Peering fearfully into the Boomer psyche

Posted by

2

This is a crude initial attempt to understand a generation that seems afraid to understand itself, but here goes. My main objective in this exercise is to understand why the Boomers are so petulant, judgmental, and self-righteous about the failures of the Millennials. The reasons are not what the Boomers say they are, so taking their word at face value is worse than useless, but I think I’m getting a decent sense of their thinking, which is important for anyone who hopes to get money, sympathy, and/or job offers out of their kind.

Many Baby Boomers, especially more successful ones, can’t or won’t face the extent to which the young today have been foreclosed from opportunity. It’s important to note that this willful ignorance cuts across the standard partisan and ideological lines. Republicans and others who self-charitably identify as conservatives angrily insist (often with a telling defensiveness) that of course America is the land of opportunity, so anyone failing to seize abundant opportunity here is morally flawed and hence discardable. Democrats and others who self-charitably identify as liberals are nominally less wedded to the myths of the American Dream and the rugged American individualist, but they did well themselves, bent over backwards to give their children what they assumed was generous academic and social enrichment, and now can’t for the life of them figure out why their precious snowflakes are such perennial fuckups. They’re much guiltier than soi-disant conservatives about their belief in meritocracy, since they also pride themselves in their belief in equity, but the basic worldviews and the resulting policy outcomes aren’t that different. I’ve heard about comments from avowedly woke liberals in affluent suburbs of Chicago, for example, who assert that they’re “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” Uh-oh. Where have we heard that before? It isn’t just the Clurb, either, and I don’t see their girls getting ready to dance up on me.

It was mostly innocuous for old-line Republicans to dick around with this happy horseshit in the thick of the Great Compression and to congratulate themselves decades later for having been active in a party that was not overrun with meddlesome religious nuts. The country could take a bit of genteel fantasy about increased fancy-pants self-dealing back then because labor held the whip hand and had no compunction about cracking it if management or capital got out of line. These days? For starters, Travis Kalanick hasn’t done a Jimmy Hoffa disappearing act. The One Percent, which is more accurately the Twenty Percent, has spent practically two full generations gorging at the trough. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires don’t explain the political success of the great neoliberal ratfuck on their own; the credentialed, salaried minority, which consistently punches far above its own weight at the polls, has been paid off well enough not to want to rock the boat.

This sleazy hustle more or less worked through the generally strong economies of the late twentieth and very early twenty-first centuries; it was objectively disgusting, but it was basically stable. It became obviously unstable in the months after the crash of 2008, when the job market went from mildly humiliating but fruitful to utterly humiliating and fruitless for marginal jobseekers. The Cathedral is deeply insulting many of us with its talk, nearly constant for at least half a decade, of “the recovery” from “the Great Recession.” Absurdly, reporters and commentators were earnestly talking for some time about a “jobless recovery.” They might as well have proclaimed a feasting fast or a celibate sexual union. This “jobless recovery” was more accurately an imposition of monetary legerdemain to prop up stock inflation at labor’s expense, but to me, and I’m sure to many other unemployed people who either couldn’t find work at all or couldn’t find work that wasn’t both ill-paid and needlessly humiliating, it felt like another campaign by the successful to rub our noses in the dirt. Since I graduated from college, I’ve come to realize ever more fully just how many people look down on the poor, the unemployed, and the underemployed, as well as the uneducated, and how many seem to outright despise us. I realize that I’ve been lumped into a cluster of categories that the successful want to silence and erase. It can be frightening. I confront attitudes prevalent in my native class whose endgames include high-volume butchery and starvation of the poor and genocide. The othering is insane and barely believable.

This is one reason why I sincerely and wholeheartedly respect trash-scavenging bums, disability frauds, Section Eight layabouts, and other lowbrow losers more than I respect most of the high achievers I’ve known. At some level, it really is about who I envision being self-dealing enough to get me killed. It’s why I’ve come to hate college as an institution. We have people with no wisdom, no morality, no street smarts, no ability to read others from outside their own caste (if they can read anyone at all), and in many cases no culture or learning insisting that they have the right to dictate policy for entire countries because they’re the best and the brightest. It chills me sometimes that I was on course to become one of them. It chills me to see how many of their peers they’ve convinced to sell out, often for low and contingent wages or for vague promises of something better years into the future.

There are times when I cannot discern a thing in my peers but comprehensive amorality. That’s how brutal and unrelenting their fog machine is. Right now, two over-the-top high achievers stand out in my mind as exemplars of the yuppie project’s amoral excesses, one from college and one from high school. The former is the Insurance Schmuck. The latter is a lawyer (at least second-generation) who graduated from an extremely Brahmin college in New England and then used Teach For America as a stepping stone to law school. She and a mutual classmate are a yuppie power couple, based in the District of Columbia the last I checked, of exactly the sort whose affluence and overbearing parochial concern for the future success of their children (or, in their case–again, last I checked–child singular) gentrifies every level of government they touch into a dystopia of unchecked privilege. They were both exceptionally gracious and well-adjusted throughout high school, nothing like the Insurance Schmuck has been the whole time I’ve known him, but she has clearly been corrupted by her caste, and I’d be surprised if her husband hasn’t been as well.

It’s hard to imagine anyone with ambition resisting this corruption when it’s been drilled into every preppy head since kindergarten that unscrupulous academic and professional conduct isn’t unscrupulous because that’s just what it takes to get ahead. Since Wyomissing is so overrepresented at Lancaster Country Day, all three of us almost certainly have acquaintances in common with Taylor Swift, who is a creepy, disturbed celebrity version of them. Restraining one’s own ambition can feel immoral and abnormal in this context, but unleashing it inevitably feels very wrong whenever I think about what my classmates are doing to the world. The Insurance Schmuck, for his part, is so spiritually narcotized that he can turn his moral compass on and off at will. This is all happening in the Facebook age, which features Facebook’s internal gaslighting of its users and its users’ aggressive self-censorship and personal branding, on top of the fraudulently selective manner in which colleges and (hey there, burnout blawggers!) law schools cherry-pick their employment data and alumni updates for publication.

The marginalized among us can’t figure out what the hell’s happening here. We can try, but we know we’re getting a snowjob. This is an extremely toxic culture. Reengagement with it, to the extent that reengagement has even been offered to us as an option, is ethically nightmarish. To wax a bit Godwinian, these verge on the moral quandaries that concentration camp inmates face. The yuppies have put me through the buzzsaw. If I were offered a turn manning their machinery of walking everdeath in exchange for a restoration of my own socioeconomic status, would I except it? Wow Much ethix Omg mr faust Very distress. Seriously, I have to assume that they have other people in their sights whom they wish to ruin with the same apparatus, even if I’ve escaped it for the time being.

Let’s get political for a moment, why don’t we. I have a bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts college whose admissions office started upping its rejection game in earnest a few years after I enrolled. If I feel so distrustful and resentful of my peers and am so eager to say why, what do the less educated deplorables say from their basket? How do they feel watching the credentialed affluent throw a gigantic shit fit because their very credentialed and notoriously crooked presidential candidate failed to secure her coronation in spite of her dirty tricks? How do they feel about the clubbable educated under the circumstances?

The Boomers entered a very different job market during a very different zeitgeist when they were young. Even I recall the job market being less deranged when I got my summer jobs at Hersheypark, starting in 2001, than has been since about 2009. I doubt many affluent retirees have a working sense of just how horrible it is, both quantitatively (in terms of the sheer unavailability of jobs) and qualitatively (in terms of the creepy insanity that has overcome so much of the managerial class). Things have really gone to hell. Employers are eating through their own payroll and pension funds so voraciously that they’re now cannibalizing themselves. We’d have routine insurgencies by street gangs, at the very least, if it weren’t for internet pornography, video games, long-term resettlement in theoretically empty nests, and disability fraud. Our leaders and the successful around us further delegitimize themselves when they insist that things are improving and refuse to take our grievances seriously. Observers who are preparing for this whole thing to blow sky-high aren’t the goofy ones here.

Part of the problem is Boomers taking cooked employment statistics and other warmed-over propaganda seriously (for the fashionable, “fake news”). Another part of the problem is Boomers refusing to listen to their children and grandchildren when we insist that things really are that bad for us. Five million people don’t disappear from the official US payroll in a single calendar year (2008 to 2009) in a time of increasing population because they suddenly became lazy. If my allowance and some other loser’s welfare abundance is the cost of your Mexican gardener, try not to forget that this is one of the reasons that I keep dogfooding the stoop labor jobs that Yanqui don’t want no more. I don’t want my country to turn into Qatar. God knows large parts of it are on course for that.

I don’t think I’m impertinent, then, to regard defenses of multimillionaires hiring illegal immigrants for yard and farm work as anything less than an assertion that their employment as illegal aliens should take precedence over mine as a US citizen. Uh, I still lives here. Can I come in? No, that’s not okay. There are dozens of millions of Americans who need to be reintegrated into the job market and the civic life of our country, who need to be respected again as citizens worthy of their citizenship, before I’ll agree with projects to prioritize the employment of Michoacano peasants in my job market or regard their preferential hiring as possibly having a damned thing to do with a humanitarian impulse. How the hell am I the unreasonable one for asking that my country’s government actually enforce its work authorization laws since employees are already made to produce I-9 documents, or for asserting that it is wrong for the US government to endlessly give Latin American governments the dispensation to be corrupt and derelict and to consequently release floods of economic refugees onto our soil? Yes, this problem has been abating, and not a year too soon, but the corrupt mentality of the clubbable that facilitates it has not. On our side of the Great Wall (“It’ll be elegant!”), we’re still governed by dipshits who don’t feel embarrassed for enthusing about Mexican gardeners.

For some unexplained, indefensible reason, social mobility for people like me was supposed to be irreversibly upward. This was nominally true about everyone, but when push comes to shove, the bougies don’t give a shit about the poors. No one was willing to imagine a world in which downward mobility, let alone inescapable downward mobility, was a possibility for the well-born and well-bred. It’s the fucking Roaring Twenties again, I guess. This is all part of a big tangled mess with the Mexican gardeners and the Honduran nannies. They were just supposed to be at a lower, meeker level on the escalator to prosperity. Then it all fell apart and we started getting bombarded with hot takes about participation trophies. I received mine from Kenneth “Ken” Fitzhugh, the future subject of Palo Alto true-crime hot take Blood Will Tell.* What nobody seems to notice about this participation trophy bullshit–what even I rarely notice–is that if the job market were decent, nobody would give a rat’s ass about what participation trophies had done to the employability of the Millennial. The eerie thing, though, is what these trophies say about Boomer psychology (and for that matter, what the reaction to them says about Americans’ psychology in general). Maybe they were meant to console us in our times of loss, but maybe they were meant to instruct us that losing was not an option. We’ll never get a straight answer on this from people who won’t talk straight to themselves.

*(I’m not sure about the participation trophies. I am sure about Coach Fitzhugh, so I thought I’d mention it, just in case.)

It’s easy for failures to launch to wonder why they’re such losers when their parents have done everything for them to prepare them for success. I’ve certainly done that. The thing is, our parents haven’t done everything for us. They’ve gone to heroic extremes to provide for our formation into good little Eichmans–I mean, good little social climbers, and in many cases they’ve given us extra money, too, but the things they haven’t done for us are painful to examine. They assumed that we wouldn’t drop our or burn out, so they did nothing to prepare us for this possibility. The BoBos immersed their children in cultural references and forms of speech that are helpful to successful social climbers but actively harmful, and often dangerous, in working-class and underclass environments. They didn’t teach us how to code-switch our way safely back and forth across the gaping cultural divide that they were too distracted and cowed to try to bridge in their own lives. Often they tried to stop us from learning our own way across the divide. A stuck-up school like Dickinson College sure as hell doesn’t want its students learning how to communicate with the domestic poors as equals. #CommunicateToCreate! Well shucks, how did that get in again? It’s always such a shock. Our parents want their property values to keep appreciating and then wonder why we can’t afford decent housing, or housing at all. But we dare not describe ourselves as homeless or our mothers will cry. (We speak royally here, but not entirely so, we’re sure.)

Who “us” this is? Many of us, probably, but we have trouble quantifying ourselves, and that’s by design. The incentives for the upper classes to keep the lower classes atomized are painfully obvious.

It isn’t a special snowstorm to insist that our peers and our parents accept us even though we’re losers. It only looks that way at first blush. It isn’t even necessarily professional victimhood. Anglo-American society has been structured and governed for two generations (roughly my whole lifetime) to produce losers and then shit on them. That’s what it does. Someone is going to be the toilet slave for as long as people who play that dirty game are welcome in polite society. We’re led by people who think it’s appropriate to shit on the generationally poor, to shit on the uneducated, to shit on the retarded who can’t help themselves, to shit on anyone who can be accused of using drugs without meeting some arbitary threshold of social proof, and to shit on surplus elites who fell from grace during economic contractions. They definitely think it’s acceptable to shit on the unemployed. If they actually loved the virtue of work, they’d try to give the unemployed a hand up into employment instead of making excuses for rejecting their applications and making fun of them for being out of work.

Someone has to speak up for the victims of this sadism. As I mentioned, it will endure until the social consequences for indulging in it become unpleasant. Someone has to keep advocating on behalf of the losers for as long as this society remains vicious enough to keep producing them so abundantly and unnecessarily.

I am called to bear witness to these things. Suck on it.

We really need an anti-immigration left

Posted by

0

Donald Trump’s botched travel ban rollout is exactly the sort of right-authoritarian assault on due process and human rights that Americans should have expected as the constituents of a polity that has proven itself too hamfisted and disingenuous to reform its unwieldy, lawless immigration regime in a lawful and humane manner. The US government could have published specific restrictions on specific types of immigration in advance, giving those affected proper notice of their inadmissibility. A well-disciplined CBP could have enforced these restrictions by humanely turning away aliens ruled inadmissible under them at ports of entry. Instead, a criminally ill-disciplined and lawless CBP detained a bunch of travelers who had been blindsided by the implementation of a blanket travel ban without notice while they were in transit, denying many of them food, water, communication with emergency contacts, and access to legal counsel. CBP officers obstructed onsite inquiries by members of Congress into the status of detained travelers at at least two airports, Dulles and Hartsfield-Jackson, and inquiries from pro bono lawyers who had rallied in front of arrivals halls at multiple airports. CBP has apparently defied several parallel orders from US District Courts, including one from “rocket docket” Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia. Worse, there are reports that customs officers at Dulles abducted travelers in their custody to offsite detention facilities in the midst of active habeas corpus petitions that had been filed on these detainees’ behalf.

The question of whether the worst elements of CBP are allowed to reenact the Stanford prison experiment under color of authority is separate from questions of whether CBP’s better officers are allowed to fairly and consistently enforce immigration laws at US ports of entry. The latter, in turn, are separate from questions of what levels and types of immigration should be permitted. Grave official misconduct, including frank human rights violations, was a huge problem at CBP before the travel ban clusterfuck over the weekend. The rogue behavior reported under the auspices of this ban or contemporaneous to its implementation has not been limited to citizens of the named countries, either. The culture of lawlessness at CBP is so entrenched, and its worst officers so deranged, that the only way to force compliance with court orders may well be SWAT raids on secured areas at ports of entry: that is, US Marshals, or possibly local or state law enforcement officers deputized by outraged local officials to enforce the Fourth Amendment (you know, federal law), storming into buildings guarded by gunslinging nutjobs with federal law enforcement commissions of their own. The prospect of the US Marshals being the sane elements in this scenario should be alarming, but it’s looking like a moot point: some recent reports claim that Marshals are systematically refusing to enforce federal court orders in these matters.

So, yes, civil war involving urban combat in government buildings used by the traveling public is now a very real possibility. This situation is chaotic and dynamic, so there’s no telling from hour to hour how it may play out. I’m quickly being won over to the position that Trump really is Nixon on steroids. I always suspected that he was mostly trash-talking everyone, but now, less than two weeks into his presidency, he’s surrounded by nutty advisors, publicly wallowing in Nixonian paranoia that increasingly looks heartfelt, not staged, directing unusually aggressive criminality on US soil by federal law enforcement agencies, and trying to subvert the judiciary. Motherfucker needs an impeachment. Nixon wasn’t given a chance to reform himself in office after he was caught ordering burglaries and the like, nor should he have been given one. What the president deserves in these cases is immaterial; the presidency is a solemn, dangerous office whose misuse can ruin countless citizens’ lives. What matters is what the American public deserves, and we deserve a hell of a lot better than we’re getting in Trump’s and his advisors’ bad moments. The republic is in peril when it’s in the hands of people so unhinged and disturbed. And for better and worse, Trump has burned so many bridges with so many politicians that he’s the likeliest candidate for impeachment since Nixon.

The protests and the lawyer mobilizations over the weekend are essentialto the survival of our constitutional order. The presence of partisan wackos and fools in the protests doesn’t make them any less critical to the rule of law. It’s unfortunate that they were so much more muted and limited in scope during Obama’s robotic-death-from-the-sky presidency, but at least they’re happening now. Given a choice between public dissent that includes dipshits who are embarrassments to the broad left and a customs agency that absolutely would give Charles Graner a commission, a pitch-black uniform, and a sidearm, I’d take the useful idiot liberals in a heartbeat.

What’s the hitch, then? Outrage unto civil disobedience about the predatory criminality of CBP and the Border Patrol does not necessitate outrage at the proposition that the United States should no longer welcome the whole wide world into its living room, no questions asked. The gist of Trump’s travel ban–not the crude, vicious mechanisms of its enforcement–is at least a tentative step towards a more thoughtful immigration policy sincerely devoted to the advancement of the national interest and the interests of many of the more vulnerable classes of US citizens. Trump arbitrarily singled out a medley of disfavored nations that are minor to middling sources of immigrants to the United States, and rogue elements in the CBP ad-libbed from there. The possibility of corruption pertaining to Trump’s business interests influencing his decision should certainly be investigated. None of this means that it’s in the US national interest to continue to serve as a come-one-come-all dumping ground for the world’s wretched refuse when we’re having trouble getting our own house into order. None of it means that there’s a compelling national interest, or even a compelling international humanitarian imperative, for the United States to keep allowing any society from any country to immigrate here at will and set up parallel kinship networks that its own atomized citizens lack the wherewithal and the social capital to replicate. None of it means that Mark Zuckerberg deserves more H-1B visas for his scab labor. None of it means that it’s a social good to encourage unassimilated ethnic enclaves to fester for generation upon generation on US soil, operating under their own arbitrary communal laws, beyond the reach of the sovereign authorities that govern native-stock communities. None of it means that the US government has any obligation to the Mexican government to absorb the demographic overflow caused by the feckless, self-serving policies of its suspiciously white elites.

America First is a rallying cry dear to certain racists, but it is not inherently racist. Yes, it’s inherently nativist and parochial, but pointing this out doesn’t explain why Mexican officials have dispensation to be nativist and parochial without offending America while the parochial nativism of US officials is such a grave offense to Mexico and all Mexicans. Why should it be our duty to worry endlessly about the welfare of Mexican swarthies, who overlap significantly with our elites’ gardeners and whom the hidalgos despise anyway, when so many of our own communities are dying? True, “we” destabilized the countries on Trump’s shit list, but really, our elites conspired with their elites, or alternately with the elites of third countries, to orchestrate their pillage and looting. Or, in Somalia’s case, “we” watched the locals wreck their own government in a civil war and encouraged “our” trawlers to stripmine their fishery in the absence of a functioning coast guard.

We get to stop fluffing our neighbors’ beds and start cleaning the piles of shit out of own own bed whenever we say so as an electorate. Trump’s particular way of saying so causes an unacceptable amount of collateral damage, both to individual foreigners of goodwill and to our own rule of law as a nation, but the grievances that he’s trying to remedy are genuine. This is why we need political leaders of goodwill who have the backbone to insist that the human damage of imperial wars stop being dumped wholesale into unsuspecting mill towns and that the Mexican peasantry stop being imported en masse to break meatpackers’ unions.

 

Christopher Cross crap, at a cost

Posted by

0

My parents spent $13,000 or some shit on their pontoon boat and another thousand or two for the dock. Every year they spend, fuck if I can say for sure, but probably another thousand or fifteen hundred on dry dock storage in a big boat shed, glorified as a marina, and eight hundred or so for a crew of rednecks to do a sloppy, half-assed job installing the dock in the spring and removing and stacking it in the fall. They dock the boat in a shallow cove, the next thing to a marsh. It was dry over the summer, so their little bit of lakefront was marshier than usual. They had barely enough depth to get the boat out from the dock without scraping the muddy bottom. Every time they go out, the propeller gets covered with lily pads, algae, and other weedy slop that my dad (and I, if I’m around) have to scrape off. Rodents have already gotten into the engine housing at least once and chewed up the wiring. Water apparently got into the engine this summer, causing it to cough even at idle and to strain and buck at speeds as low as 2,000 RPM. You know, water: something your boat might be exposed to on a lake.

This next-to-useless money pit charms the sweet everloving shit out of my parents. I always figured they could rent a pontoon boat if they wanted to fuck around on one, but that would involve going to another lake, which would be problematic because reasons. Having a pontoon boat of one’s own on the lake of one’s own is excellent bougie for retirees of a certain class who regard Lake Winnipesaukee as overdeveloped and overromneyed to the point of untenable crassness and poor taste. They built a bunch of condos around it, libertarian twits won’t stop whipping out their live free or die stiffies, and a Mormon family showed up: more like Lake Wouppadefauquindoux, yes? Pardon my French, as they say; the Quebeckers aren’t reputed to speak it tout fauquin ouelle, either, and don’t forget, they produced Paul “Da Smoothie wif D Money” LePage. In my time, my parents have evolved from opposing pontoon boats on principle as noisy motorized affronts to proper armstrong-powered water recreation in crappy old canoes and rowboats to supporting pontoon boats as da good bougie kine. This change of heart (you could have one, Rikki) corresponds to their becoming older and less agile, and also to their becoming older and more affluent, so no, I don’t know where the correlations stop and the causations start.

What hasn’t changed is their obsessive Adirondack aesthetic, except to get stronger and worse. My parents weren’t culturally appropriating shit from the Dutch when they were living in Pennsylvania; it was too low-class. Now they’ve at last arrived in a place where one might summer, where my mom in fact did summer as a child, but on the cheap because her parents were semi-functional, not-too-poor poors with more education than sense, some long-term debt and, in my grandmother’s case at least, a weird sort of part-proto-hipster, part-earnest fascination with the Adirondacks’ low English drunks. A stray fruitboy could show up there, feel the abyss staring back, and frantically ask himself where the hell his plants went, but my parents didn’t raise me to be a fruitboy, so that’s my problem. God could I use a good berry patch up there just to keep the Devil away from my idle hands. The inchoate sense of this that I had as a child has been fully conscious for years as I’ve come to ever more fully realize that agriculturalists are way the hell saner than the sorts of layabouts, retirees (I repeat myself–mostly), drunks, generational welfare crackers, dissipated trust funders (I repeat myself again), summer camp weirdos, and other losers in the Game of Farming who retreat into the useless woods for a complete alienation from the means of production.

Don’t worry, though, Willie: this baby ain’t about to grow up to be a cowboy. Plants don’t shit everywhere. They don’t need anyone’s arm elbow-deep in their assholes at three am (I must not be nearly as lonely as I was hoping), their nuts cut off, or a big tube full of overnighted sperm from one of the lucky boys who got to keep his seed sack shot up their cunts in what P. J. O’Rourke called “like teenage pregnancy, only more so.” Cowgirls are supposedly all kinds of freaky good in the sack because, per Akinokure, they’re big-booty pastoralist chicks and, per country music, they’re cowgirls. Put two and two together and, ooh, you’ll get a clue, too! (Some moralizing Saudi fuckhead that Dinesh D’Souza (?) interviewed about same-sex marriage: “Men go into the desert and do shameful things with their camels, but this doesn’t mean that a man should be able to marry his camel.”) Some cowgirl’s daughter going from the corral to the pole to the bachelor fruitboy’s bed over the course of her career may raise questions you’d better not try to answer about how she got that way, but none of this is as fucked up as the Saratoga racing season. It’s one thing to stimulate the camel and cause milky explosion (Borat was right: there really are people who do that for a living) if the end result is meat, milk, pack, or draft animals; it’s quite another if the result is an inbred horse with weak bones being whipped halfway to death by a short guy who never gets enough to eat so that the posh have a theme for their gambling problems instead of a useful and edifying Maoist agricultural adventure. It might be excusable if we ate horse meat, as my mom has accused the Welsh of doing, but we don’t. I might even be able to put aside my aesthetic, ethical, economic, social, and philosophical objections to the races temporarily if ladies from the horsey-horse crowd put out for me, or if they just got kinda frisky with me, but that never happens, either. I’m still stuck buying that strange on overpriced markets.

As an Eastern European acquaintance explained when she was asked “why it is you women dress so revealingly,” “It is because we are a bunch of horse.” That’s a nice idea, in any event. So is a Saratoga economy that is not just a bunch of horse. So is a world in which I do not have a single degree of separation from the Council of the Sacred Horse. (It’s even worse than you imagine.) David Clayton-Thomas must be like, man, I dropped fucking acid and wrote a song about carousel horses, and I never came up with anything that bad. We know all too well by now what good too much royal horse time does to other criminally inadmissible friends from the great white north, but aside from Robinson and Millington both being strong Sheriff candidates, Sauce Boss would be a great cultural fit with the North Country just by virtue (sic) of his being a lying drunk with a Jeep.

Au Canada post-soviétique, le droit maintient VOUS! Of course this thing has come to Northside Juice and the Shady Blues memes. It’s come to far worse. Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t something screwy about me for noticing whether there’s an actual productive economy in my physical surroundings or just a bunch of hustling, scamming, parasitism, and living off the fat of outside lands dressed up as an economy. Is this a form of autism? Am I rolling in the deep on the Spectrum for being able to make accurate on-the-spot estimates of what percentages of each major ingredient in my food supply, and yours for that matter, are being grown in which places, sometimes to within twenty-mile radii? Am I the Rainman for being able to take the length and convolution of supply lines into account for these same impromptu mental calculations?

I mention these things because on their own they can make me feel like I’m living in a parallel world, looking in with uncomprehending horror on the world that most of those around me inhabit. I’m seeing things that other people aren’t. As a rule of thumb, this is regarded as psychosis. Just because the things I’m noticing are actually there–grain elevators and rail lines and orchards and Safeway warehouses and shit–doesn’t mean that it feels normal to notice them when hardly anyone around me does. There’s something that feels a bit paranoid about noticing how far a place is from the nearest farm valleys of any size and how far jobbers have to drive groceries from the nearest city with a warehouse to finally get that shit on the shelves. Glenn Beck might be interested in selling me some Mormon bulk emergency staples. But where the hell would I store any of them?

In the case of the Adirondacks specifically, I always find myself qualifying comments about what a pretty area my parents retired to with assertions that they’re way the hell north and remote. What’s actually going through my mind during these conversations (which are often with new acquaintances who have no idea about any of this shit) is a deluge of powerful but inarticulable uneasy feelings. When I was little, the most dysfunctional three weeks of my year were the ones we spent every summer, save one, on the lake with my grandmother and the rotating hillbilly horror show that made up most of her social circle. Thank God for the gentlemanly old drunk who was married to her childhood best friend; we didn’t see much of him because she was too busy with her Captain Cragen-looking shithead drunk of a boyfriend and his people, but we saw the Gentleman Drunkard often enough that I was usually able to maintain some hope. Now my mom has gotten my dad to help her one-up her mother by retiring in BoBo style to the same cove on the same fucking lake. Sometimes this includes my mom not getting showered and dressed until it’s time for dinner. Oh dear.

The uselessness of the Adirondack interior only adds to this ill feeling. Other than the sugarbush and a few specialty dairying operations that can hardly grow any of their own feed, the area is useless. As I’ve said before and will surely say again, this is why it attracts so many useless people. The earnestly trashy around there have trash for aesthetics. These can be found in many places that have productive economies, too, but they have an easier time blending into the woodwork around the working classes who are also present because they have work and are busy tending to it. What the Adirondacks also attract to a distressing extent are summer people, a higher class of white trash that cleans up better and highly esteems itself. Every time I see an Adirondack chair I die a little inside. This is not just because I was *GO DIPLOMATS!* a Dickinsonian who saw that misappropriated firewood supply arranged in circles on the Quad, although that doesn’t help my case a bit. Dickinson College was pathetically trying to cultivate the same New English wastrel aesthetic. With a social climber from Albany like Bill Durden at the helm, it would. Of course that fucker was down with retarded-looking, ergonomically disastrous lawn furniture culturally appropriated from an area with rampant untreated depression and ennui enough to floor Holden Caulfield. On second thought, the depression up there isn’t entirely untreated: alcohol can be a treatment. It was for the Gentleman Drunkard. He was from minor lace curtain Irish money, though, and I was from an upper middle class family on the make that championed middle-class sobriety and insisted on it by daylight, in addition to being a preteen. Faaaaaahhhhhk. I always got a bad feeling from the Adirondack chairs and the guide boats and the summer camps, like they’re gonna find someone’s body floating face-down in the lake before long. The coroner will have to notify the newly bereaved family, and it will be the North Country’s fault.

The woods, they haunt us. We don’t have a folkway to practice, and they’re gently, eerily telling us that we don’t belong, killing us softly with their song, killing us softly. Or hardly, we might say, perhaps in a classic North Country DUI. Watch out, or ew, you might get another clue! The Amish are more right than they are wrong about idle hands. Years ago a friend called me from Cape May to tell me that a crowd of dozens of tourists had stopped in front of a hotel to watch two seagulls mate on the eaves. People can get like that when they’re off work and at loose ends for less than a week. They flee to their expensive refuges from the rat race and end up watching birds fuck on a hotel rooftop. Anyone feel like insinuating that I’m a loser for picking blueberries for forty cents a pound now? Jonathan Livingston Stupid Sonofabitch.

The summer people came to the Adirondacks to get away from crazymaking, unhealthy work and living environments in New York City, and to the Jersey Shore to get away from similar environments in Philadelphia. The more time Brenda Jorett spends lounging on a beach chair, the less she spends scolding the Philadelphia area’s White Community. No, that is not a racial statement; if it were, I’d have omitted “White.” Now, that’s a helping of #TeshTips you won’t get on WHYY. Nor will they encourage you to spend less time working yourself to the point of exhaustion and also less downtime totally at loose ends all the live-long day for a week or two straight. That’s like treating a crack problem with heroin: it makes sense if you’re Charlie Sheen. Then again, we’re a pretty insane people.

My parents moved to the Adirondacks in pursuit of this bizarre, unspoken leisure ethic. Upstanding middle-class citizens aren’t supposed to be layabouts, and they certainly aren’t supposed to be proud of their own privileged indolence and irresponsibility, so everything salient about the bizarre lifestyles of affluent rural retirees is communicated in some bogus, inscrutable, and totally inappropriate manner. Taking this bullshit at face value is madness. So is attempting to decipher the actual motivations at play through the hurricane-force fog of passive-aggressiveness, disingenuousness, projection, subliminal messaging, and other habitual miscommuncation. There’s no winning this game.

There’s an incredible childishness to this shit. My mom told me once, during an angry argument provoked by my getting her car stuck at the bottom of the driveway during a modest snowfall because the driveway hadn’t been plowed, that there wouldn’t be a problem with her or my dad having a medical emergency at their house when the driveway was impassible because the ambulance crew could always carry them down the hill on a stretcher. I’d already been furious because she claimed to see nothing wrong with our being snowed in for a full day or two at a time when their road was fully passable solely because the company that plows driveways on their lake is a dipshit squad, so who cares about the last two hundred feet; when she made this comment about having an ambulance crew carry one of them down the hill on a strecher during a medical emergency, like it would somehow be normal and reasonable, I became horrified and frantic, too. I was dealing with a woman in her seventies who refused to admit any concern about the prospect of her overweight husband being carried down an icy 6-12% grade on a stretcher during a snowstorm because he’d just had a heart attack.

Again, this was my mom talking about herself and my dad. It was absolutely fucking nuts. I was an only child dealing with aging, isolated parents whose judgment was failing to the point that one of them was swearing that she’d rather have EMT’s do a Donner Party rescue at her house than live somewhere safe. The only hope and comfort I could take in this was that she was trying to save face in a domestic argument by taking a position so extreme and so reckless that I immediately got myself mentally prepared for the day when I’d have to call adult protective services. I’m lucky I didn’t end up feeling the need to do so that night. It was looking really fucking bad for an hour or so.

If I were really serious about my parents’ access to medical care, I wouldn’t let them forget that if they ever urgently need specalized care they’ll have to be medevacced to Burlington or Albany. From where we lived in Pennsylvania, the same radius would have covered an airlift to Lehigh Valley (site of a preeminent regional burn unit), and a slightly larger radius would have allowed us to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins, Jefferson, or Penn. As I said, the Adirondacks are fucking useless. You might as well catch a ride straight to Boston since they fired up the chopper.

Their solution to this is even worse: Oh, don’t worry, we’ll just move back to the Bay Area someday. Sweet Jesus. That will be a raging nightmare in its own right if they ever go through with it. For reasons that they’ve never justified, they insist that they’ll sell their Adirondack house–which my dad personally designed and they had built on a parcel my mom has owned since the mid-sixties–instead of renting it out, say, on a weekly basis to other summer people. I’m dreading this because moving away from the Adirondacks for good will destabilize my mom more than the deaths of some of her close friends. My only option may be to buy a trailer or hillbilly hut nearby and extend an open invitation to my parents to crash in it on visits to the area, but my mom would probably take offense at the low class and poor taste of such an offer, because that isn’t the kind of Adirondack lifestyle she wanted to cultivate. She wanted the one involving a $420,000 initial outlay (excluding the boat and dock) for a custom retirement house two doors down from her mother’s old cracker cabin, with no central air and no way to install window units without Magyver modifications to the doors. And where she’d better hope that the ambulance carries snowshoes and crampons. (She’s a chronically embittered atheist who resents the religious for their (our?) spiritual comfort, so she doesn’t pray.)

My most recent argument with my parents was over whether or not I should have a car of my own on the East Coast. They were adamant that there was no need for this. They got upset and maybe even offended by my insistence that borrowing one of their cars isn’t adequate. They must forget or not notice how nosy they get about why I want to leave the house (I’m not cruising for smack, so why does it matter?), and they verge on being shut-ins half the time, so it must not occur to them that I might be less interested than they are in personally leading such a lifestyle when I’m not even 35. I’m sure it doesn’t occur to them how they’d feel if they were dependent on me for a loaner car if they were staying with me and wanted to go anywhere.

This is another version of the idiotic mindset that finds snow days cute beyond the age of fourteen. I guess they’re cool for those who are on welfare, and in the North Country, you might as well be, but how the hell do you plan to get to your job and keep it if no one can figure out how to keep the streets clear? I’ve sporadically looked at job postings in the North Country, in the hope of arranging some interviews if my parents can ever get their heads out of their asses about how working in New York is consistent with my being a Californian or (please not) an Oregonian, but I can’t be relying on one of them for a commuter car, and I can’t be relying on some derelict redneck assholes who always drive 20 mph too fast on my parents’ road to plow their drive in time for me to leave for work.

This shit is now happening in spite of the $10,000 of EXTRA money that they wired me to buy a new car. Seriously. But in the meantime, my dad got on my case to go ahead and spend $12,000 on a Fit that I test-drove in Lancaster (it was nice, but not $12k nice), register it in California, and drive it out west by way of my parents’ place. That makes no fucking sense. There are some Kafkaesque licensure and residency requirements for personal vehicle registrations that I researched, to no real avail so far, but I’m not driving a car across the country just because I’m having a dispute with my parents about where I should legally reside, where I should actually live, and why. I went down that rabbit hole because a car salesman who may not know his ass from a hole in the ground told me that it’s illegal to register a vehicle in a state where one isn’t licensed to drive, and I still can’t tell whether he actually knew what the hell he was telling me about the regulations. The surreal thing is that if I can somehow get around the residency bullshit, or narrowly comply with it, I’d be able to get myself an adequately serviceable East Coast clunker for $1,500 or less and a newer, more bitchin’ West Coast ride for $5,000 or less.

To recap, the pontoon boat cost $13,000, and my parents have been sandbagging my proposal to buy a bare-bones car for my own use around their house, WHERE THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO PUBLIC TRANSIT. I’ve suspected as much for some time, but the only way I can resolve this mess is to blindside them and show up with a new used car. I told them that I wouldn’t be complaining about this if they lived in town in Glens Falls or Saratoga Springs, or really anywhere within liberal walking distance of bus or rail service, and given the amount of walking I’ve done to and from transit stops in multiple states, this is no empty promise. Then again, they always pretended that they took my interests into account when they moved north, which is bullshit. So was their ongoing conceit that I somehow wasn’t homeless. I’m not sure that they’ve gotten out of that chronic make-believe even now. It’s absurd, but the main reason I bite my tongue about my homelessness has been a desire not to upset the housed and make them feel awkward.

I really should go to Kamloops and buy freebase for home baking from the RCMP. It’s a bad idea, but it isn’t a relatively bad idea. Just look at what I’m trying to deal with now. It’s so neurotically goddamned middle-class. The upper class doesn’t give a shit about its residency when it wants to buy a Senate seat or, according to recent scuttlebutt, a 19% stake in Rosneft. The lower classes don’t give a shit about their legal addresses when they put their trucks up as collateral for gentlemen’s loans and then get their rigs quasi-stolen for nonpayment/general lender’s avarice because that motherfucker had a set of Duplicate Keys (TM), after all. For the middle class, though, it’s always like, where do you live? I dunno. What do you do for a living? I dunno. Realtalk, if I go fuck some Kamloops crackwhores at a discount by fixing them salmon dinners and shit so they aren’t spending their McDonald’s money on base at the Mountie barn (I’m thinking a sugar cure with a maple syrup glaze, since it’s on the flag, eh), that’ll be more civic and sensible before the lower classes than just about anything I’ve been getting from the upper middle class since at least 2007 as its downtwardly mobile scion. (Rob Ford? That boy wasn’t eating his salmon. That wasn’t an Omega 3 layer he was wearing, partner.)

Instead, I’m dealing with my mom’s intensifying cold sensitivity, which I’m sure has a psychosomatic component. You’re probably thinking, thanks for the diagnosis, Dr. Hasan. You’re welcome. It also has a why the fuck did she move to the Adirondacks if she didn’t want to get cold component. I’m past the point of prejudging Interior BC’s crackwhores as a worse kind of crazy when they could just be a different kind. Just last fall I had a dope whore jonesing in my car and then going into a gas station restroom to inject her latest set into her index finger when she got into a jam and I gave her a ride home. (Homeskillet: “Captain Save-a-Ho has arrived!”) She agrees with me: it isn’t glamorous. But neither is this North Country bullshit. Sobriety doesn’t fix jack shit up there, nor does intoxication, although it might be worth a shot.

Dispatch from deplorable country: I shot the falcon, but I did not shoot the falconer

Posted by

0

An especially bizarre bit of local crime news just crossed my transom. It’s out of Hazleton, PA, where my parents and I are spending the night en route to our old neck of the woods around Hershey, on the other side of anthracite country. A few years ago, Hazleton gained some notoriety in woke circles as a hotbed for guidos eager to use all positive law to oppress the wetbacks. Shit’s been on the skids for decades around here, so of course God’s swarthies aren’t on the best terms with one another. It’s fucking classic: pull the false floor out from under the local economy and stand back while those left behind balkanize themselves.

I don’t know all the details in Hazleton’s specific case, but I do know that the anthracite fields were played out beyond profitability in the mid-twentieth century and that every level of government in Northeastern Pennsylvania has done a hamfisted job of economic redevelopment in the old anthracite towns ever since. By the time my parents and I moved to Pennsylvania in 1992, Hazleton was noticeably worse off than either Wilkes-Barre or Scranton, neither of which felt prosperous. The latter two seem to have been just economically diversified enough (a VA hospital, several private colleges, Montage Mountain, Steamtown, hell if I can say what else) to maintain a critical mass and build on it while Hazleton fell hard into the pit. It ain’t Dunder-Mifflin tourism, fam; that’s some of the most embarrassing boosterism I’ve heard of in my life, and I’d be totally appalled if The Office had been set in Lancaster. (Lebanon, as always, deserves worse.) Having a freeway crossroads on the outskirts of town is worth jack shit, too: Hazleton has 80, 81, the Top of the 80’s, and ethnically fractious malaise being transmitted to its third and fourth generations by now. The Scarantoni and Sacarantez families keep beefing, ignoring the Scrantons and their generationally landed munificence. Yes, that’s the name of Scranton’s founding family, and yes, that medley of premium crackers is still on the scene around here, but mysteriously never in the fray with the dueling ethnics.

Those who are woke to socioeconomic injustice can easily blame the premium crackers for causing all the trouble by deplorably chucking all the poor ethnics into the hand-me-down basket with the salty crackers and demanding that these diverse dispossessed cordially #RaceTogether. It’s a bad setup, to be sure.

Then something like this happens. External loci of control can be blamed for quite a few vices and pathologies in left-behind America, and the stress of struggling to make ends meet in a left-behind town has to aggravate people’s existing demons, but this dude has something intrinsically way the hell wrong with himself, and the Company isn’t the source of whatever external validation he’s been receiving for being such a loose cannon.

What happened was that a practicing ammosexual lured a romantic rival into a late-night confrontation over the other guy’s girlfriend and shot the guy in the face and neck with a shotgun. A parking enforcement officer heard the shots, discovered the victim kneeling and clutching his bleeding face, and had the victim transported to a hospital for emergency surgery. At press time, the victim was in critical condition after surgery to remove shotgun pellets, with possible carotid artery damage, brain hemorrhaging, and inner ear damage that may leave him deaf for life.

The victim told the parking officer that he’d been shot by “George.” A few hours earlier, at around one in the morning, the victim had asked his son to come to a bar to serve as a witness in case “George” did anything violent during their manly woman confrontation. Police were able to identify “George” as George Salata by following his footprints into the apartment where he lived. He was arrested after a pre-dawn standoff lasting an hour or two and, for reasons not explained in the original article, arraigned in handcuffs, shackles, and a hospital gown. The judge remanded him in lieu of $100,000 bond and preemptively ordered him, in the event of his pre-trial release, to stay away from alcohol, other drugs, and his victim. The police seized “multiple rifles” from Salata’s apartment under the arraignment court’s order.

The original article is a jumbled, confusing mess, and the arraignment documents don’t sound much clearer, but there’s plenty that’s obviously wrong with George Salata and his victim, Michael Gontz. Gontz tried to have a family member witness an armed and probably inebriated lunatic’s increasingly belligerent tirade instead of leaving the bar and calling the police. Gontz had no idea what the lunatic’s surname was, even though he knew where “George” lived and they were arguing over his girlfriend. An apparently struggling and underemployed tradesman with a serious temper problem was maintaining an arsenal in his apartment.

The craziest thing about George Salata was that, in addition to several DUI convictions, he had been convicted and sentenced to jail in 2004 for shooting his brother’s hunting falcon during a dispute over some tools. This shit is fucking insane. As badly as Luzerne County has been treated in the midst of deindustrialization and the depletion of its economically recoverable coal reserves, this lustful hothead George and his idiot neighborhood girl-hoarder Michael brought this particular chaos down on themselves. Before this river becomes an ocean–never mind: different George, different Michael–before you leave that shrapnel in my face, here are some other foolish notions you should have reconsidered probably back in the Reagan Administration:

hoarding guns on a roustabout painter’s wages;

blasting a shotgun in your romantic rival’s face (a downright pedestrian foible under the circumstances);

arguing over tools;

accidentally shooting hunting birds;

somehow never figuring out what the hell your neighbors have in the way of last names.

The right wing makes plenty of noise about shitlibs not respecting the rights of gun owners, but shit, how do they think responsible hunters and target shooters feel when they’re represented by some wackjob who nearly blew a man’s face off because he covets his neighbor’s wife, habitually drives under the influence of alcohol, brandishes firearms while drunk, and shot his own brother’s hunting bird during a dispute over tools? (Nixon: “Craftsman? Christ.”) This is like the AAA being run for Gulf Arab Eurotrash who T-bone your Focus with their Lamborghinis during their drag races. Of course, this is pretty much what the NRA has become: an organization devoted to the aggrandizement of trigger-happy lunatics who would be frog-marched off the firing range by boiling-mad counselors at any decently run Boy Scout camp. And it must be annoying, to say the least, to be a normal, well-adjusted person trying to get by and better oneself in a washed-up old coal town when a noisy local subculture keeps encouraging the adrift local men, and often enough women, too, to promiscuously brandish guns during their fits of anger, like that’s what’s keeping the Redcoats from retaking Lexington. This is like letting structural Kajieme Powell speak on behalf of the entire Northside Community AND the St. Louis restaurant industry because Kajieme was from the neighborhood and, like any respectable prep cook, he always had a thing for knives.

I can say from disgusting personal experience with my slumlords in Eureka that it’s bad news not to know other people’s last names, especially when they’re shady. If someone’s batting at least three for seven in real time on the deadly sins and doing it loaded for fowl, it’s time to learn a cracker’s legal name yesterday. These dipshits literally do not know who their neighborhood bruisers are. Think about trying to serve legal process on a disruptive neighborhood under these circumstances: “His name is George. He lives over there in that apartment building.” Think about trying to help the police track a hothead down when he gets violent with you: “George shot me. He lives over there. Jesus Christ, my face is on fire.”

The people I really feel for in these situations, again, are more or less normal people trying to hack it around neighbors like these. They’re trying to salvage some remnant of middle-class stability from the wrecks of their communities while the police try to track down some guy with only one name by following his footprints through the snow.

More shootings happen in the summer than in the winter. Good fucking luck. You might as well join Paul LePage in publicly asking D-Money and Smoothie for interstate child support. Government isn’t the problem here. The scary thing is that government sure as hell isn’t the solution, either. God only knows what is.

No more excuses. It’s time to start throwing Travis Kalanick into the Bay.

Posted by

0

A sleazy outfit called The Penny Hoarder has been plastering my Facebook feed with exceptionally offensive promoted content ads under the teaser, “No more excuses. It’s time to start adulting.” The headline for the linked article says, “41 Hustlers Show Us How To Make Extra Money in 2017.” Oddly, I can’t locate the original article at The Penny Hoarder or find the original ads on Facebook. Maybe the originals were memory-holed. Or maybe they were just recycled. The Penny Hoarder is absolutely shameless about plagiarizing itself; it constantly copies and pastes paragraphs from old articles into new articles under barely modified headlines.

The Penny Hoarder is a very sleazy, almost creepy organization. To my surprise, but not really to my surprise, it’s based in Florida. The advice I’ve seen it give includes making an extra hundred dollars by participating in these medical studies (pimp your Crohn’s Disease) and selling surplus breast milk on the open market. Get stoked, America! You have a bright future as wet nurses and prophylactic blood donors for the Thiel family! It’s also, inevitably, an affiliate marketing scam for Uber. Every fucking article that claims to have even a tangential relationship to jobs tells readers to drive for Uber. Woot woot! Most of these jobs don’t even require you to get up off your couch! 8: Drive for Uber. Its tips on saving money on food, including ways not to be “hangry,” imply that a significant portion of its readership, or at least its target readership, is food-insecure, i.e., actually hungry, not like OMG Burger King is venting its fryers and that’s making me so frickin’ hungry.

Is this how a once-stable middle class stumbles into generational penury? Am I really watching this happen in real time? Observers warn that the United States is turning into twentieth-century Argentina (Fabius Maximus), late Renaissance Spain and Holland (Kevin Phillips), and Late Imperial Rome (all of them). I don’t see why you can’t get you an overextended military empire and carceral state that can be all four at once. Middle-class thrift stops being middle-class when coupon-clipping turns into selling breast milk over the internet to pay for diapers. There’s something very, very wrong here.

Of course the kids are afraid of “adulting” these days. They’re afraid that they won’t be able to make ends meet without selling their own bodily fluids. Whack off at a sperm bank every few weeks to stop your roommates from pestering you for rent and accidentally initiate your own legion spawn into the Inferior Order of the Most Consanguineous High Priesthood of Muhjizzidik. God. An accident with a woman one actually knows, in both senses, wouldn’t be that kind of trouble.

What the hell world are we inheriting here? This is the setup for a civil war. Young people are graduating with six-figure debt, not dischargeable in bankruptcy thanks to Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., and shit for job prospects. Simultaneously, other young people are coming back from our endless wars in the Middle East with festering grievances and the military training to demand their redress in manners of which Clausewitz would not particularly approve. We just had that Alaska National Guardsman shoot up the Fort Lauderdale Airport after telling G-Men in Anchorage that he was being brainwashed by ISIS and getting himself an official shrinking at the local nut shop. We’ll be lucky if we don’t end up with our own FARC. Rugged individualism may sound like an improvement, but remember, Andrew Kehoe was a good rugged individualist, too.

This live Dickens production, featuring Major Dr. Nidal Hasan on light percussion, could turn into a Robespierrian romance with awfully little warning. Does anyone seriously want to argue that taking refuge with socioeconomically secure parents is anything but utterly prudent under the circumstances? Believe me, the alternatives can be scary. Hiring authority has increasingly been relinquished to imperious, meddlesome blowhards who make candidates jump through hoops and humiliate themselves just because they can. The job market in many areas remains saturated with immigrants, legal and illegal alike, who cultivate exactly the ties to kin and community that the native stock has been propagandized to forsake for its own individual betterment. If there’s ethnic discrimination in hiring (and there absolutely is), people with strong community and family referral networks will have an easier time working around it than those with weak networks. This is especially true when the discrimination is against the native stock, not in its favor, as is the case in much of the menial job market. The housing stock has been stolen by the worst sorts of institutional landlords, who have their own suite of ugly prejudices that they assert over fair housing laws because hardly anyone tries to stop them. This is why the poor end up living out of hotels run by managers who act like prison wardens towards their own tenants.

The problem here isn’t with adjustment to adulthood; it’s with adjustment to a lawless dystopia of atomized poverty. There was much less of this in the midcentury. It existed, but it was much more marginal, and it was easier for someone who wasn’t totally profligate to save up enough money from menial jobs to break the cycle and get into something more prosperous and stable. The rent-seeking had been toned the hell down. There was strong social pressure across the board against kicking a man when he was down, either for fun or for profit.

Things have gone to hell even since I graduated from college a bit over a decade ago. I graduated in 2006, two years before the full onset of the fourth-turning secular depression of 2008. In retrospect, I don’t know whether I was lucky or unlucky in this regard. It might have been better to start out from rock bottom and not get my initial hopes dashed. I don’t believe the news stories of the economic recovery. We’ve made economic progress as a nation, but the severe disruption of ca. 2008 has not been entirely resolved. I believe, for one thing, that I’m still personally suffering from unresolved ramifications of the crash. We still have stagflation in housing costs, and now in costs for not only medical care but for mandatory health insurance as well.

People who can’t get jobs, especially young and youngish people, can easily blame themselves for their own inability to find work. They have no way to control for all the external variables. I got my first job in 2001, when many people first entering the job market today were infants or prepubescent children. I’ve watched the stated minimum qualifications get more and more absurd. My experiences wasting my time and money on fruitless open calls for minimum wage food service positions in Southern California suggest that the popular culture and popular lore about showing up in LA and getting a job in the eighties are closer to the actual job market in LA in the eighties than the job market today is. Things have genuinely gone to hell. A whole lot of people are arbitrarily getting shut out of the labor and housing markets. It’s impossible to say what the hell is really happening in many of these situations. If hiring managers were honest about their motivations, their companies would get sued into bankruptcy. What I’ve been able to piece together indicates systemic discrimination on the bases of sex, race, and national origin, but I’ve never found a smoking gun that would have been admissible in court. Most of it is either hearsay or freelance Kremlinology. Still, “I kicked her out because she couldn’t keep her legs shut” says more about the actual housing market than Scott Pelley’s gravitas smirk about the latest numbers on housing starts.

The way the successful have been acting about these circumstances is disgraceful, of course. The rest of us are antediluvian bigots for agreeing with Donald Trump that it’s time to bring back the factory jobs. We aren’t actually looking to restore an industrial economy that works for the working class; we really just want to put our wives in Leave It to Beaver tract-house purdah and crack skulls on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Fuck. I have black relatives by marriage now. Do I sound like I want to immiserate them and their friends for the heartwarming feels? I don’t even want to immiserate Joe Dirtbag, just stop him from abusing landlord authority over Tobacco Road and baiting me into feuds with random cops, and that motherfucker ran me into homelessness.

There’s a long history, almost entirely hidden, of integrated labor unions in the United States, even in Jim Crow Alabama, but for some reason, we’re always hearing about how Southie micks, Milwaukee mill Pollacks, Bull Connor cracker cronies, and the like hate the hell out of colored folk, unlike the fancy-pants WASP’s, who never had a problem with the ethnics or the Negroes and certainly never barred Jews from their hotels or universities. These deeply pedigreed Anglo-Dutch fusspots never looked down their monocled noses at anyone or set up any sort of divide-and-conquer ethnic strife among the orders inferior to their own. The officer class never had anything to do with the Klan. It was always just the salty crackers who were into that shit.

It’s so funny how I keep saying that I support a more equitable and robust industrial policy benefiting the working classes of all races, allowing their desperate members to stop hustling all the time, like hustling is unambiguously good thing and not also the name of a very dirty magazine, when what I mean to say is that I just want to march around Washtenaw County in a sheet, carrying a cross and a can of gasoline. Maybe I should let my betters speak for me again. Maybe we all should. Why should we keep confusing people who hear us saying one thing on our own behalf and another, totally different thing being said on our behalf by sleazy third-party marketeers?

#TeshTips: All kinds of backsass comes to those who speak on behalf of the voiceful. Avoid this by speaking on behalf of the voiceless instead.

A nation of bedwetters

Posted by

0

The Trump golden showers story got sprayed all over my transom as my reward for sporadically checking in on the news, so I might as well put in a quick word about it.

First, we have public business to do (uh, maybe yuck, given the circumstances), and the internet blew up with piss jokes. Is Bernie Sanders the only federal official trying to attend to this business while the rest of the Democratic Party titters about Russian escorts peeing on a hotel bed? “The Federal Government: I lost the presidential primary, but I’m not going to let you lose Social Security and Medicare” vs. “The Federal Government: Soon to be led by the oaf who went to Moscow to watch FSB assets do pee-pee voodoo on his predecessor’s mattress.” We have ongoing maturity and focus from the old socialist who got ratfucked out of the presidency by misandrist, racebaiting bourgeois supremacists and is now out barnstorming to save the safety net while the yuppie swarm that ratfucked him goes on the internet to traffic jokes about how Trump is a Goldwater Republican.

This is like watching FDR get kicked back to Albany while the US government falls into the hands of William Randolph Hearst, Warren Harding, the Duke of Windsor, and a bunch of thoroughly sauced flappers. It’s just fucking surreal. Do we have even two dozen members of Congress who are trying to hold the line against this Imperial Roman decadence? There’s no indication of that in all the chatter about the president-elect having had FSB call girls do a Pussy Riot-style piss job on a bed that the incumbent president and first lady had used on a state visit. Instead we’re hearing about Pissing Monkey Syndrome by Foreign Proxy.

There’s been a lot of chatter from limousine liberals (NB: not the Berned-over left) about how Trump’s behavior in Russia was blackmail material, treasonous subversion on behalf of a hostile power, etc. Having hookers pee on a hotel bed just to spite one’s political enemy is off-brand even for Trump, but not as much as it would be for most politicians. Trump is notoriously petty, rude, and grandiose, so it doesn’t sound all too far out of character, even if it’s crazier and seedier than his usual lechery. He had already been smeared endlessly as a horrible oaf with horrible sexual morals before this Bedtime with R. Kelly story came out, so it didn’t come as an exceptional scandal. Hearing about watersports in the political news is shocking; hearing about Trump being sexually dissolute is not.

Some accounts of this incident intone that Trump and his rent girls “defiled” the president’s marriage bed. No, they didn’t. They vandalized a piece of hotel furniture. The Obamas expected nothing more than a very comfortable, very clean bed. As VIP guests at a luxury hotel, they surely got exactly that. They didn’t demand a fucking bedigree. They didn’t need to know who had done what in the sheets because they were given fresh ones. I’ve slept in nastier beds than any the Trumps, the Obamas, or anyone else in their class has used in decades, if ever. Some of the motels where I stay would horrify the elites. A few of them disgusted me. Presidents and puffed-up real estate magnates with network television gigs don’t sleep in joints that chintzy.

There’s no fucking way to know that the bed that Trump and his piss bitches “defiled” was the same one that the Obamas had used on a prior visit to Russia. This assumes that Trump actually did anything of the sort, which is dubious, but let’s assume that the FSB videotaped the deed and showed it to a snickering Putin. Did they also videotape the same bed without interruption from the time the Obamas left the room until the time Trump and his hoes arrived? Who the fuck would watch that? A tweaker wouldn’t be able to keep up interest in that shit if it were put on fast-forward. The most they have on him cold is that he behaved dissolutely in a room where a sitting US president had previously stayed.

It’s doubtful that Russian intelligence would have leaked information on an incident of this sort when its obvious institutional interest is to keep it quiet and use it for ongoing blackmail against a sitting president. Russian intelligence is disciplined as all hell, so it would have to take either a powerfully disillusioned defector/mole/double agent or a very well-paid crook to let the cat out of the bag. To one-up themselves now, the Russki spooks would have to release video of Trump doing something truly extreme to shock anyone with his sexual behavior: blatant pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, extreme Jian Ghomeshi game, murdering a sex partner, that kind of thing. Or maybe catch him snuggling with a babushka. THAT would be off-brand. I can’t believe that this, of all times, might be the one time that the Russian security services got sloppy with their classification protocols.

Were the whores who wetted the bed, if they actually did it, state-patriotic intelligence assets of Mother Russia and Father Vladimir, the ruler of the world? Maybe. Or they may have been independent working girls who were taped by third parties from the spook shop. Actually, he’s more like Vladikrym Vladikavkazovich once we’ve accounted for his limited interest in regional revanchism in the historically Russian and quasi-Russian periphery. This doesn’t really matter, though. What the mainstream media keep missing is that even if Trump owes the Kremlin favors, the Clintons owe the Saudi regime and others, some of them also quite odious, favors for advance payments to the Clinton Foundation. If we’re worried about compromising relationships with hostile powers, we should be worried about Saudi Arabia, not Russia. The Saudi government sponsored and coordinated 9/11; the Russian government warned the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s summit with the Caucasian beards, and the FBI dindu nuffin. Call me crazy, but don’t we want to seek better relations with the government that tried to prevent several deaths and hundreds of maimings on US soil before we try to kiss up to the one whose high-level agents orchestrated the deadliest peacetime attack in US history? God. How the hell was Tsarnaev the one guy they couldn’t get under an active wiretap in a perpetual surveillance state after one of the soberest security services on earth alerted them to his specific contacts with known jihadi radicals?

Nah, babe, this beam’s still hard as steel.

I always feel better about myself when I hear about politicians doing things like this, or that our government and its favored press outlets are run by the kinds of people who think pre-presidential watersports germane to the public discourse and/or have minds capable of thinking up such a ridiculous story and writing it. I don’t have whores piss on my enemies’ beds in front of me. That ain’t my scene. It probably should be more disturbing than it is to consider that the entire establishment may be projecting its own fetishes onto Trump (kind of like I’m less bothered than Larry Craig traditionally was by other men’s manful buttsex), but mainly it makes me feel healthy and well-adjusted by comparison.

What’s that? There’s probably something to this story but definitely nothing to Pizzagate? Sure. James Alefantis isn’t quite an anagram for j’aime les enfants, but Podesta is definitely an anagram for tsaPedo. Also, that’s some creepy, creepy shit. It already involves an ammosexual citizen-investigator patsy figure and a Zapruder scion who just happens to live in the neighborhood.

Go figure that Backpage’s escort sections were taken offline this very week. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking about something wholesome, like Sound and Pound with a thicky trick. Remember, if you go fuck a fat whore in Tacoma, Donald Trump and the liberal establishment will agree that you’re gross, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Bad moon rising again; get stoked, Fogerty!

Posted by

0

Civilization is an intricate, finely tuned, finicky machine. Certain of its minor components can break and be left unrepaired indefinitely without consequence. Other components, even ones that may look superfluous or redundant or frivolous at first glance to those who aren’t familiar with their roles in the machine, immediately cause serious consequences when they fail.

The bus I had planned to take from Arcata to Crescent City was canceled last night. Another passenger approached me half an hour after the scheduled departure and told me that all service had been canceled for the rest of the night; that is, two of the day’s three scheduled runs north from Arcata. This passenger had a drifter vibe about him and was passing along secondhand information that he’d been given at the social services shop across the parking lot from the transit center, so I decided to trust but verify. Between two versions of Google Maps, the CalTrans highway information automated phone hotline, the CalTrans highway information website, the CHP website, the CHP Twitter feed, the Lost Coast Outpost, and the KURY-FM, JPR, and KHSU websites, my dad and I were unable to find any evidence that 101 had been closed. The Redwood Coast Transit website said nothing about service having been canceled.

I couldn’t think of any other reason why bus service would have been canceled. Interstate 80 had been shut down through a wide swath of the Sierra earlier that day, Amtrak had canceled the California Zephyr between Sacramento and Reno on account of the same storm, there had been flooding all day in low-lying areas all over Northern California, and Highway 299 had been closed for weeks at the scene of a major landslide in the Trinity River gorge between Weaverville and Willow Creek. Years earlier, I had made my first trip ever on the Coast Starlight, out of Redding, because a similar landslide had buried the full width of 101 just north of the north exit for Redway, cutting SoHum off from the rest of the county for anyone prudent enough not to dick around with thirty-mile detours on shitty back roads.

After half an hour of near-constant inquiries with no evidence of a closure, I called the RCT office and asked for confirmation that service had been canceled for the night due to a road closure. No, the dispatcher told me, it had been canceled due to high winds. As in, like duh, why else? Uh, maybe because roads around here get shut down by landslides all the time? The North Coast civic poobahs who go on KURY to pester listeners to call their elected officials for immediate bypass funding make it sound like the Last Chance Grade won’t last the winter; with the once-in-a-decade storm line that had been hitting California, I wasn’t about to assume it had survived the night.

It sounded like the weather in Crescent City last night was pretty rough, so it can’t have been good for driving, but I also get the feeling that maybe RCT is run by a bed of shrinking violets. Most commercial drivers stay on the road as long as there are marginally passable routes where they’re going. This helps explain why commercial drivers have high rates of occupational injury and death. It also helps explain why supply lines are so reliable.

My stance here isn’t oh, bullshit, stop being such a pussy. Since last month I’ve known more personally than ever how dangerous Del Norte County’s highways can be. I don’t want anyone getting maimed or killed in a preventable crash. But there’s a very real trade-off here. Shutting down transit service during inclement weather can leave passengers stranded in the same inclement weather. Rural transit systems serve exceptionally indigent passenger bases. The poor make up more than their fair share of the ridership on most local transit systems, but in larger cities they share the systems with affluent passengers who have other options. Rural and small-town systems like Redwood Coast Transit have almost exclusively indigent passenger bases, augmented by a few non-indigent elderly and on special occasions by what we might call, for lack of a more politically correct term that does the job, normal people who wonder why the hell they’re on the bus.

During a storm like last night’s, a cancellation could have stranded passengers at a bus stop in Klamath or Orick all night in the driving rain. There are more ways for a poorie’s housing situation to go wrong than right; damned if I’m not personally familiar with this and how much it sucks. The drifterish guy who told me about the service cancellation was stuck in Arcata for the night without a place to stay, since he didn’t feel comfortable with the shelter where he’d been offered a bed. To my dismay, he asked to split a hotel room with me and do what he could to cover the cost. I had to decline. Whether he meant to or not, this dude was prying into my finances, and I have to stop that shit cold. Loose talk on the streets indicating that I can afford a room for the night could get me mugged. Besides, I had barely met this dude. I had my passports, a copy of my birth certificate, bank cards, and a number of financial statements with me, any of which, for all I knew, this guy could have examined or stolen while I was sleeping, and I had no way to be sure that he wouldn’t be a dipshit and light a cigarette in a nonsmoking room on my dime.

RCT left both of us in the jungle. I had the resources to navigate my way out and the other guy didn’t. As much as I felt for him and his plight, I couldn’t help him out. I didn’t feel that I was in a position to do so safely. He seemed to have someone willing to take him in in Crescent City that night, but he had no way to get there before the next afternoon. It would have cost me over two hundred dollars to get both of us up there by cab that night, and I didn’t feel that I could justify that expense when I’m so close to the wire myself so often. A bus system that was something between cautious and chickenshit in marginal weather threw us into a Darwinian nightmare far beyond my capacity to fix.

This shit always seems to fall on me specifically. My friends and relatives don’t travel on America’s worst common carriers. They don’t end up face to face with vulnerable, desperate, hapless bums all the time. Some of them seem to avoid public transit in order to keep the likes of these losers out of their lives, even as nothing more than passing scenery. I’m sure that the most bourgeois supremacist of them are of a mind to tell me to drive or take Uber like a good normie just so that I’m not surrounded by this pulsating mass of human refuse. Fuck that. Trolleys have to be totally overwhelmed by legit shady motherfuckers to stop being bitchin’ rides.

RCT is a different story. I never meant to use it. It always looked like a uselessly desultory system with unjustifiably high intercounty fares. Then I ended up with business to do in Crescent City, no car of my own because of Crescent City (OK, more like Hiouchi), and difficulty, at best, qualifying for a rental car, so there I was at the Arcata bus station, waiting for a bus that didn’t come.

In addition to the vaguely vagrant guy who wanted to share a room with me, I had to deal with a retarded man who was incessantly moaning at me to ask the time and for information on when the next bus was due to leave for Eureka. When I finally tried to look at the schedule on the wall for him, at his request, he got in my way by propping his arm on the wall so that it cast a shadow over the schedule and jutting his torso out so that I couldn’t possibly get close enough to read the damn thing in the low ambient light without putting my face right between the wall and his own. The pleas for the time of day kept coming, sometimes every 45 seconds. In the midst of this, I was trying to reserve a local hotel room on my hand-me-down iPhone (a much more useful gift from the ‘rents than the two Nooks they’ve given me, in my experience). His whining and moaning became so disruptive that after several minutes I raised my voice and told him, “Excuse me, I’m trying to do some work here. Can I have some silence, please?” At that point, he shut up for a couple minutes, to weep silently under his blanket for all I know. The salient point is that the noise about the hour and the bus schedule wasn’t my problem any longer.

I couldn’t tell just how retarded this dude was, but slower than the Loop at rush hour is a good approximation. His diction was close to normal, but he had facial abnormalities consistent with congenital mental retardation, not Down’s Syndrome by my guess but also not too far off from Down’s, and there was clearly something badly wrong with some combination of his short-term memory, listening ability, and literacy. Hell if I know why he was out alone after dark in the midst of a ten-year weather event. I don’t think he should have been, but he was. When I saw him last, he was writhing in slow motion and whimpering at the bottom of his lungs with a comforter wrapped around his entire body, head and all, and bits of trash spilling out of a cheap roller suitcase next to him. I wasn’t exactly interested in whether this suitcase was actually his, since I’d had my fill of that nonsense.

I certainly wasn’t interested in trying to cancel my hotel reservation in Crescent City around any of these losers, so I walked to the Co-Op for the second time that night for coffee and the fellowship of the legally competent. One of the people I talked to at the Co-Op laughed and said that of course the bus station was crawling with crazies; it always is. I guess what I’d expected of Arcata had been more trustafarian hustlers, fuck-the-man grungies, and loafaday stoners. Some retarded guy who doesn’t really know what time it is and does in fact really care could have annoyed me at the terminal of any podunk townie bus company. If I’d been in Chicago, I’d have had recourse to the Chicago Transit Authority, and the artists formerly known as the Chicago Transit Authority have recourse to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Being in Arcata instead, I had to summon a special authority all my own to transport that retard to the land of quiet time.

That, friends, is a small-town problem. In absolute numbers there may be more hopeless, useless losers on big-city transit systems, but they’re swamped by the sheer volume of normies. Ain’t nothin’ against the big town, except everything that’s wrong with America’s Finest Big Town, but I don’t recall ever rolling into San Diego and immediately having some retard on the loose at the trolley station moaning at me to no end.  A little ditty about jackin’ it, Diane. I mean, uh. I did once have a shady Community member on the MTS Blue Line get just a bit up in my face, ask to borrow my phone, and tell the party on the other end, “I’m borrowing phones from random niggas and shit.” No, he did not thank me afterwards, the nice asshole. But, as he might say, that’s just one random nigga. There were dozens of people on our car alone that night. The retard and I were two of maybe six people hanging around the bus station perimeter. The retard wouldn’t be able to do the math, but maybe you will.

Don’t ask me why I refer to an anonymous retarded guy as a retard on the internet. Ask yourselves whether you ever even try to minister to the likes of him. I’d been on buses and trains for most of the previous twenty-four hours and was trying to figure out where I was going to sleep that night. What time is it? It’s #TIME for #TIMMEH to get a #TIMEPIECE.

I have no evidence of this, just a gut feeling, but I suspect that RCT may have cancelled bus service last night for unspoken financial-cum-socioeconomic reasons. It must be well known locally that the bus system is run for losers with social services meetings, not good upstanding citizens whose work ethic has inspired God to bless them with wheels, and not the kind of St. Elmo’s Fire wheels used by, say, *TIMMEH*, either. If dispatchers are overly cautious about shutting the bus system down during severe weather, well, sucks to be a loser; see ya, wouldn’t wanna BE ya!

But it isn’t just reactionary local politics turning public services to shit. Federal transit funding rules are designed, perhaps inadvertently, to perennially screw over rural local governments looking to improve their transit services. I haven’t read much about this lately, but there at least used to be a fairly hard-and-fast rule requiring transit agencies to maintain an absolute minimum farebox recovery ratio as a condition of federal disbursements. I think it was 20% or 50% or something, so maybe my math isn’t that much better than my bus stop retard’s, but I distinctly remember it being an across-the-board deal.

What the feds are trying to prevent here is pretty obvious. They don’t want every alderman’s nephew, son-in-law, and circle of assorted cronies stealing federal transit grants and then pleading insolvency on behalf of their agencies. They don’t want crooks latching onto metropolitan transit agencies with naturally large passenger volumes and obliterating all natural efficiency while the infrastructure inexorably disintegrates and service levels go to hell. They want to encourage at least a small measure of restraint, not a large measure of RAHM SHANTI, RAHM HARE HARE.

Del Norte County doesn’t have a chance of achieving Chicago efficiency. I’m not saying that Chicago is efficient in practice; I’m saying that it could be and can be if various crooks are driven out of power, which would probably inspire more public-spiritedness among the union rank-and-file anyway. What I’m saying is that Chicagoland has something like six million residents. Del Norte County has fewer than thirty thousand, a much rougher topography, and a much more remote location.

That is, Del Norte County cannot be run at a profit. It is not self-sufficient. It depends on trade to export its local produce (milk, beef cattle, timber, some seafood, Easter lilies) and to import everything else. The road network, port infrastructure, Coast Guard protection, and other bare basic services cost a shitload of money. We can include public transit, or not, depending on how we feel about the poors specifically. For a geographically diverse country that isn’t insane about how it gets by, funding this stuff shouldn’t be too controversial. For a geographically and socially diverse federal country with a history of sectional civil war, known in certain sections as the “recent unpleasantness” (hint: rhymes with “shut yaw mouth”), it may be too controversial after all.

Yes, there’s worse about America. The homelessness problem, for example, not that we’re doing much to fix it. One pleasantly surprising upside to getting stuck in Eureka overnight was stumbling upon Community Voices, hosted by Eureka public eccentric Dave Silverbrand and featuring as the night’s guest Eureka City Councilman-Elect Austin Allison. I voted for Allison because his opponent, John Fullerton, sounded too punish-the-bums reactionary and authoritarian for my taste. Both Austin and Fullerton have good things to say about Betty Chinn, a sort of lay religious woman called to a life of charity who runs a number of successful high-volume outreach programs for the homeless and vulnerable in Eureka. The problem with Fullerton’s approach was that he seemed to regard Chinn as a one-woman panacea. She isn’t. Like any other nun, official or de facto, she’s swamped by the sheer volume of the problems she’s trying to alleviate. That’s exactly what happens with Loaves and Fishes in Sacramento, which is also a very lean, well-run program under Christian auspices that ministers directly to homeless hard cases. Government policy got this country into the homelessness mess, and government policy will be needed to get us all back out of it.

Community Voices is almost painfully civil. Dave Silverbrand is surprisingly sociable for a guy who walks his dog in a stroller. I don’t think I’d call him normal exactly, but God knows there’s worse in Eureka, starting with the police department. At one point, he asked Allison what he’d say, hypothetically, to the homeless about how to improve their lot and so forth, and Allison replied that he works with the homeless on a regular basis in a professional capacity at his hospital job, so he already gives them advice and solicits their feedback. He could have sent Silverbrand to the St. Joseph’s burn unit in all sickness. Instead, he looked like he didn’t see any point to turning it up to lukewarm.

One point that Silverbrand made and Allison didn’t have the gumption to refute was that it’s hard to attract medical doctors to Eureka because it’s a dumpy town with a bad reputation and too many panhandlers. It seemed reasonable enough at the time, what with the constant stream of smooth coolness and local-access production value coming through the cable, but the more I think about it, the less I agree with it. I have trouble imagining a doc visiting Eureka from Penn or Johns Hopkins and being blown away by what a shithole it is. Besides, there’s no reason why a professional who works in Eureka has to live in Eureka when there are so many other areas within easy driving distance, especially compared to standard urban commutes. Fortuna, Arcata, Ferndale, and McKinleyville are all quite different from Eureka but easily reached from it. Hell, Henderson Center, Myrtletown, and Cutten have very different vibes from Broadway. If you’re familiar with Broadway, you know that this is a good thing.

That’s one of the problems with a parochial mindset: two guys from the municipal government dorking out on television about city business and forgetting that their county contains other cities and unincorporated areas, some of them within a lazy bastard’s easy biking distance of the hospital. More likely, medical types don’t want to relocate to Humboldt County because it’s in the middle of nowhere and has high airfares for service on itty-bitty planes from an airport so fog-prone that it was an initial development and testing ground for Instrument Landing System technology.

No shit services out this way aren’t as good as they are some places. At least they don’t include nuclear services, though. That’s the other thing I watched last night: an American Experience documentary on the Damascus missile disaster. Lordy did that sound bad. And the goddamned Air Force, lying to senators about the safety protocols and punishing missiliers for doing everything they could to prevent a nuclear holocaust.

As they told us in Scouting, stay on the sunny side. It can always get worse.