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
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
GREEN JOBS AND BROKEN WINDOWS
A couple weeks ago, the EPA published a report (that the Obama administration tried to suppress), confirming there had been no actual warming of our planet since about the time Donovan McNabb was drafted by the Eagles in 1999. Actually, it has been kind of gauche to even mention “global warming” for a while now since, well, there isn’t any. Instead, we must worry about “climate change,” and we have to be really, really worried about that, and even if we aren’t, we should still shut down all the mines and oil wells and build windmills instead because then we’ll all get lots of green jobs. That was Nancy Pelosi’s final speech on the floor of the House in support of the energy tax bill. “There are four reasons we must pass this bill,” she said. “Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.”
Undoubtedly, large government subsidies for windmills and whatnot, along with punitive taxes for the other 95% of the energy-production business, will create jobs in the windmill business. This will occur in the same way that, if the government were buying rabbits, we would all start raising bunnies in our bathtubs. Of course, there is a serious question about whether the jobs created will exceed those jobs lost in coal and oil and natural gas (and businesses that use those forms of energy), but we will assume Pelosi is right and there will be a net gain of jobs---green jobs. What will the overall effect of this be?
Back in 1850, a French economist named Frederic Bastiat wrote the story of a shopkeeper whose window was broken by a boy in the village. At first, his neighbors viewed it as an unfortunate incident for the shopkeeper, but then they noticed that the glazier benefited because he got the job of fixing the window. The glazier took the money he made and spent it at the bakery, and then the baker was able to afford a new pair of shoes, which put money in the cobbler’s pocket and enabled him to buy some new equipment. And so on. Ultimately, the neighbors concluded, the broken window was a great boon to the entire community.
To economists, this gag is known as the “broken windows fallacy,” and it’s a fallacy because it ignores what the shopkeeper might have done with his money if he hadn’t had to spend it on having his window fixed. For all we know, that money might have allowed him to send his son to the university where he would become a brilliant doctor and heal the multitudes. Instead, because of the broken window, the son had to spend his life doing menial labor.
Bastiat’s point was that every act with significant economic consequences has effects that are seen and effects that are unseen, and if we only examine the effects that are seen, we can easily arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Let’s make up some numbers in line with Pelosi’s vision. Let’s say that, as a nation, we spend $5 trillion each year for energy and employ 30 million people fulltime to give it to us. It’s a lot of money and a lot of labor, but we want the lights to go on when we flip that switch. Everything shuts down if we don’t spend that money and use those people.
But now, with Obama’s energy taxes and all the green jobs that are coming, let’s say the $5 trillion becomes $7 trillion and the 30 million people become 35 million people.
What are we getting for those extra expenditures?
Well, nothing. For an additional $2 trillion and an additional five million fulltime employees, we’re getting the same output. The lights will go on just as they did before and the key will still turn in the ignition. In terms of the availability of energy, and how we use it, the only thing that changes is the price we pay. It will be “nice” energy instead of the evil energy we use now---that’s the whole idea---but in the end, we’ll be getting the same thing.
Now, $2 trillion is not nothing. In fact, it used to be considered a lot of money. Instead of using it this way, we could give everybody in America all the free root canals and Viagra they wanted and still have enough left over to sign both Jason Werth and Shane Victorino to long-term contracts. There are a lot of things we could do with $2 trillion rather than spend it on an environmental idea with no effect we can actually see, and which will have no effect on the way we live our lives. In order to evaluate the energy bill, it’s only reasonable to consider what else you might do with the money you’re spending on it.
But more importantly, what about the “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs?” Five million jobs! That’s a good thing, right? According to the Democrats who don’t really want to talk about global warming anymore, the green jobs are the primary benefit of the energy bill.
Remember the broken window? The green jobs are only the effect that we would see, but let’s think about the effects that are not seen. When you take five million people and put them to work installing solar panels and fixing windmills, what do you lose? Since we get the same amount of energy with 30 million people as we do with 35 million, the labor of those extra five million, in strictly economic terms, is being wasted. What else, as a society, might we use those five million people for?
Pelosi’s unstated assumption is that if we didn’t make these five million people do green jobs, they would do nothing. But that’s absurd, isn’t it? Some of them would be busy, and a few would be very busy and would do some very important things. What are we losing? What inventions won’t be invented, what businesses will never be built, what plays will not be written, how many gifted healers will never find their way to medical school and what diseases won’t they find cures for? Apart from the enormous cost of this program in dollars, the horror of the energy bill is the monumental waste of human resources.
The problem is that, as a society, as a prosperous Western democracy, we don’t want green jobs. They represent a step backward for all of us. Energy must be produced and wheat must be grown and cotton must be turned into clothing, but these are all things we must do, not what we want to do. What we want to do is write poetry and design skyscrapers and play volleyball and make movies and concoct delicious new dishes, but we can only pursue our various wants when the basics of survival (like energy and wheat and cotton) are in place. The measure of our success as a society is that historically, we have been able to devote less and less effort to mere survival. Yet Pelosi would have us spend more time and more resources on the fundamentals of existence, and she would like us to believe this is a good thing.
From the beginning of mankind until about 250 years ago, almost every person on earth had to work fourteen or sixteen hours a day simply to survive the night so he could wake up the next day to do it all over again. Even a hundred years ago, 60% of Americans worked on farms. Today, that number is 2%, but nobody laments the fact 58% of our people no longer have to operate threshing machines, pick cotton and castrate sheep. For some reason, those people (i.e., you) don’t complain about being stockbrokers, aerobics teachers, chemists and caterers.
Today, we live the lives we lead because wheat and cotton and energy are cheap, and we don’t have to spend every waking minute working to obtain them. It’s why we can sit in cafes and redecorate our living rooms and go to the beach---because survival costs us almost nothing.
Green jobs are not a benefit of the energy bill. They are a cost.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Undoubtedly, large government subsidies for windmills and whatnot, along with punitive taxes for the other 95% of the energy-production business, will create jobs in the windmill business. This will occur in the same way that, if the government were buying rabbits, we would all start raising bunnies in our bathtubs. Of course, there is a serious question about whether the jobs created will exceed those jobs lost in coal and oil and natural gas (and businesses that use those forms of energy), but we will assume Pelosi is right and there will be a net gain of jobs---green jobs. What will the overall effect of this be?
Back in 1850, a French economist named Frederic Bastiat wrote the story of a shopkeeper whose window was broken by a boy in the village. At first, his neighbors viewed it as an unfortunate incident for the shopkeeper, but then they noticed that the glazier benefited because he got the job of fixing the window. The glazier took the money he made and spent it at the bakery, and then the baker was able to afford a new pair of shoes, which put money in the cobbler’s pocket and enabled him to buy some new equipment. And so on. Ultimately, the neighbors concluded, the broken window was a great boon to the entire community.
To economists, this gag is known as the “broken windows fallacy,” and it’s a fallacy because it ignores what the shopkeeper might have done with his money if he hadn’t had to spend it on having his window fixed. For all we know, that money might have allowed him to send his son to the university where he would become a brilliant doctor and heal the multitudes. Instead, because of the broken window, the son had to spend his life doing menial labor.
Bastiat’s point was that every act with significant economic consequences has effects that are seen and effects that are unseen, and if we only examine the effects that are seen, we can easily arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Let’s make up some numbers in line with Pelosi’s vision. Let’s say that, as a nation, we spend $5 trillion each year for energy and employ 30 million people fulltime to give it to us. It’s a lot of money and a lot of labor, but we want the lights to go on when we flip that switch. Everything shuts down if we don’t spend that money and use those people.
But now, with Obama’s energy taxes and all the green jobs that are coming, let’s say the $5 trillion becomes $7 trillion and the 30 million people become 35 million people.
What are we getting for those extra expenditures?
Well, nothing. For an additional $2 trillion and an additional five million fulltime employees, we’re getting the same output. The lights will go on just as they did before and the key will still turn in the ignition. In terms of the availability of energy, and how we use it, the only thing that changes is the price we pay. It will be “nice” energy instead of the evil energy we use now---that’s the whole idea---but in the end, we’ll be getting the same thing.
Now, $2 trillion is not nothing. In fact, it used to be considered a lot of money. Instead of using it this way, we could give everybody in America all the free root canals and Viagra they wanted and still have enough left over to sign both Jason Werth and Shane Victorino to long-term contracts. There are a lot of things we could do with $2 trillion rather than spend it on an environmental idea with no effect we can actually see, and which will have no effect on the way we live our lives. In order to evaluate the energy bill, it’s only reasonable to consider what else you might do with the money you’re spending on it.
But more importantly, what about the “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs?” Five million jobs! That’s a good thing, right? According to the Democrats who don’t really want to talk about global warming anymore, the green jobs are the primary benefit of the energy bill.
Remember the broken window? The green jobs are only the effect that we would see, but let’s think about the effects that are not seen. When you take five million people and put them to work installing solar panels and fixing windmills, what do you lose? Since we get the same amount of energy with 30 million people as we do with 35 million, the labor of those extra five million, in strictly economic terms, is being wasted. What else, as a society, might we use those five million people for?
Pelosi’s unstated assumption is that if we didn’t make these five million people do green jobs, they would do nothing. But that’s absurd, isn’t it? Some of them would be busy, and a few would be very busy and would do some very important things. What are we losing? What inventions won’t be invented, what businesses will never be built, what plays will not be written, how many gifted healers will never find their way to medical school and what diseases won’t they find cures for? Apart from the enormous cost of this program in dollars, the horror of the energy bill is the monumental waste of human resources.
The problem is that, as a society, as a prosperous Western democracy, we don’t want green jobs. They represent a step backward for all of us. Energy must be produced and wheat must be grown and cotton must be turned into clothing, but these are all things we must do, not what we want to do. What we want to do is write poetry and design skyscrapers and play volleyball and make movies and concoct delicious new dishes, but we can only pursue our various wants when the basics of survival (like energy and wheat and cotton) are in place. The measure of our success as a society is that historically, we have been able to devote less and less effort to mere survival. Yet Pelosi would have us spend more time and more resources on the fundamentals of existence, and she would like us to believe this is a good thing.
From the beginning of mankind until about 250 years ago, almost every person on earth had to work fourteen or sixteen hours a day simply to survive the night so he could wake up the next day to do it all over again. Even a hundred years ago, 60% of Americans worked on farms. Today, that number is 2%, but nobody laments the fact 58% of our people no longer have to operate threshing machines, pick cotton and castrate sheep. For some reason, those people (i.e., you) don’t complain about being stockbrokers, aerobics teachers, chemists and caterers.
Today, we live the lives we lead because wheat and cotton and energy are cheap, and we don’t have to spend every waking minute working to obtain them. It’s why we can sit in cafes and redecorate our living rooms and go to the beach---because survival costs us almost nothing.
Green jobs are not a benefit of the energy bill. They are a cost.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
THE FIRST PITCH
Tonight, Barack Obama threw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game, and yet the broadcast never showed where the pitch went. Neither I nor you have ever seen this before. Did he get it over the plate? Did he even get it to the plate? Just as we only watch the Star-Spangled Banner to see if the singer forgets the words, the only reason we watch the ceremonial first pitch is to see whether the honoree can throw a damn baseball.
Can there be any doubt that, as a condition of his appearing on the mound in St. Louis, Obama ordered that the end of the pitch not be televised? There can be only one reason for this bizarre bit of broadcasting---Obama’s demand that he be spared any possible embarrassment if he threw it in the dirt.
This is what happens when the state controls the media. And if you needed any further proof of the fascist bent of this imperial president, you saw it tonight.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Can there be any doubt that, as a condition of his appearing on the mound in St. Louis, Obama ordered that the end of the pitch not be televised? There can be only one reason for this bizarre bit of broadcasting---Obama’s demand that he be spared any possible embarrassment if he threw it in the dirt.
This is what happens when the state controls the media. And if you needed any further proof of the fascist bent of this imperial president, you saw it tonight.
Copyright2009MichaelKubacki
Sunday, July 12, 2009
SOTOMAYOR AND THE RICCI CASE
Ricci v. DeStephano is the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the New Haven firefighters who took a test for promotions and had the test thrown out by the city when only white and Hispanic firefighters passed. When the guys who passed the test sued, the federal district court ruled (without a trial on the facts) that the city had acted properly. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, summarily upheld the district court’s decision and adopted its reasoning.
I am writing this to clear up the misconception that, since the Supreme Court ruling was 5 – 4, there were four justices on the Supreme Court who agreed with Sonia Sotomayor. In fact, there were none. The dissent, written by Justice Ginsburg (joined by Stevens, Souter and Breyer), argued simply that a trial of the facts was necessary and that the case should be sent back to the district court for that trial. Thus, Sotomayor’s ruling that the firefighter tests could be rejected by the city as a matter of law (without a trial of the facts) was rejected by all nine members of the Supreme Court.
You can read the decision here.
I am writing this to clear up the misconception that, since the Supreme Court ruling was 5 – 4, there were four justices on the Supreme Court who agreed with Sonia Sotomayor. In fact, there were none. The dissent, written by Justice Ginsburg (joined by Stevens, Souter and Breyer), argued simply that a trial of the facts was necessary and that the case should be sent back to the district court for that trial. Thus, Sotomayor’s ruling that the firefighter tests could be rejected by the city as a matter of law (without a trial of the facts) was rejected by all nine members of the Supreme Court.
You can read the decision here.
MY NEW GIRLFRIEND
I spent about an hour today in the area of the 10th green at the Saucon Valley Country Club watching the third round of the 2009 Women’s Open Golf Championship. It’s a short par 4, listed at 332 yards. However, the green is significantly elevated above the fairway and surrounded by very deep sand traps and thick four-inch-high grass. In addition, the green itself is of a sinuous and undulating nature, with large swatches of it dripping with menace. There are places on the green that will not hold a golf ball. If you place a ball by hand in one of these Bermuda-trianglelike areas, it will roll completely off the green and come to rest somewhere in the vicinity of Bethesda, Maryland, though the Saucon Valley Country Club itself is located in Bethelem, Pennsylvania.
For an hour, golfer after golfer approached this challenge in exactly the same fashion. They would attempt to hit a ball in the middle of the fairway about 270 yards, avoiding all the evil bits close to the green and leaving them with a short wedge shot onto a forgiving part of the green. The successful ones managed to do this, make two putts for a par, and slink off to the 11th tee, mopping their troubled brows as they slunk.
But they were not always successful. Paula Creamer, the fourth-ranked female golfer in the world, required seven shots to accomplish her mission. Many others found the suggested four shots an insufficient number.
Then, toward the end of my hour at the 10th, a young lady with the unlikely name of Eun Hee Ji stepped to the tee 332 yards from the flag and knocked her ball 308 yards, depositing it neatly on the front part of the green. The multitudes (self included) were simply stunned. She drove the green! No one else had even attempted it. I think I had assumed it wasn’t possible, and I wasn’t the only one, because when she arrived at the green, the crowd went a bit wacky, cheering and hooting and screaming its welcome, which Ms. Ji acknowledged with such girlish modesty that it made me a bit embarrassed we had cheered so loud. With two putts, she claimed her birdie and walked calmly off to the next hole to another thunderous ovation.
With the sang-froid of a mob assassin, there is much to admire about Ms. Ji (or, as I like to call her, Eun). But she impressed me in another way as well.
On the LPGA tour, there are still a few women who look like refrigerators, but they are all in their late 30’s or 40’s and they don’t win a lot anymore. Virtually all the other players, including most of the stars, are 22 years old with rock-hard muscles in the arms and legs and not an ounce of fat anywhere. Regardless of their country of origin, they wear short, tight skirts (white or pastel), a polo shirt one size too small (with a couple of buttons undone), and color-coordinated caps, hair ribbons and the like. Until you’ve watched them for a while, it’s impossible to tell them apart since they all look like they are on their way to the mall to spend the afternoon hanging with their BFF’s.
Eun, however, doesn’t look like that. First of all, she can’t be bigger than 5’ 2”, and if she weighs 115 pounds, my name is Barack Obama. More importantly, she doesn’t look like much of a shopper. Yesterday, she wore sweat pants and a loose fitting top that provided no suggestion of her shape. A black baseball cap was tilted forward so it was difficult to get a clear look at her face. If you want perky and cute, Eun may not be the girl for you. If you want somebody to hit a golf ball 300 yards, however….
She was in second place after Saturday, and she has won only one tournament in her two years on the tour, so she’s not a lock in the 2009 Open. The wins will come, though, and I’ll be rooting for her.
Copyright 2009 Michael Kubacki
For an hour, golfer after golfer approached this challenge in exactly the same fashion. They would attempt to hit a ball in the middle of the fairway about 270 yards, avoiding all the evil bits close to the green and leaving them with a short wedge shot onto a forgiving part of the green. The successful ones managed to do this, make two putts for a par, and slink off to the 11th tee, mopping their troubled brows as they slunk.
But they were not always successful. Paula Creamer, the fourth-ranked female golfer in the world, required seven shots to accomplish her mission. Many others found the suggested four shots an insufficient number.
Then, toward the end of my hour at the 10th, a young lady with the unlikely name of Eun Hee Ji stepped to the tee 332 yards from the flag and knocked her ball 308 yards, depositing it neatly on the front part of the green. The multitudes (self included) were simply stunned. She drove the green! No one else had even attempted it. I think I had assumed it wasn’t possible, and I wasn’t the only one, because when she arrived at the green, the crowd went a bit wacky, cheering and hooting and screaming its welcome, which Ms. Ji acknowledged with such girlish modesty that it made me a bit embarrassed we had cheered so loud. With two putts, she claimed her birdie and walked calmly off to the next hole to another thunderous ovation.
With the sang-froid of a mob assassin, there is much to admire about Ms. Ji (or, as I like to call her, Eun). But she impressed me in another way as well.
On the LPGA tour, there are still a few women who look like refrigerators, but they are all in their late 30’s or 40’s and they don’t win a lot anymore. Virtually all the other players, including most of the stars, are 22 years old with rock-hard muscles in the arms and legs and not an ounce of fat anywhere. Regardless of their country of origin, they wear short, tight skirts (white or pastel), a polo shirt one size too small (with a couple of buttons undone), and color-coordinated caps, hair ribbons and the like. Until you’ve watched them for a while, it’s impossible to tell them apart since they all look like they are on their way to the mall to spend the afternoon hanging with their BFF’s.
Eun, however, doesn’t look like that. First of all, she can’t be bigger than 5’ 2”, and if she weighs 115 pounds, my name is Barack Obama. More importantly, she doesn’t look like much of a shopper. Yesterday, she wore sweat pants and a loose fitting top that provided no suggestion of her shape. A black baseball cap was tilted forward so it was difficult to get a clear look at her face. If you want perky and cute, Eun may not be the girl for you. If you want somebody to hit a golf ball 300 yards, however….
She was in second place after Saturday, and she has won only one tournament in her two years on the tour, so she’s not a lock in the 2009 Open. The wins will come, though, and I’ll be rooting for her.
Copyright 2009 Michael Kubacki
Sunday, July 5, 2009
WHY OBAMACARE?
A couple weeks ago, I was chatting with a Scotsman who now lives in the Philly suburbs. He's politically conservative in many ways, and of course, he has lived under the UK's National Health Service regime, so I asked him his views on Obamacare.
His answer surprised me. "Well," he said, "here in America I can go to see my doctor any time I want, but I wonder if people don't go to the doctor a little too much. America might benefit from a little rationing. If your knee hurts, what's wrong with taking ibuprofen for a few weeks until you get a doctor to see you?"
Later, he surprised me again. We were discussing the Obama administration's plans (a la Europe) to mandate four weeks of paid vacation for all workers, and he said, "That's fine. I could use more vacation, couldn't you?"
One of the issues conservatives puzzle over regarding Obamacare (which is frequently the topic on talk radio) is simply this: "Why? Why are Obama and the Democrats doing this?" After all, they know what the results will be just from what has happened in other countries. They know that mammography has virtually disappeared for Swedish women and they know about the armed guards (to keep order) at the doors of Swedish hospitals. They know that dying Brits can wait hours for an ambulance and they know that National Health Service hospitals in the UK look like nothing so much as Dickensian-era work-houses. They know British cancer patients over the age of seventy each get an allotment for palliative care and hospice, but nothing for treatment. They've seen the clinics in New England with big signs that say "Canadian Checks Accepted" (in Canada, the waiting lists are long and private health care is illegal). Maybe the American people are not all that familiar with what government health care looks like around the world, but Obama knows and Pelosi knows and Reid knows, so why are they doing this? Why are they going down this path?
And I think my Scottish ex-pat pal provides the answer. Though he can be bitterly sardonic about political correctness and though he has no illusions about the jihadists, he nevertheless grew up in the UK. Despite his free-market, conservative political bent, the entitlement mindset is burned into his consciousness. Any conservative raised in the US would instantly realize that federally-mandated vacations would put millions of people out of work, but no one raised in a welfare state as pervasive as that of the UK can ever look at it that way.
And that's the reason Obama and the Democrats are pushing Obamacare, regardless of the consequences. Once there is national health care, a tipping point is reached, and the relationship of the citizen to his government is changed fundamentally. The primary issue in all future political campaigns becomes entitlements, rather than national security or free speech or abortion or anything relating to our values or philosophy. In England, in Belgium, in Canada, the main issue in every election is "how many weeks of vacation will you give me?" or "will I get a free root canal?" Once the individual becomes dependent on the government for health care, for life itself, everything else fades into the background.
When this happens, and the political playing field is altered, Democrats will have a permanent advantage over Republicans, since no one can beat Democrats in the what-will-you-give-me-now sweepstakes. And that is why Democrats are pushing so hard for Obamacare, regardless of its merits.
Ten days ago, the House passed the largest tax increase in American history. If it gets through the Senate and becomes law, every industry that can move to another country will do so, unemployment will soar, and not many of us will be able to afford to turn on the thermostat in January. But though the energy bill would be a nightmare if it passes, it could also be (with great difficulty), repealed. Once Obamacare becomes law, however, it will almost impossible to put the cork back in the bottle. America will be changed forever. At that point, we become just another dying European welfare state.
Copyright 2009 Michael Kubacki
His answer surprised me. "Well," he said, "here in America I can go to see my doctor any time I want, but I wonder if people don't go to the doctor a little too much. America might benefit from a little rationing. If your knee hurts, what's wrong with taking ibuprofen for a few weeks until you get a doctor to see you?"
Later, he surprised me again. We were discussing the Obama administration's plans (a la Europe) to mandate four weeks of paid vacation for all workers, and he said, "That's fine. I could use more vacation, couldn't you?"
One of the issues conservatives puzzle over regarding Obamacare (which is frequently the topic on talk radio) is simply this: "Why? Why are Obama and the Democrats doing this?" After all, they know what the results will be just from what has happened in other countries. They know that mammography has virtually disappeared for Swedish women and they know about the armed guards (to keep order) at the doors of Swedish hospitals. They know that dying Brits can wait hours for an ambulance and they know that National Health Service hospitals in the UK look like nothing so much as Dickensian-era work-houses. They know British cancer patients over the age of seventy each get an allotment for palliative care and hospice, but nothing for treatment. They've seen the clinics in New England with big signs that say "Canadian Checks Accepted" (in Canada, the waiting lists are long and private health care is illegal). Maybe the American people are not all that familiar with what government health care looks like around the world, but Obama knows and Pelosi knows and Reid knows, so why are they doing this? Why are they going down this path?
And I think my Scottish ex-pat pal provides the answer. Though he can be bitterly sardonic about political correctness and though he has no illusions about the jihadists, he nevertheless grew up in the UK. Despite his free-market, conservative political bent, the entitlement mindset is burned into his consciousness. Any conservative raised in the US would instantly realize that federally-mandated vacations would put millions of people out of work, but no one raised in a welfare state as pervasive as that of the UK can ever look at it that way.
And that's the reason Obama and the Democrats are pushing Obamacare, regardless of the consequences. Once there is national health care, a tipping point is reached, and the relationship of the citizen to his government is changed fundamentally. The primary issue in all future political campaigns becomes entitlements, rather than national security or free speech or abortion or anything relating to our values or philosophy. In England, in Belgium, in Canada, the main issue in every election is "how many weeks of vacation will you give me?" or "will I get a free root canal?" Once the individual becomes dependent on the government for health care, for life itself, everything else fades into the background.
When this happens, and the political playing field is altered, Democrats will have a permanent advantage over Republicans, since no one can beat Democrats in the what-will-you-give-me-now sweepstakes. And that is why Democrats are pushing so hard for Obamacare, regardless of its merits.
Ten days ago, the House passed the largest tax increase in American history. If it gets through the Senate and becomes law, every industry that can move to another country will do so, unemployment will soar, and not many of us will be able to afford to turn on the thermostat in January. But though the energy bill would be a nightmare if it passes, it could also be (with great difficulty), repealed. Once Obamacare becomes law, however, it will almost impossible to put the cork back in the bottle. America will be changed forever. At that point, we become just another dying European welfare state.
Copyright 2009 Michael Kubacki
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
MICHAEL JACKSON
I’m willing to cut Michael Jackson a lot of slack. He was a talented person, and talented people sometimes have demons that would not be there if they were not so talented.
People who are celebrities as children, and who never have a proper childhood, have an additional burden. Some grow up and become responsible adults, but some don’t. When you look at Lindsay Lohan today, you see the hard face of a 22-year-old who is going on 50, and it’s sad. Maybe she will find herself, but it’s not certain. And Michael Jackson’s childhood was far worse than hers. Apparently, he was never able to have any sort of adult relationship; he was an emotional cripple. And it wasn’t really his fault.
I’ll go further. I was pleased by his acquittal in the child molestation case. I viewed it as just another high-profile case by a prosecutor who wanted some headlines, like those involving Martha Stewart, Rush Limbaugh and the Duke lacrosse team. The payoff to the kid who had some questionable overnights at Neverland was more troubling, but I can’t say I condemned him for that either. For MJ, $20 million at that time was like me paying somebody a buck. He had a reputation to protect. It’s Hollywood. None of us really know what happened.
However, there is a place where sympathy must end. One can have pity for a madman, but the pity ends when he begins to use other people’s lives to slake his personal demons.
I’m talking, of course, about “the children.”
Who are these kids? They were not his biological children, we now learn, and there is a serious question about whether they are the children of his “wife,” Debbie Rowe, who is alleged to have been merely a surrogate. What were they to Michael Jackson? Pets? Human versions of his famous chimp? Perhaps that explains why they have never been educated. In any event, the purpose they served in his twisted psyche is now clear.
First, they were evidence he was “normal,” a heterosexual and a dad. Worse, however, is that he created them and used them to assuage his own self-hatred, his loathing for his black skin. There is no reason to think he could not have had children of his own. Even if the thought of sex with a female was nauseating to him, he could easily have arranged for an in vitro coupling. But that child would have been black, wouldn’t it? And that wouldn’t do at all. That would give the lie to the fantasy he had created for himself in all his skin-lightening procedures and plastic surgeries. And that fantasy had to be served, apparently, at all costs. Even at the cost of others’ lives.
Copyright 2009 Michael Kubacki
People who are celebrities as children, and who never have a proper childhood, have an additional burden. Some grow up and become responsible adults, but some don’t. When you look at Lindsay Lohan today, you see the hard face of a 22-year-old who is going on 50, and it’s sad. Maybe she will find herself, but it’s not certain. And Michael Jackson’s childhood was far worse than hers. Apparently, he was never able to have any sort of adult relationship; he was an emotional cripple. And it wasn’t really his fault.
I’ll go further. I was pleased by his acquittal in the child molestation case. I viewed it as just another high-profile case by a prosecutor who wanted some headlines, like those involving Martha Stewart, Rush Limbaugh and the Duke lacrosse team. The payoff to the kid who had some questionable overnights at Neverland was more troubling, but I can’t say I condemned him for that either. For MJ, $20 million at that time was like me paying somebody a buck. He had a reputation to protect. It’s Hollywood. None of us really know what happened.
However, there is a place where sympathy must end. One can have pity for a madman, but the pity ends when he begins to use other people’s lives to slake his personal demons.
I’m talking, of course, about “the children.”
Who are these kids? They were not his biological children, we now learn, and there is a serious question about whether they are the children of his “wife,” Debbie Rowe, who is alleged to have been merely a surrogate. What were they to Michael Jackson? Pets? Human versions of his famous chimp? Perhaps that explains why they have never been educated. In any event, the purpose they served in his twisted psyche is now clear.
First, they were evidence he was “normal,” a heterosexual and a dad. Worse, however, is that he created them and used them to assuage his own self-hatred, his loathing for his black skin. There is no reason to think he could not have had children of his own. Even if the thought of sex with a female was nauseating to him, he could easily have arranged for an in vitro coupling. But that child would have been black, wouldn’t it? And that wouldn’t do at all. That would give the lie to the fantasy he had created for himself in all his skin-lightening procedures and plastic surgeries. And that fantasy had to be served, apparently, at all costs. Even at the cost of others’ lives.
Copyright 2009 Michael Kubacki
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