Landfills I have known,
B&E’s I’ve committed
by David Benjamin
MADISON,
Wis. — Whenever I’m up in my old hometown, I get flashbacks driving
through a broad stretch of manicured parkland on Monowau Street, where
it crosses Council Creek. Gravel piles now occupy one side of the road.
On the other side, the only item that catches the eye is a recently
built skateboard park.
When I was a kid in Tomah, this part of
town was the edge of the wilderness. It was also where the city ran one
of its dumps. For a kid in those days, your basic landfill was — all
rolled together — a playground, a beach, an amusement park, a treasure
trove of discovery and wonder.
Conveniently, the Monowau Street
dump, perched on the shores of the creek, was walkable from any kid’s
house. Council Creek, of course, held its own fascinations. Parents made
the meandering stream virtually irresistible by trying to scare us away
from it. The standard adult lie involved giant snapping turtles. As
broad as tractor tires with viselike jaws and legs that could propel
them at speeds that rivaled gazelles and cheetahs, these monsters would
clamp onto the limbs of unwary tots and drag them into the fetid depths.
There, often, the pollution in the creek would kill your average kid
before he had time to drown.
The pollution started up on the
south side of town. That was where the creamery regularly dumped its
unwanted whey — a thousand gallons at a time —turning the creekwater
white from verge to verge and two miles downstream.
Well, not
exactly two miles. Just shy of a mile, the creek reached the dump, whose
constant flow of oily seepage mixed into the whey-white water,
rendering it the color of well-stirred Nestle’s Quik.
As tasty as this looked, the creek’s aroma at this point — an ambience
of rotten eggs with a hint of scorched ozone — tended to discourage a
taste test. However, having fallen in a few times, I can testify that
Council Creek’s prevailing flavor suggested — to paraphrase Thurber — a naïve domestic kerosene without any breeding. But I was amused by its presumption.
I
frequented the dump with brother Bill, and cousins Danny, Bobby and
Tom. We were rarely the only kids there. In later years, grownups put
fences around dumps for the simple reason that kids flock to them, like
flies to a cowflop. There’s just so much there to see and do, so many
layers of ooze and offal to lift up and see what’s underneath. Might be a
diamond bracelet. Or a pissed-off puff adder, or — bonanza! — a dead
rat crawling with maggots. “Hey, guys! Looka this!”
Your typical
grownup has no eye for a dump’s allure. All he can see is great, gray
heaps of sodden detritus — sheetrock, tree trimmings, paint cans,
splintered lumber, rags, dirt, dreck and slime. But a kid? A derelict
tricycle, for example, always had at least two salvageable wheels. A
broken mop or broom, once its head was severed, could serve as a spear, a
hiking staff, a whiffleball bat, or a kendo stick (if only we’d known
about kendo!). Once I found a multitude of 4x6 manila cards, each
covered with meaningless notations. I rescued a thousand or so that
hadn’t been smirched and tucked them into a drawer beside my bed,
intending to use the back sides for some unspecified clerical purpose.
They stayed there, clean and ready, ‘til we moved away from Tomah. I
think they ended up in the dump.
Once, we found the dump
magically hip-deep in cranberries, unwanted surplus from one of our
area bogs. We immediately launched a cranberry war. Another time, a
local bakery left a pile of bread as tall as the Tomah Cash Mercantile
building. Yes — bread war. In the dump, a kid could always find a decent
three-legged chair, or a couch clean enough for lounging on the front
porch, if only we could figure out how to hail it home. Luckily, we
didn’t need to haul most treasure very far, because all our dumps
adjoined the woods, where you could set up a camp —properly referred to
as a “fort.” Your basic fort had cardboard walls. It featured the dump’s
finest broken chairs and sunken sofas, and usually a mattress that
wasn’t too damp and didn’t smell too bad. Best of all, the erection of a
fort prompted the inauguration of a campfire. If there’s anything kids
love more than forty-foot tower of garbage, it’s a fire.
One
summer, we’d set up a nice fort, with campfire, near the Milwaukee Road
frog shops when an actual yard dick saw our smoke and barged right
through our gate, scaring the wits out of all of us. In its railyard,
the Milwaukee Road stored surplus accessories — weathered wooden bins of
thick glass light fixtures and signal arms. And there were rust-coated
clamps, spikes and connectors, all molded of high-carbon steel and
heavier than a paragraph by Nietzsche. We had accessorized our fort with
some of these items. The yard dick didn’t approve. At his urging, we
hastily decommissioned the fort, returned the loot and never again
darkened the railyard. At least not while he was there.
On the
other hand, there was this fort we built in the woods near Tomah’s other
dump, way out on the north side. In that fort, Danny and Bobby proudly
introduced the concept of a roof, so we could hang around there on a
rainy day. Unfortunately, the presence of the roof combined with the
absence of ventilation to concentrate the landfill odors that had soaked
deep into the tissues of our cardboard walls. Entering the fort tended
to make your throat tighten, your gorge rise and your eyes water. I
visited once and never returned.
One of the big lessons that a
kid learns in the dump is that anything abandoned belongs to him by a
sort of eminent domain. The corollary to this law is that, if you can
get inside any place that’s left alone, you can have anything you find
there. Or, at least, you’re entitled to look around. Operating on this
principle, Bill, Danny, Bobby, Tom and I (well, most kids in town,
really), added deserted buildings to our entitled turf. We developed a
knack for breaking and entering.
For example, there was a sawmill
way up near Grandpa Schaller’s that was temptingly empty on weekends.
Any barn with an unlocked door, any fence with a slat missing, any house
with broken windows and no occupants or furniture inside — these were
all fair game. At some time or other, we probed every building at the
Monroe County fairgrounds — a veritable wonderland for juvenile
burglars.
Our most daring B&E was the old 7-Up bottling plant
in downtown Tomah. The only access to the empty building was a small
alley-level window barely wider than a kid’s head. Once inside, we had
to navigate about thirty feet of lightless crawlspace, over a “floor”
covered by a deep layer of black filth that had a springy texture, like
compressed lint. You got the sensation of creeping over an immense
carpet of dead kittens.
Alas, when we got inside, the building
had been stripped mercilessly. We came away with no booty at all. But
this is often the archaeologist’s fate.
Do kids still risk these
mildly illicit adventures? I fear they don’t, if only because parents
are so much more vigilant now. Most moms in Tomah in those days could go
kidless for 36 hours or more with no more emotion than a sense of
relief. Eventually, like plug nickels and rag-eared tomcats, we all
showed up.
Now, kids have quality time and play dates, not to
mention martial arts and yoga lessons, skateboard ramps, 3 a.m. ice
times, Imax movies, hired clowns, iPhones, pornographic texting and
Grand Theft Auto.
But I wonder. If you’re a kid who’s never
played sandlot work-up or backyard whiffleball until it’s too dark to
see the pitcher, never played touch football under a streetlight so far
into the night that the neighbors call the cops, never found soiled
treasure beneath 500 pounds of putrifying potatoes, or skinnydipped in a
leech-infested swimming hole, never climbed a fence into a forbidden
orchard guarded by a mean old man with a rock-salt twelve-gauge, never
made a campfire in a deserted sawmill or lifted rocks in a swamp in
search of garter snakes and salamanders, never traversed a whole block
of your hometown main street by jumping from roof to roof, or crawled
through thirty feet of knee-deep grime and rat pellets to break into a
condemned factory, well, sweet Jesus! Have you lived at all?
Or did you go straight from infancy to adolescence without ever being a kid?
Friday, March 27, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#713)
The ‘right to work’ for nothing
by David Benjamin
You got me workin’, boss man, /Workin’ ‘round the clock. /I want a little drink of water, /But you won’t let Jimmy stop…
— Jimmy Reed
MADISON, Wis. — The relationship has rarely been amicable between dedicated American businessmen and the pampered laborers who rake in obscene amounts of remuneration for the little work they do. Fortunately, a tiny elite force of “efficiency experts” emerged years ago to bring order to this disparity, turning the production process into cold, crisp, clear statistics and guiding management in its mission of whipping the working class into shape.
Foremost among these geniuses of productivity is my old friend, Smedley — who consulted in the efforts of Gov. Scott Walker to castrate labor unions and elevate Wisconsin into a “right-to-work” state. Now, Smedley is drawing up the last phase of Walker’s dream. “We’re poised to strangle organized labor in America, dismember its body and bury the pieces in widely scattered landfills.”
Smedley said, “Scooter told me. It’s not enough to deny the silly notion that workers have ‘rights.’ These chronic goldbricks — who’ve been raping the economy since Samuel Gompers — have to be crushed and demeaned until they do what they’re told without a peep. They must come to see the smallest workplace benefit — like 60 seconds, once a day, to take a leak — as a gift bestowed on a case-by-case basis by Bosses whose only moral responsibility is profit.”
I said this sounds pretty harsh. Smedley reminded me that “efficiency” is harsh because capitalism knows no mercy. He noted, “Scooter is the ideal hero of a new labor regime, because hasn’t worked at a real job for even a day in his whole life. With no capacity for empathy with rank-and-file slobs, Scooter can focus totally on making the frustrated dreams of every beleaguered Boss come true.
“And the Boss,’ Smedley added, “is the savior of the American way of life.”
“But now that he’s passed a ‘right-to-work law, what more can Walker do?”
“The answer lies in that very phrase: ‘right-to-work,’” said Smedley. “It embodies the steady, patient dismantling of the labor movement. The Bosses have framed the debate, twisting language to their advantage, often with the unwitting assistance of organized labor. Indeed, the term, ‘organized labor,’ was long ago embraced by unions despite its evocation of ‘organized crime.’ When Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to label the giants of industry as ‘organized money,’ the pejorative never caught on. That was the Bosses’ first semantic victory.
“But the biggest,” said Smedley, waxing almost philosophical, “was turning the word ‘union’ into a profanity. ‘Union’ was once the labor movement’s pride. ‘A more perfect union’ is the first ideal stated in the Constitution. We waged a Civil War to preserve the Union. But, today, most loyal Americans regard ‘union’ as a synonym for laziness and disloyalty, for refusal and insubordination on the job.”
I agreed. “Even ‘right-to-work’ is a linguistic contradiction,” I said. “It means ‘the right to lose your job to someone who’s willing to work for less.’”
Smedley only smiled.
“Okay, so,” I said, “the bosses have framed the discussion. What next?”
“Workers are still ruining the economy by expecting too much. They want houses when they should be happy with tents. They want cars when they only deserve shoe leather. They want sick days, coffee breaks, day care, health coverage, Sundays off and — God help us! — overtime pay. They’re running amok!”
“So, what’s the answer to all this greed, selfishness and luxury?”
“Auctions,” said Smedley. His saturnine smile reminded me of the Grinch. “We’re talking about the logical climax of the right-to-work crusade. We’re talking about putting out to bid — once a year — every job below senior management”
“I see,” I said. “So companies would bid for the best qualified people by offering the highest possible pay for each position?”
Smedley laughed out loud. “You really don’t get it, do you, kid?”
“Well, I guess not. I’ve worked all my life.”
“This explains why you don’t get it. You have no aptitude for leadership.”
Smedley said that in the brave new world of Scott Walker (and other state-house visionaries), workers would auction themselves for the lowest possible wage.
“Let’s say you want to flip burgers at Wendy’s,” explained Smedley. “You offer the Bosses the current minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. Another guy says he’ll do it for seven bucks. A woman interrupts, willing to sell herself for $6.50, after which the first bidder cuts his price to six even. When the auction is over, Wendy’s has a sweet one-year, cash-under-the-table deal with an illegal Salvadoran for 60 hours a week at a buck-and-a-half an hour. And you know the beauty part?”
“There’s a beauty part?”
“Wendy’s doesn’t even have to pay the simple bastard. He’s illegal. His only recourse is outfits like the National Labor Relations Board, which was long ago neutered by K Street lobbyists, right-wing Congressmen and plutocrat campaign donors like Dave and Charlie Koch (who, by the way, actually have a framed, notarized deed for Scott Walker’s soul — it’s hanging in their garage).”
I was still trying to make sense of Smedley’s plan. So, I said, “But if this auction scheme of yours takes hold — ”
“Oh, it’ll take hold, son. It’s as American as rhubarb pie.”
“But eventually,” I hypothesized, “the bidding will hit zero. People will work for nothing — like bloggers at the Huffington Post. We’ll end up with a system of de facto slavery across vast swathes of America.”
“Well, duh,” said Smedley. “It worked before, didn’t it?”
by David Benjamin
You got me workin’, boss man, /Workin’ ‘round the clock. /I want a little drink of water, /But you won’t let Jimmy stop…
— Jimmy Reed
MADISON, Wis. — The relationship has rarely been amicable between dedicated American businessmen and the pampered laborers who rake in obscene amounts of remuneration for the little work they do. Fortunately, a tiny elite force of “efficiency experts” emerged years ago to bring order to this disparity, turning the production process into cold, crisp, clear statistics and guiding management in its mission of whipping the working class into shape.
Foremost among these geniuses of productivity is my old friend, Smedley — who consulted in the efforts of Gov. Scott Walker to castrate labor unions and elevate Wisconsin into a “right-to-work” state. Now, Smedley is drawing up the last phase of Walker’s dream. “We’re poised to strangle organized labor in America, dismember its body and bury the pieces in widely scattered landfills.”
Smedley said, “Scooter told me. It’s not enough to deny the silly notion that workers have ‘rights.’ These chronic goldbricks — who’ve been raping the economy since Samuel Gompers — have to be crushed and demeaned until they do what they’re told without a peep. They must come to see the smallest workplace benefit — like 60 seconds, once a day, to take a leak — as a gift bestowed on a case-by-case basis by Bosses whose only moral responsibility is profit.”
I said this sounds pretty harsh. Smedley reminded me that “efficiency” is harsh because capitalism knows no mercy. He noted, “Scooter is the ideal hero of a new labor regime, because hasn’t worked at a real job for even a day in his whole life. With no capacity for empathy with rank-and-file slobs, Scooter can focus totally on making the frustrated dreams of every beleaguered Boss come true.
“And the Boss,’ Smedley added, “is the savior of the American way of life.”
“But now that he’s passed a ‘right-to-work law, what more can Walker do?”
“The answer lies in that very phrase: ‘right-to-work,’” said Smedley. “It embodies the steady, patient dismantling of the labor movement. The Bosses have framed the debate, twisting language to their advantage, often with the unwitting assistance of organized labor. Indeed, the term, ‘organized labor,’ was long ago embraced by unions despite its evocation of ‘organized crime.’ When Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to label the giants of industry as ‘organized money,’ the pejorative never caught on. That was the Bosses’ first semantic victory.
“But the biggest,” said Smedley, waxing almost philosophical, “was turning the word ‘union’ into a profanity. ‘Union’ was once the labor movement’s pride. ‘A more perfect union’ is the first ideal stated in the Constitution. We waged a Civil War to preserve the Union. But, today, most loyal Americans regard ‘union’ as a synonym for laziness and disloyalty, for refusal and insubordination on the job.”
I agreed. “Even ‘right-to-work’ is a linguistic contradiction,” I said. “It means ‘the right to lose your job to someone who’s willing to work for less.’”
Smedley only smiled.
“Okay, so,” I said, “the bosses have framed the discussion. What next?”
“Workers are still ruining the economy by expecting too much. They want houses when they should be happy with tents. They want cars when they only deserve shoe leather. They want sick days, coffee breaks, day care, health coverage, Sundays off and — God help us! — overtime pay. They’re running amok!”
“So, what’s the answer to all this greed, selfishness and luxury?”
“Auctions,” said Smedley. His saturnine smile reminded me of the Grinch. “We’re talking about the logical climax of the right-to-work crusade. We’re talking about putting out to bid — once a year — every job below senior management”
“I see,” I said. “So companies would bid for the best qualified people by offering the highest possible pay for each position?”
Smedley laughed out loud. “You really don’t get it, do you, kid?”
“Well, I guess not. I’ve worked all my life.”
“This explains why you don’t get it. You have no aptitude for leadership.”
Smedley said that in the brave new world of Scott Walker (and other state-house visionaries), workers would auction themselves for the lowest possible wage.
“Let’s say you want to flip burgers at Wendy’s,” explained Smedley. “You offer the Bosses the current minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. Another guy says he’ll do it for seven bucks. A woman interrupts, willing to sell herself for $6.50, after which the first bidder cuts his price to six even. When the auction is over, Wendy’s has a sweet one-year, cash-under-the-table deal with an illegal Salvadoran for 60 hours a week at a buck-and-a-half an hour. And you know the beauty part?”
“There’s a beauty part?”
“Wendy’s doesn’t even have to pay the simple bastard. He’s illegal. His only recourse is outfits like the National Labor Relations Board, which was long ago neutered by K Street lobbyists, right-wing Congressmen and plutocrat campaign donors like Dave and Charlie Koch (who, by the way, actually have a framed, notarized deed for Scott Walker’s soul — it’s hanging in their garage).”
I was still trying to make sense of Smedley’s plan. So, I said, “But if this auction scheme of yours takes hold — ”
“Oh, it’ll take hold, son. It’s as American as rhubarb pie.”
“But eventually,” I hypothesized, “the bidding will hit zero. People will work for nothing — like bloggers at the Huffington Post. We’ll end up with a system of de facto slavery across vast swathes of America.”
“Well, duh,” said Smedley. “It worked before, didn’t it?”
Thursday, March 12, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#712)
“You wanna make somethin’ of it?”
by David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — Unlike Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren and Opie Taylor, I didn’t engage in a whole lot of pugilism in my school days. Every normal kid in the combative 1950’s had ample opportunity to get beaten into tapioca by thugs at recess. However, operating under the assumption that I couldn’t possibly prevail against the sadistic hulks who roamed the playground like Jurassic reptiles, I learned how to evade most near occasions of bloodshed.
In retrospect, I’m a little regretful. Later in life, I learned that I have a certain moronic tenacity and a talent for taking a punch. Beating me senseless was a little like whacking a sheet hanging on a clothesline. I just kept hanging there, white and limp, while my assailant grew ever more arm-weary, knuckle-raw and aggravated.
But in grade school, I didn’t know how durable I was. Instead, I figured out how easy it can be to talk your way out of a potential subdural hematoma. I also noticed that, whenever a ruckus broke out on the St. Mary’s School playground, the final act was an anticlimax imposed by a grownup — usually Father Mulligan — who required the combatants to emulate Jesus and shake hands.
As testament to the warped psychology of kids, these coerced truces often evolved into friendships.
I remembered all this while pondering the fuss in Washington over President Obama’s delicate nuclear-arms talks with Iran. The Republicans — who took the extraordinary measure of writing a cautionary primer on U.S. civics to Iran’s ayatollahs — have stipulated that their idea of foreign policy involves neither my conversational strategy nor Father Mulligan’s invocation of divine authority. A handshake is unthinkable, and talking? To those guys? Just plain sissy.
I realize that it’s metaphorically dubious to suggest an exact parallel between schoolboy playground battles in the 1950’s and 21st-century nuclear diplomacy, but this GOP stunt nevertheless harked me right back to noon recess at St. Mary’s.
I mean, you remember how it went. The first kid, usually without evident provocation, would get himself chin-to-chin with some other kid. He would address him by his last name (fights never began on a first-name basis), followed by something like, “You’re a slime-sucking horse’s ass!”
To which Kid #2 would wittily respond: “Oh yeah?!”
Back to Kid #1: “Yeah!”
After which, the second kid was required — according to time-honored juvenile protocol to say, for example, “Yeah, well, (Last Name), you’re a pigfaced pile of crap.”
A few more “oh yeahs?” and “yeahs!”, culminated then in the rhetorical gauntlet-blow, always framed as: “Oh, yeah? You wanna make somethin’ of it?”
This was the cue for dialog to end and combat to commence, with lots of rolling around on the playground and body blows that had no effect because each kid was wearing a winter coat, two layers of clothing (one flannel, one wool) and long underwear.
What I figured out around fourth grade was that you could reliably forestall one of these contretemps by altering the standard liturgy, essentially tossing in an “Et cum spiritu tuo” where a “Christe eleison” was supposed to go.
For instance, let’s say Laufenberg, one of my more dependable antagonists, got into my face and delivered his line about me being a slime-sucking horse’s ass. Rather than taking his cue and intoning the obligatory but hackneyed, “Oh, yeah?”, I would cross him up with, “Jeez, John, d’you really think so?”
Laufenberg, expecting a question but not that one, would hesitate. This gave me time to rustle up a little more food for thought: “OK then, John, but what sort of horse?” Laufenberg might rally with a cunning riposte like, “Hunh?” But, by then, I was positioned to defuse the threat — and launch a general equine debate among the kids gathered ‘round — by asking, “I mean, could I be an Arabian horse’s ass? How ‘bout a mustang? Or a Clydesdale? A Shetland pony’s ass maybe?”
Forgive the obviously flawed metaphor, but it seems to me that, ever since the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, the ayatollahs have been saying to America, “You’re a slime-sucking horse’s ass,” and the U.S. response, for 35 years, has been the same old, “Oh yeah?” Followed by you-know-what — which would probably be OK if we’re talking about a couple of ten-year-olds on a parochial-school playground.
But here, the “you-wanna-make-somethin'-of-i
This altered liturgy now seems to be approaching the “What sort of horse’s ass?” stage. I think this is good, but it obviously violates the Republicans’ foreign policy principles, which appear to be stuck on the “oh-yeah?-yeah!-well-you’re-a-
Ironically, Sen. Cotton’s Letter to Tehran is another positive sign. My old foe Laufenberg wasn’t known for parsing the Marquess of Queensbury Rules before grinding some kid into the asphalt at recess. If he had, he wouldn’t have remained — from 1st through 8th grades — the alpha-male Cro Magnon whom we all knew and feared. The last thing a true bully ever does is explain himself.
The President is getting the mullahs to explain themselves, and recess is already a little safer. But even if he can humor the Iranians, he faces a bigger challenge with the local bullies, who’ve been calling him a pigfaced pile of crap — and worse — for more than six years now. I don’t think they’re going to let up.
As Dorothy Parker didn’t quite say, “You can lead a horse’s ass to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”
by David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — Unlike Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren and Opie Taylor, I didn’t engage in a whole lot of pugilism in my school days. Every normal kid in the combative 1950’s had ample opportunity to get beaten into tapioca by thugs at recess. However, operating under the assumption that I couldn’t possibly prevail against the sadistic hulks who roamed the playground like Jurassic reptiles, I learned how to evade most near occasions of bloodshed.
In retrospect, I’m a little regretful. Later in life, I learned that I have a certain moronic tenacity and a talent for taking a punch. Beating me senseless was a little like whacking a sheet hanging on a clothesline. I just kept hanging there, white and limp, while my assailant grew ever more arm-weary, knuckle-raw and aggravated.
But in grade school, I didn’t know how durable I was. Instead, I figured out how easy it can be to talk your way out of a potential subdural hematoma. I also noticed that, whenever a ruckus broke out on the St. Mary’s School playground, the final act was an anticlimax imposed by a grownup — usually Father Mulligan — who required the combatants to emulate Jesus and shake hands.
As testament to the warped psychology of kids, these coerced truces often evolved into friendships.
I remembered all this while pondering the fuss in Washington over President Obama’s delicate nuclear-arms talks with Iran. The Republicans — who took the extraordinary measure of writing a cautionary primer on U.S. civics to Iran’s ayatollahs — have stipulated that their idea of foreign policy involves neither my conversational strategy nor Father Mulligan’s invocation of divine authority. A handshake is unthinkable, and talking? To those guys? Just plain sissy.
I realize that it’s metaphorically dubious to suggest an exact parallel between schoolboy playground battles in the 1950’s and 21st-century nuclear diplomacy, but this GOP stunt nevertheless harked me right back to noon recess at St. Mary’s.
I mean, you remember how it went. The first kid, usually without evident provocation, would get himself chin-to-chin with some other kid. He would address him by his last name (fights never began on a first-name basis), followed by something like, “You’re a slime-sucking horse’s ass!”
To which Kid #2 would wittily respond: “Oh yeah?!”
Back to Kid #1: “Yeah!”
After which, the second kid was required — according to time-honored juvenile protocol to say, for example, “Yeah, well, (Last Name), you’re a pigfaced pile of crap.”
A few more “oh yeahs?” and “yeahs!”, culminated then in the rhetorical gauntlet-blow, always framed as: “Oh, yeah? You wanna make somethin’ of it?”
This was the cue for dialog to end and combat to commence, with lots of rolling around on the playground and body blows that had no effect because each kid was wearing a winter coat, two layers of clothing (one flannel, one wool) and long underwear.
What I figured out around fourth grade was that you could reliably forestall one of these contretemps by altering the standard liturgy, essentially tossing in an “Et cum spiritu tuo” where a “Christe eleison” was supposed to go.
For instance, let’s say Laufenberg, one of my more dependable antagonists, got into my face and delivered his line about me being a slime-sucking horse’s ass. Rather than taking his cue and intoning the obligatory but hackneyed, “Oh, yeah?”, I would cross him up with, “Jeez, John, d’you really think so?”
Laufenberg, expecting a question but not that one, would hesitate. This gave me time to rustle up a little more food for thought: “OK then, John, but what sort of horse?” Laufenberg might rally with a cunning riposte like, “Hunh?” But, by then, I was positioned to defuse the threat — and launch a general equine debate among the kids gathered ‘round — by asking, “I mean, could I be an Arabian horse’s ass? How ‘bout a mustang? Or a Clydesdale? A Shetland pony’s ass maybe?”
Forgive the obviously flawed metaphor, but it seems to me that, ever since the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, the ayatollahs have been saying to America, “You’re a slime-sucking horse’s ass,” and the U.S. response, for 35 years, has been the same old, “Oh yeah?” Followed by you-know-what — which would probably be OK if we’re talking about a couple of ten-year-olds on a parochial-school playground.
But here, the “you-wanna-make-somethin'-of-i
This altered liturgy now seems to be approaching the “What sort of horse’s ass?” stage. I think this is good, but it obviously violates the Republicans’ foreign policy principles, which appear to be stuck on the “oh-yeah?-yeah!-well-you’re-a-
Ironically, Sen. Cotton’s Letter to Tehran is another positive sign. My old foe Laufenberg wasn’t known for parsing the Marquess of Queensbury Rules before grinding some kid into the asphalt at recess. If he had, he wouldn’t have remained — from 1st through 8th grades — the alpha-male Cro Magnon whom we all knew and feared. The last thing a true bully ever does is explain himself.
The President is getting the mullahs to explain themselves, and recess is already a little safer. But even if he can humor the Iranians, he faces a bigger challenge with the local bullies, who’ve been calling him a pigfaced pile of crap — and worse — for more than six years now. I don’t think they’re going to let up.
As Dorothy Parker didn’t quite say, “You can lead a horse’s ass to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”
Saturday, March 7, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#711)
A snatch of trade-show jazz
by David Benjamin
BARCELONA — If it’s March, it must be the Mobile World Congress (MWC). January was Vegas and CES. Been to IFA, NAB, CATV, DVB (in Dublin, with whiskey tastings and dog races — loved that), Electronica, CeBit (in Hanover, proudly known as “The Armpit of Lower Saxony"), IBC, even once hung with the leisure suits at the RCCC wing-ding in Grand Rapids.
Here, it’s “cellular devices,” everyone peering into 5-inch screens, thousands of phoneblind geeks veering and stumbling, like the first reel of The Day of the Triffids and I’m Howard Keel. What am I doing here? My only phone sits on a table at home.
I’m a spy at a Star Trek convention. Everyone is breeding tribbles and hoarding dilithium crystals to warp themselves into strange worlds (5G, wherever that is) whence no nerd has gone before. Over there, back to back, two propeller-heads staring into the hypno-screens of their “communicators,” executing a Vulcan mind-meld and catching up on Kirk’s weight-gain issues. Except, well, this starship voyage is real. These mooks are serious. They have the power, the money, the technology to make all of us into trekkies, transporting us into text-eternal exile on the mothballed transport Botany Bay, somewhere beyond the Neutral Zone.
I’m the only one without a smartphone. But I’m a certified smartass, and I’m carrying a book (Deadwood by Pete Dexter), just in case things get boring.
And they do get boring.
Up on the huge screen before the “keynote” session (how can a speech be “key” if there are two or three of them every day?) a six-foot portrait of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook feuhrer. A hero here. For most of us a lot more ambiguous. Internet pioneer or a greedy little dropout with a Napoleon complex? What have you done to my privacy, Zuck?
Oh God, there goes the music. Throb, throb, wham! At 120 decibels. Every high-tech trade show I’ve been to… How many years? Giant speakers and a beat dumber than Diana Ross singing “Baby Love.” Thump, thump, thump, not even a “thumpety” in between. Speakers the size of a two-car garage, and music composed by gifted gorillas force-fed barbiturates. Makes Iron Butterfly and Twisted Sister sound subtle and sophisticated. Wham wham wham, screech, THUMP.
Picture Beethoven here, feeling the throb. Smiling. Glad to be deaf.
But it works, Makes you grateful when the human speakers finally hit the stage, spouting drivel but so much more tuneful than the alleged music of the concussive fanfare. It’s hard to trust anyone, or any organization, or any collection of 90,000 like-minded trade-show zombies whose musical taste stinks this bad.
Next year, I bring tomatoes.
Not to eat.
As the alleged “music” humps and thunders, words two yards tall explode on a stageful of screens. Theme seems to be “ME.” Mobile entertainment? Massive entropy? Mind-numbing ennui? The flicker-flashing, epileptic uber-images — shades of The Andromeda Strain? — assist in conveying the existential apotheosis of consumer gadgetry… my Internet, my money, My health, My education, MY travel, MY entertainment, MY friends, MY identity, MY lobotomy!
OK, I added that last one.
By and by, a woman marches on stage. She has quiet self-assurance of a wounded cobra. Her name is Anne and she’s Director General of the GSMA — which used to stand for something, but now it’s NBI. She makes it clear that she wants everything “connected.” Connected cars, bikes, mopeds. Connected toothbrushes. (You get a shock if you skip a molar.) Connected suitcases. Connected suicide bombers destroying five different Burger Kings simultaneously.
Oops. Wait. We already have that.
Even so, what they don’t seem to have is connected security. To get as far into the Fira Barcelona as this “keynote,” there are security checks over and over. Six times. The only guys not carrying mobile phones are shlepping machine guns. And the uniforms! Lapis lazuli with red epaulets. Charcoal from head-to-toe with a jaunty maroon beret. Dark khaki with form-fitting body armor (a full metal jacket) and bloused pantaloons. Desert camo with forest-green trim highlights and patent-leather, steel-toe jackboots. Spain is the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré of military haute couture. Generalissimo Francisco Franco lives!
Nice thing about Spain? They hire pretty girls to stand around directing the clueless. Uniforms aren’t as varied and flattering as the cops and soldiers’ outfits, but they’re cute, in navy blue with red blazers, red scarves. One senorita smiles glowingly and Ray Charles bubbles ineluctably upward…
“See the girl with the red scarf on! She can do the dog all night long, oh-oh yeah…”
Along the way to the keynote, tall unnerving banners declaring the “unleashing” of various “markets.” From what? I pass under “South Africa Unleashed.” But didn’t that happen, finally, in ‘94? There are more unleashings — Colombia (a little scary — cocaine, anyone?), Peru (would anybody notice?), Russia (fine, but can we snap that idle leash onto Vlad the Terrible?). Wait a minute. “Germany Unleashed”? Even after 70 years, the idea of the Fourth Reich — unleashed Rottweilers and Dobermans (and Angela Merkel in a pants suit!) galloping amok across the Englischer Garten, mangling poodles and swallowing Yorkies whole? — tends to trigger my weltschmerz.
Besides “unleashed,” the big word here, in the corridors, on banners, printed in nine-foot letters on the show floor, is “INNOVATION” (all caps). Same as at CES, same for years at IFA, NAB, IBC, Electronica, etc. Marketing types in geekworld use “innovation” the way teenagers use “like,” “y’know,” “dude,” “awesome.” Y’know? Like that, dude.
Picture a precocious Mobile-Worlder, 13 or so, checking it all out, saying, “Whoa, hey! Awesome, I mean, like, the innovation here, I mean, y’know, these innovative dudes’re awesome at y’know, like, innovating, dude! I’m like, whoa. Y’know. I mean, that’s what it is, dude, like, innovation!”
Yes. I know. (Scotty, quick! Beam me up.)
by David Benjamin
BARCELONA — If it’s March, it must be the Mobile World Congress (MWC). January was Vegas and CES. Been to IFA, NAB, CATV, DVB (in Dublin, with whiskey tastings and dog races — loved that), Electronica, CeBit (in Hanover, proudly known as “The Armpit of Lower Saxony"), IBC, even once hung with the leisure suits at the RCCC wing-ding in Grand Rapids.
Here, it’s “cellular devices,” everyone peering into 5-inch screens, thousands of phoneblind geeks veering and stumbling, like the first reel of The Day of the Triffids and I’m Howard Keel. What am I doing here? My only phone sits on a table at home.
I’m a spy at a Star Trek convention. Everyone is breeding tribbles and hoarding dilithium crystals to warp themselves into strange worlds (5G, wherever that is) whence no nerd has gone before. Over there, back to back, two propeller-heads staring into the hypno-screens of their “communicators,” executing a Vulcan mind-meld and catching up on Kirk’s weight-gain issues. Except, well, this starship voyage is real. These mooks are serious. They have the power, the money, the technology to make all of us into trekkies, transporting us into text-eternal exile on the mothballed transport Botany Bay, somewhere beyond the Neutral Zone.
I’m the only one without a smartphone. But I’m a certified smartass, and I’m carrying a book (Deadwood by Pete Dexter), just in case things get boring.
And they do get boring.
Up on the huge screen before the “keynote” session (how can a speech be “key” if there are two or three of them every day?) a six-foot portrait of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook feuhrer. A hero here. For most of us a lot more ambiguous. Internet pioneer or a greedy little dropout with a Napoleon complex? What have you done to my privacy, Zuck?
Oh God, there goes the music. Throb, throb, wham! At 120 decibels. Every high-tech trade show I’ve been to… How many years? Giant speakers and a beat dumber than Diana Ross singing “Baby Love.” Thump, thump, thump, not even a “thumpety” in between. Speakers the size of a two-car garage, and music composed by gifted gorillas force-fed barbiturates. Makes Iron Butterfly and Twisted Sister sound subtle and sophisticated. Wham wham wham, screech, THUMP.
Picture Beethoven here, feeling the throb. Smiling. Glad to be deaf.
But it works, Makes you grateful when the human speakers finally hit the stage, spouting drivel but so much more tuneful than the alleged music of the concussive fanfare. It’s hard to trust anyone, or any organization, or any collection of 90,000 like-minded trade-show zombies whose musical taste stinks this bad.
Next year, I bring tomatoes.
Not to eat.
As the alleged “music” humps and thunders, words two yards tall explode on a stageful of screens. Theme seems to be “ME.” Mobile entertainment? Massive entropy? Mind-numbing ennui? The flicker-flashing, epileptic uber-images — shades of The Andromeda Strain? — assist in conveying the existential apotheosis of consumer gadgetry… my Internet, my money, My health, My education, MY travel, MY entertainment, MY friends, MY identity, MY lobotomy!
OK, I added that last one.
By and by, a woman marches on stage. She has quiet self-assurance of a wounded cobra. Her name is Anne and she’s Director General of the GSMA — which used to stand for something, but now it’s NBI. She makes it clear that she wants everything “connected.” Connected cars, bikes, mopeds. Connected toothbrushes. (You get a shock if you skip a molar.) Connected suitcases. Connected suicide bombers destroying five different Burger Kings simultaneously.
Oops. Wait. We already have that.
Even so, what they don’t seem to have is connected security. To get as far into the Fira Barcelona as this “keynote,” there are security checks over and over. Six times. The only guys not carrying mobile phones are shlepping machine guns. And the uniforms! Lapis lazuli with red epaulets. Charcoal from head-to-toe with a jaunty maroon beret. Dark khaki with form-fitting body armor (a full metal jacket) and bloused pantaloons. Desert camo with forest-green trim highlights and patent-leather, steel-toe jackboots. Spain is the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré of military haute couture. Generalissimo Francisco Franco lives!
Nice thing about Spain? They hire pretty girls to stand around directing the clueless. Uniforms aren’t as varied and flattering as the cops and soldiers’ outfits, but they’re cute, in navy blue with red blazers, red scarves. One senorita smiles glowingly and Ray Charles bubbles ineluctably upward…
“See the girl with the red scarf on! She can do the dog all night long, oh-oh yeah…”
Along the way to the keynote, tall unnerving banners declaring the “unleashing” of various “markets.” From what? I pass under “South Africa Unleashed.” But didn’t that happen, finally, in ‘94? There are more unleashings — Colombia (a little scary — cocaine, anyone?), Peru (would anybody notice?), Russia (fine, but can we snap that idle leash onto Vlad the Terrible?). Wait a minute. “Germany Unleashed”? Even after 70 years, the idea of the Fourth Reich — unleashed Rottweilers and Dobermans (and Angela Merkel in a pants suit!) galloping amok across the Englischer Garten, mangling poodles and swallowing Yorkies whole? — tends to trigger my weltschmerz.
Besides “unleashed,” the big word here, in the corridors, on banners, printed in nine-foot letters on the show floor, is “INNOVATION” (all caps). Same as at CES, same for years at IFA, NAB, IBC, Electronica, etc. Marketing types in geekworld use “innovation” the way teenagers use “like,” “y’know,” “dude,” “awesome.” Y’know? Like that, dude.
Picture a precocious Mobile-Worlder, 13 or so, checking it all out, saying, “Whoa, hey! Awesome, I mean, like, the innovation here, I mean, y’know, these innovative dudes’re awesome at y’know, like, innovating, dude! I’m like, whoa. Y’know. I mean, that’s what it is, dude, like, innovation!”
Yes. I know. (Scotty, quick! Beam me up.)
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