All of us have become so accustomed to the franchise model of doing business (e.g., McDonald’s), that we can be surprised when we discover a large and successful retail business that doesn’t work that way. Franchise outlets are owned by individuals under elaborate and detailed agreements with the mother company, but the headaches and the responsibility, and the profits, belong to the capitalist who stuck his neck out and bought into the deal.
Argus is different. All Argus stores are owned and controlled by Argus. Every truly significant decision about what happens in an individual store is made by executives who may never have seen that particular store. The job of those who manage a store is to carry out the directives they are issued from the head office as well as hire and fire the hourly workers. Managers have virtually no input on pricing, marketing campaigns, the mix of merchandise available, safety, wages, machines used, computer issues, or the physical plant. There are more than 1700 Argus stores, according to the Argus website. Actually, there is only one store, but it has more than 1700 locations. As far as I know, all of the big-box stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, operate this way.
The biggest advantage of a hierarchical structure like this is that it provides clear lines of responsibility, and little opportunity to shift blame for failure. If a marketing campaign doesn’t work, for example, it’s not the fault of the store manager. The guy who designed that campaign is in an office somewhere in Minnesota, and he will have to answer for his mistakes. If, however, shrinkage (shoplifting and employee theft) is higher in a particular store than it should be, the store manager is probably doing something wrong. There are measurements and parameters and rules for every job, from the lowest grunt to the CIO. Also, for each of thousands of tasks, there is a training program and a certification process, and if you do something you are not certified to do, you are in trouble no matter how well you do it, or how silly and pointless the certification process. Some things can’t be measured, of course, and a personable, high-energy employee is going to get recognized eventually, but the numbers are always more important. Every single employee is constantly being measured on how he is doing the very specific things he has been trained and certified and ordered to do.
The system, which has been developed over many years, works well for Argus as indicated by the only real measure of a company’s viability---profits. Argus makes money. It has made money for years. It is even making money today (though not as much), in a deep economic recession. A hierarchical, by-the-book system like this, however, does have unintended consequences. For example, it can be impossible to get a toilet fixed.
There are two staff bathrooms, both unisex, in the store. The one closest to the break room and offices has been broken, with a leaky pipe, for over two months. Yesterday, I asked our maintenance guy, Manny, if it would ever be fixed.
“I could fix that toilet in a half hour,” he said, “but they vendored it out. I’m not allowed to touch it.”
When Manny says it would take him a half hour, it means it would require fifteen minutes. Manny is one of those guys who can fix anything, and thus amazes those of us who can fix nothing. Manny can fix shelves, floors, electric lights, hard drives, carburetors, walls, doors, air conditioners, motorized wheelchairs, trash compactors, scissor trucks, Segways, alarms, cash registers, shopping carts and pipes. Manny could fix a heart-lung machine if you gave him the manual for it. If you gave Manny the right tools and stents and scalpels and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, I have no doubt Manny could perform a bypass operation. If Manny were in charge of Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program, Hawaii would now be a smoldering hole in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But Manny cannot fix the toilet in the middle of the store. He’s not allowed to. So everybody (including pregnant women) has to walk an eighth of a mile to get to the other one.
And this is one of the unintended consequences of the hierarchy. Showing any sort of initiative is irrelevant to job performance, and thus is discouraged, even where it would solve a small but real problem. There is simply no approved procedure for fixing a toilet when, for whatever reason, the outside contractor doesn’t fix it. It is literally nobody’s job to solve this problem, and if it’s nobody’s job, nobody can do it. Chuck, the store manager, has certain tasks just like the rest of us, and doing something not on his list would be a type of insubordination. No one is allowed to deal with the little things that “fall between the cracks” because, officially, there are no cracks. There’s a procedure and a training program and a certification ritual and a person responsible for everything that can possibly happen, except of course, there isn’t.
It’s tempting to view Chuck simply as a bad, or inattentive, store manager, but that’s unfair. It is true he is in one of those situations where it would be easier to obtain forgiveness than permission. If he disobeyed orders and told Manny to fix the bathroom, it is unlikely he would ever be chastised for it. But because of the culture imprinted upon him by the system, that course of action simply doesn’t occur to him, or to anyone. It never presents itself as an option.
In other words, no one who works there “owns” the store. Everyone, from the lowest grunt to the store manager, has responsibilities of various kinds and those responsibilities are generally taken quite seriously. Taking those responsibilities seriously is what gets you more money and gets you promoted. But no one feels any responsibility for the store itself, or the overall enterprise that is Argus.
I see the effects of this all the time.
Recently, the “market” section of the store was remodeled, and all the refrigerator and freezer cases were replaced. In the course of the remodeling, all sixty of the old cases sat empty for about three weeks, before they were removed. And nobody turned them off.
When I noticed the coolers were still on, I mentioned it to one of the executives. When nothing happened, I told another, and then another, and then another. It became a game for me; I was curious to see if anyone would ever take action. Over the course of two weeks, I quietly informed a dozen of my superiors, all of whom could have turned off the damn things. Nobody did. The cases remained on until the remodeling team (from Minnesota) removed them from the store. The orders to our in-store personnel were simply to empty the cases, and once that was done, our duties had been discharged.
On several occasions, when I brought up the subject to an executive or Team Leader, a surprised look would appear on his face. “Wow, you’re right,” he would respond. “We’re wasting a lot of money, aren’t we?” And that would be the end of it.
One day last summer, a patio-chair appeared in the back room with a paper sign on it: “DO NOT MOVE. BEING SAVED FOR GUEST INCIDENT. ---Leah.” When I asked Leah, an executive, about it, she told me that a customer (a large woman), had sat down in the chair to try it out, and had fallen over backwards. We were saving the chair in case of a lawsuit.
“You know,” I said, “a lawyer would tell you to give the chair to one person and have them store it in a locked room. If this turns out to be the main piece of evidence in a lawsuit, you want to have one person who can testify it wasn’t tampered with. It’s called a ‘chain of custody’ issue.”
She looked at me with that amazed look you sometimes see on the face of a manager or executive when one of the grunts says something worth thinking about that does not involve Beyonce. “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”
Three months later, the chair was still sitting in the same place in the back room, with the same paper sign on it. Though my advice had been sound, and though Leah had recognized what should be done with the chair, she had never been ordered to segregate the chair, so she never thought about the issue again. There were bathmats to be shelved, and cans of beans, and packages of toilet paper (there always are), and it was her duty to get those things on the floor. Custody of the chair was interesting in a theoretical way, but had nothing to do with her job.
Yet another example is the way PDAs, the hand-held computing devices, are allocated to employees.
Not everyone uses them. Food service workers, cashiers, security personnel, the pharmacy staff and administrators have little or no need for them. But for everyone else, everyone who deals with product in the backroom or on the sale floor, they are essential. By scanning a UPC barcode, or a label on the shelf, you can learn the price of an item, its proper location on the shelves, its proper location in the backroom, whether the store has the item (and how many it has and where they are), whether it can be found in other Argus stores or on-line, and whether it has recently been reduced in price. When an item is moved from one place in the store to another, it must be registered via the PDA. When a damaged item goes in the trash, a PDA must be informed. In conjunction with a printer, a PDA makes labels and signs, and changes prices, and makes lists of products that must be moved from one place to another. With a PDA, you can order more product from a warehouse. You can check on whether a particular employee is in the store, or has next Thursday off. There are many things you can do with a PDA, and there are very few things you can do without one.
With all the hardware and software in these things, each one is worth hundreds of dollars, and considering how important they are, you would think Argus would make a serious effort to keep track of them. You would think an employee would have to sign one out at the beginning of a shift and turn it in at the end. It wouldn’t be difficult to set up a system to do that, and put somebody in charge of the things, and hold employees responsible for them in some way. But no, that doesn’t happen. If there is one in the equipment room when you start your shift, you get one. If there isn’t (and you don’t have a manager who has tucked one away for you), you don’t.
Since there are never quite enough to go around (they break, get lost, and need to be recharged), an allocation system would also ensure that those with jobs for which a PDA is essential would have one. Others, perhaps those working on a team project, could share.
The failure to allocate a scarce resource like PDAs, or even keep track of them, has predictable results. Some people always have them but don’t really need them much. Other PDA-dependant employees who can’t get one will need twice as much time to perform their required tasks. If you leave your PDA unguarded, it may get stolen. Also, at the end of a shift, you don’t necessarily return it to the equipment room. Instead, you shove it in a hidey-hole (behind some towels, maybe, in aisle D35) and hope it’s still there when you start your shift tomorrow. This means, of course, that there is one fewer PDA available for the people who work while you are home sleeping.
It is obvious to everyone that the failure to track PDAs reduces the overall productivity of the staff, but there is no way to measure the overall amount of the loss or translate it into lost profits. The effects are intermittent, and scattered across the workforce. On the other hand, instituting a solution would mean devoting some (small) quantity of time and effort to administer it. Solving the problem would cost measurable time and money, and there would be no way to justify that expense because no one knows what the problem itself costs. There is thus no incentive for anyone at my Argus to do anything. A solution could only be implemented if there were orders to do so from Minnesota, and there haven’t been.
* * * * * * * * * *
I see that this article can be read as critical about the way Argus runs its business, but that is not my intention. I am surprised by the way the place works simply because I have never been part of an organization like this. I’ve been ignorant, in other words, but now that I have looked behind the curtain, I’m more amazed by what it does right than by what it does wrong.
Argus employs tens of thousands of people, many of whom are 18 years old, barely literate, and have never held a job before. You need a system of some kind, and rules, and a sense of priorities, in order to make this kind of business work. And Argus does. Argus pleases its customers, consistently feeds the gaping maw of the American consumer, and makes money. Of course, there are things that don’t work quite right or don’t make much sense, but this is true in any organization. The difference is that the things Argus deems important, its priorities, are actually done well. The system is designed, obsessively and compulsively, to accomplish them. In order to keep ten thousand products on the shelf, there are certain things you have to ignore.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
SCOTT HARSHBARGER, or GOLFING WITH O.J.
“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”
---Baron de Montesquieu, 1742
Those of you who have read my articles over the years are aware that I reserve a special circle of hell for two particularly loathsome categories of public vermin.
The first, which we will call “Spoiled-Rotten Irish-Catholic Prosecutors” (see here) consists of those DA’s and US Attorneys who use their offices to advance themselves politically or to grind their own ideological axes. The list is long---Elliot Spitzer, Mike Nifong, Arlen Specter (way back when), Patrick Fitzgerald, the squad that sent Martha Stewart to prison, the West Palm prosecutors who claimed, on every TV station in America, that they had Rush Limbaugh pinned to the specimen board on eleven felonies and then got him on NOTHING, and many others. There are times I wonder whether the only prosecutor in America who is NOT spoiled-rotten and Irish-catholic is Arlene Fisk, but I suppose there must be others.
The second category of miscreants consists of those who, having disgraced themselves in public in some morally repugnant manner, won’t go away. There was a time in America when a public personage who did something wrong would never be heard from again. He would retire to the country, raise root vegetables, pray for his immortal soul, and disappear. The shame of his disgrace would forever change him. I miss those days. I miss shame.
On January 22, 1987, the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a gentleman named Budd Dwyer, shot himself in the head during a televised press conference because he had been accused of financial improprieties. This, I felt, was carrying matters a bit further than necessary. For my money, it is sufficient if the gentleman simply retires to a lifetime of golf with O.J., or, since O.J. himself is currently incarcerated, the equivalent.
But they don’t, do they? Jim McGreevey writes a book and shows up on Oprah. Rod Blagojevich still holds press conferences for anyone who will listen. Spitzer is reportedly “exploring his options” on a return to public life. And Bill Clinton? It’s like he never even went away, isn’t it?
But enough about those guys. This is about Scott Harshbarger, who appeared in the papers recently as the guy hired by ACORN to conduct their internal investigation of themselves and tell them whether there is some institutional flaw that may have lead to ACORN’s numerous indictments, or whether it’s been merely a strange concatenation of circumstances. Mr. Harshberger is thus in the news, winning him my personal exacta of disdain. Not only is he one of the most despicable and ambitious Spoiled-Rotten Irish-Catholic Prosecutors of recent American history, but now, alas, he’s back.
In 1984, Scott Harshbarger was the District Attorney of Middlesex County, in Massachusetts, when Violet Amirault and her adult children, Gerald and Cheryl, were arrested for child molestation at their Fells Acres day care facility. This was one of many cases across the country in the mid-80’s where staff at day-care centers were accused of bizarre acts of child abuse. In California, there was the McMartin case. Little Rascals Day Care was the culprit in North Carolina. In New Jersey, a child-care worker in a Jersey church, Margaret Michaels, was hit with 2800 charges of child sexual abuse. Janet Reno pursued Grant Snowden, a decorated Miami police officer, through five trials before getting a conviction. In Wenatchee, Washington, a lone police detective brought case after case against more than twenty people, mostly members of a single church, accusing them of engaging in hideous sex rituals with numerous children.
In all these cases, which have been compared to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, children were “interviewed” by therapists (usually the same therapists, who traveled around the country), until they “disclosed” what had happened to them. Gerald Amirault, for example, took children to a “magic room,” blindfolded them, and performed sex acts on them, including anal rape with a long knife. One child claimed Cheryl Amirault killed a dog, drained its blood into a sandbox, and then had a robot threaten the child with death if he ever told. Other children reported ritual killings, being raped with sticks, and other outrages.
There was never any physical evidence produced, in any of the cases. Instead, children’s rehearsed testimony was presented to juries while the children were shielded from any cross-examination. Often, they testified on videotape and never appeared in court. Expert witnesses (the therapists) then told the jury to “believe the children” because children were incapable of lying about such things. Convictions, and long sentences, were automatic.
By the mid-90’s, once the mania had been exposed, all of the defendants in these cases had been released. (Some of the therapists went on to create the “recovered memories” scandal, where families were destroyed when adults in therapy, under hypnosis, would “remember” instances of abuse they had suffered as small children.) But the Amiraults remained in prison. Scott Harshbarger, who had used the Amirault case to advance his political career, was now Attorney General of Massachusetts and was about to run for governor. Thus, in 1995, when Violet and Cheryl were granted new trials, the state appealed the grant of new trials to the Supreme Judicial Court, and had them overturned. Violet and Cheryl’s convictions were finally overturned in 1999, after Violet had died.
But Gerald remained in jail, serving his sentence of 30-40 years. He continuously asserted his innocence, and refused all offers of sex-offender “treatment” in prison, maintaining that since he was not a sex offender, there would be no point in him attending treatment sessions. His stance on this matter was cited in parole hearings as evidence of his intransigence, and lack of remorse.
In 1998, Harshbarger tallied 47% of the vote, but lost the race for Governor to Paul Celucci.
Gerald was finally paroled and released, by a unanimous vote of the Massachusetts Parole Board, in 2004. He had served eighteen years in prison. Over the years, even after his political career had come to an end, Scott Harshbarger wrote numerous letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, which had campaigned for Gerald’s release. In them, he bitterly complained that the Journal was trying to cover up child abuse and even deny its existence. As late as 2004, more than a decade after the lunacy of the day-care cases had been exposed, he called the decision to release Gerald Amirault “unfortunate.” “I think,” he said, “we often forget there are a lot of victims out there, people whose lives have been dramatically changed.”
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
---Baron de Montesquieu, 1742
Those of you who have read my articles over the years are aware that I reserve a special circle of hell for two particularly loathsome categories of public vermin.
The first, which we will call “Spoiled-Rotten Irish-Catholic Prosecutors” (see here) consists of those DA’s and US Attorneys who use their offices to advance themselves politically or to grind their own ideological axes. The list is long---Elliot Spitzer, Mike Nifong, Arlen Specter (way back when), Patrick Fitzgerald, the squad that sent Martha Stewart to prison, the West Palm prosecutors who claimed, on every TV station in America, that they had Rush Limbaugh pinned to the specimen board on eleven felonies and then got him on NOTHING, and many others. There are times I wonder whether the only prosecutor in America who is NOT spoiled-rotten and Irish-catholic is Arlene Fisk, but I suppose there must be others.
The second category of miscreants consists of those who, having disgraced themselves in public in some morally repugnant manner, won’t go away. There was a time in America when a public personage who did something wrong would never be heard from again. He would retire to the country, raise root vegetables, pray for his immortal soul, and disappear. The shame of his disgrace would forever change him. I miss those days. I miss shame.
On January 22, 1987, the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a gentleman named Budd Dwyer, shot himself in the head during a televised press conference because he had been accused of financial improprieties. This, I felt, was carrying matters a bit further than necessary. For my money, it is sufficient if the gentleman simply retires to a lifetime of golf with O.J., or, since O.J. himself is currently incarcerated, the equivalent.
But they don’t, do they? Jim McGreevey writes a book and shows up on Oprah. Rod Blagojevich still holds press conferences for anyone who will listen. Spitzer is reportedly “exploring his options” on a return to public life. And Bill Clinton? It’s like he never even went away, isn’t it?
But enough about those guys. This is about Scott Harshbarger, who appeared in the papers recently as the guy hired by ACORN to conduct their internal investigation of themselves and tell them whether there is some institutional flaw that may have lead to ACORN’s numerous indictments, or whether it’s been merely a strange concatenation of circumstances. Mr. Harshberger is thus in the news, winning him my personal exacta of disdain. Not only is he one of the most despicable and ambitious Spoiled-Rotten Irish-Catholic Prosecutors of recent American history, but now, alas, he’s back.
In 1984, Scott Harshbarger was the District Attorney of Middlesex County, in Massachusetts, when Violet Amirault and her adult children, Gerald and Cheryl, were arrested for child molestation at their Fells Acres day care facility. This was one of many cases across the country in the mid-80’s where staff at day-care centers were accused of bizarre acts of child abuse. In California, there was the McMartin case. Little Rascals Day Care was the culprit in North Carolina. In New Jersey, a child-care worker in a Jersey church, Margaret Michaels, was hit with 2800 charges of child sexual abuse. Janet Reno pursued Grant Snowden, a decorated Miami police officer, through five trials before getting a conviction. In Wenatchee, Washington, a lone police detective brought case after case against more than twenty people, mostly members of a single church, accusing them of engaging in hideous sex rituals with numerous children.
In all these cases, which have been compared to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, children were “interviewed” by therapists (usually the same therapists, who traveled around the country), until they “disclosed” what had happened to them. Gerald Amirault, for example, took children to a “magic room,” blindfolded them, and performed sex acts on them, including anal rape with a long knife. One child claimed Cheryl Amirault killed a dog, drained its blood into a sandbox, and then had a robot threaten the child with death if he ever told. Other children reported ritual killings, being raped with sticks, and other outrages.
There was never any physical evidence produced, in any of the cases. Instead, children’s rehearsed testimony was presented to juries while the children were shielded from any cross-examination. Often, they testified on videotape and never appeared in court. Expert witnesses (the therapists) then told the jury to “believe the children” because children were incapable of lying about such things. Convictions, and long sentences, were automatic.
By the mid-90’s, once the mania had been exposed, all of the defendants in these cases had been released. (Some of the therapists went on to create the “recovered memories” scandal, where families were destroyed when adults in therapy, under hypnosis, would “remember” instances of abuse they had suffered as small children.) But the Amiraults remained in prison. Scott Harshbarger, who had used the Amirault case to advance his political career, was now Attorney General of Massachusetts and was about to run for governor. Thus, in 1995, when Violet and Cheryl were granted new trials, the state appealed the grant of new trials to the Supreme Judicial Court, and had them overturned. Violet and Cheryl’s convictions were finally overturned in 1999, after Violet had died.
But Gerald remained in jail, serving his sentence of 30-40 years. He continuously asserted his innocence, and refused all offers of sex-offender “treatment” in prison, maintaining that since he was not a sex offender, there would be no point in him attending treatment sessions. His stance on this matter was cited in parole hearings as evidence of his intransigence, and lack of remorse.
In 1998, Harshbarger tallied 47% of the vote, but lost the race for Governor to Paul Celucci.
Gerald was finally paroled and released, by a unanimous vote of the Massachusetts Parole Board, in 2004. He had served eighteen years in prison. Over the years, even after his political career had come to an end, Scott Harshbarger wrote numerous letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, which had campaigned for Gerald’s release. In them, he bitterly complained that the Journal was trying to cover up child abuse and even deny its existence. As late as 2004, more than a decade after the lunacy of the day-care cases had been exposed, he called the decision to release Gerald Amirault “unfortunate.” “I think,” he said, “we often forget there are a lot of victims out there, people whose lives have been dramatically changed.”
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
THE 2009 BASEBALL PLAYOFFS
Of the playoff teams in the National League, the Dodgers have hit the fewest homers, but have the best staff ERA. Colorado seems mediocre in a number of statistical categories but were the hottest team (.616) in the second half of the season. The Phillies hit significantly more homers than anybody else, but don’t seem to know who’s going to be on their pitching staff. St. Louis has great pitching and Albert Pujols, but scores the fewest runs of the bunch.
Anyone can win the National League this year.
The LA-St. Louis match may decide the issue, and I’ll take St. Louis. It promises to be a low-scoring affair characterized by pitching duels, with a dramatic homer or two, and it could go either way. St. Louis played .600 ball over the second half, however, while LA limped in with a 38-35 record, so that tips the balance.
I feel fairly confident the Phillies will handle the Rockies. They scored more runs, hit 34 more dingers, and they even have an edge in staff ERA. Also, Colorado does not have a lefthanded starter. Colorado’s chances are based on the legitimate questions about what sort of Phillies team will show up. Though Philadelphia had a strong second half (.587), both of their star starters (Lee and Hamels) have ERAs over 7.00 in their last three starts. Also, of course, nobody knows who Charlie Manuel will put on the mound should the Phillies find themselves with a one-run lead in the ninth. I have always argued that the best strategy for the Phils is to score ten runs in every game and let the chips fall where they may. That may be the only way they will advance very far in this year’s tournament.
The Yankees, of course, will beat the Twins or the Tigers. They hit better, they pitch better, and they won more games. And if that’s not enough for you, consider what the Yanks did to these teams in the regular season. New York was 5-1 against Detroit. Against Minnesota, they were 7-0.
Boston versus the Angels will probably be more interesting. Boston has a small advantage in HRs (207-172) and in ERA (4.34-4.47). On the other hand, my impression is that the Angels grabbed their division by the throat early on, while Boston rather meekly accepted its role as the second-best team in the AL East, and never seriously challenged the hated Yankees. Probably they ARE merely the second-best team in the AL East, but one has to wonder whether they enter the post-season fray with the correct attitude. Also, one cannot ignore the Angel’s 47-28 (.627) record in the second half, which is far superior to Boston’s 40-33 (.548). I wonder whether I am letting my emotions affect my choice here, but I’m still picking Boston.
(It’s not that I have any particular fondness for Boston, but if the Angels go out in the first round [like they did last year], they will become one of those loser teams that always win a lot of games, usually win their division, and never go anywhere. And that would be fine with me. I mean, let’s face it. The Angels are a sushi team. They’re not EXACTLY Los Angeles, but they’re still Southern California and the fans spend most of the game tweeting to their snotty friends about how good their seats are and then they leave the games early so they can get home and watch a Roman Polanski movie. They’re not really baseball fans.)
In the NL Championship series, the Phillies would have a decent chance against the Dodgers, but they will probably be playing the Cardinals. And the Cards would win. On paper, the match-up is reasonable. The St. Louis ERA is half a run better than the Phillies’, but the Cards have hit 63 fewer homers. The second series is best-of-seven, however, and it’s at this point that the Phillies’ pitching weaknesses will surface.
In the AL, it is fair to observe that Boston and the Yankees split their season series. Given that, as well as the history of the rivalry, we will all be told to “throw out the record book” and believe that anything can happen. Well, I don’t think “anything” can happen. I think these Yankees are one of the great teams in baseball history and only one thing can happen. I think the Yankees will beat Boston in less than six games and then do the same thing to whatever comes out of the National League.
The astonishing thing about New York in 2009 is not the home runs. The new Yankee Stadium has weird wind patterns or something and a lot of homers get hit there even though it’s a copy of the old Yankee Stadium, it’s right across the street from it, and it’s oriented directionally just like the old place was. So much for wind engineers. What is stunning about the Yankees is that, playing half their games in the most homer-friendly park in baseball, their team ERA is the lowest of any AL playoff contender. The Yankees won this year because they have the best pitching staff in baseball. En route to their crown, I would be surprised if they lose more than four games.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Anyone can win the National League this year.
The LA-St. Louis match may decide the issue, and I’ll take St. Louis. It promises to be a low-scoring affair characterized by pitching duels, with a dramatic homer or two, and it could go either way. St. Louis played .600 ball over the second half, however, while LA limped in with a 38-35 record, so that tips the balance.
I feel fairly confident the Phillies will handle the Rockies. They scored more runs, hit 34 more dingers, and they even have an edge in staff ERA. Also, Colorado does not have a lefthanded starter. Colorado’s chances are based on the legitimate questions about what sort of Phillies team will show up. Though Philadelphia had a strong second half (.587), both of their star starters (Lee and Hamels) have ERAs over 7.00 in their last three starts. Also, of course, nobody knows who Charlie Manuel will put on the mound should the Phillies find themselves with a one-run lead in the ninth. I have always argued that the best strategy for the Phils is to score ten runs in every game and let the chips fall where they may. That may be the only way they will advance very far in this year’s tournament.
The Yankees, of course, will beat the Twins or the Tigers. They hit better, they pitch better, and they won more games. And if that’s not enough for you, consider what the Yanks did to these teams in the regular season. New York was 5-1 against Detroit. Against Minnesota, they were 7-0.
Boston versus the Angels will probably be more interesting. Boston has a small advantage in HRs (207-172) and in ERA (4.34-4.47). On the other hand, my impression is that the Angels grabbed their division by the throat early on, while Boston rather meekly accepted its role as the second-best team in the AL East, and never seriously challenged the hated Yankees. Probably they ARE merely the second-best team in the AL East, but one has to wonder whether they enter the post-season fray with the correct attitude. Also, one cannot ignore the Angel’s 47-28 (.627) record in the second half, which is far superior to Boston’s 40-33 (.548). I wonder whether I am letting my emotions affect my choice here, but I’m still picking Boston.
(It’s not that I have any particular fondness for Boston, but if the Angels go out in the first round [like they did last year], they will become one of those loser teams that always win a lot of games, usually win their division, and never go anywhere. And that would be fine with me. I mean, let’s face it. The Angels are a sushi team. They’re not EXACTLY Los Angeles, but they’re still Southern California and the fans spend most of the game tweeting to their snotty friends about how good their seats are and then they leave the games early so they can get home and watch a Roman Polanski movie. They’re not really baseball fans.)
In the NL Championship series, the Phillies would have a decent chance against the Dodgers, but they will probably be playing the Cardinals. And the Cards would win. On paper, the match-up is reasonable. The St. Louis ERA is half a run better than the Phillies’, but the Cards have hit 63 fewer homers. The second series is best-of-seven, however, and it’s at this point that the Phillies’ pitching weaknesses will surface.
In the AL, it is fair to observe that Boston and the Yankees split their season series. Given that, as well as the history of the rivalry, we will all be told to “throw out the record book” and believe that anything can happen. Well, I don’t think “anything” can happen. I think these Yankees are one of the great teams in baseball history and only one thing can happen. I think the Yankees will beat Boston in less than six games and then do the same thing to whatever comes out of the National League.
The astonishing thing about New York in 2009 is not the home runs. The new Yankee Stadium has weird wind patterns or something and a lot of homers get hit there even though it’s a copy of the old Yankee Stadium, it’s right across the street from it, and it’s oriented directionally just like the old place was. So much for wind engineers. What is stunning about the Yankees is that, playing half their games in the most homer-friendly park in baseball, their team ERA is the lowest of any AL playoff contender. The Yankees won this year because they have the best pitching staff in baseball. En route to their crown, I would be surprised if they lose more than four games.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Sunday, October 4, 2009
TIME OF POSSESSION
On April 5, 1989, in one of the most famous games in NCAA tournament history, 16th-seed Princeton held the ball for most of the game, and lost 50-49 to Georgetown, the best team in the country. On every possession, the Tigers passed the ball, worked their weave, and usually managed to find a decent shot with 2 or 3 seconds remaining on the shot clock. And they almost won, though it was a game that should not have been close
In most games with a clock, “holding the ball” is a strategy employed by the weaker team, not the stronger. Reducing the number of possessions effectively shortens the game and introduces an element of luck. In a shorter game, the weaker team always has a chance. Back before the NCAA introduced a shot clock for basketball, it was not UCLA who would hold the ball for as long as they could, it was the St. Leo’s of the world. In a 4-possession game, St. Leo’s could beat UCLA; in a 120-possession game, UCLA would win by sixty.
Football teams often try to employ the same strategy, especially since Bill Parcells used it to win the 1991 Superbowl with what was probably the worst team ever to win an NFL championship. Holding the ball for 40:33 of the game, the New York Giants eked out a 20-19 win when Buffalo’s Scott Norwood missing a winning fieldgoal attempt in the final seconds. It was this game that made Parcells a certifiable football genius and sent every football coach in America scurrying for ways to manufacture 12-minute drives.
There is an additional factor that makes the strategy attractive. It simply takes more energy to play defense than offense. While this is true in any sport, it is even more important in football because of the extreme demands made on defensive players. Football coaches feel that if they can keep the opposing defense on the field for most of the game, they will wear down, become exhausted and make mistakes. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to this, though it would be difficult to quantify.
However, though reducing the number of possessions can help a football team win a game against a stronger opponent, there are three reasons shortening the game is not as effective a strategy in football.
First, it ain’t easy. On the basketball court, playing keep-away is relatively simple, even for the weaker team. In football, however, executing a 15-play drive that consumes eleven minutes on the clock requires you to advance the ball steadily down the field, getting first downs when you need them to keep the drive going.
Secondly, you are less likely to score. One of the biggest problems in putting together a 15-play drive is the likelihood something will go wrong---a fumble, an interception, a bad call by the refs, or a major penalty. In a 15-play drive, something going very wrong is three times as likely to happen as in a 5-play drive. A 15-play drive is notable BECAUSE it is so rare and difficult to achieve. Defenses, remember, are composed of large, extremely-fit, highly-trained, violent men, and their mission to prevent you from advancing the ball. While it may be possible to fool them or overwhelm them on occasion, a strategy that requires you to do that repeatedly is not likely to succeed. (This is why, by the way, every team that relies on the running game for most of its offense is doomed to failure.)
On September 21, 2009, the Indianapolis Colts beat the Miami Dolphins 27 – 23. The result was not surprising. What was notable about the game was that the Colts had possession of the football for just 14:53. The Dolphins had the ball more than three times as long as the Colts, yet lost. This brings us to the third reason that mitigates against holding the ball, at least in pro football.
Specifically, let’s consider the importance of Peyton Manning to the Colts. He is, after all, the highest-paid player on the team, and certainly the most valuable. It’s a solid organization from top to bottom, of course, but without Manning, it would have virtually no shot at making it to the Superbowl. With Manning, however, it’s one of the favorites. He is at least as important to the Colts as Tom Brady is to the Patriots. The Patriots are another great team, but look what happened last year when Brady was injured. The team played well, and were always dangerous, but they never really had a shot at the title.
Every play Peyton Manning is on the field is a play in which he might get his neck broken. It’s a violent game. And this possibility is something every sane general manager and coach has to take into consideration. If you want to get to the Superbowl, and your most valuable player is Peyton Manning, don’t you want him on the field for fifteen minutes a game rather than forty? Ideally, don’t you want to send him out for a four-play touchdown drive and then sit him down while your cheaper (and somewhat interchangeable) beasts go out for ten minutes to stop the other guys?
In the NFL, teams pay about as much money to the defense as they do to the offense, overall. However, the quarterback and the left tackle (and often the star wide receiver) usually get paid more than anybody else on the team. These three offensive players may get 30% of the team payroll. When you are that heavily invested in three players on the roster, you want to do everything possible to protect them from injury, and one thing you can do is design an offense that puts them in danger as little as possible. When Peyton Manning is your quarterback, the LAST thing you want is a 15-play drive, because it might mean the end of your season.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
In most games with a clock, “holding the ball” is a strategy employed by the weaker team, not the stronger. Reducing the number of possessions effectively shortens the game and introduces an element of luck. In a shorter game, the weaker team always has a chance. Back before the NCAA introduced a shot clock for basketball, it was not UCLA who would hold the ball for as long as they could, it was the St. Leo’s of the world. In a 4-possession game, St. Leo’s could beat UCLA; in a 120-possession game, UCLA would win by sixty.
Football teams often try to employ the same strategy, especially since Bill Parcells used it to win the 1991 Superbowl with what was probably the worst team ever to win an NFL championship. Holding the ball for 40:33 of the game, the New York Giants eked out a 20-19 win when Buffalo’s Scott Norwood missing a winning fieldgoal attempt in the final seconds. It was this game that made Parcells a certifiable football genius and sent every football coach in America scurrying for ways to manufacture 12-minute drives.
There is an additional factor that makes the strategy attractive. It simply takes more energy to play defense than offense. While this is true in any sport, it is even more important in football because of the extreme demands made on defensive players. Football coaches feel that if they can keep the opposing defense on the field for most of the game, they will wear down, become exhausted and make mistakes. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to this, though it would be difficult to quantify.
However, though reducing the number of possessions can help a football team win a game against a stronger opponent, there are three reasons shortening the game is not as effective a strategy in football.
First, it ain’t easy. On the basketball court, playing keep-away is relatively simple, even for the weaker team. In football, however, executing a 15-play drive that consumes eleven minutes on the clock requires you to advance the ball steadily down the field, getting first downs when you need them to keep the drive going.
Secondly, you are less likely to score. One of the biggest problems in putting together a 15-play drive is the likelihood something will go wrong---a fumble, an interception, a bad call by the refs, or a major penalty. In a 15-play drive, something going very wrong is three times as likely to happen as in a 5-play drive. A 15-play drive is notable BECAUSE it is so rare and difficult to achieve. Defenses, remember, are composed of large, extremely-fit, highly-trained, violent men, and their mission to prevent you from advancing the ball. While it may be possible to fool them or overwhelm them on occasion, a strategy that requires you to do that repeatedly is not likely to succeed. (This is why, by the way, every team that relies on the running game for most of its offense is doomed to failure.)
On September 21, 2009, the Indianapolis Colts beat the Miami Dolphins 27 – 23. The result was not surprising. What was notable about the game was that the Colts had possession of the football for just 14:53. The Dolphins had the ball more than three times as long as the Colts, yet lost. This brings us to the third reason that mitigates against holding the ball, at least in pro football.
Specifically, let’s consider the importance of Peyton Manning to the Colts. He is, after all, the highest-paid player on the team, and certainly the most valuable. It’s a solid organization from top to bottom, of course, but without Manning, it would have virtually no shot at making it to the Superbowl. With Manning, however, it’s one of the favorites. He is at least as important to the Colts as Tom Brady is to the Patriots. The Patriots are another great team, but look what happened last year when Brady was injured. The team played well, and were always dangerous, but they never really had a shot at the title.
Every play Peyton Manning is on the field is a play in which he might get his neck broken. It’s a violent game. And this possibility is something every sane general manager and coach has to take into consideration. If you want to get to the Superbowl, and your most valuable player is Peyton Manning, don’t you want him on the field for fifteen minutes a game rather than forty? Ideally, don’t you want to send him out for a four-play touchdown drive and then sit him down while your cheaper (and somewhat interchangeable) beasts go out for ten minutes to stop the other guys?
In the NFL, teams pay about as much money to the defense as they do to the offense, overall. However, the quarterback and the left tackle (and often the star wide receiver) usually get paid more than anybody else on the team. These three offensive players may get 30% of the team payroll. When you are that heavily invested in three players on the roster, you want to do everything possible to protect them from injury, and one thing you can do is design an offense that puts them in danger as little as possible. When Peyton Manning is your quarterback, the LAST thing you want is a 15-play drive, because it might mean the end of your season.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
FAT CATS AND SIPPY CUPS
One recent strand in the debate over Obamacare has been the argument over the expense of the program. Though the President claims great savings will be realized by nationalizing this sector of the economy, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office continues to peg the additional costs at around a trillion bucks over the next ten years. Other estimates are much higher and, of course, all of us know that government programs often cost many times the amount of the initial estimates.
Supporters of nationalization, while not directly addressing this criticism, have cited “obscene profits” currently being reaped by insurance executives, medical facilities, “Big Pharma,” and the like. Look at their millions in stock options and bonuses, we are told. Look at their corporate jets and lavish conventions! There are vast savings to be found simply by cutting these looters and brigands out of the healthcare loop. Obama himself has informed us that doctors who amputate feet and remove tonsils are often motivated to do so by greed alone.
All of which brings me to the sippy-cup aisle at Argus, which I discussed at some length in “Feeding The Maw” (here). In the American marketplace, there are more sippy cups than you can imagine, in different shapes, different sizes, different colors and different designs. There are sippy cups with screw-on tops and snap-on tops, and insulated sippy cups, and sippy cups with different sorts of handles, and sippy cups featuring cartoon characters and cute little animals and letters of the alphabet. Even Argus cannot possibly carry all the different varieties.
As I pointed out in that article, people on opposite ends of the political spectrum can have very different views of the profusion of sippy cups at Argus.
Personally, I regard them as a wondrous manifestation of the “invisible hand” of capitalism first described by Adam Smith. The only reason for the existence of, let’s say, a six ounce, powder-blue, Spongebob sippy cup with a snap-on lid is that there are people who want it. They want it enough to get in their cars, drive to Argus, take one off the shelf and pay money for it. And because these consumers exist, there is also going to be someone somewhere (or many people in many places), who will acquire the raw materials, fabricate them into the desired product, package it, advertise it, and ship it to Argus for sale. The process is entirely voluntary on all sides; in fact, the term “voluntary” makes it sound more willful than it is. It’s more of an autonomic process, like breathing, since it happens without anyone having to think about it or orchestrate it. And it occurs without sippy-cup czars or central planners or the approval of Nancy Pelosi.
For a liberal, however, the reaction is quite different. How many different sippy cups does America really need, they wonder. It’s ridiculous to have so many different designs and colors and shapes and decorations. Look at the inefficiencies and the waste of our resources! And look at all the sippy-cup executives with their $20 cigars and stock options and country clubs and corporate jets! Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we cut the fat cats out of the system? Just think how much we could save.
It’s the classic Marxist analysis of the free market system, and the analysis is the same whether we’re talking about health care or sippy cups. It’s the people who invent things and make them and sell them, and become rich as a result, who are the problem. They are simply parasites, exploiting the poor schmo who works in the sippy-cup factory (or writes the health insurance policy), and getting wealthy by stealing bread from the mouths of the deserving poor. History, however, has shown us that there is no way other than capitalism to produce things that a) provide people with what they want, and b) create wealth.
There is a very simple reason for this. It’s because the incentives for businessmen and bureaucrats are completely different.
Though “profit” is a dirty word in the White House at the moment, it is only the allure of profit that gives someone the motivation to solve all the problems involved in making a product people desire at a price people will pay. It can’t be easy to make money in the sippy cup business, for example. For starters, barriers to entry are very low and the competition is fierce. In addition to finding a design that will catch the consumer’s eye, you will have to arrange all the details of manufacturing the item (probably in a foreign country), ensuring at all times that your product conforms to every clause and sub-paragraph of the 250 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations pertaining to “Things That Go In A Baby’s Mouth.” You will also have to reach an agreement with Spongebob’s snarling mob of entertainment lawyers (reputedly the meanest in Hollywood) for the rights to use his image. If you then succeed in transporting your sippy cups across thousands of miles of ocean, teeming with pirates, and your shipment is not stolen on an American dock by mobsters or destroyed by careless longshoremen, all you have to do is forge a marketing deal with Wal-Mart or Argus or Costco, none of which will pay you one single penny more than they absolutely have to and all of which will drop you like a white-hot anvil if your Spongebob cups don’t break all sippy cup sales records and excite infants to throw their Elmo cups out of car windows. In addition, you have probably done all this with money borrowed on the security of your other business and your house so that if you fail, you will lose everything you have worked for over the previous twenty years, including your wife, your girlfriend and your Labrador retriever.
A man like this is highly motivated to make the best possible product at the lowest possible price.
But the Sippy Cup Czar will have no such concerns. The desires of customers, for example, will hold little interest since he will preside over a monopoly that will give consumers no other option but to buy their cups from the government. It’s wrong even to call them “customers” or “consumers”---they will be “end-users,” a term we have all become familiar with, which describes the user of a product or service who has no market power in the transaction by which the product or service is acquired. And as we have all learned through bitter experience, if you are ever offered the choice of being an end-user or being waterboarded, the first thing you need to do is to put on your bathing suit.
The Sippy Cup Czar will not be a free agent, of course, and there will be a number of constituencies he will have to attend to. Congressmen, who will constitute his board of directors, will have many “suggestions” on the images that should appear on the cups (perhaps a picture commemorating the Stonewall riots?), the unionized factories that should produce them, the trucking outfits that should transport them, and so on. The Sierra Club will also bring pressure to bear on the Czar, perhaps relating to the carbon usage that the manufacture of sippy cups inevitably involves. One must assume that somewhere along the line, ACORN too will get a bone.
Cost and efficiency will not be an issue because it never is in a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are not judged in that fashion. The clout of a government official is measured by the size of his budget and the number of people in his agency, which is why there is never even an attempt to save money. If, by accident, a bureaucrat fulfills his mission without spending his entire budget, his appropriation is cut for the next budget cycle and he loses prestige. It’s much safer to go slightly OVER your budget so you can claim you need a much larger number the following year. This is why government programs almost always cost more (and sometimes quite a bit more) than they were supposed to.
Given the results of central economic planning around the world, can there be any doubt what would happen if the government took over the sippy cup industry? There would be one kind of cup, perhaps in two colors, and there would probably be a picture of Rosa Parks on every one. From time to time, there would be an unexplained shortage, and the shelves would be empty for months. Half the cups would leak and occasionally, when little Johnny dropped one on the floor, it would explode. And each cup would cost $12.
Medicare (begun in 1966), now costs about thirteen times more, in real dollars, than it was supposed to. Bush’s Prescription Drug and Medicare Improvement Act of 2003 was supposed to cost $400 billion over its first ten years. It costs at least twice that today (it’s difficult to get accurate figures on this), and in its second decade, the program’s costs will quadruple.
Obamacare will be no different, and the CBO’s projected cost of $1 trillion over the next ten years will turn out to be woefully low. The idea that the government can do anything more cheaply than the private sector is absurd, and the claim that vast savings will be obtained by taking away a few jets and spa retreats from evil fat cats is simply a disgraceful appeal to class hatred.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Supporters of nationalization, while not directly addressing this criticism, have cited “obscene profits” currently being reaped by insurance executives, medical facilities, “Big Pharma,” and the like. Look at their millions in stock options and bonuses, we are told. Look at their corporate jets and lavish conventions! There are vast savings to be found simply by cutting these looters and brigands out of the healthcare loop. Obama himself has informed us that doctors who amputate feet and remove tonsils are often motivated to do so by greed alone.
All of which brings me to the sippy-cup aisle at Argus, which I discussed at some length in “Feeding The Maw” (here). In the American marketplace, there are more sippy cups than you can imagine, in different shapes, different sizes, different colors and different designs. There are sippy cups with screw-on tops and snap-on tops, and insulated sippy cups, and sippy cups with different sorts of handles, and sippy cups featuring cartoon characters and cute little animals and letters of the alphabet. Even Argus cannot possibly carry all the different varieties.
As I pointed out in that article, people on opposite ends of the political spectrum can have very different views of the profusion of sippy cups at Argus.
Personally, I regard them as a wondrous manifestation of the “invisible hand” of capitalism first described by Adam Smith. The only reason for the existence of, let’s say, a six ounce, powder-blue, Spongebob sippy cup with a snap-on lid is that there are people who want it. They want it enough to get in their cars, drive to Argus, take one off the shelf and pay money for it. And because these consumers exist, there is also going to be someone somewhere (or many people in many places), who will acquire the raw materials, fabricate them into the desired product, package it, advertise it, and ship it to Argus for sale. The process is entirely voluntary on all sides; in fact, the term “voluntary” makes it sound more willful than it is. It’s more of an autonomic process, like breathing, since it happens without anyone having to think about it or orchestrate it. And it occurs without sippy-cup czars or central planners or the approval of Nancy Pelosi.
For a liberal, however, the reaction is quite different. How many different sippy cups does America really need, they wonder. It’s ridiculous to have so many different designs and colors and shapes and decorations. Look at the inefficiencies and the waste of our resources! And look at all the sippy-cup executives with their $20 cigars and stock options and country clubs and corporate jets! Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we cut the fat cats out of the system? Just think how much we could save.
It’s the classic Marxist analysis of the free market system, and the analysis is the same whether we’re talking about health care or sippy cups. It’s the people who invent things and make them and sell them, and become rich as a result, who are the problem. They are simply parasites, exploiting the poor schmo who works in the sippy-cup factory (or writes the health insurance policy), and getting wealthy by stealing bread from the mouths of the deserving poor. History, however, has shown us that there is no way other than capitalism to produce things that a) provide people with what they want, and b) create wealth.
There is a very simple reason for this. It’s because the incentives for businessmen and bureaucrats are completely different.
Though “profit” is a dirty word in the White House at the moment, it is only the allure of profit that gives someone the motivation to solve all the problems involved in making a product people desire at a price people will pay. It can’t be easy to make money in the sippy cup business, for example. For starters, barriers to entry are very low and the competition is fierce. In addition to finding a design that will catch the consumer’s eye, you will have to arrange all the details of manufacturing the item (probably in a foreign country), ensuring at all times that your product conforms to every clause and sub-paragraph of the 250 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations pertaining to “Things That Go In A Baby’s Mouth.” You will also have to reach an agreement with Spongebob’s snarling mob of entertainment lawyers (reputedly the meanest in Hollywood) for the rights to use his image. If you then succeed in transporting your sippy cups across thousands of miles of ocean, teeming with pirates, and your shipment is not stolen on an American dock by mobsters or destroyed by careless longshoremen, all you have to do is forge a marketing deal with Wal-Mart or Argus or Costco, none of which will pay you one single penny more than they absolutely have to and all of which will drop you like a white-hot anvil if your Spongebob cups don’t break all sippy cup sales records and excite infants to throw their Elmo cups out of car windows. In addition, you have probably done all this with money borrowed on the security of your other business and your house so that if you fail, you will lose everything you have worked for over the previous twenty years, including your wife, your girlfriend and your Labrador retriever.
A man like this is highly motivated to make the best possible product at the lowest possible price.
But the Sippy Cup Czar will have no such concerns. The desires of customers, for example, will hold little interest since he will preside over a monopoly that will give consumers no other option but to buy their cups from the government. It’s wrong even to call them “customers” or “consumers”---they will be “end-users,” a term we have all become familiar with, which describes the user of a product or service who has no market power in the transaction by which the product or service is acquired. And as we have all learned through bitter experience, if you are ever offered the choice of being an end-user or being waterboarded, the first thing you need to do is to put on your bathing suit.
The Sippy Cup Czar will not be a free agent, of course, and there will be a number of constituencies he will have to attend to. Congressmen, who will constitute his board of directors, will have many “suggestions” on the images that should appear on the cups (perhaps a picture commemorating the Stonewall riots?), the unionized factories that should produce them, the trucking outfits that should transport them, and so on. The Sierra Club will also bring pressure to bear on the Czar, perhaps relating to the carbon usage that the manufacture of sippy cups inevitably involves. One must assume that somewhere along the line, ACORN too will get a bone.
Cost and efficiency will not be an issue because it never is in a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are not judged in that fashion. The clout of a government official is measured by the size of his budget and the number of people in his agency, which is why there is never even an attempt to save money. If, by accident, a bureaucrat fulfills his mission without spending his entire budget, his appropriation is cut for the next budget cycle and he loses prestige. It’s much safer to go slightly OVER your budget so you can claim you need a much larger number the following year. This is why government programs almost always cost more (and sometimes quite a bit more) than they were supposed to.
Given the results of central economic planning around the world, can there be any doubt what would happen if the government took over the sippy cup industry? There would be one kind of cup, perhaps in two colors, and there would probably be a picture of Rosa Parks on every one. From time to time, there would be an unexplained shortage, and the shelves would be empty for months. Half the cups would leak and occasionally, when little Johnny dropped one on the floor, it would explode. And each cup would cost $12.
Medicare (begun in 1966), now costs about thirteen times more, in real dollars, than it was supposed to. Bush’s Prescription Drug and Medicare Improvement Act of 2003 was supposed to cost $400 billion over its first ten years. It costs at least twice that today (it’s difficult to get accurate figures on this), and in its second decade, the program’s costs will quadruple.
Obamacare will be no different, and the CBO’s projected cost of $1 trillion over the next ten years will turn out to be woefully low. The idea that the government can do anything more cheaply than the private sector is absurd, and the claim that vast savings will be obtained by taking away a few jets and spa retreats from evil fat cats is simply a disgraceful appeal to class hatred.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
3. GUESTS
The first week in January, the weight-loss and low-fat items went on sale in order to draw in all the folks who had resolved, on New Year’s Eve, to lose twenty pounds. That’s when I met the Lean Cuisine Lady. She accosted me as I was filling the freezers with cases of the stuff.
“Which one of these was recalled because it was made in China and had pieces of plastic in it?” she wanted to know. She was 5’2,” 95 pounds, with dark beady eyes that never blinked. Her short black hair seemed headed in several directions, as if trying to escape.
I didn’t know the answer to her question. In fact, I didn’t know there had been a recall at all, but I assured her that whatever type of Lean Cuisine it was, and if we had ever stocked it, it was long gone. (With modern inventory systems, any contaminated food with a UPC code is instantly found.) But she still wanted to know, and she was rather insistent about it. Looking at her, taking her all in as it were, it occurred to me that the plastic-infested Lean Cuisines might actually be the kind she wanted because, on her planet, they were a rare delicacy.
She spent 45 minutes at the LC cases, considering the dozens of different flavors and selections. She apparently viewed the information on the nutritional labels as merely starting points in her investigations, and she peppered us with further inquiries that none of us could answer. At one point, she asked rhetorically, “Why don’t they ever tell you the ratio of carbohydrate grams to sodium?” Then she laughed bitterly and returned to her work. Gradually, she filled a shopping cart---a couple hundred dollars worth of Lean Cuisine dinners.
The crew reacted in various ways. Georgette went to lunch. I tried to work around her for a while, then grabbed all the ice cream and went to a different aisle to shelve it. Robin continued to work the LC cases as he patiently and politely answered all her questions, or tried to. Tamika kept working too but tried to push her out of the way with repeated “Excuse me’s.”
You remember the crazy ones, of course. The vast majority of guests (who are never called “customers”) are polite and friendly and just want to know where the peanut butter is, or the mayo, or the motor oil. And if they want to banter for a minute or two, well, that’s fine too.
The Coupon Guy needs more than a minute or two, but I’m always happy to oblige him. Though he’s every bit as insane as the Lean Cuisine Lady, hers is the brooding, muttering, worried-about-gluten sort of lunacy, while his is the manic glee of a man who has been released (perhaps briefly) into the wonders of Argus from a restricted facility and who intends, until his burly keepers arrive, to make the most of it.
No matter how many of us are working in the market area, the Coupon Guy always finds me and, with his stack of coupons in hand, dragoons me for his shopping adventure. The coupons themselves are odd looking items he gets direct from manufacturers. Typically, they say something like “Good for $3.63 on any Kraft product.”
“Show me all your Kraft products,” he begins. This takes five minutes or so, considering they are spread over twenty different aisles. When he has decided, he moves to the next coupon. “OK, now show me everything you have that’s made by Claussen [or Tombstone, or Old El Paso, or Kikoman],” he says, and off we go.
His choices are based in part on his taste preferences, but only in part. The price is much more important. Holding an Oscar Meyer coupon for $3.50, for example, he will not buy a pack of wieners that costs $3.51. “I don’t come here to spend money,” he confides. In his coupon universe, it is essential that everything he obtains is free.
When I ask him where he gets the coupons, he reaches out and grabs a jar of something, randomly, off the shelf. “See this?” he says, showing me the back label. “It’s an 800 number. They all have them. So I call them up and I say I bought something they make and there was something wrong with it.”
At this point, he leans into me to whisper, “Sometimes you have to lie a little bit.” Then he continues, “And a few days later, they send me a coupon! I get $300 worth of these every month! Free beans! Free mayo!” He’s getting excited now, and he grabs my arm. “And it’s a free call! They’re all 800 numbers!!!”
“Well, God bless America,” I say, at which he snaps to attention and executes a crisp salute.
“Brother,” he says, “you got that right. God bless America. Now show me everything you’ve got from Pepperidge Farm.”
T-shirts I’ve seen:
(On a woman who was 5’4” and 280 pounds):
AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL
FOR GOOD LUCK, RUB MY TUMMY
LET’S FLIP A COIN
HEADS, I GET TAIL
TAILS, I GET HEAD
Front: ECAC
Back: I chose Division II
(Sure. Duke offered you a scholarship to play volleyball, but you decided to go to Moravian State instead)
Hang Out
With Your Wang Out
Property of Hogwarts Athletic Dept.
(On a 10-year-old boy):
FREE MY FAMILY
Ask me what I can do with my hands
No Shirt
No Shoes
No Juicy
(Cartoon picture of a man holding a hamburger against his ear):
I’m Talking On My Burger Phone!
(On a woman with a very large chest):
SAY HI TO THE GIRLS
*
(On a short Pakistani-looking guy):
Good things come in small Pakis
I suspect there are more loonies at my Argus than at other places because there is more of just about everything. It’s a very busy place, mostly because there are no other big-box stores for miles in any direction. Also, since it’s on the city’s edge, it draws from both the poorest areas in West Philly and the richest suburbs off the Main Line. There are a number of hospitals and rehab facilities and retirement homes in the area. It’s the closest Argus to a dozen colleges and universities. There’s a large and wealthy Jewish community about a mile away. The Muslim American Society claims there are 200,000 Muslims in Philadelphia (which I doubt), but however many there are, most of them live in Germantown, or North Philly west of Broad St., or West Philly, and my Argus is the closest big-box for all of them. The largest town in American where Indians from India are a majority is three miles away.
The peculiar demographics of the area have a number of curious effects. For one thing, our Back-To-School is bigger than our Christmas, and there can’t be a lot of retail establishments in America where that is the case. Also, the parade of nations that strolls past me every day would make the bar scene in Star Wars look like the crowd on a Tuesday night in a corner taproom in South Philly. You like diversity? We got diversity. You really don’t understand how many different types of people there are in Philadelphia until you see them all in one place. That place is Argus.
Every day, I hear people speaking languages I don’t recognize. I also regularly hear Greek, French, German, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Tagalog, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian, and Arabic. Many of the speakers, but not most, are foreign students.
I see yarmulkes every day but Saturday. Often I see orthodox Jewish families with five or six kids, Dad with a beard and all the males in skullcaps. I always steal a glance at the mom to see if she’s wearing a wig, but it’s usually hard to tell.
A while back, I started counting the women in headscarves and the women who are fully veiled. There are some delicate judgments to be made with head coverings, but for census purposes, I am fairly strict. The haven’t-washed-my-hair-this-week do-rag is easy to recognize, as well as the babushka. Those I discard. The I-danced-for-Shatner bangled head adornment is often featured on women from India or the Caribbean, however, and it can be difficult to distinguish (at a glance, anyway) from Islamic dress. In close cases, I will give the woman a second look and determine whether, from a male perspective, it is possible in even a theoretical way to regard her as potentially hot. If so, I assume the purpose of the garment is not modesty.
There are a hundred different words for these garments, and they describe dozens of styles that are quite distinct, so I’ll just give you the basics. “Hijab” is the basic concept of modest dress, and the original and basic meaning of the word is the practice of covering up in public. More commonly, however, “hijab” refers to the headscarf itself since this is the fundamental unit of Islamic modesty for women. It covers the head (including all hair), but not the face.
Hijab come in different shapes and different colors, including patterned prints, and there are several ways to wrap them on the head. There is sufficient stylistic variety in the hijab that a certain “Muslim chic” can be found among young African-American girls who are not, in fact, Muslims. Tamika has girlfriends who wear headscarves just to look cool and to save time fixing their hair every day. These same girls remove it on Saturday night, do up their hair, and hit the clubs.
I see a dozen or more women in headscarves every day, and most of them (the real Muslims) combine it with the abaya, the long overgarment that covers the arms and legs and all the other things that drive men wild. This is truly a diverse group, from America and Turkey and Morocco and Iran and the West Bank and God knows where else.
For the veiled ensemble, there are several options, the most famous of which is the burqa. This features a screen over the eyes so no part of the woman is visible (and her vision is obstructed). I’ve never seen a burqa at Argus and I don’t believe I’ve seen one in Philadelphia. Women here wear the niqab, a veil that covers the face and forehead, but not the eyes. At Argus, the niqab is always black and is worn with a black abaya. I usually see five or six of these; it’s a rare day when I do not see at least one fully-veiled woman.
Unlike the headscarf wearers, none of these women is foreign. As far as I can tell, every one of them is American, Black, English-speaking and native. They sound exactly like all the other sisters who shop at Argus, they just happen to be covered from head to foot (except for their eyes and hands) in black cloth.
These women have always puzzled me and now that I see them every day, they puzzle me even more. I have read that when women leave Saudi Arabia, the first thing they do, once they’ve cleared Saudi airspace, is remove their “coverings.” Makes sense to me. Yet these Americans don the niqab voluntarily.
At least, I assume it’s voluntary, for most of them, anyway. Across the Middle East, there is nothing voluntary about it; women are beaten or killed, often by their own families, for failing to obey the rules of “modesty.” It also happens here in America, in ethnic enclaves of Somalis or Pakistanis. But the women I see in the niqab are not Somalis. They grew up at 10th and Diamond in North Philly and went to Ben Franklin High School. Even if they now happen to be in a situation where they don’t really have a choice about it, they did have a choice at one point in their lives, and they chose to place themselves in what some feminists call “the moving prison.”
I don’t get it. I never have. Anyone can become a Muslim, of course, for perfectly rational and spiritual reasons, but what would a modern American Black woman see in the trappings of 7th century misogyny that are not even especially Islamic? I mean, you can be a perfectly proper and devout Muslim woman without living your life in a bag and walking ten feet behind your husband and carrying all the suitcases in the airport. Isn’t it bad enough you never get to eat a pork chop? I just don’t get it.
Let’s be candid here. It may not be the best thing in the world to be Black and a woman, in America, but if you haven’t let liberals turn you into a welfare-dependent, badly-educated, reparations-demanding single mother and victim, you can be anything you want to be. You can go to college, and you can have a career, and you can make money. MILLIONS OF BLACK WOMEN HAVE DONE SO. This is not 1920, when there were impenetrable barriers that even the cleverest women could not overcome. Today, the only barriers are Democrats telling you there are racists somewhere (Kentucky? Wyoming?) who, for some reason, will hold you back, somehow.
Polygamy in America is not something on which official statistics are kept. It’s a secretive practice that is hard to pick up by handing out a questionnaire asking, “Are you in a plural marriage?” Nevertheless, those who study these things tell us there are more polygamous marriages in Philadelphia than anywhere else in the country---more than Utah, more than Nevada, more than Arizona.
I see them. They shop at Argus. Hubby will be wearing a skullcap, gown and sandals, and the wives will be fully-veiled, in black, shopping and chatting with each other. They will be near Hubby, but not really with him. Then Hubby will glance at them and with a subtle movement of his head, command them to follow as he moves to a different area of the store. They do.
And I think: “Don’t you girls ever watch Oprah?”
Walking past aisle B24, a young athletic-looking guy calls me over with a question about ironing boards. He shows me the board he is considering and asks whether a different cover is available. I examine the offerings and tell him no. He could buy a replacement cover, of course, and discard the one that came with the board he wanted, but that would cost another $20. He looks troubled.
“What’s wrong with this cover?” I ask finally.
“It doesn’t match my hallway,” he replies. “It’s just wrong.”
I spend the rest of the day wondering about him. What has happened to guys? I mean, if a guy is buying a couch and he wants it to match his rug---well, OK, I can live with that. I still don’t want that guy on my hockey team, but I can live with it. But an ironing-board cover?
A woman walks by, glances at me, and says, “Hi, how you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Can I help you find something?”
She looks at me, surprised, and says, “Oh, I wasn’t talking to you.” It is only then I see the Bluetooth in her ear.
There are times it seems every shopper at Argus is talking on a cell phone. Not true, of course, but the perception is unavoidable because people who do talk on cell phones in public places intrude on everyone around them. The practice shatters one’s expectations of the line we all have traditionally drawn between public and private behavior.
When you are in a store, or on a bus, or in the bank, and you are surrounded by strangers, you give up a certain level of privacy. People may glance at you, or speak to you in certain ways we all accept as part of the price we pay for living in society. On the other hand, I do not consent to hear the details of someone’s hysterectomy just because I happen to be in a public place.
A young, attractive blond calmly shops as she carries on a lengthy fight with her boyfriend on the phone. “How can you be such a jerk, John?” she says, taking a jug of Tide off the shelf and putting it in her cart. Later, as she examines the hotdogs, I hear, “Do you have any idea how big an asshole you are?”
A college girl on her cell, dispensing moral advice to a girlfriend: “Well, if you’re looking for a simple hook-up with him, that’s OK. But Sue, I’m your friend and I’m just not sure you’re capable of that.”
A woman is pushing her cart with an infant in the seat and a toddler walking alongside. Both are screaming, non-stop, yet she ignores them completely as she shops and chats on her phone. Five of us working in the market actually stop working to marvel at her. I turn to Hayley, who is pregnant, and tell her, “You know, Hayley, if I ever see you shopping and talking on a phone while your kid is screaming, I’m gonna have to smack you.”
“Oh no you won’t,” says Tamika, “’cause I’ll smack her first.”
A fat, loud woman on her cell: “I have to get out of here, Mary. I’m telling you, MY RECTUM HURTS!!!”
I can’t help but notice the tattoos.
I should confess my personal biases here because I am out of step with current sensibilities on this matter. Today, many doctors and lawyers and pillars of the community have tattoos, in addition to the carnival workers, gang members, merchant seamen and felons, who always had them. I see them on middle-aged, respectable-looking women in office-appropriate dresses and sensible pumps, (and I’m not talking about a discrete butterfly or flower---I’m talking about an entire sleeve of design from wrist to shoulder). I see them on college athletes who are bursting with vigor and energy and good health.
But I basically disapprove. I can’t help it. For one thing, my parents were quite clear on the subject. They felt that tattoos were a desecration of the body God gave us, and that people who had them were low-lifes. My father was a veteran of WWII, and he was more lenient toward a guy with an anchor on his shoulder or a “Semper Fi” on his forearm (I am too), but he never entirely approved.
In addition, I grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood in NE Philly in the 1950’s, and some of the first tattoos I saw as a child were serial numbers on the wrists of concentration-camp survivors. These were some of the saddest people I have ever encountered, and that early experience still makes it difficult for me to view tattoos as fun or cool or hip.
But they’re everywhere. I can count the veiled women and the headscarves and the yarmulkes, but if I tried to count the tattooed people I see every day, I would never get any work done. And these are just the visible ones, of course. Many people still get them in places that are not normally exposed. Also, there are some that are only visible in warm weather---I never see the “license plate” on a girl’s lower back in the winter. (Actually, you don’t see license plates as much in the summer either---they are not as fashionable as they were a few years ago, so girls don’t display them as much.)
And not only are they everywhere, they’re terrible. The vast majority of tattoos I see are ugly and cheap. I don’t care for the artistic ones either, as I’ve confessed, but I can tell the difference. I’m amazed that people who are getting a permanent marking on their bodies won’t take the trouble (and spend a few extra bucks) to find somebody who knows how to do it properly.
I asked Robin about this one day because he’s 22 and very hip and savvy, and I’m not. When I started at Argus, we were the only two guys who worked in the market; the rest were all women. That’s why we’re buddies, and it’s also why we call each other “Girlfriend.”
So I asked him one day if all the tattooed people I see each day had gotten their tats in prison.
“Yeah, they’re nasty, aren’t they? I want to get one someday, but if you’re going to do it, you have to find the right guy.”
“So why are there so many bad ones?” I ask.
“Well, there are tattoo parties, you know, where a bunch of people will get together and hire a guy, so they’re cheap. A lot of people get them at those things. Also, there’s no law that says you have to be smart to get a tattoo.”
The most annoying for me are the cleavage tattoos, which always seem to be words, in script, across the top of the breasts. The quality is generally terrible, which means the words are difficult to read, and you wind up staring at the girl’s chest until you begin to fear you are running the danger of getting slapped in the puss, or at least eliciting the dreaded, “What the hell are YOU looking at???” It’s not fair, really. They’re a hazard to navigation. I mean, they get the damn tattoos, and then they wear a plunging neckline to show them off, and then innocent bystanders like me are put at risk.
There was, however, one cleavage tat I will never forget. The girl was pleasant enough to look at, though perhaps a bit plump, and lying horizontally across the top of her breasts was a tattoo of a red, long-stemmed rose. It was a well-executed drawing, in muted tones, and had obviously been done with care by a tattooist with some artistic ability. The highlight, however, was the low-cut pastel jersey she wore. On it, repeated twice, was the same horizontal long-stemmed rose.
Though I spend most of my time putting products on shelves, rearranging displays, and so on, the most important job for all of us is to help guests find whatever it is they are seeking. Ignoring somebody, or blowing them off because you’re too busy, is just unthinkable, and I assume any employee who did it would be fired on the spot. Also, one of the few psychic rewards in a job like this comes when you have actually answered a question or found them the Pop-Tarts, and they thank you. It’s a little thing, but it’s a reaffirmation that civility can exist in what is sometimes a harsh world.
I was shelving some cookies one day when a 60ish woman asked me where we keep the bath mats, so I stepped away from what I was doing and started leading her to the right area. As people sometimes do, she said, “Sorry to take you away from your work.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “your satisfaction is my highest priority.”
We walked another couple steps as she thought about that. “You know,” she said, “it’s been a long time since a man said that to me.”
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
“Which one of these was recalled because it was made in China and had pieces of plastic in it?” she wanted to know. She was 5’2,” 95 pounds, with dark beady eyes that never blinked. Her short black hair seemed headed in several directions, as if trying to escape.
I didn’t know the answer to her question. In fact, I didn’t know there had been a recall at all, but I assured her that whatever type of Lean Cuisine it was, and if we had ever stocked it, it was long gone. (With modern inventory systems, any contaminated food with a UPC code is instantly found.) But she still wanted to know, and she was rather insistent about it. Looking at her, taking her all in as it were, it occurred to me that the plastic-infested Lean Cuisines might actually be the kind she wanted because, on her planet, they were a rare delicacy.
She spent 45 minutes at the LC cases, considering the dozens of different flavors and selections. She apparently viewed the information on the nutritional labels as merely starting points in her investigations, and she peppered us with further inquiries that none of us could answer. At one point, she asked rhetorically, “Why don’t they ever tell you the ratio of carbohydrate grams to sodium?” Then she laughed bitterly and returned to her work. Gradually, she filled a shopping cart---a couple hundred dollars worth of Lean Cuisine dinners.
The crew reacted in various ways. Georgette went to lunch. I tried to work around her for a while, then grabbed all the ice cream and went to a different aisle to shelve it. Robin continued to work the LC cases as he patiently and politely answered all her questions, or tried to. Tamika kept working too but tried to push her out of the way with repeated “Excuse me’s.”
You remember the crazy ones, of course. The vast majority of guests (who are never called “customers”) are polite and friendly and just want to know where the peanut butter is, or the mayo, or the motor oil. And if they want to banter for a minute or two, well, that’s fine too.
The Coupon Guy needs more than a minute or two, but I’m always happy to oblige him. Though he’s every bit as insane as the Lean Cuisine Lady, hers is the brooding, muttering, worried-about-gluten sort of lunacy, while his is the manic glee of a man who has been released (perhaps briefly) into the wonders of Argus from a restricted facility and who intends, until his burly keepers arrive, to make the most of it.
No matter how many of us are working in the market area, the Coupon Guy always finds me and, with his stack of coupons in hand, dragoons me for his shopping adventure. The coupons themselves are odd looking items he gets direct from manufacturers. Typically, they say something like “Good for $3.63 on any Kraft product.”
“Show me all your Kraft products,” he begins. This takes five minutes or so, considering they are spread over twenty different aisles. When he has decided, he moves to the next coupon. “OK, now show me everything you have that’s made by Claussen [or Tombstone, or Old El Paso, or Kikoman],” he says, and off we go.
His choices are based in part on his taste preferences, but only in part. The price is much more important. Holding an Oscar Meyer coupon for $3.50, for example, he will not buy a pack of wieners that costs $3.51. “I don’t come here to spend money,” he confides. In his coupon universe, it is essential that everything he obtains is free.
When I ask him where he gets the coupons, he reaches out and grabs a jar of something, randomly, off the shelf. “See this?” he says, showing me the back label. “It’s an 800 number. They all have them. So I call them up and I say I bought something they make and there was something wrong with it.”
At this point, he leans into me to whisper, “Sometimes you have to lie a little bit.” Then he continues, “And a few days later, they send me a coupon! I get $300 worth of these every month! Free beans! Free mayo!” He’s getting excited now, and he grabs my arm. “And it’s a free call! They’re all 800 numbers!!!”
“Well, God bless America,” I say, at which he snaps to attention and executes a crisp salute.
“Brother,” he says, “you got that right. God bless America. Now show me everything you’ve got from Pepperidge Farm.”
* * *
T-shirts I’ve seen:
(On a woman who was 5’4” and 280 pounds):
AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL
*
FOR GOOD LUCK, RUB MY TUMMY
*
LET’S FLIP A COIN
HEADS, I GET TAIL
TAILS, I GET HEAD
*
Front: ECAC
Back: I chose Division II
(Sure. Duke offered you a scholarship to play volleyball, but you decided to go to Moravian State instead)
*
Hang Out
With Your Wang Out
*
Property of Hogwarts Athletic Dept.
*
(On a 10-year-old boy):
FREE MY FAMILY
*
Ask me what I can do with my hands
*
No Shirt
No Shoes
No Juicy
*
(Cartoon picture of a man holding a hamburger against his ear):
I’m Talking On My Burger Phone!
*
(On a woman with a very large chest):
SAY HI TO THE GIRLS
*
(On a short Pakistani-looking guy):
Good things come in small Pakis
* * *
I suspect there are more loonies at my Argus than at other places because there is more of just about everything. It’s a very busy place, mostly because there are no other big-box stores for miles in any direction. Also, since it’s on the city’s edge, it draws from both the poorest areas in West Philly and the richest suburbs off the Main Line. There are a number of hospitals and rehab facilities and retirement homes in the area. It’s the closest Argus to a dozen colleges and universities. There’s a large and wealthy Jewish community about a mile away. The Muslim American Society claims there are 200,000 Muslims in Philadelphia (which I doubt), but however many there are, most of them live in Germantown, or North Philly west of Broad St., or West Philly, and my Argus is the closest big-box for all of them. The largest town in American where Indians from India are a majority is three miles away.
The peculiar demographics of the area have a number of curious effects. For one thing, our Back-To-School is bigger than our Christmas, and there can’t be a lot of retail establishments in America where that is the case. Also, the parade of nations that strolls past me every day would make the bar scene in Star Wars look like the crowd on a Tuesday night in a corner taproom in South Philly. You like diversity? We got diversity. You really don’t understand how many different types of people there are in Philadelphia until you see them all in one place. That place is Argus.
Every day, I hear people speaking languages I don’t recognize. I also regularly hear Greek, French, German, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Tagalog, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian, and Arabic. Many of the speakers, but not most, are foreign students.
I see yarmulkes every day but Saturday. Often I see orthodox Jewish families with five or six kids, Dad with a beard and all the males in skullcaps. I always steal a glance at the mom to see if she’s wearing a wig, but it’s usually hard to tell.
A while back, I started counting the women in headscarves and the women who are fully veiled. There are some delicate judgments to be made with head coverings, but for census purposes, I am fairly strict. The haven’t-washed-my-hair-this-week do-rag is easy to recognize, as well as the babushka. Those I discard. The I-danced-for-Shatner bangled head adornment is often featured on women from India or the Caribbean, however, and it can be difficult to distinguish (at a glance, anyway) from Islamic dress. In close cases, I will give the woman a second look and determine whether, from a male perspective, it is possible in even a theoretical way to regard her as potentially hot. If so, I assume the purpose of the garment is not modesty.
There are a hundred different words for these garments, and they describe dozens of styles that are quite distinct, so I’ll just give you the basics. “Hijab” is the basic concept of modest dress, and the original and basic meaning of the word is the practice of covering up in public. More commonly, however, “hijab” refers to the headscarf itself since this is the fundamental unit of Islamic modesty for women. It covers the head (including all hair), but not the face.
Hijab come in different shapes and different colors, including patterned prints, and there are several ways to wrap them on the head. There is sufficient stylistic variety in the hijab that a certain “Muslim chic” can be found among young African-American girls who are not, in fact, Muslims. Tamika has girlfriends who wear headscarves just to look cool and to save time fixing their hair every day. These same girls remove it on Saturday night, do up their hair, and hit the clubs.
I see a dozen or more women in headscarves every day, and most of them (the real Muslims) combine it with the abaya, the long overgarment that covers the arms and legs and all the other things that drive men wild. This is truly a diverse group, from America and Turkey and Morocco and Iran and the West Bank and God knows where else.
For the veiled ensemble, there are several options, the most famous of which is the burqa. This features a screen over the eyes so no part of the woman is visible (and her vision is obstructed). I’ve never seen a burqa at Argus and I don’t believe I’ve seen one in Philadelphia. Women here wear the niqab, a veil that covers the face and forehead, but not the eyes. At Argus, the niqab is always black and is worn with a black abaya. I usually see five or six of these; it’s a rare day when I do not see at least one fully-veiled woman.
Unlike the headscarf wearers, none of these women is foreign. As far as I can tell, every one of them is American, Black, English-speaking and native. They sound exactly like all the other sisters who shop at Argus, they just happen to be covered from head to foot (except for their eyes and hands) in black cloth.
These women have always puzzled me and now that I see them every day, they puzzle me even more. I have read that when women leave Saudi Arabia, the first thing they do, once they’ve cleared Saudi airspace, is remove their “coverings.” Makes sense to me. Yet these Americans don the niqab voluntarily.
At least, I assume it’s voluntary, for most of them, anyway. Across the Middle East, there is nothing voluntary about it; women are beaten or killed, often by their own families, for failing to obey the rules of “modesty.” It also happens here in America, in ethnic enclaves of Somalis or Pakistanis. But the women I see in the niqab are not Somalis. They grew up at 10th and Diamond in North Philly and went to Ben Franklin High School. Even if they now happen to be in a situation where they don’t really have a choice about it, they did have a choice at one point in their lives, and they chose to place themselves in what some feminists call “the moving prison.”
I don’t get it. I never have. Anyone can become a Muslim, of course, for perfectly rational and spiritual reasons, but what would a modern American Black woman see in the trappings of 7th century misogyny that are not even especially Islamic? I mean, you can be a perfectly proper and devout Muslim woman without living your life in a bag and walking ten feet behind your husband and carrying all the suitcases in the airport. Isn’t it bad enough you never get to eat a pork chop? I just don’t get it.
Let’s be candid here. It may not be the best thing in the world to be Black and a woman, in America, but if you haven’t let liberals turn you into a welfare-dependent, badly-educated, reparations-demanding single mother and victim, you can be anything you want to be. You can go to college, and you can have a career, and you can make money. MILLIONS OF BLACK WOMEN HAVE DONE SO. This is not 1920, when there were impenetrable barriers that even the cleverest women could not overcome. Today, the only barriers are Democrats telling you there are racists somewhere (Kentucky? Wyoming?) who, for some reason, will hold you back, somehow.
Polygamy in America is not something on which official statistics are kept. It’s a secretive practice that is hard to pick up by handing out a questionnaire asking, “Are you in a plural marriage?” Nevertheless, those who study these things tell us there are more polygamous marriages in Philadelphia than anywhere else in the country---more than Utah, more than Nevada, more than Arizona.
I see them. They shop at Argus. Hubby will be wearing a skullcap, gown and sandals, and the wives will be fully-veiled, in black, shopping and chatting with each other. They will be near Hubby, but not really with him. Then Hubby will glance at them and with a subtle movement of his head, command them to follow as he moves to a different area of the store. They do.
And I think: “Don’t you girls ever watch Oprah?”
* * *
Walking past aisle B24, a young athletic-looking guy calls me over with a question about ironing boards. He shows me the board he is considering and asks whether a different cover is available. I examine the offerings and tell him no. He could buy a replacement cover, of course, and discard the one that came with the board he wanted, but that would cost another $20. He looks troubled.
“What’s wrong with this cover?” I ask finally.
“It doesn’t match my hallway,” he replies. “It’s just wrong.”
I spend the rest of the day wondering about him. What has happened to guys? I mean, if a guy is buying a couch and he wants it to match his rug---well, OK, I can live with that. I still don’t want that guy on my hockey team, but I can live with it. But an ironing-board cover?
***
A woman walks by, glances at me, and says, “Hi, how you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Can I help you find something?”
She looks at me, surprised, and says, “Oh, I wasn’t talking to you.” It is only then I see the Bluetooth in her ear.
There are times it seems every shopper at Argus is talking on a cell phone. Not true, of course, but the perception is unavoidable because people who do talk on cell phones in public places intrude on everyone around them. The practice shatters one’s expectations of the line we all have traditionally drawn between public and private behavior.
When you are in a store, or on a bus, or in the bank, and you are surrounded by strangers, you give up a certain level of privacy. People may glance at you, or speak to you in certain ways we all accept as part of the price we pay for living in society. On the other hand, I do not consent to hear the details of someone’s hysterectomy just because I happen to be in a public place.
* * *
A young, attractive blond calmly shops as she carries on a lengthy fight with her boyfriend on the phone. “How can you be such a jerk, John?” she says, taking a jug of Tide off the shelf and putting it in her cart. Later, as she examines the hotdogs, I hear, “Do you have any idea how big an asshole you are?”
* * *
A college girl on her cell, dispensing moral advice to a girlfriend: “Well, if you’re looking for a simple hook-up with him, that’s OK. But Sue, I’m your friend and I’m just not sure you’re capable of that.”
* * *
A woman is pushing her cart with an infant in the seat and a toddler walking alongside. Both are screaming, non-stop, yet she ignores them completely as she shops and chats on her phone. Five of us working in the market actually stop working to marvel at her. I turn to Hayley, who is pregnant, and tell her, “You know, Hayley, if I ever see you shopping and talking on a phone while your kid is screaming, I’m gonna have to smack you.”
“Oh no you won’t,” says Tamika, “’cause I’ll smack her first.”
* * *
A fat, loud woman on her cell: “I have to get out of here, Mary. I’m telling you, MY RECTUM HURTS!!!”
* * *
I can’t help but notice the tattoos.
I should confess my personal biases here because I am out of step with current sensibilities on this matter. Today, many doctors and lawyers and pillars of the community have tattoos, in addition to the carnival workers, gang members, merchant seamen and felons, who always had them. I see them on middle-aged, respectable-looking women in office-appropriate dresses and sensible pumps, (and I’m not talking about a discrete butterfly or flower---I’m talking about an entire sleeve of design from wrist to shoulder). I see them on college athletes who are bursting with vigor and energy and good health.
But I basically disapprove. I can’t help it. For one thing, my parents were quite clear on the subject. They felt that tattoos were a desecration of the body God gave us, and that people who had them were low-lifes. My father was a veteran of WWII, and he was more lenient toward a guy with an anchor on his shoulder or a “Semper Fi” on his forearm (I am too), but he never entirely approved.
In addition, I grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood in NE Philly in the 1950’s, and some of the first tattoos I saw as a child were serial numbers on the wrists of concentration-camp survivors. These were some of the saddest people I have ever encountered, and that early experience still makes it difficult for me to view tattoos as fun or cool or hip.
But they’re everywhere. I can count the veiled women and the headscarves and the yarmulkes, but if I tried to count the tattooed people I see every day, I would never get any work done. And these are just the visible ones, of course. Many people still get them in places that are not normally exposed. Also, there are some that are only visible in warm weather---I never see the “license plate” on a girl’s lower back in the winter. (Actually, you don’t see license plates as much in the summer either---they are not as fashionable as they were a few years ago, so girls don’t display them as much.)
And not only are they everywhere, they’re terrible. The vast majority of tattoos I see are ugly and cheap. I don’t care for the artistic ones either, as I’ve confessed, but I can tell the difference. I’m amazed that people who are getting a permanent marking on their bodies won’t take the trouble (and spend a few extra bucks) to find somebody who knows how to do it properly.
I asked Robin about this one day because he’s 22 and very hip and savvy, and I’m not. When I started at Argus, we were the only two guys who worked in the market; the rest were all women. That’s why we’re buddies, and it’s also why we call each other “Girlfriend.”
So I asked him one day if all the tattooed people I see each day had gotten their tats in prison.
“Yeah, they’re nasty, aren’t they? I want to get one someday, but if you’re going to do it, you have to find the right guy.”
“So why are there so many bad ones?” I ask.
“Well, there are tattoo parties, you know, where a bunch of people will get together and hire a guy, so they’re cheap. A lot of people get them at those things. Also, there’s no law that says you have to be smart to get a tattoo.”
The most annoying for me are the cleavage tattoos, which always seem to be words, in script, across the top of the breasts. The quality is generally terrible, which means the words are difficult to read, and you wind up staring at the girl’s chest until you begin to fear you are running the danger of getting slapped in the puss, or at least eliciting the dreaded, “What the hell are YOU looking at???” It’s not fair, really. They’re a hazard to navigation. I mean, they get the damn tattoos, and then they wear a plunging neckline to show them off, and then innocent bystanders like me are put at risk.
There was, however, one cleavage tat I will never forget. The girl was pleasant enough to look at, though perhaps a bit plump, and lying horizontally across the top of her breasts was a tattoo of a red, long-stemmed rose. It was a well-executed drawing, in muted tones, and had obviously been done with care by a tattooist with some artistic ability. The highlight, however, was the low-cut pastel jersey she wore. On it, repeated twice, was the same horizontal long-stemmed rose.
* * *
Though I spend most of my time putting products on shelves, rearranging displays, and so on, the most important job for all of us is to help guests find whatever it is they are seeking. Ignoring somebody, or blowing them off because you’re too busy, is just unthinkable, and I assume any employee who did it would be fired on the spot. Also, one of the few psychic rewards in a job like this comes when you have actually answered a question or found them the Pop-Tarts, and they thank you. It’s a little thing, but it’s a reaffirmation that civility can exist in what is sometimes a harsh world.
I was shelving some cookies one day when a 60ish woman asked me where we keep the bath mats, so I stepped away from what I was doing and started leading her to the right area. As people sometimes do, she said, “Sorry to take you away from your work.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “your satisfaction is my highest priority.”
We walked another couple steps as she thought about that. “You know,” she said, “it’s been a long time since a man said that to me.”
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Saturday, August 29, 2009
TED KENNEDY---A POTPOURRI
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.
---Ted Kennedy, on the floor of the Senate, in a speech about Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, 7/1/87
I don't know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" That is just the most amazing thing. It's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.
--Ed Klein, former editor, NYT Magazine (on Diane Rehm’s radio show), 8/28/09
We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.
Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.
Who knows — maybe she'd feel it was worth it.
---Melissa Lafsky, Huffington Post, 8/27/09
Like all figures in history - and like those in the Bible, for that matter - Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.
---Joan Vennechi, Boston Globe, 8/27/09
Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life, and the Chappaquiddick incident ultimately ended his bright prospects for still higher office.
---Ted Sorenson, Time Magazine, 8/26/09
It is after midnight and Kennedy and [Senator Chris] Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.
As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.
---Michael Kelly, GQ, February, 1990
If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.
---Charles Pierce, Boston Globe, 1/5/03
---Ted Kennedy, on the floor of the Senate, in a speech about Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, 7/1/87
I don't know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" That is just the most amazing thing. It's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.
--Ed Klein, former editor, NYT Magazine (on Diane Rehm’s radio show), 8/28/09
We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.
Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.
Who knows — maybe she'd feel it was worth it.
---Melissa Lafsky, Huffington Post, 8/27/09
Like all figures in history - and like those in the Bible, for that matter - Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.
---Joan Vennechi, Boston Globe, 8/27/09
Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life, and the Chappaquiddick incident ultimately ended his bright prospects for still higher office.
---Ted Sorenson, Time Magazine, 8/26/09
It is after midnight and Kennedy and [Senator Chris] Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.
As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.
---Michael Kelly, GQ, February, 1990
If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.
---Charles Pierce, Boston Globe, 1/5/03
Monday, August 24, 2009
VICK, UPDATED
I don’t know anyone who has returned their season tickets to the Eagles or anyone who has been protesting at training camp, and I don’t know anybody who will be picketing at the stadium when the regular season opens. There are such people. There just aren’t a large number of them and I don’t personally know any.
But I do know people who feel the way I do. I’ve talked to a few, and I suspect there are a lot of them. These are people who don’t carry signs or make a spectacle of themselves, but they’re done with the team. They just don’t care anymore. They cannot be entertained by a football team with Michael Vick on it. Maybe they will adopt another NFL team or maybe they will follow the league in a general way or maybe they will just take the season off, but they won’t be Eagles fans, at least not this year.
So here’s what will happen. Eagles games will still be sold out, as they have been for years, but all the ancillary measures of the team’s popularity will be down. Local and national TV ratings will be down and memorabilia sales will plummet. Also, the team (perhaps after an initial flurry of interest), will be less likely to be chosen for national TV games. It’s even possible that local ad rates for Eagles broadcasts will go down. At least, I hope they do.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
But I do know people who feel the way I do. I’ve talked to a few, and I suspect there are a lot of them. These are people who don’t carry signs or make a spectacle of themselves, but they’re done with the team. They just don’t care anymore. They cannot be entertained by a football team with Michael Vick on it. Maybe they will adopt another NFL team or maybe they will follow the league in a general way or maybe they will just take the season off, but they won’t be Eagles fans, at least not this year.
So here’s what will happen. Eagles games will still be sold out, as they have been for years, but all the ancillary measures of the team’s popularity will be down. Local and national TV ratings will be down and memorabilia sales will plummet. Also, the team (perhaps after an initial flurry of interest), will be less likely to be chosen for national TV games. It’s even possible that local ad rates for Eagles broadcasts will go down. At least, I hope they do.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Friday, August 21, 2009
PENNANT RACES
Tex and I keep records on our Scrabble games---the results, the scores, the bingos. We’ve been doing it for about two years. He wins three-quarters of the games. I’m good enough to give him competition, which is why he continues to play me, but there’s no question about who is better.
The games I win are almost always those where I get a little bit lucky. I’ll get the s’s, the blanks and other good stuff, while Tex has to look at racks with five n’s on them. And I’ll win those games by 40 or 50 points. When the situation is reversed, and Tex has the luck, he thrashes me by 100 or more. My wins are by relatively small margins; his wins are often blow-outs. If you review our records, and look only at games decided by 100 points or more, Tex wins 95% of them. In other words, his record in blowouts is better than his overall record.
It’s the same in any sport.
In baseball and football and basketball, you always hear a lot of “expert” opinion about the importance of one-run games or games decided by a field goal or less. It’s hooey. It’s always hooey. Of course, it’s never a bad thing to have a great field goal kicker or a 96mph closer (or LeBron with two seconds left), but a team’s record in close games is not a reliable measure of whether that team can win a championship. The St. Louis Cardinals, for example, have a 13-12 record in one-run games so far, but if you think the Cubs are going to catch them in the NL Central, please call me tomorrow and get your money down. The Padres are dreadful this year, at 49-66, but they have a .500 record in one-run games. Close games are often decided by luck---a grounder squirts through the infield, a kick hits the left upright, or Iverson bounces the ball off his foot.
When one team beats another by a large margin, however, it usually means they’re a better team. We tend to remember the huge upset, of course, but what almost always happens when Duke plays St. Leo’s is that Duke wins by 40. The Bengals get clobbered by the Patriots. The Yankees sweep the Royals.
In every sport, championships are most often won by teams with great records in blowouts rather than teams with great records in close games. Usually (like Tex), a good team will have a better record in blowouts than its overall record. A team with a lower winning percentage in blowouts than its overall record makes you wonder whether they’re good, or just temporarily lucky. This simple fact is what allows us, in mid-August, to look at the pennant races and make observations about who is for real and who ain’t. (Note: “blowout” is here defined as a win by five or more runs. All numbers are as of 8-16-09.)
And, of course, my primary concern in all this is my beloved Phillies. And I’m concerned. I thought I was concerned about the Florida Marlins because they’re young and just learning how to win and they’re pretty good already, but now I’m concerned about Atlanta because they have the best record in the NL (21-10) in blowouts. The Marlins are only 15-14 in those games. As for the Phillies, they are 20-17 (.541) in blowouts, which is worse than their overall record of 65-48 (.575). This is not generally a good sign. Last year, the Phillies were 92-70 for a winning percentage of .568; their percentage in blowouts, however, was .600. Teams with worse records in blowouts than their overall record will often fizzle in the playoffs. Last year, the only two playoff teams like that were Milwaukee and the Angels, both of whom lost in the first round. The Angels were especially disappointing since they had the best record in baseball during the regular season.
Concerning the rest of the NL, I’m calling the NL Central for St. Louis. Their lead is only four games, but their record in blowouts is 21-16, while the Cubs’ record in blowouts is only 14-16. That race is over.
I am not as quick to anoint the Dodgers, however. Though they lead the NL West by 4 ½ games, and even though they have a 20-10 record in blowouts, Colorado is 22-12 in blowouts, and is a serious contender. (SF is only a game behind Colorado, but their record in blowouts is only 15-14; I’m discarding them.)
Turning to the AL, one looks first for a reason to doubt the Yankees, but since they have a 20-10 record in blowouts, I don’t see any. Those of you in RedSoxNation, however, have every reason to expect your team to be in the playoffs as well. Boston’s 21-11 (.656) record in laughers is much better than that of Tampa (22-16, .579) and Texas (18-14, .563).
In the West, the Angels may be for real this year, at 22-12 in blowouts.
In the other race, Detroit is leading the weakest division in baseball with a 61-54 record, with 12-18 mark in games decided by 5 or more. Chicago and Minnesota are only .500 teams in those games, but somebody has to win that division, and it’s not going to be the Tigers.
My predictions:
Division winners: Philly, St. Louis, LA, NYY, Chicago, LAA
Wildcards: Colorado, Boston
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
The games I win are almost always those where I get a little bit lucky. I’ll get the s’s, the blanks and other good stuff, while Tex has to look at racks with five n’s on them. And I’ll win those games by 40 or 50 points. When the situation is reversed, and Tex has the luck, he thrashes me by 100 or more. My wins are by relatively small margins; his wins are often blow-outs. If you review our records, and look only at games decided by 100 points or more, Tex wins 95% of them. In other words, his record in blowouts is better than his overall record.
It’s the same in any sport.
In baseball and football and basketball, you always hear a lot of “expert” opinion about the importance of one-run games or games decided by a field goal or less. It’s hooey. It’s always hooey. Of course, it’s never a bad thing to have a great field goal kicker or a 96mph closer (or LeBron with two seconds left), but a team’s record in close games is not a reliable measure of whether that team can win a championship. The St. Louis Cardinals, for example, have a 13-12 record in one-run games so far, but if you think the Cubs are going to catch them in the NL Central, please call me tomorrow and get your money down. The Padres are dreadful this year, at 49-66, but they have a .500 record in one-run games. Close games are often decided by luck---a grounder squirts through the infield, a kick hits the left upright, or Iverson bounces the ball off his foot.
When one team beats another by a large margin, however, it usually means they’re a better team. We tend to remember the huge upset, of course, but what almost always happens when Duke plays St. Leo’s is that Duke wins by 40. The Bengals get clobbered by the Patriots. The Yankees sweep the Royals.
In every sport, championships are most often won by teams with great records in blowouts rather than teams with great records in close games. Usually (like Tex), a good team will have a better record in blowouts than its overall record. A team with a lower winning percentage in blowouts than its overall record makes you wonder whether they’re good, or just temporarily lucky. This simple fact is what allows us, in mid-August, to look at the pennant races and make observations about who is for real and who ain’t. (Note: “blowout” is here defined as a win by five or more runs. All numbers are as of 8-16-09.)
And, of course, my primary concern in all this is my beloved Phillies. And I’m concerned. I thought I was concerned about the Florida Marlins because they’re young and just learning how to win and they’re pretty good already, but now I’m concerned about Atlanta because they have the best record in the NL (21-10) in blowouts. The Marlins are only 15-14 in those games. As for the Phillies, they are 20-17 (.541) in blowouts, which is worse than their overall record of 65-48 (.575). This is not generally a good sign. Last year, the Phillies were 92-70 for a winning percentage of .568; their percentage in blowouts, however, was .600. Teams with worse records in blowouts than their overall record will often fizzle in the playoffs. Last year, the only two playoff teams like that were Milwaukee and the Angels, both of whom lost in the first round. The Angels were especially disappointing since they had the best record in baseball during the regular season.
Concerning the rest of the NL, I’m calling the NL Central for St. Louis. Their lead is only four games, but their record in blowouts is 21-16, while the Cubs’ record in blowouts is only 14-16. That race is over.
I am not as quick to anoint the Dodgers, however. Though they lead the NL West by 4 ½ games, and even though they have a 20-10 record in blowouts, Colorado is 22-12 in blowouts, and is a serious contender. (SF is only a game behind Colorado, but their record in blowouts is only 15-14; I’m discarding them.)
Turning to the AL, one looks first for a reason to doubt the Yankees, but since they have a 20-10 record in blowouts, I don’t see any. Those of you in RedSoxNation, however, have every reason to expect your team to be in the playoffs as well. Boston’s 21-11 (.656) record in laughers is much better than that of Tampa (22-16, .579) and Texas (18-14, .563).
In the West, the Angels may be for real this year, at 22-12 in blowouts.
In the other race, Detroit is leading the weakest division in baseball with a 61-54 record, with 12-18 mark in games decided by 5 or more. Chicago and Minnesota are only .500 teams in those games, but somebody has to win that division, and it’s not going to be the Tigers.
My predictions:
Division winners: Philly, St. Louis, LA, NYY, Chicago, LAA
Wildcards: Colorado, Boston
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Saturday, August 15, 2009
MICHAEL VICK
I am not an Eagles season-ticket holder, and over the years, I’ve only been to a handful of games. I’ve been a fan, however. I watch every game on TV, and read all the stats in the paper, and I like to listen to the local sports-talk-radio station when Ray Didinger is on because he knows more about pro football, and the Eagles, than anyone on the planet. I have had long discussions with friends in anticipation of an Eagles playoff game.
That’s all over now. The Eagles are dead to me. I stopped caring last night about 9:00 when I learned they had signed Michael Vick. I don’t want to watch Michael Vick play football. I don’t even want to see him on the sidelines. The sight of Michael Vick makes my stomach churn.
Do you remember Peewee Herman (nee Paul Rubens)? He created two successful movies, and his Saturday-morning kids’ show, “Peewee’s Playhouse,” was so clever and innovative that it garnered a large adult audience, including me. Then, in 1991, he was caught performing an act of self-gratification in a porno theater in Florida.
Rubens was the same brilliant, creative guy the day after his arrest as he had been the day before, but his meteoric career came to an abrupt end. There was no blacklist or conspiracy involved, but it was immediately understood by everyone in show business that parents would no longer allow their children to be entertained by Peewee Herman. The idea of him doing another show for kids was just too creepy.
That’s pretty much the way I feel about Mr. Vick. I don’t doubt he can run fast and throw passes and even catch them, but I have zero desire to see him do it. In fact, I will go out of my way to avoid watching him play football.
Please understand me. I am not outrageously outraged. I am not engaged in a one-man boycott. I just can’t care about the team anymore. I have followed the Eagles, and their wins and losses, and their injuries, and the deals they made, and the internal team strife, and the travails of Andy Reid, and the saga of Terrell Owens, and I invested a fair amount of time and emotion in the team because it was entertaining. It was fun. That’s what sports are---entertainment---and the Eagles have entertained me for many years. Now, they simply can’t entertain me anymore, so I’m done.
There are many people who do not share my sense of revulsion, and I’ve heard some of them on radio and TV. Many fans will remain fans; some people even like the idea of signing Vick because they envision wonderful possibilities for the Eagles offense. And that’s fine with me. I’m used to being a minority voice. Some of the justifications offered for the Vick signing, however, are almost as offensive as Vick himself.
1) It’s time to move on.
Sorry, I can’t move on. I’m not ready. And why should I? For six years, the man made dogs kill each other in the fighting ring, then electrocuted some, or drowned them, or strangled them. These are the acts of a man steeped in evil, and I recoil at what he did. Decent people must condemn evil---when you refuse to embrace the moral relativism of our age, your view of evil doesn’t get any more complicated than that.
2) He has shown remorse, so we must forgive.
Has he? At his trial, he appeared to accept responsibility for his actions, including those he did with his own hands. Now, he says he was “naïve” and that he should have put a stop to things other people were doing. Well, which is it, Mike?
He also describes his behavior as “mistakes.” Are you as sick of this as I am? To me, leaving your car keys in the freezer is a “mistake.” Calling your intentional immoral acts “mistakes” is merely a pitiful attempt to blur the link between those acts and your responsibility for them. It’s a form of denial, a fashionable variety of denial, but denial nonetheless. Acknowledgement of one’s deeds is the first step toward rehabilitation, but there is scant evidence Vick has taken even that first step.
Besides, what if it’s true? What if he is truly remorseful? Well, that would be a good thing, but it’s really a matter between Vick and his God. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have to forgive him, and I certainly have no obligation, moral or otherwise, to watch him play football. In addition, I reject the idea that even genuine remorse would entitle him to reinstatement. I don’t see the connection between the two. Remorse can be good for the soul, but it does not erase the crime.
3) Everybody should get a second chance.
Yes, of course. All men can be redeemed, and should have a chance to prove themselves. And I would be fine with Michael Vick getting a job selling cars or working at Wal-Mart or maybe running the Michael Vick Football Camp For Troubled Teens. But the NFL? What theory of redemption is it that requires us to place a man back in the same exalted position he once occupied when he has fallen from that perch because of his own disgraceful acts? In his later years, Nixon was reported to have many regrets about Watergate, but nobody wanted to make him President again. And if Bernie Madoff ever gets out of jail, do you think we should let him start a hedge fund? I sincerely hope Michael Vick becomes a decent human being, and I think it’s possible he can do that. But that will happen, or not, depending on the kind of person Vick is. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM PLAYING FOOTBALL.
4) Three cops killed a black guy and didn’t get punished at all.
(I heard this argument at work today.) Of course, this can be used to excuse anything. There’s always somebody worse, unless you actually happen to be Joseph Stalin.
I don’t think you ever heard this argument thirty years ago, when it was accepted that justice resided in meting out punishment to an individual because of the deeds that individual committed. “Let the punishment fit the crime” was how it was expressed. Now, the argument goes, the act and the actor don’t matter so much. What matters is the background of the actor, or his nationality or skin color, or some other factor completely extraneous to the crime.
For example, there was a time, not long ago, when a man who broke into the home of an elderly couple, and robbed and killed them, would be convicted of murder and executed. Today, however, whenever such a criminal is a member of a minority group, the argument is made that it is unfair to execute him because at various times and in various places, a white man who committed a different heinous crime may not have been sentenced to death. The individual’s responsibility for monstrous acts, in other words, doesn’t matter nearly as much as his status as a representative of some demographic group. The act is the same, as is the depraved heart that committed it, and the elderly couple is still laying there in a pool of blood. And we are never told exactly why we must know the sex or race of the criminal before we can condemn his act.
The idea that justice resides somewhere other than in the relationship between the act and the actor is not really a new one---a thousand years ago, the crimes of noblemen were viewed very differently from the crimes of peasants---but it is odd that such an archaic, primitive notion can gain so much support in a modern Western democracy.
Down this road lies barbarism, a state in which no one can distinguish between right and wrong. As Natan Sharansky wrote, “The challenge in the Soviet Union was finding a way to fight evil; in the West, the challenge is to recognize it.”
5) It’s a cultural thing.
This is what the bad guys always say, isn’t it? It’s how white Southerners defended segregation. “It’s our culture; you just don’t understand.” In fact, it’s how slave-owners defended slavery; us Northerners just didn’t see how happy everybody was. “Culture” is why Muslims keep their women in bags, and why they mutilate the sex organs of little girls. It’s why the Bosnian War happened: “Hey, back off! We’ve been killing Muslims for 700 years---it’s our culture!”
Culture indeed! I think it was Blaise Cendrars who wrote, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.” If you paint Easter eggs with intricate patterns, that’s a cultural thing. If you drink a pint of Guiness on St. Patty’s Day, that’s a cultural thing. If you paint hex signs on your barn, that’s a cultural thing too. But if you torture dogs for pleasure, and you call it your culture, then there’s something seriously sick about your culture and maybe you need a different one.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
That’s all over now. The Eagles are dead to me. I stopped caring last night about 9:00 when I learned they had signed Michael Vick. I don’t want to watch Michael Vick play football. I don’t even want to see him on the sidelines. The sight of Michael Vick makes my stomach churn.
Do you remember Peewee Herman (nee Paul Rubens)? He created two successful movies, and his Saturday-morning kids’ show, “Peewee’s Playhouse,” was so clever and innovative that it garnered a large adult audience, including me. Then, in 1991, he was caught performing an act of self-gratification in a porno theater in Florida.
Rubens was the same brilliant, creative guy the day after his arrest as he had been the day before, but his meteoric career came to an abrupt end. There was no blacklist or conspiracy involved, but it was immediately understood by everyone in show business that parents would no longer allow their children to be entertained by Peewee Herman. The idea of him doing another show for kids was just too creepy.
That’s pretty much the way I feel about Mr. Vick. I don’t doubt he can run fast and throw passes and even catch them, but I have zero desire to see him do it. In fact, I will go out of my way to avoid watching him play football.
Please understand me. I am not outrageously outraged. I am not engaged in a one-man boycott. I just can’t care about the team anymore. I have followed the Eagles, and their wins and losses, and their injuries, and the deals they made, and the internal team strife, and the travails of Andy Reid, and the saga of Terrell Owens, and I invested a fair amount of time and emotion in the team because it was entertaining. It was fun. That’s what sports are---entertainment---and the Eagles have entertained me for many years. Now, they simply can’t entertain me anymore, so I’m done.
There are many people who do not share my sense of revulsion, and I’ve heard some of them on radio and TV. Many fans will remain fans; some people even like the idea of signing Vick because they envision wonderful possibilities for the Eagles offense. And that’s fine with me. I’m used to being a minority voice. Some of the justifications offered for the Vick signing, however, are almost as offensive as Vick himself.
1) It’s time to move on.
Sorry, I can’t move on. I’m not ready. And why should I? For six years, the man made dogs kill each other in the fighting ring, then electrocuted some, or drowned them, or strangled them. These are the acts of a man steeped in evil, and I recoil at what he did. Decent people must condemn evil---when you refuse to embrace the moral relativism of our age, your view of evil doesn’t get any more complicated than that.
2) He has shown remorse, so we must forgive.
Has he? At his trial, he appeared to accept responsibility for his actions, including those he did with his own hands. Now, he says he was “naïve” and that he should have put a stop to things other people were doing. Well, which is it, Mike?
He also describes his behavior as “mistakes.” Are you as sick of this as I am? To me, leaving your car keys in the freezer is a “mistake.” Calling your intentional immoral acts “mistakes” is merely a pitiful attempt to blur the link between those acts and your responsibility for them. It’s a form of denial, a fashionable variety of denial, but denial nonetheless. Acknowledgement of one’s deeds is the first step toward rehabilitation, but there is scant evidence Vick has taken even that first step.
Besides, what if it’s true? What if he is truly remorseful? Well, that would be a good thing, but it’s really a matter between Vick and his God. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have to forgive him, and I certainly have no obligation, moral or otherwise, to watch him play football. In addition, I reject the idea that even genuine remorse would entitle him to reinstatement. I don’t see the connection between the two. Remorse can be good for the soul, but it does not erase the crime.
3) Everybody should get a second chance.
Yes, of course. All men can be redeemed, and should have a chance to prove themselves. And I would be fine with Michael Vick getting a job selling cars or working at Wal-Mart or maybe running the Michael Vick Football Camp For Troubled Teens. But the NFL? What theory of redemption is it that requires us to place a man back in the same exalted position he once occupied when he has fallen from that perch because of his own disgraceful acts? In his later years, Nixon was reported to have many regrets about Watergate, but nobody wanted to make him President again. And if Bernie Madoff ever gets out of jail, do you think we should let him start a hedge fund? I sincerely hope Michael Vick becomes a decent human being, and I think it’s possible he can do that. But that will happen, or not, depending on the kind of person Vick is. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM PLAYING FOOTBALL.
4) Three cops killed a black guy and didn’t get punished at all.
(I heard this argument at work today.) Of course, this can be used to excuse anything. There’s always somebody worse, unless you actually happen to be Joseph Stalin.
I don’t think you ever heard this argument thirty years ago, when it was accepted that justice resided in meting out punishment to an individual because of the deeds that individual committed. “Let the punishment fit the crime” was how it was expressed. Now, the argument goes, the act and the actor don’t matter so much. What matters is the background of the actor, or his nationality or skin color, or some other factor completely extraneous to the crime.
For example, there was a time, not long ago, when a man who broke into the home of an elderly couple, and robbed and killed them, would be convicted of murder and executed. Today, however, whenever such a criminal is a member of a minority group, the argument is made that it is unfair to execute him because at various times and in various places, a white man who committed a different heinous crime may not have been sentenced to death. The individual’s responsibility for monstrous acts, in other words, doesn’t matter nearly as much as his status as a representative of some demographic group. The act is the same, as is the depraved heart that committed it, and the elderly couple is still laying there in a pool of blood. And we are never told exactly why we must know the sex or race of the criminal before we can condemn his act.
The idea that justice resides somewhere other than in the relationship between the act and the actor is not really a new one---a thousand years ago, the crimes of noblemen were viewed very differently from the crimes of peasants---but it is odd that such an archaic, primitive notion can gain so much support in a modern Western democracy.
Down this road lies barbarism, a state in which no one can distinguish between right and wrong. As Natan Sharansky wrote, “The challenge in the Soviet Union was finding a way to fight evil; in the West, the challenge is to recognize it.”
5) It’s a cultural thing.
This is what the bad guys always say, isn’t it? It’s how white Southerners defended segregation. “It’s our culture; you just don’t understand.” In fact, it’s how slave-owners defended slavery; us Northerners just didn’t see how happy everybody was. “Culture” is why Muslims keep their women in bags, and why they mutilate the sex organs of little girls. It’s why the Bosnian War happened: “Hey, back off! We’ve been killing Muslims for 700 years---it’s our culture!”
Culture indeed! I think it was Blaise Cendrars who wrote, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.” If you paint Easter eggs with intricate patterns, that’s a cultural thing. If you drink a pint of Guiness on St. Patty’s Day, that’s a cultural thing. If you paint hex signs on your barn, that’s a cultural thing too. But if you torture dogs for pleasure, and you call it your culture, then there’s something seriously sick about your culture and maybe you need a different one.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Sunday, August 9, 2009
I'M SPARTACUS...I'M SPARTACUS...NO, I'M SPARTACUS
Apparently, there are a lot of us out here in America who don’t accept every word Obama says about his healthcare scheme as the absolute literal truth, and the White House has decided to do something about it. This week, Macon Phillips, Obama’s Director of New Media, told the American people that if they see anything “fishy” on the web, or even in “casual conversation,” they should drop an email to flag@whitehouse.gov
Imagine, just for fun, what the harvest would have been if George Bush had suggested something like this. (“Now if any of you out there have a friend or neighbor who you’ve heard misunderestimating the effectiveness of the ‘surge’ in Iraq, I want you all to send that person’s name to my pal at dickcheney@undisclosedlocation.com.”) Picture your favorite liberal commentators---Olberman, Matthews, Maddow…. Now picture the tops of their heads flying off in rage.
I assume most of you have already reported me for my July 23 article entitled HEALTHCARE NOW!!!! (which was full of rumors and innuendo and other fishy stuff), but if you haven’t yet, it’s OK because I reported it myself. I urge you to do the same. Turn yourself in. Even if you’ve never said anything fishy about Obamacare, confess anyway. Every decent American who remembers we were once governed by the Constitution belongs on that list.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Imagine, just for fun, what the harvest would have been if George Bush had suggested something like this. (“Now if any of you out there have a friend or neighbor who you’ve heard misunderestimating the effectiveness of the ‘surge’ in Iraq, I want you all to send that person’s name to my pal at dickcheney@undisclosedlocation.com.”) Picture your favorite liberal commentators---Olberman, Matthews, Maddow…. Now picture the tops of their heads flying off in rage.
I assume most of you have already reported me for my July 23 article entitled HEALTHCARE NOW!!!! (which was full of rumors and innuendo and other fishy stuff), but if you haven’t yet, it’s OK because I reported it myself. I urge you to do the same. Turn yourself in. Even if you’ve never said anything fishy about Obamacare, confess anyway. Every decent American who remembers we were once governed by the Constitution belongs on that list.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Thursday, August 6, 2009
2. FEEDING THE MAW
Milton Friedman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, made a wonderful two-minute video (available here), in which he describes how the magic of the price system makes it possible to produce the pencil he holds in his hand. “No one individual could make this pencil,” he begins. The wood itself is cut in the state of Washington, but before that can happen, there must be a saw and someone has to make that saw from steel, and that steel must come from iron ore, which someone else will mine. Then there’s the eraser, which is made from rubber (probably from Malaysia), and the brass ferrule to hold the eraser, and the yellow paint and the black paint and the graphite from India. Thousands of people, he explains, are involved in the production of the pencil, though they don’t know each other, they speak different languages, they have different religions, and they might hate each other if they were ever to meet. Yet they all cooperate, without any commissar directing them, to produce a pencil that can then be purchased by anyone for a trifling sum.
My own capitalist epiphany occurred as I opened a case containing twelve one-pound bags of frozen brussel sprouts and began to arrange them neatly in a display case. This case had been delivered to our back room less than an hour before, one of dozens of cases of frozen food on a pallet rushed to us in a refrigerated trailer from a warehouse hundreds of miles away. Prior to that, the sprouts had been flash-frozen and bagged at a different facility before being transported, still frozen, to our warehouse. And before any of that happened, someone had to buy the seeds, plant them, water and cultivate the plants, harvest them at the proper time, and arrange for their shipment to the processing plant. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people involved in some tiny way in getting these one-pound bags of brussel sprouts into a freezer case at Argus, where each bag sells for just $1.12.
And I thought it was wonderful. I was amazed, just imagining the process by which all these strangers cooperated in getting these bags into my hands and into the display cases. And we do it, we cooperate, not because any of us have a particular love of brussel sprouts or feeding the masses or serving society, but because each of us is getting a penny or two, or maybe a fraction of a penny, for each bag that someone will voluntarily choose to purchase. For me, it was Milton Friedman’s pencil all over again, only better, because unlike pencils, brussel sprouts can be sautéed with garlic.
These thoughts persist for a while. Then other, darker ones, begin to intrude.
Every big-box store gets products on the shelves in basically the same fashion. There is a computerized inventory system linking the cash registers, the backroom storage areas, managers on the sales floor, and the central (or regional) warehouse. The system tracks every item sold along with goods that are removed from the system because they are damaged or because nobody wants to buy them. When the backroom guys see that a product has been sold, they throw some more in a cart to replenish the shelves. When the warehouse sees the backroom is running low on something, it ships more. Some actual physical counting still occurs, but it is kept to a minimum.
I am a “pusher,” the last link in the chain that may start in a Peruvian mine or a factory in the Philippines. I take carts full of merchandise from the backroom, push them out onto the floor, and place each item in its proper location. When I have finished a cart, I get another one, and then another, and then another. There are always more carts, full of pillows, Milk Duds, bookcases, diapers, can openers and Advil. I am shoving a boulder up the mountain of American consumerism and I will never get to the top.
After a couple of shifts of this, you stop marveling at the magic of Milton Friedman’s pencil and you begin to wonder just how many different types of sippy cups America really needs. I mean, there’s Spongebob and Cars and Thumbelina, and every Sesame Street character you can remember and Mickey and the royal princesses Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Cinderella (either by themselves or shoulder-to-shoulder with the others) and an endless array of unnamed cartoon kitties and puppies and clams and bunnies and monkeys and fish and bears and squid, and each one is available in five or six or seven different colors. About the only thing you can’t get in a sippy cup is PBA because, well, I don’t know why and I don’t know what PBA is, but it’s obviously something you don’t want your baba sucking on because along the entire sippy cup aisle at Argus, you can’t find one that doesn’t say PBA FREE or CONTAINS NO PBA or some variation thereof.
Another thing you wonder about, given current trends, is how long it will be before every commercial food product, including Oscar Mayer Wieners, is flavored with either green tea or pomegranate.
Then there are the deodorants. Now I suppose I’m like most guys where such things are concerned. When the old one runs out, I stroll through the deodorant section and grab a Speed Stick or a Mennen product, figuring that this makes me about as debonair and hygienic as any guy who’s not named George Clooney really needs to be. If you spend an entire afternoon in the deodorant aisle at Argus, however, as I have, you find there are deodorants designed for the darkest corners of the human psyche, though you wonder whether even the most powerful roll-on, applied to the armpit, can penetrate that deeply.
A 1.7 ounce stick of Dove Clinical Protection, for example, sells for $8.39, as does the 1.6 ounce size of Secret Clinical Strength. I paused as I loaded them into their slots. Who buys these? Who would spend that kind of money, I wondered. The word “clinical,” though, is what really scared me, since it suggests there are people so smelly they require a doctor’s care rather than, say, a bath. Are there such people, with a stink rooted in pathology? Or Satan? And do they shop at Argus? Without orders from a physician, I think I would be afraid to use these products. I mean, what happens when Dove Clinical Protection gets applied to a normal sort of armpit? Is there an explosion?
Degree Absolute Protection is another high-end item, though since it is for men, and men will not spend eight bucks on deodorant, it was a bit cheaper. Again, the name seems unnecessarily intimidating, though I guess the “absolute” is really just a bit of sales puffery. It won’t protect you from an asteroid, for example. What troubled me more was the claim under the brand name; there, the customer is informed that Degree Absolute Protection “RESPONDS TO ADRENALIN.” Well, OK, I thought. Fine. It’s a scientific breakthrough and all. But to what end? Are there really people who are concerned that their deodorant will fail them as they are pursued by a lion across the veldt? Or, closer to home, when the mugger puts the barrel of a .38 behind your ear and cocks the hammer, is your first thought going to be, “Gosh, I wonder if my Right Guard can handle this.”?
And finally, let’s discuss Hannah Montana for a moment, because if you ever hear this humble, right-wing, free-market narrator say, “You know, that Noam Chomsky guy has some interesting ideas,” or “Maybe we should pay more attention to what Fidel has to say,” it will be because pushing Hannah Montana products (which I do every single day of my working life) has finally turned me into a communist. The last time I looked, there were over 200 Hannah Montana items at Argus, and there were more than 500 around Christmastime. Hannah Montana, the character played by Miley Cyrus on the most valuable TV show Disney has ever produced, is on shoes, drapes, chewing gum, tents, skateboards, TVs, guitar picks, fishing rods, shower curtains, waffles, washcloths, sleeping bags, chairs, DVD players, hats, toothbrush holders, body mist, folding stools, backpacks, dolls, dinnerware, video games, shirts, soap dishes, roller skates, dollhouses, sheets, handbags, camcorders, rain slickers, cosmetics, dance mats, board games, band-aids, towels, hair accessories, MP3 players, lunchboxes, karaoke machines, thermos bottles, white boards, bath gel, comforters, sandals, digital cameras, photo cubes, chairs, and swim floats, just to name a few. A pusher like me works alone, interrupted only by the occasional inquiry regarding the whereabouts of ironing board covers (answer: section B24), and there is plenty of time for an initial amusement and wonder at the Hannah phenomenon to morph into a spiritual malaise, and eventually into a festering madness and a world of fantasy in which Hannah, I, and a case of her signature Eggo frozen waffles are locked in a room from which only I, ultimately, emerge.
One entertains these thoughts and asks these questions as one feeds, endlessly, the gaping maw of the American consumer.
But of course, when the shift is over and sanity returns, I realize I wouldn’t have it any other way. The one thing we all must admit about Hannah Montana products and sippy cups and deodorants is that people want them. They really want them. They may not say they want them, they may even say they don’t want them, but in fact, they want them so much they drive to Argus, grab them, and take money out of their pockets to pay for them. If people did not want them, they would not be on the shelves because Argus is utterly heartless where non-selling products are concerned. We don’t sell lima beans, for example. I wondered about that for a while, suspecting that some Argus executive had a secret hatred of lima beans based in some horrific childhood incident. (We do sell brussel sprouts, which are far less popular, generally, than lima beans.) But when I asked about it, I was told we used to offer lima beans but they were pulled when nobody bought them. Other Argus stores sell lima beans. Philadelphians, however, don’t like lima beans very much. So they’re not on our shelves.
But we do sell dozens of sippy cups and dozens of deodorants and hundreds of Hannah products, and the only reason we do is that people want them. Don’t ask me why, but they do. They could spend their money on shrimp cocktails or tank tops or a high-priced prostitute, but instead they spend it on a Dora the Explorer sippy cup. And I say God bless them, and long may they wave. Because the alternative to having individuals choose what they buy is to have somebody else choose what they buy. Those are the only two alternatives, and I come down strongly in favor of the former.
People in our government are now engaged in deciding what kind of car you can drive, and they are using your money and mine to implement their choices. Why? Why can’t I pick the car I want, as I always have? And why, if somebody else is going to choose the car I drive, is it always the last person I would choose to make that decision? In the Soviet Union, it was some anonymous apparatchik in a gray suit who didn’t know much about cars and what people liked to do in them, and who didn’t care what anybody else thought. Here, it’s people like Joe Biden, who thinks we all watched TV in the 1920’s, and Nancy Pelosi, who thinks natural gas is a renewable resource, like wind. Or it’s Barney Frank, who---well, never mind. Even left-wingers view these people as little more than clowns. They don’t even drive cars very often; they usually get driven around by others.
If somebody gets to decide what kind of car we all have to drive, why can’t it be somebody cool? Why can’t it be Charles Barkley, or Eminem, or Sean Connery? I could accept any of them because all of them are way cooler than I am. Not that any of them would get it right, of course---nobody on earth can come up with a car that would satisfy everybody---but at least they drive cars and have probably used them for a variety of fun activities that do NOT include transport to the Select Subcommittee On Pacific Salmon Fisheries And Global Warming. But we never get cool people to make these decisions, do we? We never get Sean Connery. No, it’s always a bunch of power-drunk dullards who have never had a regular job and wouldn’t know how to fornicate in the back seat of a Malibu if you planted Pamela Anderson there with a bottle of tequila.
There are many theories about the fall of the Soviet communism, but I’ve always thought that, unlike at Argus, there just weren’t enough sippy cups. In a centrally-planned economy, there is simply no mechanism to determine what people want, and therefore, people never get what they want, and eventually they grow bitter about it. In a market economy that depends on a price system, the only things that are offered for sale are things that people seek and are willing to pay for. At Argus, if something sells, I put more of that item on the shelf; if it doesn’t, we throw that item in the dumpster. The information contained in the choices of consumers is what makes Argus money and gives me a job (and satisfies consumers). Without that information, there is no way to find out what people want.
The example I like to use comes from Bill James, noted sabermetrician and consultant to the Boston Red Sox. James points out that many people criticize the practice of paying millions or tens of millions to baseball players. Think what we could do with that money if we could devote it to cancer research instead, say the critics. All of us have heard some form of this argument at one time or another.
If you’re honest about it, there’s really only one explanation for this use of society’s resources---we want good baseball players more than we want a cure for cancer. It’s simply a fact. Personally, I think about cancer about once a month, or maybe a bit more frequently if I have some unexplained pain in my gut. But I think about the Phillies every day of my life. I think about them on January 8th and I think about them on Superbowl Sunday. I think about the Phillies on Christmas morning and on Cinco de Mayo, and I think about them constantly in late September. And there is nothing unusual about me. Overall, America wants good baseball more than it wants a cure for cancer, and we know that because baseball is where America spends its money.
This autonomic, amoral aspect of free markets is the central feature of capitalism. It gives people what they want, what they really want, rather than what they say they want or what they feel they should want or what some political group thinks would be best for all of us. And it is this feature, more than any other, that separates liberals from conservatives. For a right-winger like me, the price system is a wonder of nature in its ability, without any outside supervision, to provide happiness for millions of individuals who want millions of different things. This is especially so when you look at alternative systems, like communism, which fail so miserably to provide even the most basic goods. But what I love about it, that it gives people what they want, is exactly the same thing the left hates. For collectivists, a system that satisfies the multitudinous desires of individuals is wasteful, and selfish, and inefficient. They would prefer to settle on something that’s good for everybody and not worry so much about whether a particular individual gets exactly the sippy cup he wants.
And of course, I can’t make an argument that America needs all its sippy cups or deodorants or Hannah products. Nobody can make that argument. I don’t even know what “need” means in this context. What I can say is that if Sally really wants a box of Hannah Montana frozen waffles, I want Sally to get those waffles because I want a lot of things that other people disapprove of too, but I want them anyway. If Sally doesn’t get her Hannah waffles, I may not get my beer or my potato chips, and Barney Frank will certainly decide, in all his wisdom, that my 1992 Tercel just isn’t green enough to stay on the streets.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
My own capitalist epiphany occurred as I opened a case containing twelve one-pound bags of frozen brussel sprouts and began to arrange them neatly in a display case. This case had been delivered to our back room less than an hour before, one of dozens of cases of frozen food on a pallet rushed to us in a refrigerated trailer from a warehouse hundreds of miles away. Prior to that, the sprouts had been flash-frozen and bagged at a different facility before being transported, still frozen, to our warehouse. And before any of that happened, someone had to buy the seeds, plant them, water and cultivate the plants, harvest them at the proper time, and arrange for their shipment to the processing plant. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people involved in some tiny way in getting these one-pound bags of brussel sprouts into a freezer case at Argus, where each bag sells for just $1.12.
And I thought it was wonderful. I was amazed, just imagining the process by which all these strangers cooperated in getting these bags into my hands and into the display cases. And we do it, we cooperate, not because any of us have a particular love of brussel sprouts or feeding the masses or serving society, but because each of us is getting a penny or two, or maybe a fraction of a penny, for each bag that someone will voluntarily choose to purchase. For me, it was Milton Friedman’s pencil all over again, only better, because unlike pencils, brussel sprouts can be sautéed with garlic.
These thoughts persist for a while. Then other, darker ones, begin to intrude.
Every big-box store gets products on the shelves in basically the same fashion. There is a computerized inventory system linking the cash registers, the backroom storage areas, managers on the sales floor, and the central (or regional) warehouse. The system tracks every item sold along with goods that are removed from the system because they are damaged or because nobody wants to buy them. When the backroom guys see that a product has been sold, they throw some more in a cart to replenish the shelves. When the warehouse sees the backroom is running low on something, it ships more. Some actual physical counting still occurs, but it is kept to a minimum.
I am a “pusher,” the last link in the chain that may start in a Peruvian mine or a factory in the Philippines. I take carts full of merchandise from the backroom, push them out onto the floor, and place each item in its proper location. When I have finished a cart, I get another one, and then another, and then another. There are always more carts, full of pillows, Milk Duds, bookcases, diapers, can openers and Advil. I am shoving a boulder up the mountain of American consumerism and I will never get to the top.
After a couple of shifts of this, you stop marveling at the magic of Milton Friedman’s pencil and you begin to wonder just how many different types of sippy cups America really needs. I mean, there’s Spongebob and Cars and Thumbelina, and every Sesame Street character you can remember and Mickey and the royal princesses Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Cinderella (either by themselves or shoulder-to-shoulder with the others) and an endless array of unnamed cartoon kitties and puppies and clams and bunnies and monkeys and fish and bears and squid, and each one is available in five or six or seven different colors. About the only thing you can’t get in a sippy cup is PBA because, well, I don’t know why and I don’t know what PBA is, but it’s obviously something you don’t want your baba sucking on because along the entire sippy cup aisle at Argus, you can’t find one that doesn’t say PBA FREE or CONTAINS NO PBA or some variation thereof.
Another thing you wonder about, given current trends, is how long it will be before every commercial food product, including Oscar Mayer Wieners, is flavored with either green tea or pomegranate.
Then there are the deodorants. Now I suppose I’m like most guys where such things are concerned. When the old one runs out, I stroll through the deodorant section and grab a Speed Stick or a Mennen product, figuring that this makes me about as debonair and hygienic as any guy who’s not named George Clooney really needs to be. If you spend an entire afternoon in the deodorant aisle at Argus, however, as I have, you find there are deodorants designed for the darkest corners of the human psyche, though you wonder whether even the most powerful roll-on, applied to the armpit, can penetrate that deeply.
A 1.7 ounce stick of Dove Clinical Protection, for example, sells for $8.39, as does the 1.6 ounce size of Secret Clinical Strength. I paused as I loaded them into their slots. Who buys these? Who would spend that kind of money, I wondered. The word “clinical,” though, is what really scared me, since it suggests there are people so smelly they require a doctor’s care rather than, say, a bath. Are there such people, with a stink rooted in pathology? Or Satan? And do they shop at Argus? Without orders from a physician, I think I would be afraid to use these products. I mean, what happens when Dove Clinical Protection gets applied to a normal sort of armpit? Is there an explosion?
Degree Absolute Protection is another high-end item, though since it is for men, and men will not spend eight bucks on deodorant, it was a bit cheaper. Again, the name seems unnecessarily intimidating, though I guess the “absolute” is really just a bit of sales puffery. It won’t protect you from an asteroid, for example. What troubled me more was the claim under the brand name; there, the customer is informed that Degree Absolute Protection “RESPONDS TO ADRENALIN.” Well, OK, I thought. Fine. It’s a scientific breakthrough and all. But to what end? Are there really people who are concerned that their deodorant will fail them as they are pursued by a lion across the veldt? Or, closer to home, when the mugger puts the barrel of a .38 behind your ear and cocks the hammer, is your first thought going to be, “Gosh, I wonder if my Right Guard can handle this.”?
And finally, let’s discuss Hannah Montana for a moment, because if you ever hear this humble, right-wing, free-market narrator say, “You know, that Noam Chomsky guy has some interesting ideas,” or “Maybe we should pay more attention to what Fidel has to say,” it will be because pushing Hannah Montana products (which I do every single day of my working life) has finally turned me into a communist. The last time I looked, there were over 200 Hannah Montana items at Argus, and there were more than 500 around Christmastime. Hannah Montana, the character played by Miley Cyrus on the most valuable TV show Disney has ever produced, is on shoes, drapes, chewing gum, tents, skateboards, TVs, guitar picks, fishing rods, shower curtains, waffles, washcloths, sleeping bags, chairs, DVD players, hats, toothbrush holders, body mist, folding stools, backpacks, dolls, dinnerware, video games, shirts, soap dishes, roller skates, dollhouses, sheets, handbags, camcorders, rain slickers, cosmetics, dance mats, board games, band-aids, towels, hair accessories, MP3 players, lunchboxes, karaoke machines, thermos bottles, white boards, bath gel, comforters, sandals, digital cameras, photo cubes, chairs, and swim floats, just to name a few. A pusher like me works alone, interrupted only by the occasional inquiry regarding the whereabouts of ironing board covers (answer: section B24), and there is plenty of time for an initial amusement and wonder at the Hannah phenomenon to morph into a spiritual malaise, and eventually into a festering madness and a world of fantasy in which Hannah, I, and a case of her signature Eggo frozen waffles are locked in a room from which only I, ultimately, emerge.
One entertains these thoughts and asks these questions as one feeds, endlessly, the gaping maw of the American consumer.
But of course, when the shift is over and sanity returns, I realize I wouldn’t have it any other way. The one thing we all must admit about Hannah Montana products and sippy cups and deodorants is that people want them. They really want them. They may not say they want them, they may even say they don’t want them, but in fact, they want them so much they drive to Argus, grab them, and take money out of their pockets to pay for them. If people did not want them, they would not be on the shelves because Argus is utterly heartless where non-selling products are concerned. We don’t sell lima beans, for example. I wondered about that for a while, suspecting that some Argus executive had a secret hatred of lima beans based in some horrific childhood incident. (We do sell brussel sprouts, which are far less popular, generally, than lima beans.) But when I asked about it, I was told we used to offer lima beans but they were pulled when nobody bought them. Other Argus stores sell lima beans. Philadelphians, however, don’t like lima beans very much. So they’re not on our shelves.
But we do sell dozens of sippy cups and dozens of deodorants and hundreds of Hannah products, and the only reason we do is that people want them. Don’t ask me why, but they do. They could spend their money on shrimp cocktails or tank tops or a high-priced prostitute, but instead they spend it on a Dora the Explorer sippy cup. And I say God bless them, and long may they wave. Because the alternative to having individuals choose what they buy is to have somebody else choose what they buy. Those are the only two alternatives, and I come down strongly in favor of the former.
People in our government are now engaged in deciding what kind of car you can drive, and they are using your money and mine to implement their choices. Why? Why can’t I pick the car I want, as I always have? And why, if somebody else is going to choose the car I drive, is it always the last person I would choose to make that decision? In the Soviet Union, it was some anonymous apparatchik in a gray suit who didn’t know much about cars and what people liked to do in them, and who didn’t care what anybody else thought. Here, it’s people like Joe Biden, who thinks we all watched TV in the 1920’s, and Nancy Pelosi, who thinks natural gas is a renewable resource, like wind. Or it’s Barney Frank, who---well, never mind. Even left-wingers view these people as little more than clowns. They don’t even drive cars very often; they usually get driven around by others.
If somebody gets to decide what kind of car we all have to drive, why can’t it be somebody cool? Why can’t it be Charles Barkley, or Eminem, or Sean Connery? I could accept any of them because all of them are way cooler than I am. Not that any of them would get it right, of course---nobody on earth can come up with a car that would satisfy everybody---but at least they drive cars and have probably used them for a variety of fun activities that do NOT include transport to the Select Subcommittee On Pacific Salmon Fisheries And Global Warming. But we never get cool people to make these decisions, do we? We never get Sean Connery. No, it’s always a bunch of power-drunk dullards who have never had a regular job and wouldn’t know how to fornicate in the back seat of a Malibu if you planted Pamela Anderson there with a bottle of tequila.
There are many theories about the fall of the Soviet communism, but I’ve always thought that, unlike at Argus, there just weren’t enough sippy cups. In a centrally-planned economy, there is simply no mechanism to determine what people want, and therefore, people never get what they want, and eventually they grow bitter about it. In a market economy that depends on a price system, the only things that are offered for sale are things that people seek and are willing to pay for. At Argus, if something sells, I put more of that item on the shelf; if it doesn’t, we throw that item in the dumpster. The information contained in the choices of consumers is what makes Argus money and gives me a job (and satisfies consumers). Without that information, there is no way to find out what people want.
The example I like to use comes from Bill James, noted sabermetrician and consultant to the Boston Red Sox. James points out that many people criticize the practice of paying millions or tens of millions to baseball players. Think what we could do with that money if we could devote it to cancer research instead, say the critics. All of us have heard some form of this argument at one time or another.
If you’re honest about it, there’s really only one explanation for this use of society’s resources---we want good baseball players more than we want a cure for cancer. It’s simply a fact. Personally, I think about cancer about once a month, or maybe a bit more frequently if I have some unexplained pain in my gut. But I think about the Phillies every day of my life. I think about them on January 8th and I think about them on Superbowl Sunday. I think about the Phillies on Christmas morning and on Cinco de Mayo, and I think about them constantly in late September. And there is nothing unusual about me. Overall, America wants good baseball more than it wants a cure for cancer, and we know that because baseball is where America spends its money.
This autonomic, amoral aspect of free markets is the central feature of capitalism. It gives people what they want, what they really want, rather than what they say they want or what they feel they should want or what some political group thinks would be best for all of us. And it is this feature, more than any other, that separates liberals from conservatives. For a right-winger like me, the price system is a wonder of nature in its ability, without any outside supervision, to provide happiness for millions of individuals who want millions of different things. This is especially so when you look at alternative systems, like communism, which fail so miserably to provide even the most basic goods. But what I love about it, that it gives people what they want, is exactly the same thing the left hates. For collectivists, a system that satisfies the multitudinous desires of individuals is wasteful, and selfish, and inefficient. They would prefer to settle on something that’s good for everybody and not worry so much about whether a particular individual gets exactly the sippy cup he wants.
And of course, I can’t make an argument that America needs all its sippy cups or deodorants or Hannah products. Nobody can make that argument. I don’t even know what “need” means in this context. What I can say is that if Sally really wants a box of Hannah Montana frozen waffles, I want Sally to get those waffles because I want a lot of things that other people disapprove of too, but I want them anyway. If Sally doesn’t get her Hannah waffles, I may not get my beer or my potato chips, and Barney Frank will certainly decide, in all his wisdom, that my 1992 Tercel just isn’t green enough to stay on the streets.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Thursday, July 30, 2009
1. IN WHICH OUR HERO TAKES A JOB IN A BIG-BOX STORE
I’ll spare you the embarrassing details of our financial demise, but against the backdrop of plummeting markets and a shrinking economy, wife and self had virtually no income for all of 2008. Toward the end of the year, her business showed a spark of life and a few dollars started appearing in the old bank account. Not like the old days, of course, but she had turned the corner.
And then there was me.
When you are 58 years old and you have not practiced law since you were 40, you discover there is a certain reluctance on the part of the legal community to welcome you back into the brotherhood. Perfectly understandable, of course---one can hardly blame them. Still, I grew weary of sending the resume and covering letter out into the ether and receiving no response. It’s like sitting in a restaurant for an hour and having no one offer you service. After a while, you begin to think you’re in one of those Twilight Zone episodes where you’re actually dead but you haven’t figured it out yet. It was time to do SOMETHING. Anything.
So it was I found myself in November, filling out an application for a minimum-wage job at the big-box store on the Main Line, one of the richest areas in America. It was close to my home. It was a part of corporate America that was actually making money (and as a capitalist, I respected that). Also, though I had had brushes with the retail world in the past, I had never worked for BIG RETAIL. I thought it would be interesting. I thought I might learn something. I thought there might be some potential for advancement.
The store, which I will call Argus, invited me in a couple of weeks later. My three interviews consisted of questions read to me from a printed pamphlet, with each interviewer making notes of my responses. (“Tell me about a job situation you had where you had to overcome an obstacle.”) They apparently liked me well enough to check my urine, which they also liked. I was in. I would be paid $8.00 for each and every hour I worked.
For the kind of work I’m doing, you don’t get a lot of training. One girl I talked to, who had worked at Wal-Mart for four years, summed it up this way: “In retail, they don’t tell you nothing.” At Argus, twelve of us newbies were summoned in for three hours one evening to fill out our W-4’s and watch some forgettable videos. I do remember that diversity is good and that Argus cherishes its commitment thereto. Sexual harassment, on the other hand, was treated with considerably less enthusiasm.
The longest video, with the most production values and the cutest models, was the one warning us about the dangers of trade unions and the various tactics organizers might use to seduce us. The highlight for me was an animated sequence in which dollars (my pay!) flew into the hands of union bosses who, it seemed clear, did not really care about me once they had tricked me into signing up with them. Glancing around the room during this video, I saw no hint of snickers or cynicism, only nodding heads. Of course, any union sympathizers would have kept their traps shut in that venue, but I have come to believe my buddies in the underclass really do not have much interest in unions. In my seven months at Argus, the subject has never come up in conversation.
Finally, after a brief chat with the undercover asset-protection specialist---“There are twelve of you here; three of you will steal, and I will catch you!”---we were sent off into the night to await a call for our first day of work. I was genuinely excited at the prospect, and curious about what my life would now be like. At least I knew it was a life, and not an episode of The Twilight Zone.
I do not disparage these types of jobs. They are excellent for someone just out of high school (or who maybe didn’t finish high school). A job like this is a way to start building a work history and to learn what adult responsibility is all about. And I need hardly add that honest labor is always worthy of respect.
For me, however, I confess that in addition to the excitement and curiosity about my new position, there was something else.
Maybe you’ve seen the movie “Lost in America,” starring Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty. They play a yuppie couple who decide to sell everything, load up the car and “see America,” only to have Hagerty lose their entire nest egg in a few minutes at a Las Vegas casino. Forced to take menial jobs in a dusty, nondescript town in Arizona, Brooks winds up as a school crossing guard. He had been an executive in L.A., a player, and now, his first day on the job, he is harassed by a group of 12-year-olds on bikes who taunt him with calls of “Hey, retardo!”
My first day at Argus, I couldn’t help but think of that scene in the movie. Eager as I was to start this new phase in my life, to show them what I could do, to make the company a success(!), part of me expected to be taunted by children. I also had a nagging suspicion I would encounter, as shoppers, every person in my life who had ever disliked me and would be schadenfreuded to orgasm at the sight of me pushing a cart full of school supplies. I was 58 years old. I had once made a living as one of a handful of experts in an obscure area of environmental law, and I had run a successful business with Sandi for twenty years. Now I would be making $8.00/hour opening cases of Lean Cuisine products and aligning them neatly in freezers. I was a loser. I was the biggest loser I knew. Maybe this had always been true, but in the past, I had managed to keep it discretely hushed up. Now it was public. Now it was official.
Or as my son put it one day, “Hey, anybody can work at Argus. All you need is a law degree.”
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
And then there was me.
When you are 58 years old and you have not practiced law since you were 40, you discover there is a certain reluctance on the part of the legal community to welcome you back into the brotherhood. Perfectly understandable, of course---one can hardly blame them. Still, I grew weary of sending the resume and covering letter out into the ether and receiving no response. It’s like sitting in a restaurant for an hour and having no one offer you service. After a while, you begin to think you’re in one of those Twilight Zone episodes where you’re actually dead but you haven’t figured it out yet. It was time to do SOMETHING. Anything.
So it was I found myself in November, filling out an application for a minimum-wage job at the big-box store on the Main Line, one of the richest areas in America. It was close to my home. It was a part of corporate America that was actually making money (and as a capitalist, I respected that). Also, though I had had brushes with the retail world in the past, I had never worked for BIG RETAIL. I thought it would be interesting. I thought I might learn something. I thought there might be some potential for advancement.
The store, which I will call Argus, invited me in a couple of weeks later. My three interviews consisted of questions read to me from a printed pamphlet, with each interviewer making notes of my responses. (“Tell me about a job situation you had where you had to overcome an obstacle.”) They apparently liked me well enough to check my urine, which they also liked. I was in. I would be paid $8.00 for each and every hour I worked.
For the kind of work I’m doing, you don’t get a lot of training. One girl I talked to, who had worked at Wal-Mart for four years, summed it up this way: “In retail, they don’t tell you nothing.” At Argus, twelve of us newbies were summoned in for three hours one evening to fill out our W-4’s and watch some forgettable videos. I do remember that diversity is good and that Argus cherishes its commitment thereto. Sexual harassment, on the other hand, was treated with considerably less enthusiasm.
The longest video, with the most production values and the cutest models, was the one warning us about the dangers of trade unions and the various tactics organizers might use to seduce us. The highlight for me was an animated sequence in which dollars (my pay!) flew into the hands of union bosses who, it seemed clear, did not really care about me once they had tricked me into signing up with them. Glancing around the room during this video, I saw no hint of snickers or cynicism, only nodding heads. Of course, any union sympathizers would have kept their traps shut in that venue, but I have come to believe my buddies in the underclass really do not have much interest in unions. In my seven months at Argus, the subject has never come up in conversation.
Finally, after a brief chat with the undercover asset-protection specialist---“There are twelve of you here; three of you will steal, and I will catch you!”---we were sent off into the night to await a call for our first day of work. I was genuinely excited at the prospect, and curious about what my life would now be like. At least I knew it was a life, and not an episode of The Twilight Zone.
I do not disparage these types of jobs. They are excellent for someone just out of high school (or who maybe didn’t finish high school). A job like this is a way to start building a work history and to learn what adult responsibility is all about. And I need hardly add that honest labor is always worthy of respect.
For me, however, I confess that in addition to the excitement and curiosity about my new position, there was something else.
Maybe you’ve seen the movie “Lost in America,” starring Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty. They play a yuppie couple who decide to sell everything, load up the car and “see America,” only to have Hagerty lose their entire nest egg in a few minutes at a Las Vegas casino. Forced to take menial jobs in a dusty, nondescript town in Arizona, Brooks winds up as a school crossing guard. He had been an executive in L.A., a player, and now, his first day on the job, he is harassed by a group of 12-year-olds on bikes who taunt him with calls of “Hey, retardo!”
My first day at Argus, I couldn’t help but think of that scene in the movie. Eager as I was to start this new phase in my life, to show them what I could do, to make the company a success(!), part of me expected to be taunted by children. I also had a nagging suspicion I would encounter, as shoppers, every person in my life who had ever disliked me and would be schadenfreuded to orgasm at the sight of me pushing a cart full of school supplies. I was 58 years old. I had once made a living as one of a handful of experts in an obscure area of environmental law, and I had run a successful business with Sandi for twenty years. Now I would be making $8.00/hour opening cases of Lean Cuisine products and aligning them neatly in freezers. I was a loser. I was the biggest loser I knew. Maybe this had always been true, but in the past, I had managed to keep it discretely hushed up. Now it was public. Now it was official.
Or as my son put it one day, “Hey, anybody can work at Argus. All you need is a law degree.”
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
NATURAL BORN
The “birthers” are again much in the news, largely because of a recent lawsuit filed by a U.S. Army Reserve major who questions his deployment orders on the ground that Barack Obama is not constitutionally qualified to be president.
I can’t say I’ve followed the ins and outs of this story very closely, but I know there’s a theory he was born in Kenya and another theory he was born in British Columbia, and another theory he was born in Hawaii but then had his citizenship renounced by his parents when he moved to Indonesia. I haven’t paid much attention because I tend not to credit conspiracy theories held by small clots of fervent believers. I think Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I think Elvis died on a toilet. I think 9-11 was the work of jihadists. I think JFK was killed by a communist named Lee Harvey Oswald. And I also think Barack Obama is a natural born citizen within the meaning of Article 2, Section 1 of the US Constitution.
However, there is a reason this one will not go away.
Facing more than a dozen lawsuits, Barack Obama might have decided to pay $5 to the Office of Public Records in Honolulu, obtain a copy of his birth certificate, and give it to Katie Couric. Instead, he has spent several hundred thousand bucks defending these lawsuits, largely on procedural grounds.
Why?
The standard explanation from Obama supporters (and conservatives who also want the controversy to disappear) is that producing the birth certificate would only lead to more demands from conspiracy nuts. “They’ll never stop” is the argument. Unfortunately, it’s not an argument that can withstand any scrutiny.
For starters, what could they demand? And what else could Obama possibly produce for them? In fact, the only thing that has ever been asked of him is that he obtain his birth certificate and make it public. If he were to produce it, he could fairly and truthfully say, “Here it is. Here’s everything you asked for. There’s nothing more I can do. Let’s move on.” Assuming (as I do) that it would indicate he was born in Hawaii, the “birther” movement would be over. Yet this one fairly simple request meets a flat refusal and a wall of silence.
The only reasonable conclusion is that his birth certificate would reveal something that would be extremely damaging to his image and his reputation. I have no clue what it might be, but what other reason could there be for spending all this money and letting the issue drag on like this?
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
I can’t say I’ve followed the ins and outs of this story very closely, but I know there’s a theory he was born in Kenya and another theory he was born in British Columbia, and another theory he was born in Hawaii but then had his citizenship renounced by his parents when he moved to Indonesia. I haven’t paid much attention because I tend not to credit conspiracy theories held by small clots of fervent believers. I think Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I think Elvis died on a toilet. I think 9-11 was the work of jihadists. I think JFK was killed by a communist named Lee Harvey Oswald. And I also think Barack Obama is a natural born citizen within the meaning of Article 2, Section 1 of the US Constitution.
However, there is a reason this one will not go away.
Facing more than a dozen lawsuits, Barack Obama might have decided to pay $5 to the Office of Public Records in Honolulu, obtain a copy of his birth certificate, and give it to Katie Couric. Instead, he has spent several hundred thousand bucks defending these lawsuits, largely on procedural grounds.
Why?
The standard explanation from Obama supporters (and conservatives who also want the controversy to disappear) is that producing the birth certificate would only lead to more demands from conspiracy nuts. “They’ll never stop” is the argument. Unfortunately, it’s not an argument that can withstand any scrutiny.
For starters, what could they demand? And what else could Obama possibly produce for them? In fact, the only thing that has ever been asked of him is that he obtain his birth certificate and make it public. If he were to produce it, he could fairly and truthfully say, “Here it is. Here’s everything you asked for. There’s nothing more I can do. Let’s move on.” Assuming (as I do) that it would indicate he was born in Hawaii, the “birther” movement would be over. Yet this one fairly simple request meets a flat refusal and a wall of silence.
The only reasonable conclusion is that his birth certificate would reveal something that would be extremely damaging to his image and his reputation. I have no clue what it might be, but what other reason could there be for spending all this money and letting the issue drag on like this?
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Thursday, July 23, 2009
HEALTHCARE NOW!!!
There are two Democratic healthcare bills floating around Congress, and though neither Obama nor any other Democrat have actually read them, we are informed by the president it is essential a bill be passed by the end of July. The American people are demanding action, Obama tells us. We can’t wait.
There are two reasons for this urgency, both related to the steadily-declining support for Obama’s healthcare plans in public opinion polls.
First, Obama wants a bill passed before new numbers on the economy come out. It is becoming increasingly clear, even to Obama-lovers, that the $878 billion stimulus bill has been a colossal failure. Back in February, Obama told us THAT bill had to be enacted immediately in order to keep unemployment from rising above 8%. As of July, unemployment was 9.5%, and no one expects the new number to be lower when it is released in early August. From Obama’s perspective, it is important that the healthcare bill be passed before further evidence appears that his first massive program not only failed to solve the problem it addressed, but actually made matters quite a bit worse.
The second reason is the upcoming August recess for Congress. Obama’s problem is not merely that Congress will not meet for a month. More important is what members of Congress will be doing during that month. They will go home. They will go to town hall meetings. They will give speeches and interviews in their districts.
Within the Washington beltway, the primary source of information for members of Congress is the Obama-friendly mass media, and it is easy to ignore the public’s growing skepticism of the Democratic agenda. Any negative feedback is anecdotal, or it’s a number in a poll that’s reported on page 22. It’s a very different story when you go home and confront your constituents, in person, and they are screaming at you to stop wasting their money.
Copyright 2009MichaelKubacki
There are two reasons for this urgency, both related to the steadily-declining support for Obama’s healthcare plans in public opinion polls.
First, Obama wants a bill passed before new numbers on the economy come out. It is becoming increasingly clear, even to Obama-lovers, that the $878 billion stimulus bill has been a colossal failure. Back in February, Obama told us THAT bill had to be enacted immediately in order to keep unemployment from rising above 8%. As of July, unemployment was 9.5%, and no one expects the new number to be lower when it is released in early August. From Obama’s perspective, it is important that the healthcare bill be passed before further evidence appears that his first massive program not only failed to solve the problem it addressed, but actually made matters quite a bit worse.
The second reason is the upcoming August recess for Congress. Obama’s problem is not merely that Congress will not meet for a month. More important is what members of Congress will be doing during that month. They will go home. They will go to town hall meetings. They will give speeches and interviews in their districts.
Within the Washington beltway, the primary source of information for members of Congress is the Obama-friendly mass media, and it is easy to ignore the public’s growing skepticism of the Democratic agenda. Any negative feedback is anecdotal, or it’s a number in a poll that’s reported on page 22. It’s a very different story when you go home and confront your constituents, in person, and they are screaming at you to stop wasting their money.
Copyright 2009MichaelKubacki
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