The Shoe-Leather Express

2011-12-28T23:29:00.001-08:00

Movie Night

I’m a big fan of propaganda. Whether it supports my beliefs and personal prejudices or opposes them, I’m fascinated by the many ways in which we’re influenced by media.

Of course, as with advertising, no one is willing to admit that propaganda affects their behavior, but its efficacy cannot be denied in an age where it has led us into war on false pretenses, where we’ve been frightened into sacrificing our liberties to the ironically-named Patriot Act, and where perfectly law abiding Muslim-Americans are persecuted and shunned (and their brothers and sisters abroad slaughtered at the slightest provocation--justified or not).

Some of my favorite examples of movies as socio-political propaganda come from the days of the Cold War. The late 1940s and 1950s gave birth to some of the most unsubtle, over the top movies ever made. And our first offering is a prime example. Released in 1951, I Was a Communist for the FBI told the highly fictionalized story of Matt Cvetic, who spent ten years working undercover for the FBI as a member of the Communist Party USA.

Although most of the events in the movie never happened, Cvetic was a real undercover infiltrator who was influential in smashing the CPUSA. I guess the truth of what he did wasn't sensational enough, so they had to invent Wild Adventures with which to titillate audiences.

In it, we are told that racial strife and the civil rights movement were inspired by communist agitators, as if African Americans had no reason to be angry until the communists convinced the poor, simple creatures that they did.

We are told that labor unrest is also inspired by those evil reds. When communist infiltrators rig a union vote to generate a wildcat strike, the dissenting union members try to dissuade the picketers from marching, so the commies send a gang of tough guys to beat them senseless with steel pipes (all of which are wrapped, for some strange reason, in Hebrew language newspapers). In a stunning turnabout, union-busting goons weren't sent by the Big Shots who run the factory, but those slimy Bolsheviks. I should've known it was them all along!

In another hilarious scene, a member is ordered to start a fascist movement in order to arouse sympathy for the communists. You see, even the Nazis are a commie plot.

But best of all is how we are taught all Good Americans should treat anyone who joins or even sympathizes with those Red Devils. Cvetic’s brother and son don’t realize that he is only pretending to be a communist and treat him with furious hatred. His brother even punches him out at their mother’s funeral.

In those days, it was widely believed that ‘every communist is Moscow’s spy.’ Because of this, someone who sincerely believed in communism (however misguided that might be), even if he was opposed to the outrages committed by the Soviet Union, was almost universally despised in the U.S.

But the chief irony is the film’s main message: It is nobler for us to hold loyalty to the state more sacred than loyalty to our family. If a loved one adopts beliefs that run counter to the established party line, he must be spat upon, shunned and hopefully, imprisoned or killed. I needn’t point out that this attitude is more characteristic of a totalitarian society (like, ahem, Stalin's Soviet Union) than a free country.

Watch, and be amazed.

As an antidote, I now present some leftist propaganda from the same era. Salt of the Earth, released in 1954, was also based on a true story. But, unlike the last film, it actually follows the real events fairly accurately. The story of a miners' strike in New Mexico, it deals boldly with issues like racism, women's rights, labor struggles, arrogant one-percenters, and police violence against unions and the poor--unheard of in the movies of those days.

There are only five professional actors in the entire film. The rest of the parts were played by the people who staged the strike on which the film is based. Because of this and a shoestring budget, it isn't as slick and professionally produced as the last film, but that doesn't diminish the power of its story.

The film's proposed solutions to these problems would seem self evident to today's eyes. I mean, it's hardly controversial these days to suggest that women, racial minorities and union organizers should receive fair and equal treatment (even if these dreams have yet to be realized). The last film tried to make us think these problems didn't exist, and that anyone who suggested they did was a traitor, out to destroy our nation and its freedoms. Salt of the Earth deals with them unflinchingly, and with no little amount of humor.

I think you can see which side was proved to have the right idea. Salt of the Earth could be remade today and it would fit right in with later union classics like Matewan and Norma Rae. No one would bat an eye. I Was a Communist for the FBI, on the other hand, appears ridiculously shrill to modern audiences. I mean, it looks about as relevant as D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.

So how were the films received? Salt of the Earth almost wasn't produced. The federal government relentlessly harassed the production, flying planes overhead when they were shooting and even deporting the female lead to Mexico in the middle of production. They had to shoot some of her scenes in Mexico and smuggle them back into the U.S.

Needless to say, all of its actors and producers were blacklisted in Hollywood, in spite of the fact that the movie doesn't advocate--or even mention--communism.

From the Wikipedia entry on the film::

The film was denounced by the United States House of Representatives for its communist sympathies, and the FBI investigated the film's financing. The American Legion called for a nation-wide boycott of the film. Film-processing labs were told not to work on Salt of the Earth and unionized projectionists were instructed not to show it.^{[citation needed]} After its opening night in New York City, the film languished for 10 years because all but 12 theaters in the country refused to screen it.By one journalist's account: "During the course of production in New Mexico in 1953, the trade press denounced it as a subversive plot, anti-Communist vigilantes fired rifle shots at the set, the film's leading lady [Rosaura Revueltas] was deported to Mexico, and from time to time a small airplane buzzed noisily overhead....The film, edited in secret, was stored for safekeeping in an anonymous wooden shack in Los Angeles."

Yes, America must be protected--at all costs--from such dangerous propaganda!

And what about I Was a Communist for the FBI? It was nominated for an Academy Award for, get this, Best Documentary! Fortunately, it lost.

The Best Diet For Everybody

2009-08-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

There’s been a lot of debate lately—much of it quite heated—about what sort of diet is best. Vegetarians tell us their diet is the one. Vegans believe their diet is better still. Omnivores insist that meat and other animal products are essential for optimal health. Still others believe that we should eat mostly raw foods. The level of passion in these discussions is reminiscent of the arguments in the Middle Ages over the One True Religion.

Over the years, I’ve met many devotees of each philosophy—some of them healthy and some not so healthy. And since many of these beliefs directly contradict one another, it’s difficult to know who’s right.

But I think I have the answer. They’re all correct…for them. If you’re a vegetarian, your food tastes good and you’re vigorous and healthy, you should be a vegetarian. Same goes for an omnivore. If you like animal products and you feel good, then that’s the right diet for you.

Before I go any further, I should point out that I’m not a doctor, don’t have medical training, and I don’t work in the health field. So this is more of a philosophical treatise than a medical one. Believe this if my line of reasoning makes sense to you, but not because I’m some sort of expert whose pronouncements can be taken on faith.

Biochemical Individuality

Each of our bodies is a collection of hundreds of systems—digestive, circulatory, respiratory, etc. All of these operate in dynamic balance with the other systems. So when there’s a change in one system, the others must adjust to keep things in balance.

When you eat, for example, you activate the digestive system. The circulatory system adjusts to this change by diverting more blood to the stomach and intestines. Other systems within the body also adjust to the decreased blood flow and thus the dynamic balance is maintained. Every time something changes in one system, the others adjust themselves to the new circumstances.

Because of this incredibly complex balancing act, it is meaningless to characterize one diet as optimal for all humans. Since each of our bodies must balance its systems in its own way—based on its unique genetics and environment—what works for one person might be disastrous for another. Scientists call this “biochemical individuality.”

Every couple of years, physicians and researchers tell us something new about our diets. Once we were told to eschew butter in favor of margarine. Now we’re told the opposite. Once we were told that we should eat lots of red meat. Now we’re advised to reduce or eliminate it from our diets.

So who are we to believe? The doctors? The vegetarians? The omnivores?

Well, we all have a much more reliable source of nutritional advice than all of these put together: our own bodies. Perhaps it’s the puritanical belief that our natural impulses are base and wicked, but most of us have been conditioned to ignore our bodies’ messages, especially when they contradict the prevailing wisdom. When we crave something or it tastes extra good it is—I believe—our body’s way of telling us what we need.

Caveats

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. I’m not advocating just eating anything you want. There are a few rules that are important to follow, since modern processed foods are designed to trick our bodies. They make us think we’re getting something we need when we aren’t. And our body can’t tell us what it wants if it doesn’t know what it’s getting.

That’s the dirty little secret of the processed food industry. The taste of these foods doesn’t so much come from the vegetables, meats and spices in them, but from added flavor concentrates. Because processing effects flavor, either weakening it or changing it to something unpleasant, quite often the taste that you think is coming from the food ingredients is really from artificial or natural flavorings.

So you can’t really follow your cravings if you eat processed foods. If the ingredient label says “artificial flavor” or “natural flavor,” it means that your body is being tricked. Your craving for, say, bell peppers will be satisfied if the taste of fresh bell peppers is there, even if the nutrients you need from those peppers have been washed out by processing.

Moreover, many of the additives in processed food aren’t there to make it more flavorful or nutritious, but to enable it to withstand the long trip to market and to extend its shelf life. So you have preservatives, chemicals to inhibit the formation of ice crystals, chemicals for the retention of color, etc. None of these additives make the food more healthy.

To avoid this problem, I follow the “200-Year Rule.” If something hasn’t been widely consumed by humans for at least 200 years, I avoid it. So that means no processed foods, no refined sugar and no bleached, fortified white flour. It also means buying organic whenever possible. Other than that, I eat anything that tastes good to me.

For me, that means a diet rich in meat, potatoes and dairy, with very little in the way of grains or green vegetables. While, according to common wisdom, this diet should leave me in horrible health (and likely would for someone else, if their cravings told them otherwise); the effect has been the opposite.

For thirty years I had stomach trouble about three times per week—ranging from a little heartburn to, about once a month, major stomach pain that kept me up all night. It had been going on for so long—regardless of what I ate—that I had assumed it was just something I had to live with. But once I began eating only what I craved—and ignored the food advice that almost everyone wanted to give me—I found the problem disappeared completely. I literally haven’t had any indigestion in over a year and my overall health is better than its been in decades.

So who ya gonna believe? Doctors and researchers whose advice seems to reverse itself every five or ten years, or your very own body—your oldest and most intimate friend? Doctors can only tell us what is good (they believe) for the average person—one size fits all. But our body tells us exactly what is best for us at any given moment. And it tells us with taste and cravings.

All we have to do is pay attention.

WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN

Mr. Ski

2009-05-30T17:31:00.001-07:00

Mr. Ski was the Metal Shop teacher at my Junior High School. Like many with long Polish last names, it was shortened to ‘Mr. Ski.’ But it was not, in his case, because we couldn’t remember his full name. Everybody knew his last name and could pronounce each tongue-twisting syllable if given the time. The abbreviation was merely for convenience.

You see, Mr. Ski was legendary in our school. Not merely well known or well liked, but truly legendary in the manner of some terrible, ancient god. More feared than worshipped, he was like one of those sea monsters so dreaded by ancient mariners.

That kind of legendary.

Only we really met our Dreaded Monster. The seafarers of yore never had to contend with the dragons that supposedly lurked at the ends of the earth. We actually had to face, and somehow evade, the Awful and Inevitable Wrath of our monster.

Long before we arrived in seventh grade (Junior High ran from seventh through ninth grades in our neighborhood), those of us with older brothers had been regaled with tales of how Mr. Ski had thrown hammers at kids who had angered him, sending more than a few to the nurse’s office with bruises and bloody gashes. My own brother told me how he had been chased around the shop by Mr. Ski who, brandishing a pair of tin snips, wanted to cut his long hair.

He appeared to us like the some sort of mega-bully. Someone you would dare not offend, and yet you knew that you couldn’t help but piss him off if you spent enough time in his presence.

People like that always found an excuse to get angry and slap you down.

Worse, he was a teacher. So this was a bully with a power that our other bullies—the garden variety schoolyard type—only dreamt of: The sanction of the authorities; a veritable license to terrorize and intimidate. And he was a bully from whom you couldn’t possibly hide. You had to appear before him each week in his shop.

All you could do was to be like some small mammal during the age of dinosaurs, hoping to make yourself sufficiently small and insignificant as to be of no interest to the T-Rexes of your world. You scurried about from rock to rock and took care of your rodent-business as best you could, but if he noticed you and felt like a snack, you were paleo-history.

And there was no doubt among us that Mr. Ski was the biggest, meanest damned T-Rex that ever walked our world. No one else was even close.

The funny thing was that the older kids who related these tales of horror and violence seemed to speak with a sort of admiration for Mr. Ski. You could tell they liked him, and it wasn’t some kind of Stockholm Syndrome emotional-attachment-to-the-abuser thing. They actually seemed to think he was cool; something unheard of in a Junior High teacher.

Frightening as they were, Mr. Ski stories always seemed to be told with a smile and a laugh—even if the smile was in the form of a sneer and the laughter a bit harsh. Their reaction was akin to that received by a particularly clever racist joke or the many ‘dead baby’ jokes that were popular at the time. You would laugh because of the irony while grimacing at the cruelty.

In those days (the late 1960s) our school had two groups at the top of the social ladder. There were the “good” kids, who rose via traditional means: sports for the boys; cheerleading and afterschool clubs for the girls. And then, with a pecking order totally separate from the “good” kids, were the “bad” kids.

They were the ones who got in trouble a lot and generally resisted all authority. Even though it was the late 1960s, the Hippie Fad hadn’t yet fully arrived in our medium-sized East Coast city. So the rebellious ones weren’t the long-haired types who dominated the bad kids’ scene a couple years later, it was the tough kids.

Most of them were the offspring of factory workers, skilled tradesmen and owners of small businesses who had, in the boom of the postwar years, become sufficiently prosperous to move to the suburbs. They mostly came from the tough immigrant neighborhoods in the cities and they instilled that toughness in their kids. This meant that the guys at the top of the bad kids’ world were the best fighters and the most aggressive, most heartless bullies.

Now you would expect the bad kids to look up to Mr. Ski. After all, he was one of their own who had grown up and made good. He represented their aspirations—not so much to become teachers—but to be able to carry their bullying ways into their professional lives.

Funny thing was that just about all the older kids seemed to think Mr. Ski was cool, even the good kids.

(…well the guys anyway. Girls in shop classes didn’t appear until a couple years later. And because Mr. Ski was loud and often harsh, the girls neither liked him nor understood the high regard he enjoyed among their male counterparts.)

Maybe it was because, we had to confess, he had style and a sense of humor. Sort of like the way a drill sergeant punishes his recruits. Not merely mean, but creatively mean in a manner designed to simultaneously elicit laughter from the other sergeants and sorrowful groans from the recruits.

When we got to seventh grade, we had Wood Shop and Mechanical Drawing the first half of the school year and Metal Shop in the second. During those first months, our anxiety mounted as we caught brief glimpses of Mr. Ski loudly castigating students in the hallway. If he was that scary in the hall where everyone could see him, what must he be like in the confines of his shop, far from the eyes of the other teachers?

After Christmas break when we entered his shop and finally faced him, we didn’t actually see him throw hammers or anything. But his bellicose manner and harsh threats of punishment for the slightest infractions kept us certain that a hammer-throw was always imminent. We were sure that his lack of violence was due to the fact that we were so terrified, so utterly intimidated that we didn’t dare misbehave. Were we to slip that harness only slightly, we were certain that the hammers would commence flying in earnest.

And his appearance reinforced the point. About forty, he stood at least 6’4” and was lean and strong looking without appearing either skinny or overly muscular. Something like Clint Eastwood with an anger-management problem. He looked like the sort that—if he were to punch you—you’d stay punched, well and good. When he yelled at you it seemed like it was all he could do to restrain himself from cold-cocking you on the spot.

One topic on which Mr. Ski dwelt long and loud was cigarette smoking. It was his favorite gripe and nary a class went by without at least a sharp comment on the subject. The walls of his shop were festooned with posters decrying the dangers of smoking, most of them crafted by students (toadies!)

It was his fervent desire to rid his school of all teenage smoking and he went at it like a man with a mission. His most dire and terrible threats were always reserved for those who might be caught grabbing a butt.

This was a worry for me because, like most of the kids in the bad crowd, I smoked. Back then, cigarette smoking was what you might call entry-level rebellion and I aspired to join the “fast” crowd. As such, I felt it my teenager-ly duty to scour the ends of the earth, forever on the lookout for anything I could do that would really piss off my parents.

As you can see, smoking offered a splendid opportunity to get started.

Still more worrisome was how Mr. Ski began berating Steve, a classmate, about his smoking.

“Hey Steve,” he bellowed one day, early in the semester, “people have been tellin’ me you’re a smoker. Whaddya say, kid, are you a Marlboro Man? What’s yer preference, reg’lar or menthol?”

He fixed him with a deadly gaze.

“Neither, sir,” Steve replied, with an obvious tremor in his voice.

“That’s not what I heard, man,” he shot back, wearing an icy grin. “And my sources are pretty good.”

“No sir,” Steve repeated, almost cringing, “honestly, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.”

“DON’T LIE TO ME!!” he roared, “‘cause God help ya if I catch you in a lie!”

“No sir, I swear I don’t. Those guys are lyin’ about me”

Every day he’d confront him anew and it was always the same. Mr. Ski would say he had fresh reports of Steve’s smoking—each more detailed than the last—and Steve would offer a slew of fresh denials. It became a regular feature of Metal Shop class, like putting on our safety glasses or lining up for roll call.

The reason this worried me so is, as aforementioned, I was a smoker too and if his ‘sources’ could tell him about Steve, they might mention me as well. Worse, Steve and I were buddies and members of a group of five or six who met every day in the woods behind school to grab a quick smoke. Each day before and after classes, the same group of friends huddled together sharing cigarettes and banter.

So my worries were more than a little well founded. I mean, if Mr. Ski found out about Steve, and Steve did most of his smoking with me, it stood to reason that he’d soon catch on to my Dread Secret.

Week after week, the standard litany of accusations and denials repeated itself and each time I trembled in fear of the day I would replace Steve as the object of Mr. Ski’s Special Attention. It went on through the Winter and early Spring, and it was always Steve who was the target of Mr. Ski’s wrath. The more Steve denied smoking, the more Mr. Ski seemed hell-bent on getting him to admit it. I had begun to think that his crusade was so important that he might ignore the rest of us in his drive to obtain a confession from Steve.

It was, I think, around mid-Spring when I discovered just how badly I had been mistaken.

By that point in the semester, we didn’t need a lecture from Mr. Ski to start the class. We had all been assigned our projects (cold chisels, if memory serves), and had begun work on them So we just showed up, answered roll call, and went right to work. Mr. Ski wandered amongst us, checking to make sure we were doing things according to his instructions.

I was busy grinding or sanding or something when Mr. Ski spoke up in a loud voice:

“Hey Willie!”

(Earlier in the semester, he had decided to begin addressing me as ‘Willie,’ even though no one else ever had.)

Everyone stopped working and turned around.

“I hear you like to do THIS!”

“FFFFFFF-PHEWWWWWWWWWW, FFFFF-PHEWWWWWWWWWW.”

He pretended to be smoking—with very exaggerated gestures—making a loud sound as he drew in, and then exhaled the smoke from his imaginary cigarette, waving his hand airily.

I know it’s a hackneyed cliché, but my blood ran cold. I guess it’s what they call the Fight-Or-Flight Syndrome, but at that instant I felt as if all the blood had drained out of my arms and legs. If you’ve ever been in a position where you’re trapped, utterly doomed and you know it, you’ve felt what I’m talking about. Your whole body suddenly feels like it’s made of lead.

Although thoroughly panicked, I had the presence of mind to realize that I had to come up with some sort of an answer, and his fierce look told me that he’d brook no delays or stammering.

“…um, Yes Sir.” I replied in a clear voice, gazing down at my feet.

(WHAT????? OMIGOD!!! WHAT DID I JUST SAY??? OH, YOU INSENSATE FATHEAD!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE??? YOU’VE JUST SLIT YOUR OWN THROAT!!!)

“Well you better not…,” Mr. Ski began, but stopped, clearly perplexed. It was obvious that no smoker had ever truthfully answered that question.

“Well I want you…,” he began again, still unsure of how to react. “Uh, gimme your parents’ phone number,” he resumed, speaking quickly. “I’m gonna call ‘em up tonight and tell them that you’ve been smoking.”

As he walked away, back toward his office he added, seemingly as an afterthought, “And I want you HERE,” pointing at the floor, “IN MY SHOP, right after school!”

Well as you can imagine, my gaffe was the talk of the school for the rest of that day. The smart money had it that I would be greeted upon my entrance into the shop with a flying hammer (some opined it would be two since, after all, Mr. Ski had two hands and he was all about efficiency), and that a ghastly series of tortures—augmented by an array of power tools employed in novel and exotic ways—would follow that.

The prospect of his phone call to my parents didn’t worry me though. It’s not that they wouldn’t react to the news with many powerful strokes of Dad’s belt, followed by a long period of rigidly enforced social isolation. It’s just that the long odds were, as I said, in favor of the prospect that I wouldn’t live long enough to suffer their wrath anyway. So I didn’t give it much thought.

That was the longest afternoon of my young life. (Again with the clichés!) As any death row prisoner will tell you, it’s the awful waiting that gets to you. Contemplating your death is always worse than the actual dying. And I had the rest of the day (shop class was in the morning) to think about it. My fellow students, ever helpful, enhanced my anxiety with an endless stream of comments and speculations.

Worse, the Wood and Metal Shops were situated in their own wing of the school, so no one passed by their doors unless they had business in one of the two shops. Since that rarely happened after school, Mr. Ski would have absolute privacy when he rendered his Awful Punishment.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, his shop was the last one at the end of the wing. So the journey down that long corridor made me feel like some condemned convict walking his last mile. (But unlike those poor bastards, I wouldn’t even get a final cigarette!)

So as I walked, ever so gently and quietly down that hall, I thought:

“Bye, Ma. Bye, Pa. Bye, dreams. Bye, future.

O Heartless Fate! O Foul Destiny! Why have I been singled out for such a painful and untimely demise???”

I pushed open the door as quietly as I could. I guess I figured that if I entered the shop so softly he didn’t notice, it might delay the onset of my punishment for a few seconds.

No sign of him. Could it be…..?

I took a few steps forward so I could see into his office and, to my profound and overwhelming disappointment, there he sat with his feet on the desk reading the sports page.

“Hiya Willie,” he said in a somber tone. “Well I see you showed up. It’s a good thing for you that you did.”

He flashed a menacing look.

Then he paused for a moment, looking down and appearing thoughtful.

“Awwright, you showed up. Now get outta here.”

He dismissed me with a wave of his hand and looked back down at his newspaper.

(The warden has just run up with a pardon from the governor!! My execution has been called off at the last minute!! I’m to be released! I’m going to LIVE!!! I’m going to LIVE!!”)

As I walked out of the shop, absolutely baffled by my turn of good luck, the truth about Mr. Ski began to dawn on me. Now I can’t say I realized it all at once, it probably took the rest of the school year to fully sink in. But it was on that day that I began to awaken to the truth:

Mr. Ski was kidding! He was putting us on! It was all a bluff, designed to amuse him (and those who were in on the joke, like the older kids and now me) during his long, boring hours in the shop.

Now that I understood, it was screamingly funny to see all those petrified seventh graders scurrying wildly about in hopes of avoiding the alleged flying hammers. Their hushed discussions about how Mr. Ski went off and almost killed someone (‘…it happened to a buddy of mine’s brudder!!’) were now hilarious, although I couldn’t let on. Just like the older kids, I knew that it would only work if people believed his Deadly Temper was genuine. We, the elect few, knew better and I wasn’t about to ruin it.

And he never did phone my parents.

After that, it seemed that everything Mr. Ski did—outside of his teaching duties, about which he was quite serious—was with tongue in cheek and splendid wit. I began to look forward to his classes, and it helped my performance in Metal Shop too. I now wanted mine to be the best damned cold chisel in the whole damned class. (Turns out, it wasn’t.)

And Mr. Ski treated me differently. He still bawled me out when I did something stupid, but it took on the character of an outburst from a cantankerous and emotional mentor, not some enraged, unreasoning beast. Because we both knew otherwise, his chastisements no longer carried an implicit threat.

“DAMMIT, Willie,” he’d bellow, “don’t hold it like that or your new nickname’ll be ‘Stumpy!’ How many times I gotta tell ya? Now GET IT RIGHT, kid, or I’ll kick yer ass!”

I guess I had earned some measure of his respect on that Fateful Day. I never told him that it wasn’t so much bravery on my part, but the only option I saw open to me. After all, I had seen what happened to smokers who denied Mr. Ski’s allegations. So when Option A was ruled out, the only remaining course was Option B, no matter how unpleasant. There was no third option.

So it wasn’t courage. I was more like some poor critter who is tossed into a frying pan. He’ll jump right out, even if the only place he can land is in the fire.

And as I think about it all these years later, I wonder if maybe he knew it was my only choice and made it so in order to teach me a lesson: That it’s a lot easier to be honest in the first place and take your punishment than to prevaricate and dance around like poor Steve. He showed me that lying can trap you into an endless cycle of having to come up with new lies to answer new evidence. The constant, grinding anxiety it produced in Steve was a stark lesson for me.

So maybe Mr. Ski was teaching us about bravery. After all, many of the noblest acts of courage are performed by people who have to choose between facing danger—and the risk of being consumed by it—or just laying down and dying. It doesn’t mean that their blood didn’t run cold with stark, all-consuming terror while they were doing it. It’s just that, like me, they figured they had no other choice.

Maybe Mr. Ski believed that, by forcing his students into positions where they had to be brave, he could teach them the necessity of bravery in all times of crisis—be they great or small.

And only now do I realize how much of an artist he really was. We’re in the habit of thinking that all artists, all gifted poets are the people—mostly intellectuals—who are depicted as such in the popular media. But the Mr. Skis of the world are artists as great as Picasso, in my opinion. Perhaps greater, since their inspiring works are shrouded in anonymity, never to be known or appreciated by the cognoscenti of Arts and Letters.

**************************************

By the time I left Junior High (I spent four years there because I flunked the Eighth Grade—Step Two in my campaign to enrage my parents), Mr. Ski had lost much of his popularity.

You see, the Hippie Fad had begun to catch on and, more importantly, the neighborhood began to change. Due to a sharp rise in property values, the makeup of the area had gone from neighborhoods of mostly blue collar workers to those largely populated by white collar workers and PhD technical types.

So now, instead of the best fighters ruling the bad kids’ sphere, it came to be dominated by middle-class pseudo intellectuals. Mostly skinny and long-haired, they weren’t physically intimidating, but they were every bit as brutal as the bullies of earlier years. You see, they beat up on people with slanderous gossip and other forms of malicious backstabbing, not fists. Their snottiness could be devastating.

In a way, they were worse, since you can see a bully’s punch coming at you, but you usually don’t see the intellectual’s blade until after it’s been slipped neatly between your ribs.

Because he was a loud, emotional blue collar type of guy, these kids never got the joke with Mr. Ski. Whenever he roared at them, they didn’t so much get scared (after seventh grade anyway) as wrinkle their noses and say, “What’s up with that dude? He’s such a dick, man!”

As I say, they never got the joke and, because Mr. Ski wasn’t like them, I doubt they cared to.

But those wonderful people like Mr. Ski who, when they got angry, acted angry and when they felt happy, acted happy shall live forever in my most blessed of memories. You knew what they were feeling because they weren’t afraid to hide it. Their eccentricities were the tools with which they amused and educated us, the canvas upon which they painted.

These days, expressions of strong emotion—good or bad—are regarded as off-putting and even somewhat frightening among most of my yuppie brethren. The stiff upper lip (and the concealed dagger—always at the ready) is the order of the day. The Mr. Skis have fallen into popular disfavor.

And yet nowadays, more and more, these people have come to be my heroes. The folks who plugged away at their ‘ordinary’ lives just like the rest of us but, because of their wit and panache, made life more meaningful and fun for those lucky enough to have known them.

Whenever I think of the “heroes” fed us by the mainstream media: singers, movie actors, politicians, military generals and the captains of industry—and people like Mr. Ski, there’s just no comparison.

It doesn’t matter that they never became rich and famous.

I loved Mr. Ski.

WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN

Walled Off

2009-03-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I go these days I see people who have walled themselves off from our world. You know what I mean, the people you see on the street with headphones on or cell phones at their ear, totally oblivious to all around them. You can tell by their eyes. They never meet yours as you pass them, but seem to be focused on some distant, invisible universe.

Thanks to the miracle of electronic miniaturization, almost everyone you see on the street is listening to music or the radio, talking on their cell phones, or riding in their cars on a beautiful day with both music and windows up.

Way back in the horse-and-buggy days, horses were forced to wear blinders. These were little flaps that were mounted alongside each of the horse’s eyes, blocking its peripheral vision. They could only see things that were in front of their heads, and the direction their heads pointed was controlled by the reins.

That was done so the horse wouldn’t be distracted by other horses and the general chaos of busy streets. The horses saw only what the driver wanted them to see. Put differently, people couldn’t exploit the strength of their horses unless they controlled what the horses saw. Without blinders, the horse might go where it wanted instead of obeying the driver’s commands.

Now that portable communications and entertainment devices are as common as cat droppings, our electro-toys have become our electro-blinders. These virtual blinders serve to isolate us from our surroundings, save for a narrow focus on a selected range of topics. And as with horse blinders, it is the drivers who determine the direction of our gaze.

And guess who the drivers are: The vast and interlocking corporate behemoths that, together, make most of the important decisions about our lives and our world. They know that the best way to continue swindling us out of our money and our freedom is to keep us perpetually diverted.

Or, as the Roman satirist, Juvenal, observed almost two thousand years ago:

... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,

the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time

handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now

restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

In other words, as long as there’s an ample supply of trivial entertainment to be had, and there isn’t mass hunger, people won’t pay much attention to what their ‘drivers’ are doing.

Once they’ve succeeded in smashing the traditional ties of family, clan and community, that void can be filled with an endless array of diversions, from corporate pop music to video games to airhead history programs on TV’s many ‘Hitler Channels,’ portable video, spectator sports, etc., etc., etc. ad nauseam.

Even the political process is made into a spectacle, with elections and fundraising treated like horseraces and political discourse taking the form of ‘square-offs’ between hostile partisans, a sort of political cock-fight. (Pun intended.)

Indeed, it seems that our media proxies do all of our socializing and discussing for us. Think about it. In the old days, the talk around the water cooler was usually gossip about people in the workplace or community. Nowadays, water cooler gossip is about fictional characters on TV shows. You’ll hear discussions about their peccadilloes as if they were real people known to the speakers.

Same goes for sports. Most of the commentary sounds like the living room banter of the viewers. Talk shows too. It’s as if they’re having our conversations for us so we don’t have to go to the trouble of getting together and talking with our friends. We can have them all alone with our TV and radio ‘friends.’

This may not seem particularly sinister but remember, all of these are commercial media. Most of them are supported directly by advertisers’ dollars and the rest—like recorded music, movies and video games—are made by huge, interlocking conglomerates that have a big stake in preserving the status quo.

All of them depend on getting us to buy more stuff. Not only that, the system demands that corporations increase their profits (or try to) each year. So even if they make the same tidy sum every year, that isn’t enough. They must strive to make their money-piles larger and larger. And that means constant pressure, relentless propaganda aimed at getting us to purchase more and more each year.

Billions are spent on the most sophisticated non-coercive mind control techniques known to humanity, namely, advertising. And that propaganda is embedded in almost everything we see.

In the movies and on TV, the happiest people are usually the ones who have the neatest stuff. The smartest people are the savviest consumers. The reason the characters are idly sipping Diet Coke and driving Jeep Cherokees is because these companies paid the producers to put them there. When you buy or rent a DVD, there are advertisements trying to get you to buy or rent more DVDs.

The very survival of these corporate behemoths depends upon conning us into believing that our lives are incomplete unless we buy their products or use their services. We won’t be liked, won’t get laid, and people are laughing at us behind our backs unless we’re buying (literally!) the consumerist myth: that happiness and acceptance demand an unending supply of cool new stuff.

“When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

Of course, all of these are contradicted by social interaction. I mean, what will happen if some stranger tells you you’re unworthy, but your family and friends assure you otherwise? What will happen if the TV tells you you’re stupid or boring or ugly, but your active social life convinces people that you aren’t?

Well, the advertising just won’t work. That’s why they have to lure us away from outside activities, where we might get useful information about the real world and our place in it. Temptation comes in the form of The Sopranos, Harry Potter and American Idol.

Instead of youngsters gathering to shoot baskets, our Masters want them to while away the hours shooting virtual baskets in NBA video games. Even if they play together they don’t really interact, except for a few terse comments about the progress of the game. Splendid!

And pre-adolescents, who used to develop their imaginations, their bodies and their social skills in vigorous outdoor play, are now spending their free time with Mickey, Barney and Sponge Bob. Just the thing!

Rather than debating the issues of the day with the people around us—with whom we just might combine to make significant changes—we’re lured away by loud-mouthed partisans on the news channels and talk radio. These shows never seem to give any meaningful information on how to mobilize our friends and neighbors—the way that most important changes have been wrought—just endless sniping over manufactured ‘hot-button’ issues.

All of these media are structured in a manner designed to lead us away from spending any uncontrolled time socializing and learning from one another. They must invade every aspect of our lives in their quest for ever-larger shares of our money, our political power and, ultimately, our very souls.

But even if I’m completely wrong about all this sinister stuff, ponder this: One day you’ll be lying on your deathbed, feeling life slipping away. As we’ve all heard, people in this situation typically spend those last days pondering how their life was spent.

Now, when that time comes, I doubt you’ll be lamenting, “Oh, my life has been wasted! If only I’d spent more of my precious time listening to canned music and watching TV! If only I’d worked a few thousand extra hours away from my friends and family so I could’ve bought more cool stuff!”

No. I suspect you’ll bitterly regret each moment wasted on such idle diversions. You’ll curse every second spent away from the ones you love. You’ll long for just one more hour of life so you can cherish the simple joys of watching clouds move lazily across the sky, listening to the wind rustle through the forest trees, or overhearing the laughter of children at play.

And none of these cost a dime.

WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN

Dad and the Union Drive

2009-03-03T20:56:00.000-08:00

Around 1970—the year I turned fourteen—my Father and I had gotten to a wonderful place in our relationship. Gradually, beginning a couple of years earlier, he had actually begun relating to me like an adult. While he still exercised his authority, he now respected me enough to explain the rationale behind his edicts, and was amenable to well-reasoned arguments against them.

And argue we did. Not just over matters of discipline, but about almost everything. Pop had a wide range of interests, liked to read and, even more, he liked to argue about the issues of the day. As I entered adolescence, I had begun to try out some new ideas that I had picked up from TV, teachers and elsewhere, so we had a broad palate of topics about which we could disagree.

You know how it is. When you’re young, Daddy and Mommy are almost always right. Since they’re pretty much your sole source of information about the world, your emotional security depends upon believing that it’s accurate (…even if it isn’t; therein, methinks, lies the root of neurosis). So the first opinions we hold about social and political issues are usually identical to those of our parents.

But as we get a little older, we begin to toy with different ideas. When conducting these experiments of the intellect, it helps to have people around you who hold divergent beliefs, so you can test yours against theirs. For anyone who’s really interested in learning, someone with whom you can argue can be a godsend.

Now, when I say ‘argue,’ some might get the idea that these were bitter, hostile exchanges. They weren’t. Without ever formally agreeing to any ground rules, we understood that our arguments wouldn’t do either of us any good if they descended into name-calling. So while we might argue very passionately for or against some idea, we never used phrases like, “that’s stupid,” or said, “bullshit,” (unless a concise explanation of why it was bullshit immediately followed).

We understood that any meaningful challenge of ideas depends upon honesty and proper respect. Failure to abide by these tenets will produce alienation and a fight, not mental stimulation; and that’s what we both wanted from it. So even though we often raised our voices or jabbed our fingers to make a point, it was done in the spirit of an intellectual joust among friends, not to intimidate or beat down the other. If you won your point, it wasn’t because you’d bullied or tricked your opponent, but because you had marshaled the best argument.

And since Pop was such an honest man, he’d admit it if you bested him. (At that tender age, I didn’t realize how amazingly rare this trait is.) True, his standard of proof was almost impossibly high, so it didn’t happen very often, but that was OK. My standards were pretty high too.

And come what may, agree or disagree, we always ended our arguments as friends.

I can still see him sitting across from me in the dining room after everyone else had gone off to begin their evenings, his face dimly illuminated by the reflected light from the kitchen as he gestured forcefully with the cigarette pinched between his knuckles. Three or four evenings a week, we’d sit there in semi-darkness (we never seemed to have the dining room lights on), happily arguing away the hours.

Over time, we came to talk about other things. As I said, these were among the most wonderful days in my memory because Pop was finally treating me like an equal. In addition to being his Son, I had now become his trusted friend and confidant. (And the fact that I still love a good argument—as defined above—is because I associate them with the bond I developed with my Father back then.)

In our discussions, he began confiding in me about personal matters as well. I remember, for example, hearing him describe in horror a dream he had where blood began pouring out of his mouth. He related how he had—in the dream—told my Mother to call for an ambulance while the awful certainty gripped him that he was dying. I can still remember the fear in his voice as he contemplated the moment of his own demise.

He also spoke of his troubles on the job. Indeed, it came to be a frequent topic of discussion. He was a Lab Technician at the main research facility of a big chemical company headquartered in our East Coast city. What irked him most was that, no matter how hard he tried, he didn’t receive an ‘Excellent’ rating when he had his annual performance review.

The four ratings given in these reviews were, Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor. Dad, after many years of Excellent ratings suddenly began getting only Good ones. He was baffled by this because he hadn’t slacked off during that time. Indeed, he carried his work ethic to an almost fanatical level, and had a drawer full of letters of commendation for going years without missing a single day’s work.

And yet, after about 1968, his rating never rose above Good. From then until he retired in the early 1980s, he always received the same rating. Whenever he asked his supervisor why he had been downgraded, the answers were always vague, like, “well, you forgot to initial such-and-such form six months ago,” or, “you have a negative attitude.” All he ever got was doubletalk.

This caused him no small amount of anguish because an Excellent rating was necessary if one were to hope to rise above Lab Technician level. If you didn’t, once you got to top salary as a Lab Tech (usually taking around ten to fifteen years, depending on your rating), you had nowhere to go for the remaining fifteen to twenty years until retirement. In order to be considered for one of the tiny handful of management slots, you had to have a string of Excellent ratings. Otherwise it was just a job, not a career.

In 1979 I was hired by the same company and was assigned to Pop’s department. After a couple years working in another building, I was transferred to the building where he worked. While we didn’t share a lab, we were able to spend our twice-daily coffee breaks together.

Each morning and afternoon, the same four or five of us gathered in the laboratory of our friend, Mark. We congregated there because it was the only lab on the fourth floor: a land where bosses rarely tread. It was a comfortable spot where we could get away from the prying eyes of the Wardens of our Institution.

One of the regulars was a fellow named Irv. About five years younger than Dad, he was the only member of management in our little group. Because he started out as a Lab Tech like the rest of us and, as Transfer Coordinator, he wasn’t actually anybody’s boss, we accepted him as one of us.

Besides, he was a hell of a nice guy. About fifty-five at the time, he stood a slim 5’6”, had neatly groomed, salt and pepper hair slicked back, and one of those 1940s mustaches, a thin little thing that barely clung to the edge of his upper lip.

He was perfectly suited for the position of Transfer Coordinator. When someone new came into the department, it was his job to pick their assignment from among the available openings. (I later found out that my initial appointment to one of the easiest jobs in the department was thanks to him.) But his main duty was to smooth ruffled feathers.

Whenever a technician had a beef with his boss (usually a chemist or engineer), it was Irv’s job to intercede and try to patch things up. Failing that, he could switch the technician to a different assignment if the dispute was insoluble. But most of the time a patient, friendly voice was all that was needed to quell any discontent. Irv’s abundant charm and calm, reasonable demeanor made him a natural for the job.

And it was his charm which ensured that, during the twenty or so years they shared their coffee, cigarettes and confidences twice a day, Irv and Pop would become good friends.

I liked him too. Always nice to me, he had an easy smile and could tell a funny story with the best of them. He came off like a regular sort of guy, so I never saw any reason to doubt his sincerity.

Quite some time later, I discovered the truth about Irv.

It was the late 1980s and Pop had been retired for a few years. No longer going to the fourth floor for my coffee and cigarettes, I’d found another isolated spot (a ‘bum’s nest,’ as we called them) in the lab of my buddy Paul. He shared the lab with Jim who, at around fifty-five, had known and worked with my Dad for many years.

One day I was hanging out—waiting for Paul to come back from some errand or other—and I got talking to Jim. Somehow the conversation came ‘round to the topic of labor unions. Back in the late 1960s, a major national union had attempted to organize our site. They had already been successful at a few of the company’s manufacturing plants, and were now seeking to represent the research facilities as well.

I remember Pop telling me at the time that he had attended some union meetings and, in our nightly discussions, we weighed the pros and cons of the proposition. As I recall, he decided to vote in favor of the union and even went so far as to become a member in the weeks leading up to the vote. But when the campaign failed, he let his membership lapse and the talk of unions quickly ceased. He never mentioned it again.

“It was that union campaign that wrecked your Father’s career,” Jim told me in his lab, some twenty years after the fact. “The chemist I worked with in those days told me, ‘I’m not supposed to say anything about this, but don’t go to any union meetings. Irv has been attending and writing down the names of everyone there. If you value your future with this company, stay away from the union!’”

“That’s how Irv got his job as Transfer Coordinator and that’s why your Dad never advanced past Lab Technician,” Jim went on. “He was such a meticulous worker, they couldn’t come up with any excuse to fire him. But they could delay his raises and keep him from ever going anywhere, and that’s what they did.”

Perhaps it’s best that Papa was too far gone with Alzheimer’s to understand the news I received that day. His awful affliction spared him the knowledge that one of his best friends had so heartlessly betrayed him. By the time I learned of it, he was beyond the sting of such cruel lessons.

Now you might think I hate Irv, but I don’t. It took me awhile, but I came to understand that he was just as much a victim as my Father. After all, he was one of a chosen few Lab Techs who had gotten a leg-up into management. Many of the company’s top honchos had begun their ascent to lofty positions after taking that crucial first step.

So when his superiors (!) told Irv they wanted him to spy on his friends, he knew he had no choice but to comply. All of his hopes for a future in management hinged on severing the sacred bonds that are essential for true friendship. His ambition demanded he accept this Devil’s Bargain.

And we wonder why the soul of our society is so desperately ill, with all of us caught up in the daily rat race (and each day becoming more like rats ourselves). When the profits and power of a few depend upon the absolute destruction of our most basic social bond: the trust among friends; how can our society not begin to die as the result?

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t evil to have ambition—we all want to do the best we can for ourselves and our families—but it has to be kept in its proper perspective. When we attach greater importance to our careers than we do to the ties of family (as with absentee, workaholic parents), or friendship (like Irv did), we’ve surrendered to the devil’s most cunning weapons: the twin idols of Vanity and Gold.

So I don’t hate poor Irv, I pity him. He sold his very soul for a passel of promises.

…And they were empty promises, as it turned out. Irv never rose above Transfer Coordinator. He retired a year or so later and died shortly after that.

WHY CAN’T WE GET ANY HELP ANYMORE?

2009-01-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

I recently switched my DSL service and ran into something that’s become maddeningly common these days. At every step of the way they got it wrong. When I told them I wanted a standard modem, not a wireless, they sent me a wireless.

On the date my service was to begin, I received an automated phone call telling me the service would start on that day no later than 6 P.M. When I tried to set it up at 7, nothing worked. Thinking I had made a mistake, an hour-and-a-half was lost while I redid everything about three times to make sure it was right.

Then I called their tech support and spoke with a fellow who—judging from his accent—was from some exotic land far away. Now, normally I would enjoy the opportunity to chat with a person from a distant culture, but in this case I would have preferred to talk with someone who actually understood what I was saying and who had the power to correct my problem.

After going on and off hold several times while he checked various things, the best he could tell me was that my service hadn’t been activated yet. When I told him of the automated call that said otherwise, he again put me on hold while he talked with his supervisor. After about ten minutes, he came back on the line and said that the date and times given were estimates, not actual commitments.

There was nothing in the message about estimates. They said it would be activated on that date.

I tried again the next day and it still didn’t work. Another call to Bangalore (or wherever) yielded nothing except that they now thought my service had indeed been activated and that the problem must be on my end. They said they would set me up for an appointment with a technician, who could probably get here within a couple days. Problem was, I had to go out of town for a few nights, so they told me I’d have to wait until I got back to make the appointment and then wait one or two days after that.

I returned home four days later but had to leave town again after a couple hours. Imagine my delight upon discovering that my internet service was finally working! I completed the online setup and everything was running smoothly. I left on my trip satisfied that I was good to go.

When I returned two days later, it was off again! Another call to Bangalore (and the obligatory journey through an endless maze of recordings and responses before one can speak with an actual human), and they tell me that I’ll have to have a technician come out to my apartment. I told him that it had worked fine a couple days before, and that nothing had been changed on my end, but he was adamant: A technician visit was the required next step.

“He’ll be there between 8 A.M. and 7 P.M. tomorrow” he told me.

(sigh)

Luckily, the tech arrived at 9 A.M. (Good fortune at last!!!) When I told him that it had worked fine a few days ago, he said that the problem was likely in my neighborhood phone company office.

“We always have problems with that station,” he told me. “Usually we can get a problem fixed while we’re talking with them on the phone. But in the area covered by that office, it can take the better part of a week. It’s a real mess down there. Half the time when they connect somebody new, they accidentally disconnect someone else. They can’t help it, though. They’re terribly understaffed and overworked these days.”

Just to be sure, he checked every part of my connection, starting from the back of the computer, testing the wiring running through my apartment and out to the box where the main line comes in. He even climbed the pole in my neighbor’s back yard. Everything checked out fine. The problem was definitely at the local office.

To make matters worse, it was now Friday—and they don’t work weekends—so if it wasn’t fixed that day, I’d have to wait until at least Monday before I could again be connected to the internet.

Well, it is now Tuesday and I’ve been disconnected for twelve days. And there’s no one I can talk with who has the authority to get it straightened out. All I get, after about an hour of answering recorded questions and waiting on hold, are heartfelt apologies from my Old Buddies in Bangalore.

(I imagine that, after all of my calls there, mine is now a household name throughout the Venerable Old City of Bangalore. Because of all the business I’ve generated for them, and the many genial hours we’ve spent conversing, I hear they’re planning to name a bridge after me…and that my name is to be misspelled.)

Now, I’m sure that everyone reading this has similar tales of horror to relate about their dealings with vast, faceless corporations. It seems to happen to us at the rate of about once a week in some form or other. And it always seems that, the bigger the company, the harder it is to get a problem resolved.

The point of this isn’t to rant about the frustrations of modern life (such a tirade would be truly endless), but to try to understand why—as the title asks—can’t we get any help anymore?

A large part of the reason for all this can be found in the way in which the heads of major corporations get their money. We’ve all heard the reports of outrageous levels of executive compensation, running into the tens—and sometimes hundreds—of millions of dollars. What most people don’t know is the mechanism by which the cash is funneled to them.

Their most extravagant windfalls don’t come from salaries or bonuses, but from stock options. Without going into the particulars of how they work, the key is that the options given to these Big Shots are worthless unless the price of the corporation’s stock rises. They are awarded the options when they assume their positions on the Board of Directors, and the more they can make the value of their stock go up, the more money they’ll make when they cash in their options later.

If the stock price stays the same or goes down during their time on the Board, the options are worthless and the poor, hapless boobs must somehow squeak by on their salaries and bonuses (in other words, mere millions instead of tens of millions).

Now, on the surface, this seems like a good idea. Stock options offer a strong incentive for executives to make their corporations as profitable as possible, because when profits go up (relative to their competitors) the stock price tends to rise and their options become worth a bundle.

Along with that, the theory goes, stockholders will prosper and, because of enhanced buying power and economies of scale, service to customers will improve and prices will be kept as low as possible. Everybody’s happy.

But the devil, as they say, is in the details. In order for the options to fetch the many millions of dollars necessary for our poor, benighted executives to avoid having to give up one of their Lear Jets, stock prices have to rise as high as possible, but only until the executive cashes in the options. Once that happens, there is no incentive, none, to ensure the corporation’s prosperity after that time.

If an executive has a choice between prudent policies which would generate stable, long-term profit growth, and reckless policies (like, ahem, a flagrant disregard for customer satisfaction) which might cause faster growth, the incentive—in the form of tens of millions of dollars—is too strong for him to resist the second option, even if it jeopardizes the corporation’s long-term prosperity. It doesn’t really matter to them once they’ve cashed in their stock options.

Also, key to a rise in stock prices is how quickly profits grow from year to year. Problem is, corporations do most of their fastest growth in the years when they are small- to middle-sized enterprises. By the time they reach the size of the giants of the telecommunications industry, for example, their rate of growth has slowed considerably. Most people have telephones and cell phones already, so there aren’t too many new customers out there.

So how do you maximize profit growth when you’ve long ago done the lion’s share of your growing? By cutting costs. That means cutting (or limiting the growth of) workers’ pay and benefits. It means reducing staff so that three people have to do the work formerly done by five. It means replacing all of your telephone operators with cheap, automated systems. It means outsourcing all the service and contact personnel to far-flung regions ‘round the world where wages are low.

As I said, they don’t give a damn if their actions annoy the hell out of their customers and hurt the corporation in the long run, so long as they can rig things to generate a bundle (an obscene bundle) in the short run.

(And they can rest easy in the knowledge that, given their enormous size and resources, they can use their political clout to thwart any meaningful regulatory control.)

And anyway, who else ya gonna deal with? They’ve long ago driven out all the responsible (and irresponsible) small businesses, so they can pretty damned well do what they please and we have to put up with it. They know we have no choice but to accept their arrogance and negligence.

True, we could switch to one of their competitors—although their numbers are few and rapidly dwindling. But since they are all equally vast, arrogant and impenetrable, that ain’t no choice at all.

So the next time you’re frustrated with some incompetent bureaucracy like I was, don’t take it out on the poor chaps in Bangalore. They’re just regular folks like us, struggling valiantly to stay afloat in a world economy whose floodwaters are threatening to drown us all.

Instead, let’s raise a little hell where it belongs: with the Big Shots who are living high on the hog by causing it.

If you’re one of their servants, drivers, a waiter at one of their favorite restaurants, or anyone who works in the industries providing luxury and convenience for our Corporate Barons, be sure to louse up EVERYTHING you do for them. Spill their drinks, disconnect their calls, drive the golf cart over their favorite putter, pretend you don’t understand when you really do. Not enough to lose your job, mind you. Just an ‘honest mistake’ as often as is safely possible. Make yourself as utterly incompetent with them as their corporations are with us.

We need to remember that everything they have and do depends on little schmucks like us, so we have more power to annoy and delay them—far more—than they have over us. Maybe if their lobster is undercooked and their wine not properly chilled one time too many, we can get better treatment.

I mean, they’re sunning themselves on their yachts and hurtling themselves aloft in their private jets while we sit on the phone, hour after hour, waiting, and waiting, and waiting…..

WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN

Smedley Butler - My Hero

2008-12-20T10:25:00.000-08:00

In addition to identifying war as a racket (see my previous post on the subject), did you know that Gen. Smedley Butler--almost singlehandedly--saved the U.S. from a fascist coup in the 1930s?

It was planned by a group of super Big Shots, like the honchos of the J.P. Morgan banking empire, Irénée duPont, and the bosses of GM and several other major corporations.

Here's an excellent documentary from The History Channel, The Plot to Overthrow FDR.

Bet ya never heard about this in history class!

WAR IS (STILL) A RACKET

2008-12-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

In one of the early scenes of Warren Beatty’s great movie, Reds, Beatty’s character—a journalist who had just returned from Europe during the early days of U.S. involvement in WWI—is asked to make a speech about what he’d seen. In introducing him, the emcee asks, “What would you say this war’s about, Jack Reed?”

Reed rises from his place at the dais, looks out at the audience of prominent citizens and says, “Profits,” and sits back down.

When I first saw the movie in the early 1980s, I thought the characterization a bit naïve and simplistic. But in the intervening years—as I’ve learned more of history and have observed the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—I’ve decided that Beatty’s character was right.

And it isn’t just leftist radicals like Reed who think this way. Back in the early 1930s, none other than Major General Smedley Butler, who received the United States’ highest medal for valor—the Congressional Medal of Honor—not once, but twice, said,

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

What Gen. Butler said seventy-five years ago sounds like it could’ve been written last week. With the revolving door between the Pentagon and defense industries; Barack Obama’s promise to withdraw (some) troops from Iraq (maybe), but increase the number of troops sent to Afghanistan; his appointments of hawks and defense lobbyists to top positions in his administration; it’s clear that little will change for those making their fortunes on the dire misfortunes of millions.

We’re told again and again that we’re in Deadly Danger from terrorists around the world. So what did Bush do? He mounted two invasions that his own advisors in the CIA told him would increase the incidence of terrorism against the U.S.

Now, we’re told by critics of his administration that this is proof of his rank incompetence and stupidity. But is it? I mean, terrorism is a tactic—virtually the only effective tactic—used by small forces when fighting a much larger force. Mind you, I’m not defending it. I don’t endorse any tactic of war on the grounds that “War is all hell” to quote Gen. Sherman. But the Big Shots know that it’ll be used by weaker countries and groups if they feel threatened by the U.S.

And by going ‘round the world shoving sharp needles into the butts of countries like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and Bolivia, to name but a few, they’re ensuring a constant supply of desperate, outraged people who just might do something horrible that will spur us into giving up ever larger chunks of our wealth and surrendering ever larger chunks of our freedom.

It’s as if I went to a blighted, impoverished African-American neighborhood, mounted a soapbox on a busy street corner and began yelling the N-word over and over at the top of my lungs. As you might imagine, there’s a fairly decent chance that I’d soon get the living snot beaten out of me by outraged passersby. Now, the people who did the beating would undoubtedly be guilty of a crime, but any competent judge would hold me at least as responsible as my assailants, probably more so.

The same goes for the U.S. government. If one believes the propaganda that their policies are designed to thwart terrorism, they appear completely stupid—criminally so. But if one supposes they’re intentionally ‘yelling the N-word’ in order to encourage terrorism and the extravagant increases in their wealth and power that go with it, they make perfect sense.

With all of their bubbles bursting one after the other, the Big Shots are desperate to keep the money flowing out of our pockets and into theirs. All that is required is to keep pissing off (or, more to the point, pissing on) the poor of the world, combined with periodic scare alerts from the mainstream media, and they can keep on fleecing us forever.

After all, the so-called War on Terror is, by definition, unwinnable. I mean, there’s no capitol that can be conquered, no enemy leader to be captured or anything else that might constitute ultimate victory. As long as anyone, anywhere is angry enough to lash out against the U.S., the gravy train will keep on a-rollin’.

The War on Terror, the gift that just keeps on giving! It offers the opportunity to expand U.S. hegemony abroad and it keeps the Common Folk toiling for their Masters at home. Better still, in a few years it’ll bust the budget so they can have a convenient excuse for scuttling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (not to mention any economic stimuli that might protect the jobs and security of those of us not fortunate enough to have been born into an aristocratic family).

With a constant bombardment of fear-mongering in the news and entertainment media, the Big Shots want to keep us perpetually cowed and fearful, willing to do anything, pay anything or give up anything for relief from the danger.

It’s like a protection racket in one of those 1930s gangster flicks, where a sleazy character sidles up to a shop-owner and hisses, “That’s a nice little store ya got there. It suuuure would be a shame if anything was to happen to it!”

That’s how the racket works. Our Masters manufacture a crisis and then take our time, money and blood in return for promised salvation (which never comes).

How to Control a Politician

2008-12-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

As I write this, the news media are a-buzz with the scandal surrounding Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich. He’s accused of using the power of his office to wangle himself lucrative payoffs and a cushy union job, attempting to bludgeon the Chicago Tribune into firing editors critical of his administration and, most shocking of all, conspiring to sell the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

But you know all that. The news media and punditocracy are reeling over the allegations and the news reports have been virtually nonstop. I doubt there’s anybody—save for a handful of hermits and hard core survivalists—who hasn’t heard about this terrible affront to our nation’s political integrity.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret. The corruption of high elected officials isn’t an occasional aberration, it’s a job requirement. In the two-party system in the U.S., you don’t get a chance to run for a high office like a governorship or congressional seat unless you’ve already demonstrated that you’re willing to ‘play ball.’

In other words, before you can rise in the Republican or Democrat parties, you have to show that you’re willing to represent the interests of our real masters, the rich and powerful; the Big Shots. True, you’ll be allowed to mouth the words and ideals of the common folk, even badmouthing the people who are holding your puppet strings. But if you don’t show the proper compliance when you’re at the lower levels, you’ll never get the chance to run for governor.

“But what of those who only pretend to play the game until they can rise to the level of governor, senator or president, so that they can have the power to curtail the abuses of the rich and powerful?” you ask.

Well, the Big Shots have an answer for that too.

If we look at how spy agencies like the CIA operate, we see two things: First, most of the actual spying isn’t done by agents themselves, but by insiders hired (or bribed or blackmailed) by the agents to do the dirty work.

Second, the way they ensure that these hired spies and traitors don’t betray their employers is by finding out some dirty little secret about them and using it to blackmail them into continued service. It’s a much more effective tool for control than merely relying on the agents’ good intentions or sympathy with the mission.

The most common threat is simply to expose what they’ve been doing for their handlers, to show that they’ve been spying for a foreign government. Another is to corrupt them with bribes and payoffs that, if revealed, would destroy the operative. Another biggie for them are the many sexual kinks not currently sanctioned by society.

This method is so effective that, in the unlikely event a potential operative is squeaky clean—with no skeletons in the closet and nothing to use against him—he’ll be rejected as unreliable.

This is also, I propose, the method used by political parties in vetting people for candidacy to high office. If they don’t take bribes, participate in pay-for-play, mess around with prostitutes or bugger little boys, they’ll never be allowed to get anywhere because they can’t be controlled.

So what was Blagojevich’s sin? There’s no telling for sure, but it’s interesting that immediately before the charges were announced, he’d threatened to withdraw the state of Illinois from all dealings with the Bank of America in support of the sit-down strike at Republic Windows & Doors.

That’s a strike that is, I suspect, really giving the willies to the Big Shots. I mean, in the current dire economic climate, factory occupations and takeovers could become widespread, like they have in Argentina in recent years. In the excellent documentary on Argentine factory takeovers, The Take, we see worker-occupied factories where the occupiers get their work done without bosses and supervisors.

Occupiers realized that, as equal co-owners of the business, working for their own benefit instead of toiling to support the people who held the whips at their backs, they didn’t need the whole layer of people at the top, the “command structure.” (Whose main function was to get more work for less money from the employees, so there would be more dough pumped upstairs to the Big Shots.)

And that’s what terrifies the ruling elite in the U.S. If this sort of idea caught on here, the Billionaire Gravy Train would be over and they’d have to go out and get real jobs. So they must nip this sort of thing in the bud and slap down anyone who supports the strikers.

A similar thing happened to former Governor of New York, Elliott Spitzer. As Attorney General, he went after Big Shot criminals on Wall Street, many of whom were the very people and corporations responsible for the current economic collapse. So what happened? He was outed for his proclivity for prostitutes and forced to resign in disgrace.

See the pattern?

So you can rest assured the media and ruling elites will continue to express shock at the corruption and call for Gov. Blagojevich’s immediate resignation and prosecution. You can also be sure that whoever replaces him will be another willing tool, whose own corruption will be ignored unless he steps out of line.

That’s how you control a politician.

WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN