Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

The shack by the track

The shack by the track . . . from above (Google Maps)

I would have thought the "shack by the track" off of "beautiful Choctaw Trail" would have been long gone by now. After all, I've been long gone from Baton Rouge for more than 31 years.

But no. The shack -- a rather forlorn-looking Quonset hut even when it was still home to WIBR radio a half century ago -- still stands at what once was 600 Neosho St. in north Baton Rouge . . . at least according to the latest view available to Google Maps.

Google Maps street view
Back in the day -- my day -- it was hard to miss WIBR when you were driving down Choctaw, about a quarter mile off River Road on the north end of Capitol Lake. You can make quite the impact on a Quonset roof with enough black paint, a giant W, I, B and R's worth of black paint.

Time has worn away the giant WIBR on the roof, revealing the previous "1220 kilocycles" painted up there. To my generation, WIBR always was Radio 13, but when the brand-new station signed on in July 1948 -- Baton Rouge's seventh or eighth, counting all the FM stations its AM predecessors were opening before they closed them in just a few years -- it was WCLA, with 250 not-so-booming, daytime-only watts at 1220 on your radio dial.

In that Quonset hut, with a tower plopped down right in Capitol Lake. That right there had to have helped coverage, and with 250 watts, WCLA needed all the help it could get.

Morning Advocate, July 18, 1948

THAT Quonset hut, stuck between a contrived lake, a grimy industrial park and a "Choctaw Trail" that was beautiful only in the supreme irony of the WIBR announcers having dubbed it such, nevertheless was a tin-can incubator of Baton Rouge broadcasting royalty. Pappy Burge. Bob Earle. B.Z. (Bernard Zuccaro). "Ravin' Dave" Davison.  J.C. Politz.

That Quonset hut was the first radio station I'd ever been in -- the first time I got to glimpse what was on the other end of the radio waves energizing my transistor radio. It had to have been 1969, and I was an 8-year-old geek with mad telephone skillz -- mad enough to be quick enough on the rotary dial to score a MAJOR-LABEL LP from the then middle-of-the-road station.


OK, so the record album was Jimmy Roselli's Let Me Sing and I'm Happy and not the Beatles. Or even Bobby Sherman.

But it was a MAJOR AWARD . . . and it wasn't a leg lamp. ("The soft glow of electric sex" would have been lost on my prepubescent self.)

Yes, I still have that LP today.

When I encountered "the shack by the track" somewhere on the cusp of the '60s becoming the '70s, it was a weekend. I'd won this record album from a big-time radio station in a small-time structure in a city that sometimes confused big-time and small-potatoes, my parents had difficulty with the concept of "regular business hours," and so the old man steered the 1967 Mercury Park Lane off "beautiful Choctaw Trail," through the lovely meadow of Quonset, concrete and quiet despair, then up to the gravel parking in front of 600 Neosho St.

There were two cars there -- ours and the weekend disc jockey's.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

A young man answered the door. Long hair, blue jeans, bare feet.

"My boy here won a record album."

OHMYGAWDOHMYGAWDOHMYGAWD . . . IT'S STEVE ST. JOHN! I JUST HEARD HIM ON THE CAR RADIO!

The young man let us into the reception area, from which you could see EVERYTHING through the big studio window. They could launch Apollo 8 from that control room.

If you somehow didn't get electrocuted by all the technology in there, you might could get yourself to the damn moon. I did not say "damn", though "damn" was the least of the colorful language I learned from Ralphie's -- uh, my -- old man. Daddy would have whipped my ass; I would have learned a few new terms for future reference, no doubt.

WIBR handout, circa 1955

THE FAMOUS weekend DJ, Steve St. John, apologized for his casual attire and bare feet amid the musical merry-go-round of Andy Williams, Jerry Vale and whatnot. He explained that things were pretty cas on weekends at WIBR, and he was gracious about our lackadaisical attitude toward Monday-Friday, 9 to 5.

And I got my Jimmy Roselli album, which I expect to fully musically appreciate any year now.

Later, I figured out that Steve St. John (who by this time had advanced well beyond "weekend guy" in the WIBR and Baton Rouge-radio pecking order) was Steven Robert Earle, son of Bob Earle, who ran the joint.

Yours truly, a former "overnight guy" himself, also figured out that radio was one of the coolest things ever, in the sense that one "figures out" what one knew all along. Quonset-hut studios, as it turns out, only add to the mystique.

And they're apparently damned durable -- more durable than the major station that gave out major awards to majorly geeky little kids. WIBR, decades past its MOR and Top-40 heyday, is (at best) an afterthought today, something a major radio chain doesn't quite know what to do with. In recent years, it's been off the air a lot more that it's been on the air.

Now, it rebroadcasts KQXL, the big urban station in Baton Rouge. In my mind's eye, WXOK is the big urban station in Baton Rouge, but that's another memory of faded glory . . . in my hometown.

Friday, May 31, 2019

How to create middle-age stranglers

May 30, 1966.

Buddhist monks were setting themselves alight as the war in Vietnam intensified apace. Surveyor 1 headed for the first soft lunar landing of an unmanned American spacecraft. The Klan was being the Klan in Denham Springs, La. -- which meant that Denham Springs was just being Denham Springs.

And "A WOWIE ZOWIE ZING-A-LING SWING-A-LING THING" had just hit Baton Rouge. The Teen-Age Rattler apparently was "the new fun sensation sweeping the nation."

The reaction to this, no doubt, from every person old enough in 1966 to have spawned a teenager was "Oh, joy." Note the lack of an exclamation point.

THE TEEN-AGE RATTLER was billed as being some sort of bad-complexioned, ill-tempered, bastard child of a hula hoop and maracas.

The "bad-complexioned, ill-tempered and bastard child" parts of the description are solely mine.

I gotta tell you that, as a 5-year-old kid in Baton Rouge on Memorial Day 1966, I would have loved this shit. My parents, not so much.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

For just a measly extra buck, you could buy a 45 single of the original Teen-Age Rattler song, "as recorded by the sensational Happy Four quartet." As opposed to the sensational Happy Four septet.
Considering that you could go down to the TG&Y dime store and buy a hot-off-the-record-press copy of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" for something like six bits, I can't see the Happy Four's rattlin' wreck of a hack promotional song as much of a bargain.
THEN AGAIN, this is the 58-year-old me talking and not the 5-year-old me talking. On the other hand, the 5-year-old me had his share of Beatles' records. Until July 1966, that is.
July was the month John Lennon's "we're more popular than Jesus" interview hit the States, and Mama busted up my Beatles records. It was Louisiana; she was far from alone. Apparently, cracking up commie records from Limey purveyors of beatnik music was less inconvenient than actually attending worship services.

Not that I'm still bitter or shit.

BUT BACK to May 1966 and the Teen-Age Rattler.

At the time, the Teen-Age Rattler made no impression on the pre-kindergarten me whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I'd never heard of the things until . . . well . . . today.

My best guess is that the "Rattle in the morning . . . rattle at night . . . rattle anytime . . . it's dynamite!" sensation was a sensation in the same vein Donald Trump is sentient -- hardly.

After all, there DID come to be a Generation X. That could not have happened had the "greatest generation" quite understandably been driven to cut short the rattling lives of their rattling teen offspring.

Now let us speak no more of this. We wouldn't want to give rogue youth social-media "influencers" any ideas.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

How did they sleep?

We should have seen the end coming a half century ago.
It was as plain as a patchwork plague, courtesy of your haberdasher from hell. Which in this case was the 1969 Sears Wish Book.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Holy Hash Pipe, Batman!
One thing never changes, however -- copy editors are always required but never in adequate supply. I'm reasonably certain that the headline above the Red Menace display at left should have read "Family Nightmare."

Wednesday, December 05, 2018

We must Facebook the music here


It started with the Grinch Who Muted Christmas Music.

It ended with the last straw for me on Facebook after a decade wasting way too much time and productivity there. Here is the one thing you need to know about everybody's favorite addiction: Facebook is the devil. Ask Parliament.

Make that co-devil. The incompetent, greedy conglomerates that ate the music industry are just as evil. I eagerly await the leak of their internal memos and emails.

I don't know exactly why it took me this long -- and why the last straw was a geeky string of muted Facebook videos shot on my iPhone -- to delete my account. But here I am.

Last week, Facebook and Sony Music Entertainment decided that my 1936 Zenith, playing Christmas music in a video I posted last year, was a threat to the entire music-copyright regime. Thus, I was notified that, for all my Facebook friends and enemies, the sound of yuletide also would be the sound of silence.

This was my entirely unconvincing appeal of patent insanity . . . or Digital Millennium Copyright Act insanity, to be precise:

It's background music played on a bloody antique radio, for God's sake. This is absurd.

If anyone is using this video to bootleg music, he is a moron. This is just insane. Stop it.

THIS WEEK, Russia's favorite social-media platform, some other bunch of music charlatans muted a nerdy, geekly little iPhone video of a 1949 7-inch single playing on my 1957 Zenith record changer. I thought it was a bit of audio-enthusiast fun with sufficiently not-good-enough-to-pirate audio.

Which no one was making a penny off of.


Corporate America thought it was a mortal threat. You know, like women smoking cigarettes are for the Islamic State.

And last night, after the copyright Nazis yet again muted the audio on a video of another exceedingly old 45 I got at an estate sale, the reason for my disgust crystallized in my mind. Short version: Facebook is the devil.

Long version: It seems that Facebook is a corporate entity dedicated to eating the capitalistic and societal seed corn. I think you reach that point on a couple of levels -- you successfully addict people to your product, then spend years abjectly exploiting them while you destroy, bit-by-bit, the product's value and utility.

The second level? A good example is the virtual impossibility of posting genial little videos like those of mine that keep getting muted (because ambient-sound music on iPhone videos obviously will destroy all music sales on every level). It illustrates a larger issue about Facebook that doesn't bode well for our country (anyone's country, actually) or our society. Basically, it's a crapload easier to post the worst kind of racist propaganda and hatred, then have it stay on the platform and spread like a metastasizing cancer than it is to post a geeky, innocent video of a radio or a record playing that's more likely just to make people smile and wax nostalgic.

Then we have Boris and Natasha. Has it not been extensively documented how simple it was for Russian saboteurs to flood Facebook with abject fakery and disinformation in order to steal an American presidential election and perhaps fatally undermine the world's greatest democracy?


THIS IS what happens during the terminal stages of capitalism and capitalistic societies, when human beings -- citizens of advanced Western nation states -- are nothing but pieces of meat whose utility ends at the point some corporate entity extracts their last dime.

Bigotry and hatred, corporate America can monetize via platforms like Facebook in much the same manner Donald Trump turns it into political capital. Stupid little videos of old record players playing old records -- or old radios playing Christmas music -- are not nearly so profitable for the platform or those to whom it sells your personal information. Indeed, some music-industry megalith sees your stupid little video as imperiling the extraction of the last nickel from an industry mortally wounded by those self-same corporations' overarching greed and lack of marketing vision.

Not to put too fine a point on it, when you find that you're spending too much time somewhere that expressly makes it easier to do bad than good . . . run. Run far away.

That's what I'm doing -- running. Plus, if I'm exposed to much more of the average level of language-arts proficiency on Facebook, I'm gonna regress to communicating via clicks and grunts.

I suppose one could write strongly worded letters to our corporate overlords. That, however, would take years and cramp millions of fingers. It also, I betting, would avail us nothing.

Or . . . you starve the bastards. Tragically, the only universal language (and common value) today is money. If they can't sell my eyeballs to advertisers, Facebook is diminished just a little. If Facebook can't sell 500 million eyeballs to marketers, it's screwed.

I mean, how many f***ing selfies can you take and overshare? Am I right?


Bye, Facebook. I can feel life becoming simpler (and less overshared) already.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Plunging into the ruined, moldy heart of a metaphor

Vintage FCC 'history card' for WJAR radio



Last month, an urban explorer trekked into the wilds of East Providence, R.I., in search of adventure and long-abandoned places.

Wielding nothing but a video camera and a respirator, "RnK All Day" brought his YouTube viewers along as he pored through the ruins of radio stations WHJJ, WHJY (94 HJY) and WSNE that once broadcast from the crumbling building at 115 Eastern Ave. He got more than he bargained for -- as did we.

What the intrepid archaeologist of urban abandonment found was a moldering, unsealed time capsule of mid-market AM and FM radio, circa 2002. It almost seemed as if, going on a couple of decades ago, the DJ on 94 HJY was playing Lenny Kravitz's latest CD while the talk guy on WHJJ argued with a caller about George W. Bush . . . and then the apocalypse.

The lights blinked. The phone went dead. A blinding flash. Someone spied a mushroom cloud in the distance.

Then everyone ran from the building, in a panic and in search of a fallout shelter. No one ever came back.

Yes, scavengers would go through the place from time to time. But they were looking for canned goods, cash and booze. Maybe some forgotten weed from the HJY wing. Broadcast electronics held no attraction for nuclear survivors worried more by the threat of irradiated zombies.

Fate had left these postmodern ruins amazingly intact, save for the smashed windows, some trashed rooms . . . and the mold that was everywhere.

THIS WAS the result of no nuclear detonation and the sudden collapse of civilization, though. This was another kind of apocalypse -- a corporate apocalypse.

There were no glowing zombies staggering through deserted streets searching in vain for human brains. The survivors of this apocalypse were the ones who brought it about -- the business-attired men and women walking crisply through cubicled offices in search of shareholder value.

Sometimes, they spat out glib clichés about "thinking outside the box" and "It is what it is." Other times, they merely moaned "EBITA! EBITA!"

A few years ago, one of this country's tens of thousands of "downsized" (or "right-sized" . . . or "redundant" . . . or "laid off" . . . or whatever) radio professionals -- I was told it was a disc jockey fired about 2003 -- cornered a regional program director outside the offices of a "station cluster." He just wanted answers to a few questions.

Would he ever feel useful again?

Was his training -- were his talents --  now useless?

The man in business casual was silent.


"Will I ever fucking work in my profession again!?"

Quoth the Craven "Nevermore."

Yet the suits could move three stations out of one building into another building with new equipment . . . and just abandon all the old. Utterly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the time, of "utterly."

That waste represents "shareholder value," no doubt. Efficiency and belt-tightening, don't you know?


OK, I LIED about the tale of the questioning DJ. I don't know that it happened. I'll bet it probably did somewhere, however. I didn't lie about the apocalypse part. What's befallen radio -- and to a lesser extent, TV -- since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ushered in the Lord of the Flies is an apocalypse. In ancient Greek, "apocalypse" meant "an unveiling." In modern English, it can mean a prophetic revelation . . . or an inferno . . . or a great disaster.

The tens upon tens of thousands of cashiered broadcasters say, "Take your pick, man. Hard to go wrong." And millions of listeners across the land might agree.

Once, WHJJ was a big deal in Providence. Before 1980, the call letters were WJAR, and for much of its history, it was a pretty big deal in the Northeast. After first taking the air in 1922, WJAR became a charter affiliate of the National Broadcasting Co., in November 1926.

And legendary NBC announcer Don Pardo (of Saturday Night Live and every-damn-thing-else fame) got his start at WJAR in 1938.

SO LOOK at the mysteriously, confoundingly abandoned studios, once the pre-ruinous home to the jewels of the Franks Broadcasting Co., Inc., beginning in 1980. Before Franks Broadcasting, the old WJAR was the pride of The Outlet Company.
 

Outlet owned WJAR for six decades. Franks owned it for a few years. Then it gets consolidatingly confusing until you end up at iHeartMedia, a crapload of assumed debt and -- how do they put it? Ah . . . yes. Efficiencies, economies of scale, elimination of redundancies and . . . "right-sizing." 

It sounds so much better than "You're fired." But it still means "apocalypse." And the abandoned, fully equipped ruins in East Providence still make for a hell of a metaphor for an entire ruined industry and an entire unraveling country.

What you hear wafting across the ether today is substantively denuded. The happy-clappy corporate speak of besuited Visigoths is risible -- especially if you jack up your eyelids with toothpicks, turn your radio on and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to th. . . .


SORRY. The program server had a bit of a meltdown, nobody's in the building after 5, and I had to drive in from home to reboot it.


Next time that happens, just go online and call up the iHeart station in (fill in the blank). It's playing the same damn thing -- probably at the same damn time. How're you liking those "economies of scale"?

The legions of former radio people -- the first casualties in the apocalypse, the ghosts inhabiting our East Providence metaphor in ruins, the men and women who have radio in their blood and nowhere to show it, the ones who talk incessantly about the old days on Facebook because there are no more new days -- they're not liking those "economies of scale" at all.

And they don't much care for your station, or for bombed-out radio studios full of perfectly good equipment being perfectly ruined.

Neither, I suspect, do they care for metaphors. Unfortunately, it seems as if metaphors are the only damned thing we have left in this sad, sad land.

Don't forget to call in your request to the studio line. No one will answer.

Wednesday, April 04, 2018

Back to the future with President Stupid


Well, ladies and germs, it would appear that President Stupid is about to get us all into a real, honest-to-God trade war of the Smoot-Hawley variety.

Those never end well.

I fear the chill'uns are about to get a lesson on what it was like when their grandparents -- folks my age -- were teenagers and college students. The cool stuff you really wanted was really expensive, and you seriously had to save up for it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-administration-targets-chinese-electronics-aerospace-and-machinery-goods-with-50-billion-in-tariffs/2018/04/03/9be42e5e-3786-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html?utm_term=.06d82e62a1d6In 1980, I was working about 20 hours a week at minimum wage -- then $3 an hour. Today, that would work out to $9.22. And being a total gear head, I really wanted a cool new stereo receiver.

To get one, I had to save for months. The Yamaha receiver I bought cost just shy of $400, or around $1,100 in 2018 dollars. That was serious money then, and it's even more serious today, as wages haven't come close to keeping pace with inflation the past four decades.

Later, I decided I wanted a color TV, a nice one, for my bedroom.  So I got a "Sony of my owny," to borrow the phraseology of the era's advertisements for the brand. It was a 12-inch Trinitron color set with push-button tuning. I also could tell you the model, but that would just bore you and out me as a total anorak, which is a particularly geeky way to say "nerd."

My Sony cost a mere $369.95 ($1,086.25 today).

GOOD LUCK doing that now as a student making minimum wage at a part-time job. For one thing . . . your wages have been depressed.

For another thing, your depressed wages in 2018 go toward lots of stuff we didn't have in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- like monthly cellphone bills.

And monthly cable-TV bills to watch programs and sporting events that were on free, over-the-air TV in 1980.

And then there's Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime Video so you can watch the popular shows that aren't on cable.

Oh, yeah. There's your monthly broadband-Internet bill, too.

Then there's college tuition. In 1979, my old man shelled out $295 in tuition and fees for me to attend Louisiana State University full time for the fall semester ($995.29 in 2018, about a $2,000-a-semester discount over one of today's "reasonably priced" state universities). Back then, state legislatures tended to think public universities were, well . . . public.

By the standards of today's Republican Party, we all were pinko-communist, socialist radicals living in a thoroughly collectivized country . . . and we liked it. We particularly liked not being bankrupted by student-loan debt which, of course, can't be erased by bankruptcy.

And I saw Bruce Springsteen in 1980 for the princely sum of $8 a ticket ($23.30 today). The Who cost $12. I had great seats.

Sucks to be you, kids. There's a reason so many of you live with Mom and Dad till you're 30. 

SUCKS TO BE us old farts, too. When prices go through the roof, the economy craters and our 401(k) retirement accounts come to naught, we'll probably die at age 80 . . . shivering in an unheated hovel, eating cat food and wallowing in our own shit.

On the bright side, maybe Donald Trump will just get us nuked instead, and we'll never know what hit us.

Monday, April 10, 2017

1977: Fly the friendly skies of United
2017: Don't f*** with us, or you'll regret it


This is what happened to a paying passenger -- a physician who said he needed to get back home so he could see his patients today -- when United overbooked a flight and no one volunteered to get off the plane so four airline employees could take their places.


This is what United's chief executive said about it.

1977 United advertisement
NOW, I'd like to know a couple of things.

First, is there any damn horrible thing American cops won't do in the name of "just following orders"? If they had caught the glint off a pager or cellphone the doctor was carrying out of the corner of their eye, would the hired thugs law-enforcement officers have just the f*** shot him?

Second, if Corporate America marshaling law enforcement to manhandle and brutalize law-abiding, non-violent, paying customers on the whim of incompetents isn't a hallmark of a fascist state, what the hell is?

If justice is still any kind of a thing in this desiccated and decadent land, that doctor will be America's newest multimillionaire, will be clutching the scalp of United CEO Oscar Munoz, and those aviation cops will be saying hello to their new cellmate, Tiny.

Monday, February 09, 2015

Farewell, Radio Shack


If I had a dollar for all the stuff I've bought at Radio Shack over the last four decades or so . . . I'd still be so far in the hole on the deal, it wouldn't be funny.

I loved Radio Shack, especially when Radio Shack was still the Radio Shack I knew when I was young. And now it's going to be gone, with the "surviving" locations being Sprint stores with a "Radio Shack section" in them.

Sure, I can get everything I got at the Shack online now, but it's not the same. And it's not as convenient -- no more making a quick trip down the road for that part or connector I need right now.



ON HBO'S Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes aim at the snarksters laughing at the demise of a 94-year-old company. Good for him. Double good for him in producing the farewell commercial he -- and I -- would like to see run on TV.

Take that, you hipster, Millennial scum!

For old farts like me, Radio Shack was where you went to drool over cool stereo and communications gear. It's where you went to get a new needle for your phonograph. It's where you, as a kid, bought cool Science Fair electronics kits. It's where, like the corner drug store, you could test the vacuum tubes from your radio or TV.

It's where you bought batteries and Supertape. Remember audio tape?

Radio Shack is where I bought those boxes that let you put several inputs into a single "AUX" imput on your stereo. Several VCRs or DVDs on the "video in" input on your television set.

If you needed it, Radio Shack had it.

AND IF YOU wanted to spend some quality time pining for all the cool stuff that you didn't have but wished you did, you pulled out your Radio Shack catalog. That's all gone now, relegated to blessed memory like all those other lost things from the lost youth of middle-aged Americans.


If you want to snark about that, go ahead. I hope one of the soon-to-be-unemployed employees of the fallen electronics giant knocks you into next week.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Goodness knows, Clear Channel blows


I don't care who ya are, this is funny!

Well, it's probably not too funny if you're Bob Pittman, but who cares? It's guys like him who have been ruining radio and throwing away the kind of talent who can produce one screamingly funny parody . . . while standing in line at the unemployment office, no doubt.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

John Boehner is flying right down to see this


The people angry person has spoken.

Did you hear that, Congress?

This is what you call an old-school protest, just like disgruntled would-be activists did it before Al Gore invented the Internets. The scribbled sentiment is near the northwest corner of 72nd and Dodge streets in Omaha, right by the Mall With 7 Stores.

OF COURSE, to get your message out effectively, you might want to pick a location next to a Mall With 100 Stores. You know, one that people actually patronize and isn't scheduled to be torn down this fall.

And, for the record, the doomed Crossroads Mall  has more than seven open stores. It has at least 15 12 10 that are still in there.

Give or take.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

SMASH RUNNING-DOG VERBAL DIARRHEA
OF DILETTANTE U.S. REVOLUTIONARIES!


Does anybody in his right mind take crap like this seriously?

I found this hand-scrawled tract lying on the ground at Omaha's almost-dead, soon to be razed Crossroads Mall today, and I think there's a metaphor somewhere in that circumstance. I'm also thinking somebody watched "Reds" five times too many. Sheesh.

What's worse is that I agree with the general sentiment, hiding though it be in a steaming pile of outraged agitprop. Yes, the growing inequality of our society is a bad thing -- it's a very bad thing if you're the minimum-wage bug and not the overcompensated windshield. And what Wall Street bankers and bond traders have gotten away with the last decade (and more) is outrageous.

You can't even call it beating the rap. There's no rap to beat, and that is an affront to both social justice and civil society.

Furthermore, balancing a budget on the backs of those who most need "entitlements" like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when the "1 percent" -- indeed, even the 10 percent -- are well capable of paying a fairer share of taxes would be fundamentally unjust. Cruel, even.

WE ARE our brother's keeper -- this comes from a Very High Authority, indeed -- and a society for which that is not an organizing principle is one that would be, in a word, brutish.

There's a lot you can say on this subject in support of reining in Wall Street and bestowing a little governmental mercy upon Main Street, not to mention Skid Row. It all would comport with what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," and some of it might even persuade a few Fox News Channel viewers.

Hand-scrawled tracts parroting a bunch of Leon Trotsky's B-sides?  Not so much. 

It's a natural fact that anywhere you land on God's green earth, those who are quickest to lend a helping hand -- to share with you whatever they have -- tend to be those who can least afford their own generosity. It doesn't take much for these souls to "give until it hurts."

"The widow's mite" wasn't just something Jesus pulled out of thin air.

BUT the thing is, those in our society who have the most right to be damned angry at their plight generally aren't half as mad as America's outraged, tract-scrawling, fill-in-the-blank-occupying dilettante revolutionaries, whose sound and fury thus far has signified pretty much nothing. Kind of like John Reed back in the day.

Frankly, I think America's have-nots deserve better representation.

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Truth in headline writing


And the award for most truthful headline ever goes to The Inquisitr website in a story on how the freakish -- morally and otherwise -- CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch doesn't want fat people wearing his clothes . . . for basically the same reasons that "uncool" kids get bullied in junior high.

Sometimes, your average teenage bully ends up like Biff Tannen does in Back to the Future -- first, covered in manure and then, 30 years later, detailing George McFly's luxury vehicle.

Other times, though, he ends up as CEO of a company dedicated to fetishising everything that's wrong about America . . . and with the human soul. And then he eats your teen's brain -- which, quite frankly, this dude looks quite capable of doing.

With a nice Chianti and some fava beans on the side, no doubt.

But it's a free country, and if you or your kids want to be a whore for "that partially melted penis candle," as The Inquisitr so aptly described Abercrombie's Biff-in chief, Mike Jeffries, no one's going to lock you up before you debase yourself and the culture you inhabit. Just don't hand me any hypocritical crap about the glory of "diversity" or the evils of bullying while you're wearing hell's preferred casual wear.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Better living through chemistry

April 16, 1947 :
Texas City, Texas





April 17, 2013:
West, Texas


Twice in 66 years, the fertilizer that helps put more and cheaper food on your table also has blown up much of a Texas town.

Ammonium nitrate and fire don't mix. Large quantities of flaming ammonium nitrate and commercial or residential areas mix catastrophically.

When I was a kid, DuPont's ad slogan was "Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry." That may well be true, but that "better living" comes at a cost that well-off advertising executives are at little risk of having to pay.

THAT deadly check, when it comes, usually gets picked up by working-class folks in places like Texas City. Or West. Or my hometown, Baton Rouge.

You don't want to know what would happen if the entire Exxon-Mobil refinery there blew. We just found out what happens when a fertilizer plant blows in a town like West.

Not that we'll stop to count the costs of progress, however. That's just not the American Way.

Monday, December 03, 2012

A confederacy of dunces . . . on the make



I . . . well, you see . . . uhhhhhh . . . the . . . ummmmmm . . . well, dat's Loozi . . . errrrrrr . . . I . . . ummmmm . . . HOLY CRAP!

I . . . I . . . I . . . errrrrrr . . . I . . . it . . . the the . . . ohhhhh . . . ummmm, well. . . .


Aw, hell, here's the story from WWL television in -- of course -- New Orleans:
The Quicky's convenience store in Mid-City takes its parking lot rules seriously. Very seriously.

About 4 p.m. Friday, New Orleans paramedics rushed inside the store for a man with a life-threatening medical issue.

They worked on the patient with chest pain, put him inside the vehicle, then started to speed off.

The paramedics “heard a loud noise,” and the vehicle came to a screeching halt, according to Jeb Tate, spokesman for New Orleans Emergency Medical Services.

The medics stepped out and found a boot on their ambulance.

Convenience store employees allegedly put a restrictive parking boot on the ambulance. And now it was stuck.

The paramedics were perplexed.

Tate said the ambulance had its emergency lights on the whole time.

Store employees didn’t want to talk about it. They declined requests for comment.

Apparently one of the employees took the boot off. The tire was left flat.

And so the paramedics and the man with the emergency waited.

“We actually had to delay that patient's care by calling another ambulance out here to come transport this patient,” Tate said.


 
BUT THERE'S MORE . . .
The man who booted the ambulance was a Quicky’s convenience store employee and New Orleans Police cited him for simple criminal damage to property for putting the boot on the ambulance.

Eyewitness News saw workers continuing to boot cars in their parking lot Monday morning. A worker at Quicky's convenience store said the employee, identified in a police report as Ahmed Sidi Aleywa, who booted a working ambulance Friday has been fired.

“The guy that did this, he came from another country. He didn't even know what an ambulance looked like. He's been fired,” said Ali Colone, a man identified as a worker at Quicky’s. The owners declined to comment, but Colone said the owners are sorry it happened.

“We just have rules and regulations that we have to follow by. There are signs out here for our regular customers,” Colone said.

Those rules and regulations are self-imposed. Quicky’s parking lot is private property. Signs posted read, “If you leave the property your vehicle will be booted."

Akesha Allen is a private investigator and in September, she stopped to get a drink at Quicky's. Before getting out, she climbed to the back of the van to secure her equipment when it started shaking.

“I said, what are you doing? I'm not illegally parked. He goes, yes you are. You didn't pay the fee. I said I never got out of the van to pay the fee,” Allen said about a $5 charge for parking in the lot.

They gave her a sheet that said she owed them $120 to remove the boot.

“We had to come out there with cash. They wouldn't take a check,” said Mark Avery, Allen’s employer at Deep South Investigations.
SO, do you need any more proof that New Orleans is not of this country, if indeed of this world? It's not just anywhere that you will find such a perfect storm of abject stupidity plus people always, always on the make and looking for somebody, anybody to shake down.

Even an ambulance trying to take one of your deathly ill customers to the freakin' hospital.

It says a lot about the folks who run Quicky's that they think it's a defense that their now-former employee was so out of touch with modernity that he didn't know what an ambulance was and, one assumes, couldn't read or comprehend "New Orleans EMS" painted on its side in giant letters.

"Eems? Wha iss theese eems! Theese eems no park here!"


Really? They think they'll look better because they hire flippin' morons from BF Egypt? That booting an ambulance is somehow less abjectly criminally insane because they hired a moron mystified by an ambulance parked in the convenience-store lot, emergency lights flashing?

God Almighty.

Well, at least somebody at Quicky's knew the number for 911. That's something, I guess.