Missin’ This?

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Rigged Against Them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cults Here, Cults There, Cults Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

“Where Did They All Go?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is where they all went. Any questions?

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.