One last look behind

Tomorrow being the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, a lot of people may be thinking about those days, and how everything changed utterly. As I dodge in and out of reflecting on those events, here are some of the images that flash in my head.

Finding out about the first strike on the World Trade Center from the manager of the company canteen, where I was working in the UK. It was three work days after I’d been told that my company was breaking my ex-pat contract and I’d be sent home, probably to be laid off. Dot bomb, you know.

Watching a wall o’ TVs in the reception area of a spinoff company (long since folded) as the same videos ran over and over.

Driving home to London on the M4 and seeing the flags at GSK’s UK headquarters at half-staff and starting to sob.

Phone calls and texts from colleague-friends offering comfort and support. English, Welsh, German, Italian, Kiwi.

Taking a long-planned holiday to Florence and Siena on the 12^th; chaos at the airport; arriving long after midnight and no car to take me into town; a grotty hotel room in Florence and a long train ride to Siena.

Getting a snotogram from UK HR about when I was going to turn in my company car, mobile and laptop…because there was “concern” that I might somehow take them with me.

A miserable, chaotic flight on UAL when I was finally repatriated in late October, but being met at Dulles by a friend, who took me home for my first night back in the States.

Managing to buy a new car and get a loan just before my company laid me off, and making sure I turned in my company-paid rental car to Hertz with as empty a gas tank as I could manage.

Driving down Route 7 and listening to NPR’s Scott Simon interview Natalie Merchant; among other things, she sang “Motherland”, and I kept driving down the road until I got to Tower Records, where I bought the CD.

You know—people keep wanting to return to “normal”, and I get that. But whatever normal is planning on being, it won’t be what it was before COVID19. Just like it wasn’t like what we used to call normal before 9/11. It never is—you don’t ever step into the same river twice. We’re just accustomed to the shifts being slower and more subtle, not having commercial aircraft ploughing into buildings or an overnight global pandemic.

But that’s where we are now.

So, here’s Natalie Merchant, singing “Motherland”.

 

Black and white

I occasionally toss out onto the patio food that’s past its prime, or that turned out to be unappealing, or that I just don’t want to eat. For example, a couple of months ago I bought a box of lime shortbread cookies at Trader Joe that tasted of chemicals. After eating at least ten of them (they’re about an inch in diameter), I decided I did not want to spend my calories on powdered sugar coated off-tasting things, so I’ve been flicking a handful of them outside every couple of days.

I know they’re bad because even the squirrels aren’t interested in them. Yesterday I watched as one took half a cookie, then jumped up to the bird bath to wash the taste out of his mouth, sniffed a couple of others and then left the back yard. Turns out that all I needed to repel squirrels were these cookies.

Fish skin falls into the “don’t want to eat” category. Tuesday evening, I peeled the skin off my roasted salmon fillet and chucked it outside; it’s probably irresponsible, but I figure that a passing racoon might like it. Later, around 2200, I heard critter rustling sounds on the patio, so I slipped downstairs and turned on the light to see the trash panda.

Well, blow me if it wasn’t a skunk snuffling about. It eventually got to the salmon, picked it up and took it a few feet away to munch.

No, I do not have video, because I didn’t have my mobile on me and I did not want to call attention to myself. Unlike our fearless family chihuahua-X Buffy, for whom we had to buy tomato juice by the tanker truck, I do not fancy duking it out with a skunk. (Even though the sudden flooding of light didn’t seem to bother it; I still wasn’t taking chances.)

So my wildlife neighborhood has become even more diverse.

Maybe the skunk will like the cookies.

 

 

Green and orange

Well, guess who’s back?

Cicadas. Singing the songs of their people.

Actually, these aren’t the same lot as May and June—these are Brood X’s cousins, who are around every summer. Also, note that these guys are wearing green. Brood X were orange.

Just like Ireland. Huh.

 

An immodest proposal

Had a convo with a friend at the weekend. He asked my opinion about Scarlet Johansson suing Marvel-Disney over their decision to release the Spider Woman blockbuster to Disney’s streaming channel concurrently with its theatrical opening. Well, I haven’t read beyond the headlines on the story, but of course that doesn’t preclude me from having an opinion.

Which is: if Johansson gets screwed out of any income to which she’s contractually entitled, I’m all for her sticking it to the production company. It’s the same issue over which writers, directors and performers have gone on strike since about the 80s; content creators are entitled to full proceeds of their labor.

Well, my friend said, but Johansson is getting millions already…

So? Twenty thousand or twenty million, she’s entitled to get all the proceeds which her contract permits.

But she’s not even all that talented…

Well, she’s what Disney/Marvel figured would be box-office draw; they hired her and she delivered. They owe her.

Then the argument pivoted. My friend has an issue with people making mega millions and not sharing with the greater community. He hasn’t heard of Johansson being any kind of philanthropist…

Well, okay—different complaint. And while I agree that the obscenely wealthy have a moral obligation to give back to the communities that enabled their wealth (see yesterday’s post about labor), there’s currently no legal mechanism for encouraging them to do so.

Oh, but wait—what if the über wealthy got taxed? I mean, if they really got taxed on those squillions of dollars? At the federal and state levels? And the government(s) used that tax income to do things like training people for better jobs, educating their children, providing universal healthcare, building affordable housing and like that? What if Johansson and Disney paid equitable taxes on the bazillions they make on Spider Woman and all the other blockbuster mind-drivel they produce? They can still live la vita dolce on what they have left, and the folks who pay to see the movies (in theatres or in their homes) could benefit, too.

I have a feeling there’s some kind of glitch in my theory, but I’ll think about it. And I’ll bring it up the next time my friend and I chat.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Worthy of their hire

I don’t know when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved wide circulation in the past 30 years.

We see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have sent unions out howling on picket lines just 60 years ago. At the lower end, they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.

And all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart, slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. (If their skin pigmentation contains higher quantities of melanin, then the opprobrium is proportionately greater.) Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.

In the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.

(As for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors, working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health, safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that matters is who’s going to cost the least.)

Because it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments; winners aim to take it all. Now.

In the past 18 months, this dynamic has been bruised some, as COVID-19 swept through the economy like hurricane Ida. The food supply chain, in particular, has been upended to the point that even calling supermarket stockers and checkers “essential workers” and tossing a couple of extra hourly dollars onto their wages isn’t quite enough to make them want to put in long days dealing with anti-maskholes and maniac managers. Take that by an order of magnitude and you’ve got the hospitality industry, which has relied from the beginning on ridiculously low wages, inconsistent schedules and management abuse as their business model. There’s a lot of frantic right-wing screeching about lazy workers needing to be dragged by the scruff of their necks into restaurants and set to scrubbing and serving.

This being Labor Day, I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work literally to death.

These were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray. But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.

Sadly, that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes unless we want all those jobs manufacturing goods and providing remote services to go overseas. (This as factory after factory closes down to be replaced by ones in places with even fewer worker protections than we have here.)

I think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of gold shareholder value by applying this cleaver to its neck…

And I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in that strategy. But I do not see how an economy can grow if you strangle the buying power of those who actually build it.  

Thus, I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. All workers are essential; all are valuable. Thank you.