Editor’s note:

She writes mostly angry tirades about things that really make her mad hoping other people will become mad too.

Ellyn Benning takes truth over love, the scary open over the cozy closed, and the ugly over the phony almost every time. She has no blog, she would rather hunt than be hunted. She would rather search than be found. She would rather be in your living room instead of her own.

Post Office, Heal Thy Self

by Ellyn Benning

First of all, if I ran the Post Office I would charge more for people who send out mass mailings, not less. Why? Because a certain amount of those, some mysterious percentage, are destined to a short life between printing and landfill. Many will be sent to old addresses, many will be sent to people who do not want them, and so on. So I would work in a penalty for that fact, right off the bat.  Let’s call it an idiocy and environmental recklessness tax.

Then we take that and we use it to pay for our Saturday delivery, which we actually already paid for when we bought that first class stamp but hey, who’s keeping track?

I’m no expert on the United Stated Postal Service, but there seems to be this vibe of “or else!” extortion going on here with the new demands that they will soon make to Congress.  This is something people all over should be talking about because while most of us shop at a variety of department and chain stores, we ALL “shop” as consumers at the post office in one way or another- like having a chain of one business in every small town without any rivals. Sweet? I guess not.

The bureaucrats at the USPS are complaining that revenues are down, which stands to reason with email, e-statements, and online banking.  Mail is down almost 13%, which is good news for the environment but bad news for them.

They are warning that if the changes they want are not approved by Congress, the rate hikes for postage will be astronomical. Really? Then we will use the web even more, which is also better for the trees.  And what will they have accomplished? Do they think the price point of a stamp is so elastic that we will pay a buck to mail a card? Get real. It has to stop somewhere.

Oh yes, and excuse me, but didn’t postage go up last year? It seems like we keep having this discussion. A penny here or there doesn’t hurt the consumer much in a casual way, but consider what this does to a small home business where those pennies add up, or for people who don’t qualify for that bulk rate discount. (AKA subsidy to the ones with the most? Prizes For The Landfill Superstars? ) They also add up for the post office, who seem to have this way of raising rates while acknowledging that demand is down and services will be cut, not improved. Where is all the money going from the last increase?

And not for anything, but the services should be improved, there has been investment in improvements. There are computerized trackers, scanners to make packages process quickly. You can forward mail online, get post office boxes online, you can even print stamps in your house. These are career workers who make a decent salary, (40 K to toss your shit into a truck) we expect that service is professional and we don’t expect in 2010 to still be dealing with lost mail, misdirected mail, broken boxes, and ripped postcards.  Oh wait, they don’t do that.

I did look up satisfaction and reliability rates, but they were mostly listed on sites I would consider to be biased, such as from the postal workers themselves. They claim that the rates are below inflation and that they have done a great job of keeping costs down. Well, great, more power to you. Keep doing it! And don’t raise the rates again! What? You can’t hear me? Not an option, monopoly, too bad, WHAT?

I can’t understand all this.

Forget everything you were taught about business.  It isn’t about “the market” when it comes to a quasi-governmental entity. They can be irrational, they have a monopoly blessed by law and yet they can profit from tote bags and philatelic offerings. They want to approach Congress to close branches, and reduce their services. Evidently the last increase pushed on the American people wasn’t enough to make up for the fact that people send less mail. Don’t we usually call this a trend? Why don’t we expect any of these bureaucrats to keep it real, respond to changes accordingly? Maybe they could offer internet terminals in ten minute snaps for a buck so people can check email or maybe go online to do what they seem to be waiting at the window forever to do. (last time I went to the window my wait time was nine minutes. ) What about kiosks, all over the lobby, like ATM machines? Scales? Weigh it, slap on a sticker yourself? Pay me forty grand. I’ll throw your shit around three times faster. Oh, and stop sleeping in my car.

So why didn’t they do this last year, or the year before that? Why don’t they stand in front of the American people and explain that raising rates do not seem to increase the mail volume, and times have just changed. We are going in the digital direction, so let’s consolidate some services and decide how to move this dinosaur into the modern age.

But that isn’t what they are doing. They are threatening the huge rate hike as a response to opposition. They want to cut your Saturday mail, for example, and make you drive further perhaps to do your business. And if not? Well, prepare to see the price of stamps go up. (Cue scary music)

Oh wait, they did that already. They do it all the time, if you look at postage rate increases in relation to salary increases. One of the things the American people are wrestling with is the fact that the price of everything continues to climb while wages just… don’t. But that is in our heads.

If you have to, cut services. Consolidate branches.  Cut Saturday delivery. But don’t turn around and raise the price of stamps every chance you get. Don’t make people pay more for less.

If you are broken, go fix yourselves.

Editor’s note. The America farm. Once the envy of the world, today a battleground between Corporate America, genetic scientists and sound economic policy. Thomas Sullivan has his take on the very real displacement that occurs when Corporate Uncle Sam spreads his winds across borders, sending economic shock waves both near and far.

Our Apologies Senor

By Thomas Sullivan

The two middle-aged guys that I passed while first checking out the beach are still sitting under a tiki-umbrella with drinks when I mosey up to the outdoor lounge three hours later. I grab the empty table next to them and watch in awe as the enormous Mexican sun sinks further into the horizon. Birds sail past silently, gliding over the gently churning water. The flock looks like it is skipping between the specks of light reflecting off the waves. The beaches on the Yucatan are absolutely wonderful.

A loud grunt disrupts my placid ocean viewing and I turn to locate its source. The larger of the two guys has removed his cowboy hat and is wiping his brow with the strap from a cotton tank-top. He waves a meaty hand in the air, calling for another drink. A slender server wearing khakis and a dress shirt with tie hustles across the sand to their table. He takes the drink order and inquires about their possible interest in dinner. A meal perhaps, amigos? The men wave this off and direct the server to bring more chips (free). Then they resume talking about the cell phone business in their deep Texan drawl.

I turn back to the water. The sun has set fully, releasing a warm and gentle breeze across the beach. A fat moon rises behind us and bathes the ocean’s edge in a soft light. The scene is one of pure peace and tranquility.

The guy in the cowboy hat lifts out of his seat, wobbles through a turn, and marches unsteadily towards the water. He staggers to a stop at the surfs edge and stands in place, backlit by the moon glow. Then he grips the top of his shorts below his big gut, unzips his fly, and starts urinating in the water.

The scene is no longer one of peace and tranquility.

A sizeable wave crashes near the guy’s feet. He struggles against the resulting undertow and goes down, face forward. He lies on his stomach flapping his arms as water courses over his flabby frame. The undertow drags sand over his legs and into his shorts. It’s a truly avant-garde spectacle of man versus nature.

His friend and the Mexican server jog towards him like a Greenpeace rescue squad. They each take an arm, lift the guy to his feet, and escort him back to the table. The guy falls into his chair like a creature that has just completed a difficult evolutionary transition from water to land. He coughs and hacks for a bit, dislodging salt water and sand. Then he tries to order another drink.

I look at the guy’s chest and face, which are covered with wet sand, and think about something the Mayan guide told me as we puttered through a UN biosphere reserve. After NAFTA passed, many small farmers were displaced by cheap, heavily subsidized imports of American corn. They could no longer sell their crop to a local market they had been sourcing to for centuries. To survive they often ended up seeking employment in resorts like this one.

The server approaches with a towel. The guy grabs it without thanks and starts wiping off his pudgy face and hairy chest. I look at the server and wonder if he was once a proud farmer now reduced to serving drunken sleaze.

The pair stands up and starts heading for the hotel behind the tiki lounge. The dry guy falls in line behind the urinator as they enter a dirt pathway between a row of small yucca plants. As they move under a stucco arch the urinator swerves hard to the left and slams into a wall. He reaches for his forehead and then stumbles back into the other guy’s arms. The server just stands and watches, done with the whole affair. His air is one of resignation, suggesting that this is not a unique occurrence. He knows that another gringo will take the guy’s place in short order.

I wave for my bill while pondering dislocation. We Americans like to think of ourselves as a wellspring of inspiration and economic development for the rest of the world, but we’re actually quite the opposite. Our agricultural mega-industry displaces indigenous farmers around the world. Our factory-like movie industry smothers local filmmaking. Our fast food gulags threaten local cuisine and imprison people in their own obesity. And so on. It’s always big and always about making more money than we ever needed. If it was my economy that got undermined and my choices were (1) serving drinks to classless Texans or (2) making junk in a nasty American maquiladora or (3) risking my life trekking across a scorching desert to pick your fruit while being harassed by crackpot Minutemen, you can bet I’d choose option #4, growing drugs and selling them to your kids.

And the sight of a fat, drunken American lying facedown and choking on the surf of a foreign land? That’s the perfect metaphor for the world fighting back against callous greed and insatiability.

I pay my bill, leaving a huge tip for the server, something like 900%. He’s more than earned it.

Paul Corman Roberts Website

neocom(muter) at Tainted Coffee Press

CONFESSIONS OF A LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST

By Paul Corman Roberts

My confession:  in my heart of hearts, I am a patriot.  Even though I ostensibly joined the United States Air Force to escape my economically depressed hometown, there is a part of me that will always be proud to have lived in, and served, a country that could progress and allow for some modicum of free speech and opportunity to the individual. For all of my railing and ranting against the industrial giants, I’m still glad, barely, that they won the Civil War.  The union prevailed.  And to want the union to prevail is as a conservative tenant as anyone could hope to propagate.

Which is why I think a public option health program is in fact, a conservative idea.

I think the last time this column ran in Side of Grits the idea of universal healthcare was tossed out as a “Big Idea” that Obama might use to revitalize the very real “malaise” the United States is experiencing after nearly thirty years of what our forty-first president, George Bush the First called “Voodoo Economics.” Right now the economic body of our country is looking like it’s been worked over by witch doctors on Wall Street sticking their needles and pins into pie charts.

There is geographic and poetic justice to the notion that Obama, a South Chicago community organizer, should be the first U.S. President to oppose the basic tenets of Reaganomics, a nifty label for an economic policy whose intellectual birth was fostered at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman. It’s not unlike the White Sox versus the Cubs.

Basically, the big idea comes down to this:  Is health care a right or a privilege? As of this writing, Obama nearly bet the house that the American people, and ultimately the American legislative body would vindicate the former position.

Obviously, they didn’t.

This is a big enough idea to cause a backlash of epic proportions, because an oligarchic form of Capitalism, masquerading as a “free” market system, is the ultimate form of Darwinism.

The people in power engineering the “socialist” label of Obama are radical capitalists for whom the Becks and Limbaugh’s of the world are merely mouthpieces; speculators, investors and bankers who can’t abide by a risk in profit loss, creating in fact, a fixed market.

Obama’s job of course, isn’t to change this process, but to apply strong corrective measures that in fact allow the good vessel “Enterprise” to keep sailing a strong, middle course. Obama knows this; otherwise Wall Street wouldn’t have got behind him.  The self appointed voices filling in for real leadership in the GOP claim Obama’s policies veer the ship of state toward Castro and in their more expansive moments, Stalin.

As of this posting, the “public option,” has failed to pass the U.S. Senate, courtesy of Joe Lieberman. It’s hard to imagine things getting any better, but the hullaballoo is justified because this is the “Big Idea” Obama has staked himself to, and win or lose, he stands to be the winner in the long haul of history, particularly since he has proved such a friend to the investment and insurance industries while crafting the proposal for the public option.

Don’t be surprised if the public option finds its way back to the Congress if Obama can get to a second term.  The truly conservative approach would be to preserve the consumer class that corporate America so desperately needs to preserve its hold on power.  An eroding middle class and with eroding home values that have been paying the cost of out of control premiums set by corporate insurance conglomerates can only sustain that power base for so long.

Or can it? To the radical capitalist, a “safety net” is not Darwinist enough for the pillars of the Supply-Side model.  To oppose the public option in Obama’s proposal is to in effect say “health care is not a right but a privilege.”  And they have their right to their opinion.  But do they have the right to impose that belief on the majority of Americans who don’t believe that?

If the public option doesn’t come to pass in the next few years, bet on the black market for imported drugs to make a healthy spike.  The middle classes could easily turn more and more to resources outside fixed markets, perhaps themselves over time becoming a sort of resourceful, “hustler” strata of society.  Such a society will be less safe for children and other unprotected citizens, and there will be a large numbers of both.  If one looks carefully at the booming domestic drug trade, in conjunction with the malignant yet expanding business practices of the Mexican drug cartels, a civil war is closer than it appears.

The defenders of Friedmanism, essentially casino high rollers getting their rides comped and playing with “House Money” may well then find themselves confronted with a genuine class upheaval, and all the sneering at Obama’s supposed socialism will come back to bite their faces off.

With all this in mind, the public option is easily the REAL conservative choice, far more conservative than the “single-payer” model, and oddly, available to every member of congress and the U.S. military. Meanwhile, a continuing Lassez-faire approach to regulation, and the bailout of the financial sector is a serious risk for the nation’s economic stability…these industries are patently incapable of policing themselves or consciously “leveling.”  Ask yourself seriously…where would you rather live?  Canada or Mexico?

The public option represents an effort to prop up that part of the American populace that the nation can least afford to lose in a sinking economy…the working consumer.  To choose the other way, the way things are going now, is to ensure that the gap between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us continues to accelerate. And that can only lead to further radicalism.

If financial institutions are too big to fail, what does that make the American people?  Expendable?

No the real test of health care reform will play out over a longer time, but not so long that the decisions made in this time will be easily forgotten.  Maybe for once, our short attention spans can remember a history lesson or two, like how socialized medicine didn’t make Totalitarian states out of France or Sweden, or how all these same criticism’s of government health care were the same ones made about social security.  Those criticisms weren’t true then, they’re not true now, and given the true nature of this debate, they’re also unpatriotic.

Not exactly the welcome mat for those choosing to practice freedom of religion in the U.S. of A.

Earlier this week I wrote a review/oped piece for Like The Dew where I looked at Timothy B. Tyson’s book, turned movie, Blood Done Sign My Name.  The story chronicles Tyson, a historian and professor of Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke University, and his experience as a child growing up in rural NC. There he was witness to a turning point in the racially charged southern small town of Oxford. Like many such southern communities in the period immediately following the civil rights movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, Oxford residents were grappling with what the future of race would look like in their hometown.

Race  and religion as a proxy for race have been an issue in America (and beyond) since our founding and is not going away anytime soon. What we need is MORE dialogue, more in your face confrontation of hate and ignorance and more understanding. Here is Rob Crisman’s take. Listen up.

STEREOTYPES

by Robert Crisman

Black and white are two camps in this country, divided, at war. The early white boss-man, for all the raping he did in the slave shacks, decreed: black and white segregation and enmity forever. He figured, keep the black and white peons apart, and throw the white boy some peanuts and tell him he’s better than black, and the boss-man could keep right on raping from one end of town to the other.

Divide and conquer! It worked like a charm. The white boy strutted like he was the boss-man, the standard by which things are measured. The bossman patted his head and said, “Good boy,” and tossed him more chump change.

Myth has it today that the walls have come down—after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching and riots and marches and myriad movements for change. The color line’s dead! We all love each other! That’s the line now.

Of course, the ghettos and all their uncounted millions… But talk about that on the Six O’clock News and you spoil the white folks’ dinner and stuff. Some black folks’ too. So, spin propaganda: “It’s all getting better.”

White folks, meanwhile, are scrambling to get to the exurbs and enclaves, or up into condos so high, with armed guards at the door, that mean streets can’t touch them. Then, out of sight, out of mind…

Aside from TV and the movies and ads, it’s a huge racial divide.

Of course, some things have changed, enough that the question is raised, just what does it mean to be black in this day and age? What is black? What, for that matter, is white? Black folks are doctors and lawyers, dancers and golfers, and aides to George Bush—and now the president, Barack Obama. Meanwhile, the white folks are stockbrokers, junkies, and Maytag repairmen, like always.

All duly noted, and yet—be black and get stopped by the cops in L.A. or Detroit or wherever. Be white and go walking in “bad” parts of town.

And those black and white stereotypes, man! Straight out of Time-Warner, re-cooked from past poisons, each taken for truth on both sides of the line.

Brothers are bone thugs, they have these big dicks, and they want your mama, your grandma, your sister, your daughter—or you, for that matter.

Gorillas and thieves, yes indeed…

The white boys mostly are sissy-ass Dagwoods and short-dicks whose daddies have money and they can’t do shit. Also, fake Rambos who want to be bad like the brothers.

Poor whites? Trailer trash, brother. Arkansas peckerwoods fucking their 10-year-old sisters in pig-sties…

One thing to note: Dagwoods get funneled toward corporate anthills—mostly as lackeys with some sort of title—and not to the prisons and graveyards that so many brothers learn to call home.

A critical difference for sure. Yet all these black and white jackets eat just like acid. They kill our humanity deader than dogs. They function as murder by brushstroke, nightmare cartoons. And to the degree that we’ve bought them—and that’s to quite a degree—they’ve turned us into a nation of pi-dogs and monsters—image made flesh, n’est ce pas?—our hearts full of murder, afraid of our own fucking shadows.

Divide and conquer, no shit.

Not So Quiet Desperation

by Ryn Cricket

We all know that politicians and news reporters regurgitate statistics like a frat boy on Sunday morning.  We also know that statistics work for us to push our point or cause, because they are both easily manipulated and easily believed.  So the statistics for unemployment have gone down from 10.2% to 9.7% this month.  What that doesn’t take into account are people who have been out of work for more than six months (and therefore not collecting unemployment), people who have given up looking for a job, or people who are underemployed and therefore way below the poverty level –yet still employed.  If these people were included, I am sure the number would be staggering.

And then there are crime rates.  “Crime has gone down in the cities.”  (We swear!  Please don’t move out!) The politicians plead.  Ask any police officer if crime has gone down.  What has changed are the definitions.  Well, that and the number of first-time offenders.  Desperate times create desperate people.  A few weeks ago, a house blew up a few blocks from where I live.  This caused 10 families to be homeless.  The original house was abandoned and foreclosed.  Scavengers had taken all the copper piping out, and the gas company seemed to have forgotten to turn the gas off.  Which I find awfully ironic, because they are so quick to shut the gas off when you’re behind on your payment, but this house hadn’t been lived in over a year.  No one reported that theft, so thefts are down, right?  Actually, these foreclosed homes are often completely gutted from anything of value, but those numbers don’t fit in.

Here’s another, bit more personal example.  Last week, the night of my daughter’s third birthday, someone (or more than one) person broke into our home –while we were sleeping, and robbed us.  I am not going to go through the million “what ifs” that have plagued me for days now.  But the police officer, who arrived in amazing time, explained a few things to us.  We used to live in a district that they used to fight over because nothing ever happened.  However, according to him, it has gotten really bad, but he added, that it has gotten really bad everywhere.  He lives in a quaint little prestigious suburb and his building has been broken into three times recently.  He said they have been overwhelmed with first-time offenders who would never have done something like this, until they couldn’t feed their family.  That’s not who robbed us, but that is a reality.  The ones who got us were well-practiced.  The jails can’t hold all of these people, so the non-violent ones get off lightly, or no time at all.  Here’s the crux.  They won’t classify our type of break-in as aggravated anymore.  We were home.  A few years ago the charge could have been a lot higher but we don’t want to scare those city-dwellers away, so we don’t have violent or aggressive crimes.

The criminals know the laws probably better than we do.  They know what they can inevitably get away with.  Our visitors took around five hundred dollars worth of electronics (T.V., cell phones, iPod, camera).  They did not take our computer or credit cards.  Why? Because that classifies as identity theft and carries a much stronger charge.  In fact, they took my purse and left all of the cards in my wallet neatly stacked on the kitchen table.  They took things they could sell fast and easy.  With all of these second-hand game and music stores, there aren’t any questions asked and it’s legit.

But, here’s another misnomer.  If we claim it on our renter’s insurance, the premium goes up, and there’s a five hundred dollar, deductible, so we receive nothing anyway.  Therefore, even insurance companies can’t give accurate statistics; because I am sure so many go unclaimed.

We have gotten eight thousand pieces of advice since this happened, and almost all of them aren’t valid.  “I keep the lights on at night.” So do we.  “I make sure the doors are double locked before I go to bed.” They were.  They came in through the bathroom.  “I make sure I have security lights outside.” We live in an apartment building, it has all of that.  “I would get a dog or a gun.”  This happened to my brother while he was at church on a Sunday morning in broad daylight and they drugged his dogs.  A friend of mine had a gun, but it was also stolen.  I, personally, would rather pay for a nicer, new T.V. than be responsible for anyone’s death.

I’m not looking for advice,  given or received.  But the truth needs to come out.  Desperate times create desperate people and this economy is breeding crime on a much larger scale than anyone is really aware of.  And no politician or news reporter is going to tell you otherwise.

Will someone please put Dick Cheney in a Toyota and send him back to the bunker? The former Veep and puppet-master was sounding off yesterday with the talking heads taking aim at his successor and Barry-O regarding their stand on fighting the war on terror.

The pot shots come from the man whose “Mission Accomplished” proved to be a premature ejaculation as was his famous quote, telling all who would listen that Iraq bound U.S troops would be greeted as “liberators” in the streets of Baghdad.

Sensing the plunge in value of his speaker’s fees  to less than a quarter of the  right’s new darling, Sarah Palin, the big Dick is trying his best at revisionist history. Scolding Joey-B via the airwaves he said the progress in Iraq and Afghanistan made during the past year is deserving of a big “thank you” to Bush Jr. and the previous administration.

Credit to jumping Joe for getting his digs back, as most pundits scored the W for the plagiarist from Delaware. In a particularly juicy jibe, Joe chided the Dick-meister, noting he’d been sidelined by his own boss for the last year of Bush’s tenure.  He said Cheney had been “misinformed or was misinforming” in an attempt to rewrite history.

To think that this dude was once a heart-beat away from the football is pretty scary. Maybe he wants his job back at Halliburton?

Editor’s note: In America we are eating ourselves to death. No fewer than half our population is obese by some estimates. Michael Pollan, a harsh critic of the U.S. diet, eating habits and prominent food author , has a mantra of: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Even our First Lady is on the bandwagon having adopted childhood obesity as her cause celeb while in the Maison Blanc.

Thomas Sullivan has another, far less reported upon side effect of our fast food nation. The daily abuse and psychological backlash faced by the nation’s FF workers. Funny, poignant and a bit sad, his piece will leave you pondering if in fact, you really do want fries with that.

Thomas Sullivan’s writing has appeared in The Legendary, Word Riot, and 3AM Magazine among others. His memoir of teaching drivers education (titled Life In The Slow Lane) is forthcoming as an e-book from Uncial Press in March, 2010.

Fast Food Fun

by Thomas Sullivan

Spring, 1988

Jay rolls his ’72 Datsun with a faulty battery down the exit ramp somewhere in Pennsylvania.  We’re heading back to New England at the end of the school year and the trip has already offered a few surprises.  Last night we spent two hours in a scary Philadelphia ghetto while a mechanic jerry-rigged wire cables to the aging battery.  The place had flickering streetlamps, boarded up buildings, occasional banging noises, the works.  The night before, in a dark, deserted parking lot, Jay yelled out in shock when the Coke machine started talking.  But there’s more to come.

We slog into a McDonalds parking lot and turn off the car.  Neither of us says so, but we’re both silently praying that the car will start when we return.  We’re tired from overnight driving and don’t want any more trouble from the Datsun.  We pass the enormous “M” and stroll into the yellow building with its trademark plastic tables and oppressive lighting.  As our eyes adjust we shuffle into a long line of customers.

A large woman is working the register on the left while a skinny teenager with long hair manages the one on the right.  In between orders the woman looks over menacingly at the teenager and shakes her head.  There appears to be some tension in the happy house of Ronald McDonald.

The woman turns her head and says, “Jimmy, I need a large fries.”

Staring straight ahead the kid snaps, “Get ‘em yourself.”

The people in line pretend to ignore the exchange.

The woman, whose badge reveals that she’s the manager, repeats her request.  She disregards the customer in front of her and stares down the counter at Jimmy.  Jimmy ignores her and keeps taking an order from the guy in front of him.

The woman sighs and says, “Jimmy, get me those fries.”

Jimmy whips around to face the woman and says, “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to work here.”  Right on Jimmy.  She can waddle over to the fryer and get them herself.

The boss glares at Jimmy and barks, “Get me those fries or you’re fired.”

The people in line shift uncomfortably.  Like me, they’ve probably never seen a real fast-food fallout, the kind where a disgruntled employee returns an hour later and shoots the manager.

Jimmy spins toward the woman, rips off his hat, and yells, “Then just fucking fire me.”  He furrows his brow and glares at the woman, unblinking.  The room is tense and silent, with everyone waiting for the manager’s response.  Jay breaks into a huge smile and shouts, “Yeah man, you tell her.”  The ice breaks.  Other people in line join in, chastising the manager.  One guy, a burly man in a flannel pleads, “C’mon lady, take it easy on the kid.”  Others in line echo this sentiment and the manager backs down.  She plods over to the fryer and angrily snaps a greasy bag of fries from the rack.  The two workers return to taking orders in silence.

Eventually we get our meals and grab a seat.  It’s not hard to realize why people dislike working at fast food.  It’s in part because of people like Jay, who is carefully removing the pickles from his burger.  He’s lining them up on a red plastic tray and touching each one carefully, assessing something.  I’m wondering if the long trip has finally broken him.

Jay looks at me and says, “Have you ever played Stick-A-Pickle?”

“Stick a what?” I replying, choking down a greasy fry.

Jay grabs a pickle and launches it at the window.  It hits the glass, slides a few centimeters, and then stops.  The pickle holds to the dirty window and doesn’t move, as if clinging to a chance at escaping this hell hole.  Jay looks over at me with satisfaction and says, “Stick-A-Pickle.”

Summer, 2000

I reach down to get a CD off the floor and knock over a big coffee tucked between the seat and the parking brake.  Not again.  I love my economy car, but the lack of cup holders makes transporting liquids difficult.  Just the other day, I broke hard to avoid hitting a late-turner at a light and watched a cup surge forward from its tenuous holding place.  The carpet got soaked.

I hit my blinker and enter the center turn lane on this four lane road.  I’m aiming for McDonalds — I need to get some paper towels to dry off a book sitting on the floor.  When I glance into my rear view mirror I see a mini-van practically on top of me.  The guy driving is so close that I can’t even see his headlights.  As I’m looking at his thick beard I wonder why women push their men into buying mini-vans.  If their manhood is already threatened, the mini-van just sends them over the edge.

The guy is shaking his hands in the air and yelling behind the glass.  When an opening in the traffic finally materializes I roll into my turn and start entering the parking lot.  The mini-van whips by me on my left, rushing down the second lane, the one used by patrons to exit the McDonalds.  I roll into a spot and look over at the mini-van, which screeches to a halt over two parking places.  There’s definitely something wrong with this food.  It’s turning people into aggressive idiots.

Summer, 2007

I roll my bike into the Burger King parking lot.  The bike rack is empty, which isn’t surprising – the only people who bike to a fast food joint hereabouts are guys who got a DUI after their last visit to the place.  I lock the bike and race into the restroom, my primary destination on this visit.  I’m en route to a friend’s house but had a last minute challenge to my middle-aged bladder.  I can’t wait.  It’s the only reason I’d ever consider patronizing a Burger King, which is really just a restroom that serves food.

After using the restroom my conscience kicks in.  Sometimes I wish I was a purely utilitarian, heartless person, but I’m not.  I feel the need to support the BK after using their bathroom.  So I stroll up to the counter and order a large fries.  As the woman tallies up my order I glance up at the menu board.  Jesus, who needs a triple Whopper.  That’s just not right, no matter how hungry you are.

I stroll away from the counter and wait.  Shuffling in place, I ruminate on the idea that fast food is probably a feedlot used by extra-terrestrial beings to fatten us up for their incipient invasion.  They’ll need something to eat while they conquer Earth, and they’ll start by hunting down the slow and chubby.  While I wait for my fries I read the nutrition poster on the wall.  The print is tiny, and like most customers I soon lose interest in figuring out the truth about what I’m eating. I recoil from a glistening picture of a chicken nugget that contains God knows what. I picture some maintenance guy in a kill factory running a wet-vac over the factory floor and then dumping chunks of grizzle and bone into a bin marked “Nugget Ingredients.”

I grab a seat in the vacant room with its tile floors and hard plastic seats.  A couple with a seriously overweight kid finishes up and exits the store, leaving me alone in the cavernous room.  A moment later a muscular man with a love patch and arm tattoos walks through the door and orders.  After paying he slumps into a seat and waits while his girlfriend silently checks her pages.  She stands in high heels and tiny, tan shorts scrolling through her messages.  The shorts look like a skin graft with pockets.  A woman behind the counter calls out their number and the guy struts to the counter.  The pair gets their “food” and leaves, saying nothing.

The peaceful Musak playing overhead is suddenly interrupted by the manager, who’s standing by the drive-through widow, hands on her hips, yelling at the staff.

“Hello!” she barks, eyes wide behind thick glasses, “it’s called customer service.”  The staff stops working and shuffles in place, avoiding eye contact.  One cook ignores the manager and keeps making fries, banging the metal basket against the side of the fryolater.

There’s nothing quite like hostility to enliven you dining experience.  I’ve sometimes wondered where they train these managers to motivate employees.  From the look of things, probably at the arm wrestling contests they hold at sports bars.

After ten minutes I give up.  My order somehow got lost.  I’d inquire about my item, but I’m wary of a worker being head-butted by the manager for making a mistake.  I drop some change into a charity box near the counter and slip on my helmet.  At the last minute I decide to grab a BK crown as a gift for my friend’s daughter.  As I leave the store it occurs to me that the charity box is probably being used to feed the manager’s drug habit.

* * * *

I arrive at my friend’s house and join the people congregated in the back yard.  As we chat I realize that I forgot to give my friend’s daughter the crown.  I dig the pointy cardboard cap out of my bag and walk into the garage.  I approach a plastic table with four kids coloring pictures with large crayons.  I think of the Kid’s Table of my youth as I whip out the crown and reveal my prize.

A girl with dark braids looks up at me and says, “We don’t eat fast food.”  A second kid, a boy in a Batman t-shirt, looks up at me and says, “Us too.  We only go to a restaurant called Burgerville.”  Burgerville is a locally owned burger and fries joint that uses only range fed beef and organic inputs.  It treats its employees surprisingly well, offering health coverage and scholarships.  As someone aware of Mad Cow disease, it’s the only burger place I’ll visit.  I want the person handling my food to have some skin in the game and actually fear a lawsuit.  I’m impressed with these kids and tell them so.

The boy starts chanting “Burgerville, Burgerville.”  Soon his three friends join in.  As I slump out of the garage I see four kids with their arms in the air excitedly chanting and reveling in their little protest movement.  Like any true leftie would be, I’m proud.

Twenty minutes later my friend’s daughter bursts into the kitchen holding a small piece of the cardboard crown.  She’s flashing a huge smile and beckoning me to check something out.  I follow her into the garage and see bits of the crown strewn across the concrete floor.  The kids swarm around me, pointing out their destruction.  I’m awed by their awareness.  One day people will realize that eating fast food is like driving without seatbelts.  These kids are the future and they will undoubtedly bring down the beast that is slowly killing their friends.

Editor’s note: Robert Crisman was born in the wrong century. Had he been around with the Visigoths he’d have shown them a thing or two. Namely that the pen is mightier than the sword. Provided of course your head wasn’t on a chopping block at the time the sword was coming your way. Blasphemy follows, though it is exactly what we’ve come to expect from our man out west.

THE MIDDLE AGES

by Robert Crisman

Get stupid and life sends its ICBMs up your ass.

Here’s how that went in the early 400s: Alaric the Visigoth king threatened Rome. Pope Swineflu the Last gave Alaric the bird.

Alaric wasn’t as bad as Attila the Hun, but he sure had the boys to kick Swineflu’s ass. And everyone knew this except for the Pope, whose brains were made out of old chewed-up bread and saliva.

See, by the 400s, Barney Fife could have punk-slapped the whole Roman army, gone fishing with Opie that same afternoon, and then danced like a Zulu that night with some sweet thing in gingham who’d take him up into the hayloft and roll till the wee morning hours…

Alaric sacked Rome in 410. Rome tanked like a wino for keeps after that, and the Dark Ages slammed down on Europe like six trillion long tons of rat shit.

Then, serfs, knights, and castles, King Arthur, Merlin, nitwits with lutes, and all the rest of that silly-ass shit that they bore you to death with in grade school, to make you believe that the whole Feudal Era was some sort of fun. Presumably so that when you all get treated like serfs, on the job or wherever, you’ll somehow think that you’re having a ball, or at least keep your gripes to yourself.

The Middle Ages! One thousand years of Popes fucking peasants and bubonic plagues, with Guinevere maybe flashing some tit to Gawain riding by on his steed dressed in armor, to see if he’d fall in the moat like the dick-thinking mukluk she knew him to be.

The whole western notion of Romantic Love was born in that moat! The lutemeisters warbled that women were angels, as pure as the snow, and their tits were to die for, but too fucking bad; the Good Thing was out of your league, if you weren’t King Arthur, or Jesus.

This gave the boys blue balls of course…

So then those clowns told them, go slay some dragons and bring home the bacon and you might get lucky.

The boys hopped their horses, went looking for dragons and made sure to miss them, then joined the Crusades to rip off the Arabs and bring home the bank, in hopes that Guinevere would finally get off that Good Thing the next time they rode by the moat.

Then a thousand more years of dick-thinking morons. Crusaders for pussy and all that good shit.

And God’s Greater Glory, of course…

We’re doomed as a species.

And all because Swineflu got stupid.

Loving, Eartha Kitt, and Justice

by Ryn Cricket

“It’s not natural.”  “It goes against the Bible.”  “It is not what God intended.”  These are things we hear so often today, but didn’t were hear these very same things just over 40 years ago?  Except then, no one was referring to gay marriages; they were referring to interracial marriages.  Religious people had their reasons, politicians had their reasons, and average citizens had their reasons.  It was toted as some HUGE unnatural sin that would be judged by God, and would bring down society as we know it.

It’s interesting how we are seeing the exact argument today about gay marriages.  How in the world do gay marriages affect straight marriages?  We don’t arrange marriages in America anymore, so why would a stranger think they can decide if any couple can get married?  More importantly, why is the government even putting it up to a vote?  The government didn’t put interracial marriages to a vote because it would have never passed.  It really only effected a small percentage of the entire population.  Very much like gay marriages.  The government has to take upon themselves to decide what citizens’ rights are for all citizens.  That no one else should be able to decide who you can fall in love with, who you can marry, and who you can have children with.

When Eartha Kitt was born in South Carolina under so much controversy and legal issues, her mother had to send her to New York City when she was 8.  Her mother was Black/Cherokee and her father was white.  This is the exact same mix my own daughters are.  In some states in the 50’s and 60’s they could have been taken away from me for being mixed.  My marriage would have been considered illegal, and we would have been put in jail.  It seems crazy now, but it was very serious then.  We all know that black men were killed for touching, talking to, or even looking at white women in the south.  Miscegenation in all of it’s forms was illegal. Even against great opposition, the Supreme Court passed a decision.  The Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 overturned that stating that race-based legal restrictions on marriage were unconstitutional.

How many gay men have been killed for being gay?  Beat up? Ostracized?  Had their rights taken away?  I asked one of my lesbian friends why this issue was so important.  She said that when her lover was sick in the hospital, she was not allowed to be there and the doctors wouldn’t talk to her because she was not related.  Had they been married, there would have been no restrictions.  She said she had a friend once who died in a car accident.  Her parents, who hadn’t talked to her since she came out to them, decided where to bury her, even though she wanted to be cremated, automatically received all of her property and money, and wouldn’t even allow her long-time partner to the funeral.  They had lived together over 10 years.  My friend has lived with the same woman for a very long time.  Her lover has a good job with full-benefits.  My friend owns her own business.  She cannot be under her lover’s health-care plan, and has never been able to have insurance.

I have a lot of gay friends who have children, and I rarely see better parents.  They have a lot of money to provide for everything, and their children are never surprises; they are well-planned for.  And unlike popular myth, being gay does not rub off.  You are born with it.  All my friends “knew” around 3^rd or 4^th grade.

My issues are always with civil rights and justice.  If it doesn’t affect you, there is no reason you should have a say on how others live their lives.  Every citizen who calls themselves American should be afforded the same rights and responsibilities of that privilege.  We all pay taxes, and we expect paved roads, and good schools for our children, police protection, and all of those other rights and freedoms that most Americans get to enjoy.

European Spa, American Body

By Nicole Hadaway

Three short years ago, my husband, an engineer, was placed by his company on a project located in Monaco.  So we, hubby, kiddo (nine months at the time) moved to the French Riviera.

Wohooo!

I finally would use that French I’d studied for six years!

Funny thing – back when I studied French (in the late eighties/early nineties), they taught things they thought might be useful in trips to the Patisserie, the Train Station, or inviting your friends over for a sleepover.

The trip to the European Spa was not one of those things.

So Hubby’s company thought it might be a nice idea to treat all the wives to a great day at the spa, at the Monte-Carlo Thalasso, wherein they specialized in seawater treatments.

I went to book my appointments and picked out from the menu (written completely en francais): a mud wrap, the douche a jet (which, with my French I translated to mean “high-pressured shower”), and a massage under a shower of sea water.

Sounds great, huh?

Let me just say here that before I moved to France, I knew that there were different attitudes towards body shame, nudity, etc. I went to the spa with the mindset that I might be baring body parts I wasn’t used to in a spa setting. But I had no idea what awaited me.

I never had a mud wrap before, and they are not my thing, but I thought I’d give it a try – it was free, after all.  So I get to the spa, change into the fluffy white robe provided for me, and pull out my bikini when the lady supervising me shakes her head, “no,” and gives me a pair of paper underwear bottoms (the Brazilian kind. Oh yeah, and they’re white) and a shower cap to wear.

And that’s it – a white paper thong and a shower cap. Then I got coated with mud, all over.  I mean, everywhere.  After that, she wrapped me in a plastic sheet, just like they do before they kill people in mob movies! Then she belted an electric blanket around me, as if I were an enchilada, turning on the heat.  If you have any kind of claustrophobia or fears of cooking to death whilst tied into an electric blanket, then I can tell you — this treatment is not for you!

After 20 minutes of relaxing thoughts like, “What if they forget about me here and I bake down to a muddy, desiccated corpse?” The attendant came back, unwrapped me from my plastic corpse-bag, and then motioned for me to go over to the shower next to the table. She took the hand-held shower head and hosed my back, while I was allowed the dignity of doing my front all on my own – wohooo!

Next, after my oh-so-calming, mob-style mud treatment, I wrapped myself in my fluffy white robe and sat and waited in the waiting room for the douche a jet. Having been coated with mud by a complete stranger, I looked forward to standing by myself under several shower-heads as they massaged my body with warm, relaxing sea water.

Uhm, no.

So a guy – yes, a male – leads me to my next treatment. It’s in a long, white-tiled room, with a stool near the door, what appeared to be a fire hose (white) wrapped on the wall next to said stool, and handrails and a drain at the far end of the room. I’m thinking, “Oh, no. No, no, this can’t be right.”

The guy gestures to the stool, upon which is laid a shower cap and another set of white paper Brazilian underwear. He says to me, “Je vais retourner,” and smiles as he leaves the room. I’m thinking, when he said, “I’ll be back” that he meant “A lady will be back because you’re a girl and you’re going to practically be naked during this treatment and that would just be plain awkward even though this is Europe and we’ve got more liberal attitudes regarding nudity over here.”

Oh, how wrong I was! He comes back – the guy — and it’s me, my shower cap, and the white paper thong against guy with the fire hose. I kid you not. Have you ever seen that movie Silkwood, where Meryl Streep’s character gets contaminated and they have to hose her down? Yeah, people apparently pay good money for that treatment at a high-class Euro Spa!

If I closed my eyes and concentrated on the high pressured water massaging my feet, legs, arms, and back, it was nice and did work whatever kinks I had in my muscles out.

To his credit, the guy was nice. However, it was a man who was not my husband nor in the medical profession, hosing my nearly-nude body down as if I were a piece of garden furniture getting washed after a weekend of pollen.

The last treatment was actually nice – a back massage – by a girl, thank heavens!  Sea water gently cascaded down on top of me.  This was my idea of a cool spa treatment and I did enjoy it. Whew! Finally.

And that was my visit to the swanky Monte-Carlo Thalasso.  All in all, I was glad to have the experience, because it certainly makes for interesting (and funny) conversations and of course, it gave me something about which to write!