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Tag: General Comment

  • On rethinking the year as a series of Festivals (a repost)

    NOTE: As stated in the title, this is a repost of something I wrote a couple years ago toward the end of summer. Now that Thanksgiving 2025 is in the rear-view mirror and most people who took the long weekend are going back to work tomorrow (except me! I took Monday off! HAHAHA!!!), we’re solidly into The Christmas Season, or The Holidays, or whatever you call this time of year. Now, I’ve always been one to factor Thanksgiving mentally into “The Holidays”: after all, that term is plural, and for me it includes not two but three separate holidays that all reflect a common theme of people coming together to celebrate one another. (In my view, celebrating Christmas absent the actual Christian content of the day is not a bad thing at all.) I hear it every single year, the vexation at Christmas-themed content before Thanksgiving, and the complaint that “We should keep our holidays separate!” That does not work for me and never has, for various reasons that I think pertain to our societal view of Time and what feels to me a hard-wired suspicion of anything that isn’t directly related to what we’re SUPPOSED to be doing with our time, which is WORK. Anyway, here’s how I tend to see the year as we move through it.

    (Image credit: “Father Time”.)

    It’s late August, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain about the arrival of Pumpkin Spice items in the stores and elsewhere.

    First of all, there’s the usual proviso: Let People Like Things! No, your summer isn’t any shorter because the Pumpkin Spice stuff is showing up. No, you’re not being forced into cold nights or flannel shirts or raking the leaves (by the way, raking leaves is dumb and you should stop doing it) or going back to school any earlier. Just relax. The clock is not actually affected by the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice stuff.

    But on the other hand…I get it, to an extent. It’s all driven by Big Retail’s cost-control and inventory-management strategies. That’s the only reason all the seasonal stuff always shows up freakishly early and seems to be gone when the actual season is in full swing. Big Retail’s problem is that it wants to sell the popular seasonal stuff to the people that love it, but retail doesn’t want to get stuck with leftover stuff if they make too much of it after the season is over. Thus you have the inherent absurdity of seasonal merchandise hitting the market well before the actual season starts, and then–and this is the part that pisses me off–disappearing from the market before the actual season has even ended.

    I guarantee you this, folks: for the most part, Pumpkin Spice stuff will have completely disappeared sometime in the first half of November at the latest, except for whatever hanger-on items exist because they just didn’t fly off the shelves as planned. So when Thanksgiving Week rolls around and you’re actually thinking, “Wow, I am really in the mood for a pumpkin spice item right now,” you will be out of luck. Because the Christmas stuff, with the eggnog and the mint flavorings, will have touched down.

    And that will keep on going! Because you’ll try to hit the store up to buy some last-minute Christmas candy, maybe on December 23, and you’ll be out of luck, because the stores will have sold it all down and put out the stuff for that noted holiday for which everybody on earth is known for shopping for way in advance, Valentine’s Day.

    That’s just how retail thinks, and yes, it’s deeply annoying. It’s the exact same mindset that leads to the absurdity of it being really hard to find a nice winter coat in February or a new swim suit in late July.

    Another dirty secret of all this is that for a lot of specifically seasonal merchandise, stores can’t even re-order. They get one giant shipment of it all at once, and then they work through it until it’s gone. If you’ve noticed that the Halloween candy is already showing up at stores? And you’re thinking, “Geez, we’re still more than two weeks from Labor Day!”? Well, that stuff arrived at the stores almost a month ago. Yup.

    Businesses can claim this is all about “market forces” and it’s just what the market wants, but that’s a lot of special pleading; what’s really at work is the desire to sell what one might while also not being stuck with what one can’t. And I don’t know what the solution to that is, but that is the problem you need to solve if you want the Christmas stuff to at least not be on display until November 15 and the Pumpkin Spice stuff to sit in reserve until September. What it all boils down to, as always in our Capitalist society, is profit. And it has been determined that this is the road to maximizing profit.

    As I’m thinking of this, though, I remember my earlier thoughts from about thinking of the year less in terms of being punctuated by holidays and more like being a series of festivals, not unlike the old church calendar. I’m not much of a liturgical person, but I do think the church calendar from the Middle Ages did represent a relationship with time that might have been in ways more healthy than the one we have going on now. We seem to approach holidays grudgingly, don’t we? We make sure to limit our holidays to one day, and then the day after, it’s time to put it all away and get back to work. Holidays in America are occasional interruptions in the real important thing: working and ensuring profit for somebody (almost always not ourselves). Our approach to holidays, all of them, is of a piece with our approach to time off from work in general. We take less vacation time than anybody else on Earth, and when we do take vacation, we get back to work to an overflowing inbox that makes the mere act of taking earned vacation feel like something that merits a punishment.

    And all of that is baked into our general societal distrust of pleasure and leisure, which is a bigger topic than I’m going to solve right here…but I do like the idea of framing our calendar into a series of festivals. Here’s how I would break it all down:

    September 15 through November 1: Autumn Harvest. This is the Pumpkin Spice period. Flannels, earth tones, pumpkin, big pots of chili, falling leaves. Also Halloween! I know that lots of people, including some dear friends of mine, would straight-up make this entire Festival Halloween, but not everyone is into the spooky/supernatural scene as strongly. It would definitely have a strong presence, though.

    November 1 through The Night Before Thanksgiving: Winter Gathering. I call it this because this is usually when a lot of us start loading up on things we expect to need soon: food for Thanksgiving, or heating pellets, or whatever. It’s colder, but not actually winter yet.

    Thanksgiving through January 2: Winter Lights. I dunno, I might come back and change the name of this…I thought about just calling it “Christmas” and making that into a whole Festival, because that’s how I see it, but that’s not especially inclusive, is it? A whole lot of religions have winter celebrations, and it would be nice if our societal calendar was maybe a bit less centered on the trappings of Christendom.

    January 3 through February 15: Winter Meditation. This is when winter gets quieter, more reflective. But not always! This period includes Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, so…yeah. Generally, though, this period can be for refocusing, thinking things through, and just plain living.

    February 16 through March 17: Spring training. Because there’s a sense that things are starting to shift a bit once the pitchers and catchers report!

    March 18 through April 30: Reawakening. Obviously this includes the Vernal Equinox and Easter. In most places in this country this is when Spring really takes place. (Not in my neck of the woods, sadly…spring in Buffalo is generally awful, but we’ll see what our old friend Climate Change does for that….)

    May 1 through June 20: Beltane. Yes, I’m co-opting an ancient Celtic festival name for this period. By this point spring is well underway, baseball games actually count toward the standings, and hockey and basketball are starting to work toward their respective championships.

    June 21 through July 31: High Summer. Yup, this is summer proper. Grilling, campfires, trips to the beach, yada yada yada. It’s also generally my personal least favorite time of year, after spring (again, this is just because of the nature of where I live), but I do acknowledge that I’m liking it more with each passing year, as my body does that thing that most peoples’ do as the years accumulate: feeling cooler every year. I wonder why this happens….

    August 1 through September 14: Golden Summer. There’s a term in photography: Golden hour, which indicates roughly the hour right after sunrise and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle in the sky is low and thus the light is less harsh and, well, more golden. This is the hour when the day tends to be its most beautiful, just in terms of the light that’s in the air. And yes, it’s a magical time for taking photos. Well, I think that this particular stretch of time is when summer is its most beautiful. By this point it’s still warm and bright, but the summer days feel less like a thirteen-hour bath in hot blazing sunlight. This is the time of cooling and fireflies in the woods and the campfires blazing under actually darkening skies.

    And that brings us back to Autumn Harvest.

    Nothing here suggests the replacement or abandonment of specific holidays, mind you! But I really do tend to see the calendar as a grouping of “times of year” than of specific dates, and I even go a bit broader than what I outline here: In my life, I tend to see “Golden Summer” and “Autumn Harvest” as not-entirely-distinct periods that begin with the Erie County Fair and last up to, and even beyond, our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in late September or early October. And I really do mentally file all of November and all of December and the first few days of January into one big “Christmastime” season. I just don’t see why every holiday has to be its own unique and separate atomic entity whose celebration is a complete in-and-of-itself kind of thing.

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  • Tabular Enclosification

    It’s time to close out some of the tabs I’ve had open for a bit.

    ::  This first grouping is about the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, which I have been reluctant to address in any major way, and I suppose I’m going to keep not much addressing it. It’s phrasing things mildly to say that I was not a fan. I do not think that Kirk injected any particular level of intelligent insight into the national conversation; I found his views to be a typical MAGA blend of virulent toxicity, white supremacy, sexism, creepy evangelicalism, and a general lack of factual correctness. I also think Kirk was Exhibit A in my ongoing belief that debates, as we generally see them in American discourse, are a complete and utter waste of time that reward talking-point facility, quick speaking, and general loudness over developing and advancing serious argument. (I differentiate greatly between debate and argument.) In short, I do not believe that Kirk made America a better place; rather, he played a starring role in the political forces that I believe are relentlessly making everything that has ever been good about America worse.

    But I am appalled and disgusted by his murder. The man should be alive. His wife should still have a living husband. His children should still have a living father. And the person who murdered him should never have been able to get hold of the tool he used to do it. (Assuming that the person in custody truly is the one who committed the act, an assumption that I see no reason to question.)

    Here are several pieces that I read in the days following Kirk’s murder (which, in a sign of the times, I learned about on Tiktok):

    Jamelle Bouie, New York Times: Charlie Kirk didn’t shy away from who he was. We shouldn’t, either.

    It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

    But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

    Elizabeth Spiers, The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning.

    Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long as you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama, whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.

    AR Moxon, The Die-ers. (This piece is not specifically about Kirk, and was written two years ago. I think it still applicable to the current moment.)

    Supremacy is a belief system that rests on what I’ve called foundational lies: the lie of separation, which insists that we bear no relation to one another; the lie of scarcity, which insists that life must be earned; and the lie of redemptive violence, which insists that those who have not earned life owe a debt to those who have earned life; a debt that is best paid with violence and hard use.

    It’s a belief system that lets me believe that other people don’t exist in the same way that I do—that they aren’t people, in fact—and makes that case so subtly, I don’t even have to tell myself that’s what I actually believe; makes it so subtly, I can be outraged and offended when I reveal this belief to others without even knowing I’ve done so, and people who have learned to detect the assumptions behind my mountainous inhumanity inform me that they’ve detected mountainous inhumanity in me.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair: Charlie Kirk, redeemed: A political class finds its lost cause. (Amazing piece. You may need a paywall-bypass site to access it.)

    Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

    Rebecca Solnit on debate (link is to a Facebook post):

    Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, aand it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it’s dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there’s the free-for-all versions….)

    Was he good at it? He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport–a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups–could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. Adding a link in the comments of him being solidly trounced at Cambridge, thanks to Christopher Knight. Where the Brit is actually using facts and logic and kind of showing what debate should be, and Kirk is flailing.
     

    Laurie Penny: “No, I will not debate you.” (Another older piece, but one which speaks directly to my personal distaste for “debate” as it’s mostly framed these days.)

    There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.

    Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.

    Tad Stoermer, “The Absolutist Trap: How free speech became anti-Democratic” (paid Substack):

    Ezra Klein’s argument that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way” perfectly embodies this destructive thinking. Klein celebrates Kirk’s willingness to “show up and debate” as if the form of engagement somehow sanctifies whatever gets said, regardless of its content or effects. This is the abandonment of democratic values — or, at the very least, an ignorance of them — in favor of procedural worship. It’s a genuflection at the altar of democracy as ritual.

    What’s most striking about Klein’s position—and the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination—is how it reveals our complete abandonment of the contested tradition that once defined American approaches to speech and power. Contemporary commentators treat absolute free speech as if it’s some foundational American principle, when in fact it represents a radical departure from centuries of ongoing struggle over what speech deserves protection and why.

    Nekimi Levy Armstrong, The Minnesota Star Tribune: “The blunt truth about Charlie Kirk’s legacy“.

    When the machinery of the state chooses to grieve selectively, it teaches the public whose humanity is recognized and whose is disposable. That hierarchy is not new. It is deeply familiar to those of us who live at the intersections of fate, race, gender and justice.

    The rush to sanitize Kirk’s legacy is not an isolated phenomenon. America has a long history of smoothing over the sharp edges of those whose influence was harmful. Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery were reimagined in textbooks as honorable men defending “states’ rights.” Richard Nixon, forced to resign in disgrace, was later eulogized by political elites as a statesman whose “legacy will endure,” with Watergate reduced to a footnote. Even George Wallace, who once pledged “segregation forever,” was later softened in memory as a “complex” figure rather than a lifelong architect of racial terror.

    ::  Setting aside Mr. Kirk (and honestly, I plan to never speak of him again, as I assume his memory will fade until no one will think of him any more than anyone really thinks about Rush Limbaugh these days), but the news is still depressing: How the Current Administration is dismantling American cancer research. In the long run, the most damaging thing about the current administration may well be Robert F .Kennedy Jr. and his ongoing jihad against vaccines and health in general.

    ::  Finally, because this is getting long, a tip of the hat to a voice I’m sorry to see retiring: Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonymous creator of the comic strip Nancy over the last seven years, is stepping down.

    Since 2018, “Nancy” has been penned by an enigmatic cartoonist who uses the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes. The reclusive creator modernized the strip, which has been in print since 1922, and its characters: the always sassy, sometimes grouchy Nancy Ritz, her aunt Fritzi, and best friend Sluggo.

    But last week, we noticed black-and-white reruns on GoComics running in place of Jaimes’ bright, spare colored panels. These were “Nancy” strips from the Ernie Bushmiller days, who wrote and drew the comic from 1925 until his death in 1982. Wait. Where’s Olivia?

    True to her mysterious ways, Jaimes quietly exited the strip and officially announced her retirement.

    This makes me sad, though I’m happy to note that Jaimes leaves behind a seven-year-long body of work that is compelling and artistically interesting in the best Nancy way, as well as being often downright funny, which is the whole point, isn’t it? During Jaimes’s run, Nancy introduced a new cast of schoolmates for Nancy, as well as modernized her interests (Nancy was a member of her school’s robotics team!) without ever leaving behind Nancy’s trademark self-centered, but still somehow kind-hearted, nature. (Esther, Nancy’s new-ish best friend, had better make the transition to the new artist!) I also noticed that Jaimes played with the comic strip’s relationship with time: in a daily strip, obviously time passes (you can’t have Blondie and Dagwood just living in the 1940s forever), but you can’t have the characters aging while time passes. Jaimes observed this with great facility, allowing her characters to subtlely change and even mature over time (witness Nancy’s relationship with Mildred, her counterpart at the local magnet school) while no, nobody ever aged in the strip.

    Olivia Jaimes’s true identity has thus far not been revealed, and while I am not clamoring for that to happen (unless Jaimes wants it to be so!), I am clamoring for Olivia Jaimes to have many successful future projects that are at least somehow clearly indicated as being Jaimes’s, if they choose to do any. I’d like to follow their work. (I also want a collection of all of Jaimes’s Nancy strips!)

    That’s all for now…and my tabs are STILL overflowing, fancy that….

     

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  • Well-wishes

    UPDATE: Sadly, Mr. Drum has died. If fact, he had already passed when I wrote this.

    Liberal blogger Kevin Drum is very ill.

    Back in the hey-day of blogging–oh, from roughly 2003 to 2009 or so, at which time Facebook and Twitter were starting to take up more and more oxygen–bloggers like Drum were every day reads of mine. I still do read a number of blogs every day; this format isn’t dead yet by any means, no matter how much anyone wants to pretend otherwise! But my daily perusal of politically-themed blogs has dwindled greatly, and Drum’s blog is one of the very few I check in with any regularity.

    He has been fighting cancer on an on-and-off basis for a while now, and while I don’t really know the nature of his current struggles, he has been silent for several days now and apparently his medical team as of his last post hasn’t been able to figure anything out. While he doesn’t know me from Adam, Kevin Drum does have my best wishes for what recovery is possible.

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  • Keeping up with the Joneses, and keeping ahead of the Smiths (a repost)

    This is a repost of something I wrote nine years ago, occasioned by someone on social media opining how terrible it is for the burger-flippers of the world to be getting a raise someplace while the “first responders” aren’t paid well at all. Setting aside that this seems to be the only time many people express concern for the lot of “first responders” at all, I’m reminded of the obnoxious way people in this country erect road-blocks in front of progress because of some vague notion of who “deserves” the progress more. This is, of course, a bullshit excuse for not having progress at all; if you said “Fine, we’ll give those folks a bigger raise and then we’ll do the rest,” they’d find a way to object anew. But the whole phenomenon really does point up some key ways that mainstream American attitudes are holding everyone back.

    The post:

    Below the jump: some thoughts on the minimum wage. Long and liberal, so beware.

    (Note on structure for this post: there is no real “through-line” in terms of my “argument” here. This really is a collection of thoughts, not all of them as closely-intertwined as others.)

    After a lot of protesting and virtual “striking”, fast food workers have won a number of victories, most notably the State of New York recommending a raise in the minimum wage in their industry to $15 an hour. Now, there are some provisos that get overlooked in commentary on this: first, that wage is to be phased in over six years, so nobody’s going to be making $15 an hour for making cheeseburgers until 2021, and second, the wage increase only applies to businesses over a certain size threshold (something like thirty locations). So this will hit the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and Subways of the world, but not the small local chains like Tom Wahl’s and Ted’s Hot Dogs.

    But it’s a start.

    Random thoughts, then:

    :: Good for them. I am happy for any worker who benefits from this. I am a firm believer that anything that helps people at the lower end of the economic pool rise up a bit is a good thing.

    :: I am also thrilled at the prospect that maybe the pendulum is starting to swing in this country away from what we’ve made our central core of economic priorities since roughly 1980. Our prevailing notion regarding the economy has been to embrace “trickle down”, and we’ve spent nearly 40 years cutting taxes and regulations in an effort to create an economy where virtually all the gains, all the big benefits, all the money are relentlessly funneled to the top. I hope that this minimum wage increase for a specific industry is just the start of something.

    :: Of course, for this to be the start of something – the beginning of a swing back toward an economic model where benefits are focused more on the middle and bottom than relentlessly funneled to the top – an awful lot of people have to start looking at things differently. Sadly, this seems to include a lot of people who are in the middle and bottom of the pool. I’m referring here to the constant undercurrent of resentment people seem to feel toward others who are doing better than they are.

    We’re all familiar with the concept of “keeping up with the Joneses”, but what I’m noticing now is a kind of insidious reversal of that concept. We all seem to have fewer Joneses with whom we feel we need to keep up, and we feel a constant sense that our grip on what we have is…well, if not exactly weakening, then there’s a sense that what we have could be ripped from our grasp at any moment. So we’re less worried about “keeping up with the Joneses”, and more worried about “keeping ahead of the Smiths”. Each concept is harmful in its own way, but I think the latter might be more dangerous.

    “Keeping ahead of the Smiths” leads to jealousy and envy. It leads to literal resentment of when someone else has something that we feel they don’t deserve, and it seems to be an even stronger impulse when it’s something we don’t have that they suddenly do. I don’t know where or when this odd impulse became so engrained in the American psyche, but I definitely believe it’s there. I see this impulse at work whenever voters spread vicious rhetoric about how awful public school teachers are to make the money they make, and I certainly see it at work now.

    “Maybe I should go apply at McDonald’s,” I hear a lot these days. Or “Gee, I’ve never made fifteen bucks an hour.” The latter is often coupled with a description of the jobs one has done, obviously intended to make clear that my work should pay more than theirs. And these sentiments aren’t brand new, either, born of shock that burgerflippers (said with appropriate voice filled with disdain) are going to make that kind of money. I once heard a counter clerk at a store complain bitterly that her husband made twice what she did at his union job, even though all he did was [insert menial task here]. I find such sentiments irritating, because first of all, I myself have never been angry that someone else makes more than me at a certain job.

    Seriously, I’ve never understood that point. These things are inherently unfair. Minimum wage when I started working at my very first summer job, when I was 17 years old, was $3.35 an hour. It went up to $5.25 a few years later, and there it stayed for a good, long time. When I started moving into management with Pizza Hut, the highest wage I attained was somewhere around $6.50 an hour. So what?

    Also, I remember what happened every time the minimum wage went up. The already-existing employees who were making less than the new minimum would get brought up to the new minimum, while employees already above the minimum would get a raise of some sort. However, this always resulted in complaints: “Why am I only getting a raise of fifty cents an hour? I’m making a buck fifty more than minimum now, and after this I’ll only be making seventy-five cents more!” These arguments always struck me as odd. Your pay was going up, wasn’t it? Did it really matter that you stayed ahead of the minimum by the same margin as before? Was “keeping ahead of the Smiths” really that important?

    Ultimately, though, this whole issue reveals just how completely Labor in this country has allowed itself to be trampled, and how thoroughly everyone, from the cashier at Home Depot all the way up, has bought into the concept that our companies must be willing to pay no more than what they determine we are worth. That is mind-boggling to me. We’ve completely bought into the idea that the key economic factor holding everyone back from ultimate prosperity is taxes. Every time a tax increase is proposed, well, get ready for some fur to fly. I invariably hear commentary from someone saying “I haven’t had a raise in three years, but now I gotta pay more in taxes!” Setting aside the amount of the new tax levy itself, doesn’t it ever occur to anyone to say, “Hey! How come I haven’t had a raise in three years?”

    To my way of thinking, as I look at the numbers that demonstrate a wildly growing level of inequality in America, our economic self-perception is seriously out of whack. We have bought completely into the notion that the Free Markets are the best engine for all this, and never mind that throughout history the most “Free Market”-dedicated eras resulted in massive inequality of the type we’re seeing now. We have bought completely into the idea that the market will eventually bring its benefits upon us, and that it’s taxes that are the big problem. After nearly forty years of unending tax-cutting and deregulating, however, all we have to show for it is wages that are stuck in neutral and money flowing ever, ever, ever upward in a pattern that can only be described as redistributive (albeit in the exact opposite way that that term is usually deployed by libertarian-types). The biggest problem most Americans face, economically, is not what the government is taking out of our paychecks. It is what our employers are not putting into them in the first place.

    So why, then, so much resentment toward a group of workers who banded together and through various means of legal redress seem to have won a kind of victory for themselves? Why are so many people so eager to see in this another screwing of themselves by the system, instead of an example of what might be done elsewhere? If you’re so convinced that your line of work is deserving of better pay, than why not band together and do your own self-advocation?

    Well, I’m not really sure. Part of it, I suppose, has to do with America’s infatuation with the Individual, and the idea that we are singularly capable of, and ultimately responsible for, achieving things. That’s probably at least partly why I hear so much “I never made fifteen bucks, why should they?” My answer to that is, “Why didn’t you, and why shouldn’t they?” That’s why I always hear so much condemnation of public schoolteachers, and it’s also why we always manage to denigrate factory workers for striking for more money (or for keeping the money they make) even while we complain about the sorry state of American manufacturing.

    We do too much worrying in this country of keeping up with the Joneses and ahead of the Smiths. There’s this creepy undercurrent of American thought that tells us that someone doing better than we are really shouldn’t be, and that’s a pretty lousy way to look at life. Maybe we should stop viewing our lives through the prism of how the Joneses and Smiths are doing, and maybe start admitting that if the Joneses and Smiths all do well, maybe it will help us.

    :: Side issue: I’ve also seen some rejoinders along the lines that now companies will simply automate more. There’s a picture-meme-thing going around Facebook of what is apparently a McDonald’s someplace where there are no order takers, just a bank of self-order kiosks. “See! They’ll just replace you with machines! Maybe you should have been happy with your $7.25 an hour!!!”

    This is simply dumb, of course. Anyone who thinks that such automation isn’t coming down the pike already, because McDonald’s is perfectly happy to pay $7.25 but feels their hand is forced at $15, is simply delusional. And that brings up my biggest worry for the future, which just manages to push Global Warming into the second spot.

    Eventually, there simply isn’t going to be enough work for humans to do. We are going to get so good at automating things that there simply will not be enough jobs to be filled by humans. I am nowhere near good enough a futurist, in terms of imagination, to see what kind of society this will lead us to create, but I truly believe that our entire economic way of life, based on work, is going to end somehow. Either we’ll start inventing work, literal “busy work”, just to prop up the idea that we’re all supposed to work jobs for money and then buy the stuff we need, or we’ll move into some sort of post-work economy. I have no idea what that’s going to look like, and the notion of that transition scares me, because it doesn’t seem to me that we make such transitions easily.

    It will also be interesting to see what happens specifically to the American psyche once we start settling into a post-work world, when there isn’t enough work to go around. Our country is built to what often seems to me an absurd degree on the idea that it’s our work that makes us who we are. Americans work harder for less, and take less time off than anybody else, and somehow we’ve elevated that aspect of our character to a particular spot of pride. This always strikes me as deeply odd, but I don’t think we’re going to shake off that “Work! Work! WORK!” mentality of ours, in which we’re still expected to be available and answer e-mails on the few vacations we take, and in which we wear the number of hours we work over 40 as a badge of honor, until the ongoing march of technological innovation forces us to do so.

    This is another reason why I reject Libertarianism so strenuously. In a world where so much of the work is automated that an ever-shrinking number of people are paid to do what’s left, the idea that the unfettered functioning of a market will be the best way to accomplish anything at all is downright silly. It’s also for that reason that I think that things like single-payer healthcare are going to have to happen, eventually. We won’t have a choice in the matter, if we want people to have healthcare. (And yes, we will want people to have healthcare.)

    :: By the way, “hard work” has entirely too strong a grip on our collective imagination. It’s utterly absurd that the United States is one of just a handful of countries in the world, and virtually alone amongst large industrial countries, that doesn’t mandate paid vacation time. Other countries that are not the most affluent nation in the history of the planet have made this happen, but somehow we always manage to claim poverty when the idea is floated here.

    :: In fact, this is yet another example of our ongoing national failure to allow the experiences of other countries to inform our own policy choices. Other countries have figured out how to have better healthcare for all citizens than we provide, and pay less to do it; other countries have figured out how to have a significantly higher minimum wage than we do, and yet not have burgers cost the equivalent of twenty bucks; other countries have figured out how to have better national transportation and better this and better that. We’re always told that these things can’t possibly work here, for reasons that never make any sense to me; the USA simply cannot be an outlier on everything, so much so that ideas that work elsewhere are doomed to failure here. And I’m roundly sick to death of any argument against something that boils down to some odd, abstract, almost-metaphysical appeal to “freedom”.

    :: Every time some kind of regulation like this comes along, companies and industry groups start screaming “Poverty!” and trotting out the exact same objections. It will destroy their industry, it will destroy jobs, it will crush entire economies in its wake. We hear this every single time the minimum wage is increased at all. We heard this when the ADA was passed. We heard it when the ACA was passed. Hell, we heard it from restaurant and bar owners as cities and states nationwide passed rigorous anti-smoking laws, and we heard it from the direct marketing people when the government created its Do Not Call List. We hear this objections every time out, and never do they come true. At all. So I will not be listening to any such protestations in the future. Business America has gone to that well a few too many times for me.

    Of course, there will be some business closures that are cited as examples why this matter of policy is a bad idea. But guess what? There are always business closures – or, at least, business decisions that adversely affect consumers or employees – that are blamed on some new policy or other, such as how every medical insurance company has been able, the last few years, to cite the ACA for raising prices. My general view is that companies are going to do what they plan to do anyway, and if some government regulation comes down the pike that they can blame, so be it.

    So yes, McDonald’s may decide that because of this wage increase, locations that have been underperforming will be closed. In general, though, those locations were likely doomed anyway.

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  • Seasons and their Reasons

    The AFL-CIO Monument in Chestnut Ridge Park, Orchard Park, NY

    It occurs to me that for most holidays, we always end up hearing a lot about how important it is to remember WHY the holiday exists. We’ve got multiple holidays now where we’re supposed to meditate on Freedom and The Troops, and don’t get me started on the cottage industry that surrounds Christmas with all manner of evangelical zeal nowadays…but how much do we ever hear about “the true meaning of Labor Day”? So maybe take a few minutes today to bone up on the life of Samuel Gompers, a guy who it seems to me maybe should be as well remembered as, say, Henry Ford.

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  • On Festivals and the Dating Thereof

    NOTE: I’ve had this in drafts for-EVER (I started this post in August 2022!), and I think it’s now time to go ahead and finish it, because it’s that time of year again. Not the time of year indicated in the opening paragraph, obviously: if that paragraph were written today, it would go like this: “It’s early November, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain that it’s not Christmas yet, wait until Black Friday at the absolute earliest, so on and so forth.” But the rest of the post stands.

    (Image credit: “Father Time”.)

    It’s late August, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain about the arrival of Pumpkin Spice items in the stores and elsewhere.

    First of all, there’s the usual proviso: Let People Like Things! No, your summer isn’t any shorter because the Pumpkin Spice stuff is showing up. No, you’re not being forced into cold nights or flannel shirts or raking the leaves (by the way, raking leaves is dumb and you should stop doing it) or going back to school any earlier. Just relax. The clock is not actually affected by the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice stuff.

    But on the other hand…I get it, to an extent. It’s all driven by Big Retail’s cost-control and inventory-management strategies. That’s the only reason all the seasonal stuff always shows up freakishly early and seems to be gone when the actual season is in full swing. Big Retail’s problem is that it wants to sell the popular seasonal stuff to the people that love it, but retail doesn’t want to get stuck with leftover stuff if they make too much of it after the season is over. Thus you have the inherent absurdity of seasonal merchandise hitting the market well before the actual season starts, and then–and this is the part that pisses me off–disappearing from the market before the actual season has even ended.

    I guarantee you this, folks: for the most part, Pumpkin Spice stuff will have completely disappeared sometime in the first half of November at the latest, except for whatever hanger-on items exist because they just didn’t fly off the shelves as planned. So when Thanksgiving Week rolls around and you’re actually thinking, “Wow, I am really in the mood for a pumpkin spice item right now,” you will be out of luck. Because the Christmas stuff, with the eggnog and the mint flavorings, will have touched down.

    And that will keep on going! Because you’ll try to hit the store up to buy some last-minute Christmas candy, maybe on December 23, and you’ll be out of luck, because the stores will have sold it all down and put out the stuff for that noted holiday for which everybody on earth is known for shopping for way in advance, Valentine’s Day.

    That’s just how retail thinks, and yes, it’s deeply annoying. It’s the exact same mindset that leads to the absurdity of it being really hard to find a nice winter coat in February or a new swim suit in late July.

    Another dirty secret of all this is that for a lot of specifically seasonal merchandise, stores can’t even re-order. They get one giant shipment of it all at once, and then they work through it until it’s gone. If you’ve noticed that the Halloween candy is already showing up at stores? And you’re thinking, “Geez, we’re still more than two weeks from Labor Day!”? Well, that stuff arrived at the stores almost a month ago. Yup.

    Businesses can claim this is all about “market forces” and it’s just what the market wants, but that’s a lot of special pleading; what’s really at work is the desire to sell what one might while also not being stuck with what one can’t. And I don’t know what the solution to that is, but that is the problem you need to solve if you want the Christmas stuff to at least not be on display until November 15 and the Pumpkin Spice stuff to sit in reserve until September. What it all boils down to, as always in our Capitalist society, is profit. And it has been determined that this is the road to maximizing profit.

    As I’m thinking of this, though, I remember my earlier thoughts from about thinking of the year less in terms of being punctuated by holidays and more like being a series of festivals, not unlike the old church calendar. I’m not much of a liturgical person, but I do think the church calendar from the Middle Ages did represent a relationship with time that might have been in ways more healthy than the one we have going on now. We seem to approach holidays grudgingly, don’t we? We make sure to limit our holidays to one day, and then the day after, it’s time to put it all away and get back to work. Holidays in America are occasional interruptions in the real important thing: working and ensuring profit for somebody (almost always not ourselves). Our approach to holidays, all of them, is of a piece with our approach to time off from work in general. We take less vacation time than anybody else on Earth, and when we do take vacation, we get back to work to an overflowing inbox that makes the mere act of taking earned vacation feel like something that merits a punishment.

    And all of that is baked into our general societal distrust of pleasure and leisure, which is a bigger topic than I’m going to solve right here…but I do like the idea of framing our calendar into a series of festivals. Here’s how I would break it all down:

    September 15 through November 1: Autumn Harvest. This is the Pumpkin Spice period. Flannels, earth tones, pumpkin, big pots of chili, falling leaves. Also Halloween! I know that lots of people, including some dear friends of mine, would straight-up make this entire Festival Halloween, but not everyone is into the spooky/supernatural scene as strongly. It would definitely have a strong presence, though.

    November 1 through The Night Before Thanksgiving: Winter Gathering. I call it this because this is usually when a lot of us start loading up on things we expect to need soon: food for Thanksgiving, or heating pellets, or whatever. It’s colder, but not actually winter yet.

    Thanksgiving through January 2: Winter Lights. I dunno, I might come back and change the name of this…I thought about just calling it “Christmas” and making that into a whole Festival, because that’s how I see it, but that’s not especially inclusive, is it? A whole lot of religions have winter celebrations, and it would be nice if our societal calendar was maybe a bit less centered on the trappings of Christendom.

    January 3 through February 15: Winter Meditation. This is when winter gets quieter, more reflective. But not always! This period includes Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, so…yeah. Generally, though, this period can be for refocusing, thinking things through, and just plain living.

    February 16 through March 17: Spring training. Because there’s a sense that things are starting to shift a bit once the pitchers and catchers report!

    March 18 through April 30: Reawakening. Obviously this includes the Vernal Equinox and Easter. In most places in this country this is when Spring really takes place. (Not in my neck of the woods, sadly…spring in Buffalo is generally awful, but we’ll see what our old friend Climate Change does for that….)

    May 1 through June 20: Beltane. Yes, I’m co-opting an ancient Celtic festival name for this period. By this point spring is well underway, baseball games actually count toward the standings, and hockey and basketball are starting to work toward their respective championships.

    June 21 through July 31: High Summer. Yup, this is summer proper. Grilling, campfires, trips to the beach, yada yada yada. It’s also generally my personal least favorite time of year, after spring (again, this is just because of the nature of where I live), but I do acknowledge that I’m liking it more with each passing year, as my body does that thing that most peoples’ do as the years accumulate: feeling cooler every year. I wonder why this happens….

    August 1 through September 14: Golden Summer. There’s a term in photography: Golden hour, which indicates roughly the hour right after sunrise and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle in the sky is low and thus the light is less harsh and, well, more golden. This is the hour when the day tends to be its most beautiful, just in terms of the light that’s in the air. And yes, it’s a magical time for taking photos. Well, I think that this particular stretch of time is when summer is its most beautiful. By this point it’s still warm and bright, but the summer days feel less like a thirteen-hour bath in hot blazing sunlight. This is the time of cooling and fireflies in the woods and the campfires blazing under actually darkening skies.

    And that brings us back to Autumn Harvest.

    Nothing here suggests the replacement or abandonment of specific holidays, mind you! But I really do tend to see the calendar as a grouping of “times of year” than of specific dates, and I even go a bit broader than what I outline here: In my life, I tend to see “Golden Summer” and “Autumn Harvest” as not-entirely-distinct periods that begin with the Erie County Fair and last up to, and even beyond, our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in late September or early October. And I really do mentally file all of November and all of December and the first few days of January into one big “Christmastime” season. I just don’t see why every holiday has to be its own unique and separate atomic entity whose celebration is a complete in-and-of-itself kind of thing.

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