growth and most of them waste resources that will likely kill the business.

If that kind of mismanager were inclined to take advice from an honest consultant (both, a rare breed), that consultant would tell the growth mismanager  “Don’t worry about growing, dumbass. You are dying. Try to concentrate on staying alive.” Not growing is a symptom of dying, not the core problem. As any old person who has lived long enough to begin to lose height. It isn’t the lost inch or two that is the problem, the problem is being old and close to dying.

“Staying alive” activities are (in order): superior customer service, staying close to customers to determine their needs and desires, creating reliable and innovative products, employee development, and (dead last by several lengths) marketing and sales. When you ask an ex-customer of a company that was once considered excellent why they now dislike or distrust that company, 99% of the time I’d bet the answer will be “they treated me like crap.” Poor customer service will flip a loyal customer to a hater in a few seconds. That kind of hater will spread poisonous word-of-mouth stories that no marketing plan could ever keep up with. There is an old restaurant management rule that says something like “It takes $50 in advertising to get a new customer to try your business, 5 seconds of poor service to lose them, and $5,000 in advertising to get them to try you again.” The cost of poor service is under-rated, often ignored, and when it has gone on too long there is no road back for the company. No one can afford to spend $5,000 to attract a customer for a $20 meal.

22 years ago, I started my RatsEyeView.com (a domain I gave up a few years ago) business page and this blog to attract customers to the business consulting companies I worked for. I was a sub-contractor, most often, for D&H Consulting out of Rancho Santa Fe, CA working with an old friend from California on improving quality management and inventory control. I didn’t last long, 3 or 4 projects I think. It was soon apparent to me that in the early 2000s the corporate rewards were going to mismanagers who could downsize operations to little more than marketing and sales, passing off manufacturing and service to overseas manufacturers and contract companies. What these CEOs and other corner-office creeps wanted to hear was “How much do you like my poetry?” The only "improvement" they had in mind was in their own salary and perks. Almost universally, these mismanagers were all proud holders of the most worthless degree in academia, the MBA. Someone once said that you could sum up the entirety of a Harvard MBA with “Push blame down and pull credit up.” If any of the corporate “leaders” I consulted with had other skills, they did not display them around me. Every one of the companies we worked with has since been absorbed by another entity now, most at bargain basement prices. The CEOs, though, made out like the bandits they are.The businesses and employees were trashed like they were the disposable private property of the executives and, usually, the stockholders got the shaft too.

Why people like that keep getting hired is impossible to explain. Killing a business ought to be a scarlet letter on an executive’s resume, but it doesn’t work that way. Corporate American seems to protect and reward the really major failures. Which is why our companies keep dying while they focus on growth and keep over-paying executives who don’t produce revenue or customer satisfaction.

Go figure.

Falling in Line

The old saw about liberals and conservatives is playing out to be uncomfortably true: “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line.” Conservatives like to mouth insults like “sheeple” without doing much thinking about what those words mean and, usually, that is just entertaining. Today, not so much. After the FBI raided their Führer’s palace in Florida, Trump fanatics are threatening civil war. It doesn’t matter to the Marching Morons that Trump had illegally taken and stored top secret documents in his treasonous rat hole. They are not only fine with der Führer’s close connection to Russian dictator and international criminal Putin, they celebrate their MAGA-wing’s common cause with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Their designated spokesman, Tucker Carlson, has become almost as popular in Russia as he is in the uneducated white power crowd in this country. How did a group so misnamed as “conservative” become so radically anti-American?

Easy. They fell in line.

Remember the “never Trumpers?” Yeah, I barely do too. It took so-called “RINOs” about a month to decide their usual out-of-control deficit spending, internal problems buck-passing to immigrants, racism, and pro-war money-grubbing would get a bigger pass with Donny than with an actual conservative. Donny knows how to speak to morons and Republicans are on most level not that bright. But one thing they have been for at least 200 years is “desperately seeking royalty.” The people who consistently vote Republican are also people who would have been Tories in 1776 and they would rather take a knee to a king than admit that their personal problems are due to their personal failures. They imagine that living in a dictatorship or under a king anointed by priests and other royalty would, somehow, solve their problems.

Back in late 2016, our Maytag dishwasher died, the 2nd unit of this model in 3 years, and I’d written a negative review about the product and company on a couple of big box hardware store sites. A woman from Maytag’s “customer service” emailed me to setup an appointment with a repair tech, supposedly at no charge to me. The guy who showed up for the repair was a sixty-something local driving a beat-up Ford van with his business decal flapping in the wind and a call tag from Maytag. He took a special interest in our dog and the opportunity to rant about how much better off the country was going to be with Trump in charge. We, obviously, disagreed, and I speculated that the country would be going through another economic disaster like the Reagan/Bush years and the end result would be an even smaller middle class, an even more obtrusive and invasive government, and a less secure nation. Just like the Reagan years.

The goober went into full worshiping rant mode about how grateful he was for Reagan and his economic policies. They guy claimed to have been a “mechanical contractor” in San Diego during the 80s and, if you know much about construction trades from the 80s you’d know they threw their lot in with Reagan to stop the metric conversion process. Reagan made all sorts of promises to protect unions, which won their support, and he betrayed those promises almost immediately without any penalty at all. He did kill metrication, which pretty much put the stake in US manufacturing's heart, so there is that. I guess construction workers would rather fall out of the middle class, suffer all sorts of economic instability, and see their futures limited to regular downgrading than have to learn a rational system of weights and measures. It’s good to have priorities.

“Devotion” is a word that most accurately describes the fervor Reagan and Trump culters exhibit. I used to wonder how and why people would fight for a king and now I know. Sort of. I don’t understand it at all, but I’ve sure seen it enough to recognize it. So, I know people will do that stupid thing and I have met them and do not understand their motivations at all. It is, apparently, akin to religion where people want to feel that they are part of something bigger, longer-lasting than just their own lives. Of course, they are wrong and we are all just insignificant specks of dust in an infinite universe that could not care less if we live or die. Reality sucks, so I guess the alternative is make up some crazy religion, pretend a god has chosen your Führer, and if you can do that you can probably imagine that the Führer is going to carry you to heaven/nirvana with him (as a servant) when he dies. I guess the “live free or die” thing has morphed into “live on your knees and beg” for these racist, sexist, incel libertarian-fascists?

Me and the wannabe Maytag tech argued a bit about politics and reality. Being a fanatic, changing any part of his locked-down mind was impossible and any real effort was pointless. I was mostly interested in observing his attitude toward his fluffy wimp of a “fearless leader.” He literally worshiped Trump and Reagan. His eyes got all glassy and his already pasty face got whiter. Of course, he charged me $60 to tell me my Maytag dishwasher was unrepairable. A few days later, I replaced the Maytag with an LG dishwasher that has been working reliably for the past 6 years.After listening to our conversation, my wife commented, "I used to think it was only 14-year-old girls who were that gullible. Now, I realize that some people never grow up."

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

Over in a Moment

“Nobody knows anything,” is one of the many brilliant phrases from one of my favorite authors, William Goldman. Mr. Goldman created a host of phrases (and ideas and principles) that we use every day as if they have always been part of ordinary language.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

• “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.”
• “I keep asking myself the same question, ‘How can I be so damn stupid as to keep comin’ back here?'”

The Princess Bride

• “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
• “When I was your age, television was called books.”
• “Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”
• “Inconceivable!"
  "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
• "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!”
• “We’ll never survive!”
  ”Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
• "Get used to disappointment.”
• “You seem a decent fellow," Inigo said. "I hate to kill you."
  You seem a decent fellow," answered the man in black. "I hate to die.”
• "You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that it?”

All the President’s Men

• “We’re under a lot of pressure, too, and you put us there–not that I want it to worry you–nothing’s riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press plus the reputation of a hundred-year-old paper plus the jobs of the two thousand people who work there—(still building)—but none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I’m gonna lose my temper.
• “Follow the money.”

The Ghost and the Darkness

• “Have you ever failed?
  ”Only in life.”

Magic

• “Wow! Brains as well as boobs.”

Adventures in the Screen Trade

• “It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.”
• “The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”
• “I write out of revenge.”
• “A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite.”
• “You can never trust what you read.”
• “There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.”
• “One of my great breaks is that I have only done work I wanted to do.”
• “Nobody knows anything.”
• “But this is life on earth, you can’t have everything.”

When I was young, in my 20s if you can imagine that, anything William Goldman wrote, I read. His first book, The Temple of Gold,. came out when I was nine and I didn’t read it until I was in my 20s, but I was a 25-year-old fan by the time The Princess Bride was released, in 1973. I read that book to my daughters when they were babies and they grew up knowing the story as if it were a traditional fable. In 1987, when the Bride movie finally came out, we were all living in California and saw the movie in one of the Orange County theaters where Rob Reiner liked to first showcase his films. (We saw the 1984 premier of This Is Spinal Tap in the same theater, because my employer—QSC Audio—had provided some technical assistance for the film,) Apparently, not many people ever saw The Princess Bride in a theater, but millions or billions have seen it on VHS or DVD. For people who loved words, for 25 years years, William Goldman was a writer’s writer. It would have been hard to imagine he could be forgotten.

And that, finally, brings me to the fucking point of this screed.

Last week, I decided to do one of my semi-regular William Goldman binges and when I went to my local library organization I discovered the regional library system only owned one William Goldman book, in hard copy, and not a single one of his books in eBook format. (Have I mentioned that I have grown to really dislike paper books?) So, I read Adventures in the Screen Trade again and put as many Goldman books as I could find in the state’s MNLink system on reserve. The first of the MNLink books arrived yesterday,. Magic, and it came from the Raugust Library, Jamestown College. That’s Jamestown, North Dakota! It is a very beat-up paperback 1977 first printing copy that dramatically demonstrates how far from today’s consciousness one of the most famous American writers has fallen. Magic was described as “One of those once-in-a-generation novels that changes everything” and, today, the only copy of the book the Minnesota state library system can find is in a North Dakota college. I had to look it up, Jamestown is a 15,000 person shriveling burg halfway between Fargo and Bismarck. It is “the ninth largest city in North Dakota,” for whatever that is worth.

A few years ago, my step-sister made one of her fairly regular attempts to convince me of life-after-death. I shoulda kept it, but it was a picture of some old people practically crawling over each other in some kind of celestial ecstasy with the caption, “Wouldn’t you wish for this if you could have it?” Or something equally weird. For me, the answer is consistently “no.” As Mr. Goldman would have said, “But this is life on earth, you can’t have everything.” After you’re dead, you can’t have anything. Wishin’ and hopin’ won’t change anything about that, either. As Mr. Goldman’s fading fame proves, after you’re dead you just vanish from everything; no matter how famous, rich, powerful, or irritating you may have been in life. When you’re dead, you are not just dead, you are gone.

As an afterthought, I wanted to figure out who that North Dakota college library was named after. What I got when I tried to search for that information on the Jamestown College website was a “Page not found. The requested page was not found.” I suppose Mr. or Mrs. Raugust were North Dakota rich people, emulating Andrew Carnegie’s tactic of creating libraries all over the country to paper-over his vicious robber baron history. Even Carnegie’s massive effort is fading from history since “The USA had 1,689 public libraries built thanks to Carnegie grants. Of those, about 750 are still functioning as libraries today.” Outside of New York City, where 31 of Carnegie’s 39 original libraries are still functioning, greedy old Andy’s buildings are mostly gone or converted to other less-respectable or admirable purposes. Today, however, Carnegie’s most substantial “invention,” vertical integration (the act of controlling every step of production, promotion, and marketing an industry; aka monopolies) are well and thriving. The robber baron’s best friend, Ronald Reagan, tossed out every progressive move the country had made since Abraham Lincoln in 8 brutal, avarice years (Remember “Greed is good?”) and, today, the Bezos, Musks, Zuckerbergs, Pages, Brins, Kochs, and the rest of the billionaires who own the nation’s governments are having a field day with . . . everything.

The good news is that they will die and disappear with no more of a trace or memory than Carnegie. The bad news is that the good and great, like William Goldman will suffer the same fate.