Turkey Day with Lucretius and Eric Cantor

Posted on November 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

It's two years old. No excuses. Read it.

It’s two years old. No excuses. Read it.

Last week I bought enough Wild Turkey to get Swamp Rabbit through the week, which left me just enough money to buy a real turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. But there’s no oven in my shack to bake a turkey, so I hitchhiked from the swamp to a convenience store to buy turkey hoagies instead. These turned out to be almost as expensive as a whole turkey but what the hell, it’s a holiday, let tomorrow take care of itself.

I have a stove for heat but the wood got wet last night, so we ate on the porch in feeble sunlight. I talked politics and the rabbit talked philosophy. Which means he lectured me on the wisdom of the poet Lucretius, who believed there is no afterlife and we therefore should squeeze as much pleasure as possible out of our limited lifespans. Not by overindulging our appetites, as the rabbit does, but rather by learning to appreciate the modest pleasures — a simple meal, a beautiful sunset, the company of good friends, and so on — that Lucretius believed are conducive to peace of mind.

“You ain’t never gonna have no peace of mind you keep worrying about them politicians,” he said. This was in reference to my ranting about Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, who wants to eliminate overtime pay for hourly workers.

“Cantor is special,” I replied. “A smug little weasel, always a smirk on his face, always pretending he’s doing working people a favor by ripping them off.”

The rabbit picked a red pepper from his hoagie and threw it in the swamp. “He’s doin’ what weasels do, Odd Man. You expectin’ divine justice or something?”

He thinks I’m a Platonist, maybe even a closet Christian. “I’m expecting earthly justice. Just because Lucretius was an atheist doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in justice.”

“Them’s nothin’ but words,” the rabbit said. “You’re like one of them frogs in the scum pond over there, croakin’ I’m special, I’m special. But you don’t even get no hourly wage, let alone OT.”

“That’s my point, you dumb rodent. Things get worse unless we fix them. The fact that the universe is indifferent is no excuse to behave like sheep. It’s a reason to behave like humans.”

The rabbit took a drink and said, “Humans, sheep, weasels — what’s the difference? We’ll all be dead in an eye blink.”

“I don’t get you,” I said. “Last week you said those people who work at Walmart should burn down the stores if they don’t get pay raises.”

“I changed my mind.” he said. “Last week I didn’t have no whisky.”

I shook my head. “The times are changing, rabbit. Humanism is back. Even the new pope is down with it.”

He said, “Tell that to Rush Limbaugh and his ditto-heads. Tell Eric Cantor.”

Footnote: In case you missed it, Pope Francis called the current brand of free-market capitalism “a new tyranny,” so Limbaugh called him a Marxist. I’d consider that a compliment.

Posted in arts, down and out, humor, mainstream media, philosophy, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Where were you when poverty became acceptable?

Posted on November 25, 2013 by oddmanout215

I’ve been thinking of JFK and of those hard-luck cases who work at places like McDonald’s and Walmart. (There but for the grace of God and the wearing of a clown uniform go I.)

Those who are old enough can recall exactly where they were 50 years ago when JFK was killed, but I’ll bet few of them recall when the fight to wipe out poverty, a key factor in Kennedy’s New Frontier spiel, turned into acceptance of the widening gap between rich and poor. No, worse than that — acceptance of the idea that government’s main job is to ensure the rich get richer at the expense of the rest of us.

The union-busting Ronald Reagan had something to do with it, but there wouldn’t have been a Reagan without the legions of working-class white voters who thought he had their interests at heart.

From Noam Chomsky, with my boldings:

We don’t use the term “working class” [in America] because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say “middle class,” because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.

It’s true that there was a one-sided class war, and that’s because the other side hadn’t chosen to participate, so the union leadership had for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations, in which their workers — say, the autoworkers —- would get certain benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it wouldn’t engage the general class structure. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States doesn’t. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care for themselves and they got it. Of course, it’s a compact with corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by the 1970s they were planning to break it and we’ve seen what has happened since.

How’s that “compact with the corporations” working for you now, former labor unionists and ex-members of the middle class?

Footnote: The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. Ninety-five percent of the gains made in recovery from the 2008 crash have gone to the richest one percent of Americans.

Another: A recent piece by Peter Turchin attempts to put our era of growing economic inequality in historical perspective.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, globalization, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Guess who pays for Walmart’s greed

Posted on November 19, 2013 by oddmanout215

walmart-always-low-wages

Maybe you saw the news item about the Walmart near Canton, Ohio that’s holding an in-house canned food drive “so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.” It seems retail employees at the monster store are so badly paid, many of them can’t afford to eat right. The solution? Employees who aren’t quite starving should feed employees who are.

I showed the last part of the story to Swamp Rabbit:

Walmart’s low wages come at a public cost. Because low-income workers still need housing and health care, taxpayers end up doling out millions in benefits to bridge the gap faced by many of the store’s retail workers. They have also led to strikes at Walmart stores from Seattle to Chicago to Los Angeles in recent weeks.

Even if the canned food drive successfully gathers enough to help out the Canton store’s low-income workers, many of them might not even be able to have the food on Thanksgiving. That’s because Walmart is one of a group of retailers that will open its stores for Black Friday sales beginning at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving afternoon.

The rabbit said, “Somebody oughta do somethin’ about them greedy Arkansas skunks who own that company. Somethin’ to git their attention.”

The funky old rodent is in a foul mood because the weather’s getting too cold for his hangover cure, which is to jump off the porch of my shotgun shack and swim a few laps around the swamp. He’s been pestering me to buy him a bottle of Wild Turkey to get him through Turkey Day.

I said, “Walmart is beyond satire. It’s like trying to satirize Nazi war crimes. Not even that New Yorker guy, Andy Borowitz, could pull it off.”

“I ain’t talkin’ about no satire,” he said. “Skunks care about action, not words. Them so-called associates oughta burn down one of them big, ugly stores. That’ll get their attention. Or walk out together and tell customers to shop somewhere else till Walmart pays a living wage.”

“That’s crazy talk,” I told him. “There aren’t enough employees willing to strike. When they fight back they don’t get a raise, they just get fired.”

He shrugged. “What’s worse, gettin’ fired or slow starvation? Ain’t nobody ever got nothin’ in this country without fightin’ for it. It don’t pay to be meek. It’s like my pappy used to say, the meeks shall inherit the dirt… You’re almost broke, Odd Man, you oughta know better.”

“You’re hopeless,” I said. “You’ve been in this swamp too long to know about the global economy. It’s too complicated for you to understand.”

He spit into the swamp. “Bullshit. The meeks can fight them skunks or they can kiss their asses. They can demand enough income to eat right or they can eat shit and die. What’s so complicated?”

It’s at moments like this that I usually buy him a bottle, which is what I did today. Anything to make him shut the f*ck up.

Footnote: Check out this story: “One Walmart’s Low Wages Could Cost Taxpayers $900,000 Per Year, House Dems Find.”

Another: Go here to help “associates” who were fired for fighting back.

Correction: OK, Stephen Colbert can satirize Walmart and make it funny, but he’s in a league of his own.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, globalization, humor, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Poverty, straight up

Posted on November 18, 2013 by oddmanout215

From a blog called killermartinis, a stark account of living in poverty:

… Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6 AM, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30 AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I’m in bed by 3. This isn’t every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I’m in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won’t be able to stay up the other nights because I’ll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can’t afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn’t leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn’t in the mix…

Read the whole piece. It’s as if someone said “Just the facts, ma’am,” and the blogger said OK, here goes, and what came out was an artfully plain explanation of why poverty often feels like quicksand — the more you struggle against it, the deeper it sucks you in.

The headline is “Why I make terrible decisions,” but the piece illustrates how hard it is not to make terrible decisions when none of your options is good. The best you can do is choose the option that seems less bad than the others. When you’re poor, this is the same thing as high-stakes gambling.

But it looks like the story might not end on a grim note. Another blogger apparently read the killermartinis post and said, damn, maybe I can help drag this woman onto solid ground. So the other blogger apparently established an online fund to help pay to have KM’s teeth fixed. Check it out.

And it seems KM’s “terrible decisions” piece may have caught the eye of a literary agent.

All of this seems to be on the up-and-up, although the cynic in me is always suspicious of Frank Capra-esque plot twists. Again, check it out.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Bush to help convert Jews, speed end of days

Posted on November 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

From yesterday’s Guardian UK:

Some people think George W. Bush did as much as he could to bring about Armageddon with his earlier interventions in the Middle East. But not the man himself, apparently. He has signed up for a fundraising event for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, an organisation which aims to promote the second coming by converting Jews to Christianity, and will speak today at their fundraiser in Irving, Texas.

The idea is that Jews must be converted in order to trigger Jesus Christ’s return to the Holy Land for the Last Judgment. So it is written, somewhere. It’s deep stuff and Christian fundamentalists wouldn’t expect us heathens to understand.

Laugh if you will, but Christians have made great strides toward tolerance over the centuries. Sure, there were the countless pogroms and the Inquisition and they were not nice people during the Holocaust, but that’s ancient history. The new pope is cool and even the Christian primitives — the Baptists and such — are much better behaved, especially when the end is nigh.

And yes, support for Israel is conveniently in tune with the foreign policy goals of American right-wingers, but let’s not be too cynical. The fact that a great Christian thinker like Dubya is eager to convert Jews rather than slaughter them is progress, don’t you think?

Posted in apocalypse, history, humor | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Kos pretends to know Elizabeth Warren’s mind

Posted on November 13, 2013 by oddmanout215

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas has spoken:

Trust me with this. Elizabeth Warren isn’t running. She wasn’t an eager Senate candidate. It took lots of cajoling and begging to get her to make that race. And if you’re hesitant to mount a Senate campaign in a small state where you can go home and sleep in your bed after a day of campaigning, you aren’t going to want to engage in presidential craziness.

You need an immense ego to run for president, a religious-like certainty that you are the best person IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF 314 MILLION to run it. That’s not who Elizabeth Warren is. She’s on a mission, make no mistake, to reform the way Wall Street does business. But she already has a platform to make that happen—a perch in the nation’s Most Exclusive Club and a grassroots army of millions amplifying her voice.

What a relief to read that Moulitsas knows what tomorrow will bring. For a while I thought he might be mulling the pros and cons of someone other than Wall Street’s darling, Hillary Clinton, heading the Democratic ticket in 2016. But that’s almost as silly as thinking he’d own up to being a faux-progressive.

Make no mistake, this guy is being disingenuous as well as patronizing. He pretends to know Warren won’t run — how would he know her mind? — but what he’s really saying is she shouldn’t run. Maybe he’s afraid that, in seeking the nomination, she would wreck the love affair between the Democratic establishment and the Wall Street crooks who tanked the economy in 2008, and that this would be a bad thing.

I’m still looking for logic in The Great Kos’s argument. If Warren is indeed “on a mission… to reform the way Wall Street does business,” then why wouldn’t she consider running for president? Why would she be content to be a voice in the wilderness of the Senate, where only Bernie Sanders and a few others appear to genuinely believe the concerns of the poor and middle-class are more important than those of the obscenely wealthy?

“Given [Warren’s] goals, the Senate is a great place to be,” Moulitsas wrote. This is like saying, “That’s a good girl, Lizzy, sit back in your nice little Senate seat and grouse about income equality and let the old pros run the party, even though they’re as corrupt as the old pros who run the GOP.”

But I’m glad Moulitsas, a long-time apologist for Barack Obama’s disastrous presidency, is so sure Warren will stay put. It means those of us who think she might make a good candidate, and in the process help rescue the Democratic Party from total irrelevance, are probably on the right track.

Footnote: Moulitsas, of course, was fiercely anti-Hillary when she ran against Obama in 2007-08, but likes her now because “she has evolved with the times.” I’m not sure how he’s defining “evolved.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, liar, mainstream media, Obama, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

If at first you don’t secede…

Posted on November 12, 2013 by oddmanout215

I handed Swamp Rabbit a bucket of epoxy and put him to work fixing a new crack in the shack that’s deep enough to let in plenty of water if there’s a downpour. While he worked I talked politics, I guess because I’m better at talking than fixing leaks.

“Christie won big, but Ken Cuccinelli is done,” I said. “Terry McAuliffe wasn’t the ideal candidate, but at least he’s a Democrat.”

The rabbit flung a dab of epoxy at me and said, “What planet you from, dude? McAuliffe is a house boy for the Clintons. He don’t answer to nobody but millionaires. And he won by a whisker, even though he spent a fortune and the other guy was an knuckle-draggin yahoo who wanted to outlaw oral sex and probe every pregnant girl who didn’t want to — how you say? — carry to term. The Cooch don’t like no cooch, no way.”

The greasy old varmint hopped off the roof and got on the computer and showed me a Washington Post story from last week. Excerpt, with my bolding:

…Tuesday’s vote – which left McAuliffe the victor by less than 2.5 percentage points – revealed potentially important lessons about Virginia’s evolving politics for both parties.

McAuliffe’s victory masked the fact that although Democrats in Virginia can reliably depend on nonwhite and unmarried voters, they seem to lose among whites and married people almost without regard to their candidates’ ideology or personality. Democrats have lost the white vote by 20 or more percentage points in the last four Virginia votes for governor or president, according to survey data.

“Less than 2.5 percentage points!” the rabbit yelled. “They couldn’t have run a slimier candidate, but he still got the white vote, and a lot of that was women.”

“But he lost,” I said. “What’s your point?”

He spit in the swamp and said, “I gotta draw you a picture? Karl Rove and them other sharpies are looking at the presidential election. They know them good ol’ boys down South won’t never vote for no Democrat, even if he put on a Johnny Reb suit and whistled Dixie on Fox News. But they also know most Northerners, even the yahoos, ain’t gonna vote for some Republican whack job who cheers when the federal government shuts down. So they’re gonna pick somebody who’s into union busting and tax cuts for the rich but not into race-baitin’ and cooch-hatin’ and government shutdowns, at least not out loud. Somebody who’s down with states’ rights but don’t wanna bomb Fort Sumter. They’re gonna pick that fat boy in Jersey.”

My rodent friend has seen little of the “civilized” world, but he’s sure the GOP’s big-money boys will annoint Chris Christie king of the yahoos and in this way bolster the sort of backdoor secession that lets the yahoos give the finger to federal laws but still get federal aid when they want it.

It’s the same point I brought up in October, but with the fat boy thrown in. Hard to argue with the rabbit on this one. I’ll find out when it rains again if he can argue and fix leaks at the same time.

Posted in health care, humor, mainstream media, NJ, taxes | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Christie takes care of business — at kids’ expense

Posted on November 8, 2013 by oddmanout215

Maybe you missed reports of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie bullying a public school teacher at a campaign rally a few days before he cruised to victory on Election Day. The teacher, Melissa Tomlinson, asked Christie why he has referred to NJ public schools as “failure factories.” The XXXX-sized champion of privatization shouted, “What do you people want?” Tomlinson told him teachers want more money budgeted for students. A “heated discussion” followed.

Tomlinson wrote a long letter to Christie the next day. An excerpt:

Getting back to the issue of money. I am fully aware of our educational budget. Where is all of this money? To me it seems like it is being siphoned right off into the hands of private companies as they reap the benefits of the charter schools and voucher programs that you have put into place. It certainly hasn’t gone to improve school conditions in urban areas such as Jersey City. The conditions that these students and teachers are forced to be in are horrifying. Yet you are not allowing the funds needed to improve these conditions. Are you hoping that these schools get closed down and more students are forced to go to private charter schools while the districts are being forced to pay their tuition? I know for a fact that this is what has happened in Camden and Newark. Yet these charter schools are not held to the same accountability as our public schools. Why is that? Because deep down you know that you are not really dealing with the issues that influence a child’s education. You are simply putting a temporary band-aid into place. Unfortunately that temporary fix is already starting to be exposed as Charter Schools are showing that they actually are not able to do better than public schools.

The sentences I bolded also describe the situation in my state, PA, where Gov. Tom Corbett is working as hard as Christie to strangle teachers’ unions and privatize education. Both phonies have the same agenda – to enrich large-scale campaign donors and other cronies at the expense of teachers and schoolchildren. The difference between them is that Christie has his eye on the presidential nomination and therefore uses the compliant mainstream media to portray himself as a moderate. Democrats who think Christie can’t get the nomination because he doesn’t have enough cred with the Tea Party are really, really stupid. As AlterNet noted last winter, “…You can piss off some of the people some of the time, just so long as you don’t rock the billionaires’ boats.”

Footnote: Moron or monster? The latter, in Christie’s case. He was sharp enough to somehow demonize schoolteachers and firefighters in his successful first-term efforts to boost his profile (I know, poor choice of words) and the interests of his wealthy backers.

One more: This wasn’t the first time Gov. Ralph Kramden, I mean Gov. Christie, bullied a teacher, of course. Here’s one of several other instances.

Posted in mainstream media, NJ, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

How many male novelists does it take to make a joke?

Posted on November 6, 2013 by oddmanout215

My friend Susie, who has read some of my fiction, sent me a bunch of male-novelist jokes from The Toast, all of them in the “how many” format. Like this:

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: This lightbulb is inauthentic.

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: He straightened his tie. He had lost, but in a romantic way, which meant that he had won. “I’m going to do a pushup,” he announced to his tie. His tie respected him for it, and secretly wished that it could have sex with him.

Here’s one of my own:

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. They retreated at dusk. He ran 30 miles, until his shins were splintered and his lungs on fire. The pain felt almost as good as a bullet. He sat and waited for the commissary mule with the keg of wine to catch up.

Posted in arts, fiction, humor | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

‘I’m Waiting for the Man’

Posted on November 5, 2013 by oddmanout215

I’m waiting for my man/Twenty-six dollars in my hand… — Velvet Underground

“Twenty-six dollars!” Swamp Rabbit yelled. “That’ll git ya one Oxy from the ice cream man on Staten Island. Maybe two mixed drinks at Death & Co.”

He was on the porch at my shack in Tinicum swamp, drinking Wild Turkey and making snarky comments about the record on my turntable. In front of us were mallards paddling through the pond scum, which for some reason gets thicker when the weather turns cold.

“You can’t feed a drug habit with twenty-six bucks,” the rabbit said. “That’s good for three packs of ciggies at 7-11, or a few toots on the pipe with the mayor of Toronto.”

“Twenty-six dollars went a lot further in the 1960s, when Lou Reed wrote the song,” I explained.

The pesky rodent has been dissing Reed all week. I recited for him the Velvet Underground’s discography and informed him that Reed, on “I’m Waiting For the Man,” is working the “white Negro” hipster persona that Norman Mailer glorified in the 1950s.

I suspected the rabbit had no idea the song was so old and hadn’t even heard of the Velvets until Reed died. Then again, he reads a lot more than he lets on. I realized he might be setting me up for another of those questions I can’t answer. He pretended to doze.

“You’re as dumb as duck shit,” I said, looking out at the mallards.

“Maybe so,” he replied. “But if you’re so smart, how come you live in a swamp?”

Footnote: I couldn’t find a live version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” that sounds as junk-sick as the studio recording posted above. First thing you learn is you always gotta wait…

Posted in arts, humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment