Category Archives: Social comment

What was it like growing up in the 1970s?

February 4, 2012 jkkblog 2 Comments

(This was originally a message board post people seemed to really enjoy, so I felt free to republish it here.)

When the 1970s began, Vietnam was still going on but the hippies were starting to thin out. It took pot a few years to grow mainstream (by my early high school years late in the decade it seemed like I was the only one not smoking it). Then Nixon got in trouble and resigned. I got a pretty good laugh over his later rehabilitation, given how deeply and nationally he was excoriated. In a sense, he was the initiator of the modern political climate, where the good of the nation has ceased to factor and the only thing that matters is beating the other guy. This was confirmed when Ford promptly turned around and pardoned him.

The energy crisis was just unreal. What most people do not realize today is that, in terms of relative purchasing power, the $4/gal spikes a couple years ago were probably less dramatic than what we saw in the early 70s, with gas lines around the block and rationing in place. Just as when gas was hovering around $0.80 in the late 1990s, it was actually a lot cheaper than the $0.25/gal I remember as the lowest price in my lifetime’s awareness (late 60s). As ever, most people simply have no idea how to compare costs and values from one era to the next.

One big kerfluffle was the gas pumps. They were not digital–the numbers rolled on a spindle inside–nor were they equipped to show prices over $0.99.9. When gas cleared a buck a gallon, just about every gas pump in the country required a retrofit. What a goat rodeo.

A lot of new stuff came along: the desktop digital calculator (we were awed), video games (wanting an Atari in the mid-70s was like wanting a PS3 a couple of years back, only more so because there was nothing before it), and the fadeout of party lines. (Yes, they were a prime tool for snooping on your neighbors’ conversations, and yes, that did occur. It was a punishable offense to fail to yield a party line if someone declared an emergency.)

Carter got elected just as the post-Vietnam national malaise was settling in. It lasted into the early 1980s. Might have been the worst president ever for the time in which we got him. Inflation up to double digits. Interest rates for borrowing up in the same neck of the woods. People with decent credit and income who do not buy houses now, at today’s depressed mortgage rates and prices, simply have no idea of the historic buying opportunity before them, perhaps because it was before they were born. Carter’s focus was to rag on the rest of the world to have better human rights. (Everyone ignored him.) That didn’t do jack for our flopping national morale. The modern deification of the troops? Unthinkable. Did not exist. The military was outdated, had too many druggies, and the junior officer corps in particular was shaky. Good thing the Soviets didn’t invade West Germany in 1976–they probably would have won. Happy Bicentennial.

Then comes the second defining event of the era after the energy crisis, the Iran hostage crisis. On top of that, we couldn’t even make a rescue attempt without a desert disaster. In 1979, “person who burns flags” became synonymous in many minds with “Iranian” in many minds, and the term “Iran” acquired a lasting toxicity akin to that which “Jane Fonda” has with Vietnam vets. Every night on the national news, Walter Cronkite: “And that’s the way it is, this 300th (or whatever) day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran.” When I see Iran talking about getting nuclear weapons, it proves to me that they understand us as poorly as we understand them. They truly believe that we think like them–like pragmatic Near Easterners interested in bargaining, who understand the game. They have no idea. A lot of us in those days felt so infuriated that we would have welcomed and endorsed an air attack on Iran’s population centers with weapons of mass destruction (not a chance under Carter), and some of us (emotionally, if not practically–and not everyone looks at such matters with a practical side) think it’s long overdue. That generation–mine–is now starting to run the country. If Iran had any idea of how much lasting loathing it created by taking and keeping the hostages, and how gladly some people would open up on them even thirty years later, they would turn pale. They would immediately shut down anything and everything nuclear. They would not do the least thing to give an excuse to people who, at least on an emotional level, would love a pretext to even that score with modern weapons. I’m not saying this is the right idea for us as a nation today (at least not with my rational side…), just pointing out what kind of fire they are playing with. If they knew, and they are sane (and I think they are, at least when it comes to their own survival), they would throw a bucket of water on that fire and never light it again.

That’s part of the reason the 1980 Olympic ice hockey victory meant so much, why everyone can remember where he or she was when we beat the USSR (probably glued to the TV; it should not be forgotten that we still had to beat a tough Finnish team to win the gold). We felt like a country that couldn’t do anything right, couldn’t even stop a bunch of radicals from invading our embassy and humiliating our people, couldn’t rescue them without screwing up, completely demoralized. Then came the Olympics and something finally went right. I would describe the 1970s as a time of national pessimism, a sense that we had already lost the Cold War and were just waiting to be the last non-socialist country in the world, a time of things going wrong and government unable or unwilling to do a thing to fix them. We know now, of course, that it didn’t all work out that way. But that’s how it felt at the time.

I disliked the 1970s deeply. I remember them as a nearly unbroken string of bad news, failed leadership, and general impotence. I’d never want them back again. While we had a lot more freedom as kids–we were essentially still as free-range as kids of earlier decades–I for one had the sense that my parents’ generation had completely boned the pooch and was going to leave it up to mine to clean up. And looking around at the people in my school, it seemed pretty obvious we would be too drunk, stoned and lazy to do that. (What I did not foresee was just how much worse they would screw it up; how, presented with golden opportunities, first the Boomers and then their successors would botch them.)

I graduated from high school in 1981 with a general sense of worse things to come, a very dystopian view of my country and even humanity. When the Berlin Wall fell, this dystopian view shook quite a bit–maybe I’d been wrong. Subsequent events proved that it had just been a temporary hiccup. I soon realized that our national psyche had to have its Emanuel Goldstein, a focus for regular sessions of the Two Minutes hate, and if the Soviet one were gone, we’d need a new one and we’d create it as necessary. Without an external enemy to direct the angst toward, it would find its direction inward, and a lot of people had a lot invested in that not happening.

Book reviews, Social comment

Tom Sawyer

January 10, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

I just finished re-reading this eternal classic, and I hope some of you will do the same. As a child, I had no idea of Clemens’ social commentary, which I can now appreciate a little more.

Then again, as a child of five, living in Kansas, I read it and immediately began to talk like a Missouri 1840s hillbilly kid. What you may not know about Kansas is that while there is definitely a fair bit of Cletusism in the state, the population is rather divided about it. As in: there is one segment that embraces country everything, speaks with a rural drawl and makes no apologies for it. My father comes from that stock, but more or less abandoned it to get an engineering degree. My mother doesn’t, despite her ranching upbringing, and always wanted not to be identified with backwoods habits. Not one bit.

Back home, this is somewhat accentuated by stereotypes and prejudices specific to Kansas and our Missourian neighbors, in which the perception is that Missouri has only one tooth and shares it out without even washing it. Of course, it’s not true; it’s mostly good-natured joshing but underneath it lie some authentic prejudices with deep roots more terrible than the rest of the nation understands. One of these days I’ll write about it. Suffice it to say that the folk memory runs deep on both sides, and neither side was a wagonload of saints. It’s a miracle we get along as well as we do now, probably because most sensible people realize the two states are not as different as the more prejudiced citizens of either would like to imagine.

So, along comes their son, a fairly precious little fellow whose idea of fun is to read through the whole encyclopedia, and he begins to talk like Tom Sawyer. As you may know, erudition ain’t a feature of Tom’s character.

It did not go over well at all. “But we wanted him to have access to great reading!” Oops.

Fortunately, I got over it. I still say ‘ain’t’ sometimes just to annoy her, or in cercles litteraires. I’m at ease with both. I like the down-to-earth rural life and basic practical wisdom of it all, and I like Brie. Zero reason one can’t have both, as I see it. If that doesn’t fit someone’s mailbox, they can refuse delivery and send it back.

This is the part where it’s about time to explain to why Tom Sawyer would be a good re-read. Where Clemens shines for me is in his cynicism about mob mentality, stuffiness, pretense and the fickle nature of mass opinion. The reader cannot miss it. Clemens is laughing at his characters, which seems to be his literary wheelhouse. In a lesser author, his laughter would come off mean-spirited and snooty; that’s probably how I’d ring if I set myself to the same storytelling task, which is why I don’t. Clemens laughs at people without malice, and has you laughing at them too. He ranks among our great.

Definitely a happy reunion.

Social comment

How to do a labor protest wrong

December 14, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Today I’m driving through one of our town’s major intersections, and out in front of Gold’s Gym I see three people holding up a large banner about a labor dispute with Gold’s. Hmmm. Okay, well, in general I tend to be friendly to labor in labor disputes, so I loop around and park nearby. I wander over to find out what it’s about, radiating a friendly aspect.

The picket captain in her orange vest comes over, and it goes something like this:

“Hi, what’s the dispute about?”

“Well, we’re protesting blah blah blah which I can’t talk about for obvious legal reasons, blah blah, but here is a sheet about what the protest is about and it’ll tell you all right there.” She clearly wanted me gone, mystifying to me, as it doesn’t take three people to hold up that sign.

“You can’t tell me about the dispute?”

“No. Are in a union, or close to someone who is?”

A little smile. “You might say that.” And I’m thinking, Lady, I’m married to one of the most dynamic labor leaders in the whole state of Washington. If you refuse to even have a conversation with me, your cause is doomed because you are too dumb. You didn’t even probe that statement. You should have. My wife would have been interested.

“Well, everything is in the flyer, so hope you enjoy reading it, and have a nice day.” She walks off on me. I’ve barely said a word. No discussion occurred, no accepting the opportunity to enlist support, not even from someone who walked up and showed interest. There I am, standing on the grass alone, holding a piece of green paper. Dismissed.

Bewildered, I walk away reading the flyer with the headline: SHAME ON GOLD’S GYM For Desecration of the American Way of Life. Underneath it, it has a rat eating the US flag. Well, that’s about my personal opinion of both our major parties and their governing abilities, so if they are trying to shock me, that’s not very effective. I get to reading it, and essentially Gold’s hired a contractor who hired a subcontractor that doesn’t pay the carpenters standard union wages and benefits. How this is an issue she cannot discuss for ‘obvious legal reasons’ is beyond me. Why she brushes off a gold-plated chance to make her union’s case to me is even farther beyond me. It’s an area with very little foot traffic.

For the record, the flyer is authored by the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters. It urges me to call some guy and urge him to change the situation. Yeah, I’m really sure he’s still taking calls today.

On second thought, at the rate these people are going, maybe he doesn’t even realize there’s a picket.

When I get home, I decide to call the information number to let them know what kind of shape their picket is in. A recording: please leave your name and number and we’ll have someone call you.

You know what? Nah, I think not. Figure it out yourself. No wonder organized labor can’t counter the negative propaganda about itself–when given the opportunity and a receptive audience, it won’t talk to it. It hands it a piece of paper and walks off.

PS: A friend of mine from Sweden, Mattias, has suggested that they may actually have been rental protesters. I guess there are companies out there who can be hired to protest, and their own contracts forbid them to talk about the actual issues for legal reasons. That would fill in a gap of understanding, although she was still an idiot, as the “obvious legal reasons” were hardly obvious to me. Next time I’ll have a bolt in the quiver:

“So, are you rented protesters or are you actually union members and sympathizers?”

“We can’t talk about that for legal reasons.”

“Heh, thanks. I have my answer.”

Social comment

Pizza Hut dishonors coupons–really!

November 22, 2011 jkkblog 3 Comments

I was too amused to be annoyed. Called up to order pizza from PH, current coupon in hand. It included 10 hot wings and a large pizza, about as simple as it gets. Slam dunk.

Phone guy, after talking to manager: “Uh, we can’t do that, our wings come prepackaged and we can only do packages of eight.”

Me: “Coupon says ten.”

PG: “They changed everything around just yesterday, we only have packs of eight.”

Me: “So you’re going to dishonor the coupon?”

PG (defensively): “You can talk to the manager if you want.”

Me (quite calmly): “No need. It’s a simple question; ask whoever you need to ask. Yes or no: are you actually going to dishonor a current coupon?”

PG: “We can’t do ten wings. They changed everything.”

Me: “Not my issue. Yes or no: going to honor or dishonor your coupon?”

PG: “I guess the answer would be we’re going to dishonor it.”

Me: “Okay, thanks, then no need to place the order. Bye.”

It’s not that I am greatly bothered over a couple of chicken wings. It’s not that the Pizza Hut (818 N Vineyard, Kennewick, WA) evidently isn’t very well run. It’s that the guy couldn’t even think sensibly enough to ask his manager to do something intelligent. The coupon came in one of those mailed coupon packs, so they have to know they’ll hear about this again; obviously a manager needs to devise some form of counter-offer if the coupon is somehow physically impossible to fulfill. I’m receptive to almost anything except ‘tough beans’ as an answer; ‘tough beans’ basically says “we are dishonoring our advertising, and screw you if you don’t like it–we simply don’t care.”

So I called PH’s customer satisfaction hotline, carefully concealed on their webpage in hopes that no one would call. The automated answering system did its all to convince me I couldn’t even talk to a person, but I’m persistent. It put me on a protracted hold, then hung up on me after about five minutes. Tried again, silent void.

WWHCD? He might get confused if you ask him to locate Libya on a map, but he knew a lot about how not to screw up selling pizza.

What better way to entertain myself while on protracted hold than by blogging the experience to share with the world?

Social comment

Penn State

November 10, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Well, that’s about as painful as it gets. All of a sudden UW going 0-12 a few years back, and keeping Tyrone Willingham around purely out of Seattle racial guilt, doesn’t look quite as bad as it felt at the time. I guess when they say ‘it could always be worse,’ this would be what they meant.

For those unfamiliar with the story, evidently a Penn State assistant football coach has been raping young boys at their facilities for a decade at least, and evidently the coaching staff and university knew to varying degrees that it was going on, and didn’t take steps to put a stop to it. PSU’s head coach, Joe Paterno, was the longest-tenured and most admired coach in US college football, the symbol of Doing It Right. So the idea of such an upstanding figure looking the other way, in a case like this, is something just about no one can feel neutral about. The issue here: while it happening is bad enough, people who know it happens–and allow it to continue–share at least some of the guilt. In one especially bad aspect, an assistant (named, disastrously, McQueary) actually caught the rapist in the act at one point, and didn’t do anything about it so far as we’re aware.

Paterno, the AD, the boy-raping assistant, someone else in the athletic department and the president of the university have all been sacked, and several will face felony charges (not Paterno). Look ahead to about ten years of litigation (probably longer than Paterno will live; he’s 84, had coached there since I was a toddler), profiting only lawyers. The students are somewhat rioting in support of Paterno, and the country is taking sides. You either want him and everyone involved hanging from a lamppost, or you think it’s a horrible disservice to the most visible symbol the school ever had.

My own take is that I don’t see either side doing a damn thing for the real victims, which are the boys who got raped. I see all anger and recrimination, and I understand why, but I do not understand why no one can seem to spare some emotion for those who suffered most. They certainly suffered more than a half dozen six- (in one case seven-) figure employees, though if a couple of those can’t buy their way into the nice jails, or out of jail altogether, those may get a taste of what the original victims experienced. My dominant emotion here is not fury and punishment, but what can we do for the real innocents?

I wish I heard more of that, and less rioting and screaming and such. We get so angry in these situations we forget to invest some energy in support for and kindness to the most damaged.

Social comment

Behavior vs. character

November 7, 2011 jkkblog 2 Comments

Some people judge and react to you mainly by your behavior. Others react primarily to your character. Is it about doing, or being?

In the case of children at nearly all times, the primary reaction is to behavior. (Not always. We’ve all known children with character way beyond their years.) In adults, behavior is usually the first evidence we have of who they are, so there it begins–but typically gives precedence to character in time.

This is why a child will try to rack up some good deeds to cancel out the bad deeds, or presume eternal forgiveness for all errors and misbehaviors; life is a ledger to them, gold stars and black marks, reward and penalty. An adult–at least one who thinks like an adult–will seek to correct wrongdoing going forward as well as making amends or atonement. After paying the bill, a child looks forward to getting by with the deed (or one like it) again. Plenty of adults in relationships lapse into child thinking, or never actually grow out of it. Entire segments of society have it as their foundation. Most families would have no idea how to intrarelate without it, because family is most people’s refuge for bad character. If you have people who will never reject you for lack of character, why bother to show them good character? For many, that really is what family boils down to. Paradox: that’s the low character response anyway. In short, if one is of low character with family and high character with non-relatives, maybe it means one is of basic low character and just puts on a better front to the world. Maybe it also means character can be situational, and that the entire subject is more nuanced and complex than I have thought through. You tell me. I don’t pretend to be an authority on this. Dissect the fallacies in my thinking, and I will thank you.

Does behavior reflect character? Not always, but that’s really the fundamental question, is it not? If my wife says something cruel and unjustified to me, does that mean she’s of low character, or that she’s simply having a bad behavioral lapse? If she is of high character, such an utterance is out of her character, and doesn’t reflect who she is. Of course, if she is of high character, it won’t be long before she’s pretty embarrassed by it, because it is not who she really is. But while her words may have offended me, my fundamental reaction to her is to her character, not one action. It would take more than one bad behavior to convince me her character had altered. Hope she sees me the same way. She must, because she has self-respect and she stays married to me. Surely there’s something about my character she likes, because it certainly isn’t because of my mighty deeds (or mighty misdeeds never committed).

What got me thinking about this is a period of watching a child in an adult body, experiencing the world from one unsustainable pleasure or toy to the next, seemingly contrite over black marks and happy over gold stars, happy to do the minimum to get by. The individual never fully grasped that it wasn’t about bookkeeping good and bad acts, but the development of personal character. And when it became clear that this person’s priority was not the same as my priority, there was nothing left to do but turn her/him loose to find it as s/he might.

Or might not.

Looking back at this, I am alarmed how much I sound like a mediocre Andy Rooney knockoff. But I’m posting it anyway. The disappointment hurt, and maybe talking about it will help.

Married life, Social comment

Facebook chain sermons about animal love

October 22, 2011 jkkblog 6 Comments

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that a lot of folks find themselves deeply moved by some of these–and sometimes they even affect me. Today I had a good rejoinder for one and was feeling self-promoting enough to share it, with the kind permission of Lisa, who gets props for being a great sport about it. It accompanied a cartoon picture of a couple in bed, each perched on an edge, with several animals hogging the middle:

“IF I DIDN’T HAVE MY DOGS OR CATS:

I could walk around the yard barefoot in safety
My house could be carpeted instead of tiled and laminated
All flat surfaces, clothing, furniture and cars would be free of hair
When the doorbell rings, it wouldn’t sound like a kennel
When the doorbell rings, I could get to the door without wading through fuzzy bodies who got there before me
I could sit on the couch and bed the way I wanted without taking into consideration how much space several fur bodies would need to get comfortable.
I would have money and no guilt to go on a real vacation.
I would not be on a first-name basis with 6 veterinarians, as I put their yet unborn grandkids through college.
The most used words in my vocabulary would not be: out, sit, down, come, no, stay and leave it ALONE.
My house would not be cordoned off into zones with baby gates or barriers.
I would not talk ‘baby talk’. ‘Eat your din din’. ‘Yummy yummy for the tummy’…
My house would not look like a day care center, toys everywhere.
My pockets would not contain things like poop bags, treats and an extra leash.
I would no longer have to spell the words B-A-L-L, W-A-L-K, T-R-E-A-T, O-U-T, G-O, R-I-D-E, C-O-O-K-I-E.
I would not have as many leaves INSIDE my house as outside.
I would not look strangely at people who think having ONE dog/cat ties them down too much
I’d look forward to spring and the rainy season instead of dreading ‘mud’ season.
I would not have to answer the question ‘Why do you have so many animals?’ from people who will never have the joy in their lives of knowing they are loved unconditionally by someone as close to an ANGEL as they will ever get.”

How EMPTY my life would be!!!

[last known credit: Wanda Jones]

I thought about it for a moment, then replied:

“Well, I’ll be able to go along with that the day an actual angel uses my basement as a celestial urinal, or lays a holy steamer next to my wife while she’s decorating our fake holiday tree, or throws up angel yack on my bedroom carpet causing naked me (coming in late and in the dark) to slip and fall on my bare ass in about six quarts of angel vomitus.”

No, I wasn’t making that up or exaggerating. It happened about six years back. We have a Labrador Retriever named Fabius. I named him for Q. Fabius Maximus Verrocosus Cunctator, Dictator of Rome, for a number of reasons. The chief one was that as a puppy (he was primarily ears and paws), Fabius would not come on his leash. He delayed us frequently. Fabius Maximus’ epithet ‘Cunctator’ means ‘the delayer’ or ‘the procrastinator,’ depending on whether you are admiring his tactics of wearing Hannibal down, or grousing that he doesn’t immediately win the war for Rome…’Fabian Tactics’ remain the term for this in military science to this day. I finally had to drag him along until he got the idea, thus, ‘Fabius.’

Anyway, around 1:30 AM, I came in to go to bed, shucked my clothes in the pitch dark, and worked my way along the base of the bed with caution for the Thigh Hunters–the square bedpost capitals that seek out an author’s quadriceps if he is incautious in the dark, causing him to hiss a curse. It did not occur to me that Fabius might have cut loose with a spectacular vomit on the carpet, nicely cooled down by now. I stepped right in it, barefoot, slipped, and landed on my butt with a thud and a volley of pain-pumped swearing. While I realize this is not what my lovely bride wants to wake her up at 1:30 AM, you try falling on your nalgas in dog puke at that hour (without advance warning, mind you) in silence.

Let me know how that went.

I didn’t take it out on Fabius. While certainly one shouldn’t, I still think I deserve at least a minor commendation ribbon for not losing it.

Feel free to share your funniest pet disaster in the comments.

Social comment

On aging

October 13, 2011 jkkblog 2 Comments

One of our greatest challenges in life and maturity is to see the world through other eyes, empathize with how other people feel. There are limits to it. A man may, with significant effort, apply the assumptions of femaleness to life, and see that life somewhat through her eyes. An adult may quite easily see the world through a child’s eyes, having once owned a pair. A white person will probably strain to empathize with the experience of being black, but to a degree, it can be done. Most of this is really a matter of thinking things through: what would it be like for the other person, and what attitudes, preferences and behaviors does this explain?

One firm bar exists that I do not think we can breach: age. I’m 48. At 24, half a life ago, I could not have conceived how it felt to be double my age, much less quadruple. This, it seems, only years confer. My grandmother is 92, nearly double my current age. The impact of the changes, cycles, generations, the sheer accumulated mass of people she has known, the realization that a vast percentage of them have passed on, the icy reality that even in excellent health and with much luck, the clock of life ticks ahead, these I believe are beyond me despite the greatest effort I might make.

This is why it’s good to talk to people older than ourselves. They simply know things we do not. Even a glimmer of their realizations is precious to those of us younger. And once those realizations fall silent and still with the passing of life, or fade into forgetfulness or loss of mind, they are lost and gone forever. There will be others, but that set of memories and that gathered mass of realization is no longer available.

I think of this sometimes when working with older clients, and as I become elder myself. Much is there to learn, and to teach if people wish to learn.

I will share with you one bit of that elderly wisdom I gathered up, just over half a lifetime ago. It was the time Queen Elizabeth II came to UW for a visit, and ROTC cadets and midshipmen were invited to volunteer to help the police and Secret Service with security. There’s a lot else about the story, but the pertinent part here is where we were assigned to help usher people to their seats.

Well, the bleachers at Hec Ed are not always an easy climb for the ancient and frail. Noting a very elderly lady struggling to get up to her place, a NROTC midshipman and I simultaneously arrived at her sides. We somewhat helped and somewhat lifted the lady up the bleachers into her seat. An unremarkable act of duty in itself, but what was remarkable was her eyes, eyes that had known at least four British monarchs despite Her Majesty’s considerable longevity. As we set her down gently on the varnished wood, she looked at each of us in turn with an intensity that pierced the soul. She said quietly but very firmly, “Thank you, you young gentlemen. Someday, someone will do this for you.”

You’re welcome, ma’am, but I wasn’t the giver. What I gave was insignificant in comparison to what I received.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.