Author: Tom Fitzpatrick

Life

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One of the more pernicious bromides that infects American life is the idea that you can do anything you want, be anything you want. You just have to be willing to put the time and effort into it. Of course, there is some truth to it. Yes, some people are lucky enough to achieve their dream but not terribly many and some start with hidden advantages that makes their journey to success a bit less bumpy.

The American ethos is built around the stories of the very few winners in the race and not the millions who struggle on the less glamorous sidelines. But we know it in our hearts. Millions of people will not be Super Bowl Quarterbacks. Millions of people will not be Rock Stars. Millions of people will not be President. Millions of people will not become billionaires. An overwhelming number of Americans will lead regular lives with regular incomes no matter how hard they try to be something else.

Yet, we still hold to this idea that you can do and be anything you want. It’s unhealthy and it is cleverly couched in language that conveniently blames the individual for not fulfilling his dream. There is always that if you willing to put the time and effort into it part of the equation that makes this idea impossible to refute. Obviously, it’s not the system that failed, it’s you. You just didn’t put enough effort into it, did you?

Yes there are people who beat the odds. We love to hear their inspirational stories hence the mind numbing blather about Olympic athletes overcoming impossible odds to follow their dreams. On the other hand, you don’t hear the stories of all those athletes who fought impossible odds and didn’t make to the Olympics. Obviously, there are more of these stories than the success stories but these stories don’t get heard. We only want stories that reveal something great about America. The problem is that these failure stories are telling an important American story. Everybody doesn’t make it to the top. Most people don’t. It could be lack of money. It could be bad breaks. It could be the slightest lack of talent. She sings well but there are other singers just the slightest bit better. Or how does five foot tall basketball player get into NBA?

People have to be realistic. That doesn’t somehow fit into the idea as presented. You can be anything you want to be. How is this a good idea to pass onto children? Telling children to have big dreams, go for it and then when they fail, letting them think it’s their fault for failing. Because they will, because there is always that second part of the idea, if you try hard enough. Yes, let’s be realistic, but not too realistic because we wouldn’t want to discourage young people from beating their heads against the wall trying to be something they didn’t have a chance in Hell of becoming.

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Business managers are complaining about how people won’t work like they used to in the good old days. As the linked Los Angeles times article points out, this is a complaint as old as the Republic. The problem isn’t the workers, it is the wages.

I once worked at a call center. I supervised workers who made hotel reservations and they, on a busy day, may receive 20 or more calls in an hour. Having performed the job as an employee, I can assure you it was boring job full of mindless tasks. It did pay the bills. Barely. Call center operators are taking calls pretty much the whole time they are on the clock. This is the way companies want it. They want just enough operators to make sure that they only lose a small percentage of incoming calls. That’s right, they would rather their employees are always working than all of their customers get served.

The call center’s biggest problem was employee turnover. Because the pay was low and there was rarely any employee commitment to do anything other than an all right job, and, if they lost their jobs that could easily replace this job with one making the same wage, people quit or lost their job on a fairly regular basis. This meant that management generally was in a hiring and training mode most of the time.

Sometimes, the Uppity Ups would wonder why we couldn’t slow employee turnover. I’m sure my bosses, who were all a pretty smart lot and knew the answer to the problem, would suggests more money for labor. It was a dance that everyone knew had to be danced but that never really changed anything. Because more money for lower level employees is always off the table. The Uppity Ups received the truth and then acted as if it was never proposed. More money for lower level employees is a budget buster. Strangely, more money for higher level employees is not.

The Uppity Ups that counter the idea that more money will make lower level employees happier in their job. They have read some article in a business management magazine which site scientific studies that say people don’t just work for money. Money isn’t even one of the top reason that people work. Try to work on these other non-money reasons to bring down worker turnover because these studies prove that more money isn’t the answer. Employees want recognition, they want challenges, they want better jobs, and then they want money. So we would go off and see how we could improve those other areas.

We found that we were just as restricted in improving employees work life in those other areas as we were in more money. We needed employees on the phones not at the better jobs. This being the fact. We had significantly more entry level jobs than upper level jobs. Once anyone managed to get one of the upper level jobs, they stayed forever. So these better jobs rarely became available and just as a side note that me be obvious but I feel compelled to mention, a better job meant more money. The reason many people go for better jobs is they get more money. Regardless, this option was off the table as well.

Challenges. The job was answering the phone and booking hotel reservations. Almost every call was exactly the same. Different cities, different dates, maybe but there were no challenges except getting the customer off the line quickly and making no mistakes. The company already had a negative incentive on those two tasks — if you failed to meet standards after a three month period, you were fired. There was no challenge we could add to the job and there was no incentive in doing either task much better than you were. There, also, was an amazing disincentive to getting better at either task. If you worked faster, you made more mistakes. Which could put you on warning. If you made less mistakes, you talked too long. This too would put you on warning. Once you found the right balance, you maintained it. All management was left with was recognition and there are only so many pats on the backs a person can take before it looses its effectiveness.

In reality, all we could do was give them recognition. Everything else was off the table. Recognizing good work without spending a dime. More money isn’t the answer says the uppity ups. But it is and they know it is because this, of course, is their defense of the income imbalance between the top wage earners and the bottom. You have to pay top management top salaries in order to interest them and keep them in the job. Why doesn’t that same philosophy work for lower wage workers?

But I never stopped believing that if low level employees got more money for their jobs and, because they received more money, these jobs might be something they value and would want to keep, that there would be less employee turnover. The Uppity Ups refuse to believe this. They just can’t believe that people don’t value the crap wages they are paid. Herein lies the problem.

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If you want to know why elections get so ugly, it is because undecided voters are so difficult to read. It could be almost anything. Hair color, a divorce, being sick, driving cross country with the dog on the roof of car, an affair, and a long list of wrong doings that rarely have anything to do with the national interest.

I get why Republicans are staying with their less than stellar candidates. If they were Democrats I would do exactly the same thing. If Hershel Walker was a Democrat and he was running against Ted Cruz, I would vote for Hershel Walker. It makes more sense to me to vote the party and not the person.

I can’t quite understand people who vote for the person and not the party. It may have made sense fifty years ago when independent thinking people could get elected to congress and would occasionally vote differently than the majority of their party. However, in these polarized times, why would I vote a person. An individual in Congress has little chance to affect policy or law making. Independent thinkers are so rare as to be extinct. If an individual is a member of the majority party, they have a slight chance to get something done. If an individual is in the minority, it is pretty much hopeless. Republicans have their agenda and Democrats have their agenda and never the twain will meet. This means I vote for the better party and not the better person.

Which brings me to the undecided voter, first, how can anyone be undecided at this point in an election. It boggles the mind. The Democrat position and the Republican position are so starkly different that I find it very difficult to believe that there are people are still dithering over who they will vote for. I can accept that you may be a Republican but an undecided voter. How can this be?

This is also, of course, why Hershel Walker’s craziness and John Fetterman’s health are important. Apparently, these are the considerations that guide the undecided voter. The parties are throwing spaghetti at the wall hoping something will stick with the undecided voter. Any muck will do because unknown voters are rogue. What is important to them is not important to the typical voter. But these are the very voters that each party needs to put them over the top in close elections.

Which bothers me. The undecided voter could shift one way or the other for most insignificant and obscure of reasons. I know a woman who voted for Trump because she didn’t like the way the Clintons handled Chelsea’s wedding. That is right Chelsea’s wedding became the deciding factor on who got her vote. It revealed to her Hillary Clinton’s true character and it appalled her. Now speaking as a Democrat, who voted for her at least twice but never was wild about her, I can say there are other better examples of why you would vote against Hillary Clinton. Decisions she made, positions she took, I can understand people voting against her for those reasons, this makes sense to me but Chelsea’s wedding? Who cares? Apparently, my friend.

This challenge is always going to be here in a democracy. People make their decisions they way they make decisions. And it is scary because it is so intangible, so unknown. What will get the undecided voter to vote my way?

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I had problems with Catholicism right from the start. Communion troubled my seven year old mind. I just couldn’t grasp why it was a sacrament. I understood Confession even though I hated going. It made sense to me. Confirmation seemed redundant to me. Why do you need both Baptism and Confirmation is beyond me. Still I understand what Confirmation is about. Communion, on the other hand, was nothing short of cannibalism. I am eating the flesh of God. For what purpose. Does taking Communion make you a better person? Not as far as I can tell, so why am I required to eat the flesh and blood of Christ?

Worse still, at least as far as religious faith goes, even as a child, I never believed, for one moment, that the host was the body of Christ. And, I am telling you I was a fairly gullible kid, ask my older brother and sister who delighted into tricking me into going to the basement, which I was terrified of, because they also told me about the horrible things that could happen there, and then locking the door so I couldn’t get out and them laughing at me from beyond the door. Bastards. I spent many hours terrified in the basement based on their trickery but I never was much bothered by all the rules and regulations regarding the proper taking of the Communion wafer. It was a piece of terrible tasting bread.

I bet that a lot of Catholics who take communion would agree. It is just too damn difficult to make any sense of transubstantiation which goes something like this — the priest arrives with some unleavened bread during the Mass he turns it into the body of Christ which, while now being the body of Christ, still looks and tastes like unleavened bread and not the actual body of Christ. Tell me this isn’t difficult to believe.

More importantly, why am I eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. Why would we ever consume the body and blood of anyone much less Jesus? It isn’t in the bible, at least not as an instruction to turn bread into the body of Christ and then partake in the bread.

Communion is based on the Last Supper where Jesus said something about eating bread and remembering him when they did this in the future. It is pretty obvious, at least to me, that Jesus was speaking metaphorically. Firstly, he was very much alive at the Last Supper and, still being human, needed his body. Secondly, it sounds like this bread is my body is the 1st Century idiomatic equivalent of remember me when I’m gone. The body and blood has a less transcendent meaning here and more of a way to say I will be with you, any time you are eating this bread keep this in mind. Somehow this got incorporated into the Catholic Mass as Communion where congregants feast on the body and blood of Christ.

It makes more sense to me as a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper. That would have meaning to me, that I would understand. But why do priests go to all this trouble of changing bread and wine into Christ and then asking the congregants to eat and drink the body and blood once it has been changed? It doesn’t make me holier. It doesn’t stop me from sinning. What exactly is the purpose?

So, I would say, that I started down the road to perdition on the day I made my first Communion.

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Netflix created a small controversy when it tagged Dahmer as LGBTQ television series. Some in the Gay leadership felt that Dahmer was really about a serial killer who preyed on Gay men. That the murderer was also Gay is irrelevant because the story is about a serial killer and not reflective of Gay life. The bigger concern is that by labeling Dahmer with the LGBTQ tag that Netflix is portraying Gay life in a negative manner. How, really? Do they think that straight people will believe that Jeffrey Dahmer is the role model for all gay men? And Dahmer is, in fact, gay. This is why this tempest in a tea cup has bothered me. Do you only get the LGBTQ label if you show positive portrayals of gay people? This doesn’t seem possible because sometimes Gay people do terrible things. More importantly, sometimes these terrible actions are directly related to the person being Gay.

Then isn’t Dahmer is a good example of that? Could some ambiguous feelings about being gay have contributed to his actions? I would think likely and certainly worth exploring. So, why would a LGBTQ labeling be wrong? Does every show labeled as LGBTQ have to have a positive depiction of Gay life? Where does one draw the line? Would showing a Gay person in depression or with suicidal thoughts risk the same kind of scrutiny as Dahmer? While it would be very nice to only have heroic people in whatever group you are talking about, it is very unlikely. All groups have all types of people even serial killers.

This controversy reminds me of another one involving the movie Cruising. Gay activists in 1979 tried to shut down the making of this movie because of its depiction of the gays into leather and sadomasochism They were afraid that the heterosexual community who, at the time, had very little contact with the gay community would see this depiction of promiscuous sadomasochistic sex play as representative of the whole gay community instead of it being about a small subset of gay people. Instead of just saying no comment and moving onto more important matters, they tried the movie made. In the meantime, these leaders had no problem dissing a significant group of gay men because they failed to represent the perfect gay image. The fact is that some Gay men like S/M, they like it so much that they risk going home with strangers who are potentially dangerous.

Indeed this is part of what Dahmer is showing. Is the allure of a one night stand worth more than the dangers of choosing a killer? I would venture to say that most Gay men have gone home with a stranger. I know I have. That is a very real part of most gay men’s lives which actually may be more beneficial to the average gay than some heroic image guy. These critics want straights to see the white middle-class monogamous couple with 2 children and a dog. It is impossible for one movie to show the entirety of gay life. Some movies will be darker than other movies. These movies may be difficult to watch because they show Gay people engaging in self-destructive or harmful ways. Dahmer happened, and it happened within the gay community. We will just have to leave it up to good judgement of straight people that Dahmer is not your typical gay man.

****Corrected on 10/7/22, 2 paragraph, changed very likely to very unlikely.

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Billy Eichner’s recent gay RomCom called Bros failed to pull in the box office revenue it was expected to. Eichner went on to complain that there was some homophobic backlash against the film. I am sure there is something to that but I am also pretty sure that billing it as a RomCom may have had more to do with it. RomComs are not for everyone — particularly straight men. That’s why RomComs are also know as Chick Flicks. They simply appeal to women more than men.

I, for example, am bored by action pictures. I found the Bourne films a terrific bore — one long chase scene without any plot whatsoever. At least that was my opinion, however, many other people loved the movie and they went to in droves. So if you invited me to a Gay Action film, I probably will decline because it is just something I am not interested in. I find it difficult to believe that any of the straight men I know would willingly attend a RomCom movie, much less a gay RomCom. It has nothing to do with gay either and everything to do with RomCom.

So I don’t think it particularly fair for Eichner to complain about homophobia. He could be correct, but, it is just as likely, that he is wrong. There is no way of knowing until someone digs deeper and asks why didn’t you see this movie. Until then, I think we should give the audience the benefit of the doubt and accept the fact that a lot of straight men don’t want to see RomComs.

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I am finding House of Dragons, the prequel to Game of Thrones, a bit of a bore.

First and foremost it is too dark. I don’t mean dark mood here, I mean too dark to see what is going on. At the beginning of every night scene, I go blind for a few seconds, kind of like when you turn out the lights and your eyes haven’t adjusted. Once I have regained my full sight, I am still left wondering who is talking and where they are and what might be going on. On the plus side, it is a wonderful depiction of night time. Seriously, even a few extra torches would help immensely.

Then there is the plot. It really is just a rehash of Game of Thrones. The only difference is there it is a new group of contenders for the throne who all have seemingly valid reasons to succeed King Viserys on the throne. The good news is that he is taking his sweet time to die. He was on his last legs from the start. But somehow, perhaps the leeches his doctor applies to his wounds, he has managed to hang on, coughing and hacking and barely being able to walk, for an incredible ten years. I wish I could say it creates tension in the show. He has to die in order for the succession battle to begin, until then everyone is waiting for him to kick the bucket. Maybe he lives so the audience can pick a contender to root for. Unfortunately, they are a nasty group of people. I can’t latch on to someone.

There are battle scenes and loveless royal marriages and doomed affairs and gruesome murders and period perfect costumes and fire breathing dragons and medieval sets and plenty of gratuitous nudity. Does this sound familiar?

The worst thing about the House of Dragons is the use of a made up language called High Valyrian. I didn’t like it in Game of Thrones but mercifully that show used it rarely. In House of Dragons it is spoken much more. But, for the life of me, why? No one speaks the language. The audience wouldn’t know the difference between High Valyrian and Chinese. It is unnecessary and adds nothing to the story. For me, in fact, it is a distraction because every time I hear it, I have to fume for a minute or two before I can read the subtitles.

A lot of work has been put into it. It is a good production but it has failed to grab me yet. I am committed to watching until the end of this season. Right now I can say that if I had my druthers I would rewatch Game of Thrones instead.

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Karl Marx is purported to have said “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” I have been thinking about this quote since I heard that Putin is drafting more Russians to fight in the Ukrainian war. I am no military expert but is seems like a pretty bone headed move.

Putin plans to draft 300,000 thousand very unhappy men, some of who are fleeing the country to avoid the draft or protesting against the war, and then sending these less than enthusiastic solders to the front where they will be greeted by an already demoralized Russian army who have been floundering in the Ukraine since February. This seems like a mighty desperate roll of the die.

He is betting that any warm body given a gun and pointed in the right direction is enough soldiering required to win a war. If it works, Putin is a genius and I will take it all back. But if his best trained professional troops aren’t able to beat the Ukrainians, why would adding a large group of badly trained draftees be more successful? And, if Putin is wrong, and his disaster in the Ukraine keepings getting worse, he has a large group of angry men with loaded weapons directly on the Russian border facing an already weakened Russian military.

Perhaps this would be a good time for Putin to review the history of the Russian Revolution. The first revolution in February of 1917 was started by mutineers in the Russian army — unhappy with their defeat at the front and unwilling to fight a losing war any longer. The Bolsheviks came later in the year. For some reason, I keep thinking that this farce is about to get worse. Yes, I admit, it might be amusing to watch the evil fuck Putin take a fall but I do fear what might come next.

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As someone who considers himself a part of Western Civilization, I ask this question because people are always carrying on about the success of the West but, it seems to me, that the basis of that success was the departure of millions of people from Europe to other parts of the world. These migrations were so large that the majority populations in three continents (North America, South America and Australia) have changed from a majority indigenous population to a majority immigrant population. The other 5 continents, at least until recently, didn’t find it necessary to send their excess population across the oceans in order for their people to make a decent living. The European world did. And why is this seen as a success?

Over 70% of the population of the United States has European ancestors. They left, by and large, because they were poor. They saw little chance for themselves or for their children in the old country. They left the world they knew to take a treacherous trip across the ocean, bringing precious little with them and landing in a new world. Many immigrants didn’t speak the language of the country they were going to or know anyone who could help them when they arrived or have any money to invest in their new country. They still left family, friends, and their known world. Imagine how bad it must have been for millions of people to take this risk.

Americans have a tendency to glorify this mass movement of people and, because it has been the driving economic philosophy of the time, capitalism as a success story. Poor people were given a chance to succeed in the new world, a chance they didn’t have in the old one. But it begs the question, if the western world and capitalism were so successful why did so many people have to leave Europe, the home of Western Civilization, in order to make it happen? Europe certainly had a problem sustaining the population it had. What would have happened in Europe if the New World had never been discovered? Also troubling is the way the immigrants took the land from the indigenous people. It was less a cash transfer from seller to owner and more outright theft of property. This certainly is the antithesis to how capitalist ideology is designed. How successful would the immigrants have been if they had to actually pay for the land they took?

What bothers me here is that there is this unquestioning assumption about the success of Western ideas in general and Capitalism specifically. It is highlights freedom, personal initiative and courage and forgets the despair the drove the emigrants and the elimination of indigenous cultures. Neither of which speaks well of capitalism, at least, capitalism as it is supposed to be practiced and hardly should be considered a smashing success for Western Civilization.

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I thought Rod Dreher’s column about race would cause more of media storm than it did. He worries that whites are ignoring the dangers of black criminals because they fear being labeled racist. Whites needlessly are walking into danger because they are ignoring their own instincts regarding dodgy black men. He calls these criminals animals unworthy of sharing society with the rest of us. The implication here is that people need to be prejudiced in order to be safe from the rampant criminality of young black men.

The crimes he describes are horrible. But what is his solution — more judicial leeway for the police and avoiding groups of young black men. He only sees the black criminal and not the police. One of the factors in Black/Police relationship is that many in the Black community don’t trust the police. The don’t believe that the police are there to help them. How does Dreher’s thinking address this perception? Furthermore, how does a person distinguish between Black criminals and rowdy Black teens? Or is Dreher’s default setting for young black men hoodlum? What does Dreher think about White criminals? Both the Littleton theater shooter and the Sandy Hook school shooter were White. Does this make a gang of young White men animals as well? As far as I can tell, he is only worried about young Black men.

This makes it easy for Whites to retain their prejudices and believe that criticism of the police are based on isolated incidents that doesn’t represent the actual experience of a Black person in the criminal justice system. Most cops are not racists. How can that be when Dreher documents accounts that support his view of black criminality. He thinks that people need to protect themselves whenever they see Black teenagers. He then admits that Whites already have a preconceived notion of the Black teenaged male as hoodlums but stifle this prejudice because they don’t want to be seen as racists and because they are ignoring these gut instincts they are making themselves fodder for the heartless Black criminal.

If people have this knowledge regarding young Black men then how can Whites working in the criminal justice system be free of this prejudice? There are a numerous accounts of judicial system employees with racial bigotry and instances of their unfair treatment of Blacks. How can Blacks trust a Louisana judge who uses the N word? Or policeman who use the N word, and here, and here and here and here? Or their jailers and here and here? Or policeman who beat them for traffic violations? Or police that are so afraid of young black men that they shoot unarmed black men within seconds of seeing them with toy guns or no guns– see Amadou Diallo, Tamir Rice, Donovan Lewis, and John Crawford III. Or how are they supposed to trust the justice system when innocent kids were railroaded into convictions for the rape of the Central Park jogger? If you remember the Central Park jogger rape, you will also remember that the defendants were called animals. Some of these public officials were absolved for their errors and still retain their government position. How does that engender trust within the black community?

There are an awful lot of isolated incidents here too. If you look at the volume, you might even suspect a systematic problem in the criminal justice system. But, OK, for the sake of argument, I will view these as isolated incidents and not a systematic one. Then, Dreher has to do the same thing with the crimes he is talking about it. He describes some horrible crimes with Black culprits and, from these isolated incidents, draws a general conclusion regarding Black criminality. Or, if he is unwilling to give up his prejudice regarding Black men because people’s lives are at stake here, then how can he ask Blacks to surrender their beliefs that the justice system is filled with prejudiced people who are afraid of Black people and treat Black people differently because of that fear.

Most mystifying in Dreher’s commentary is that he complains that these victims of Black crime are not given the same attention from the press as the Black victims of the police. There is a big difference and that Dreher is unable to see this difference is troubling. I think everyone would agree that people who shoot convenience store employees are criminals and deserve prosecution. There isn’t a question or a debate on what happened. On the other hand, when policeman on duty murdered Floyd, there was a debate regarding what happened. If not for the press attention, this crime might very well have been swept under the carpet because the police, at first, tried to paint Floyd as responsible for his own death. This is a very different situation to the murders Dreher describes. I am not sure what Dreher finds missing from the Press coverage of these terrible crimes. The only thing I can think of was that the press didn’t highlight that Black hoodlums were going around murdering people. How is this helpful to the bigger problems here? Oh, I know, it reinforces the Dreher’s belief that Blacks are criminals and don’t deserve to be with the rest of us.

There is no easy solution, particularly not the one the Dreher chooses. I wish there was. Dreher wants to blame Black criminality as the problem. If only Black people would behave better than White people could begin to let their guard down. But right now Black crime is running rampant and until then Whites have every right to worry about young Black men. The problem with his thinking is that there is no way to stop all Black criminals. Ever. We know this to be true because we still have plenty of White criminals. If White people can’t stop White criminal behavior how do we expect Black people to be successful? It is an impossible standard. What needs to be done is for the police to work with Black communities so show them that police are on their side, that working with the police will make their communities safer and better able to handle and lessen the impact of the criminals within their community. This is a much more difficult task and I don’t see Dreher offering much in the way of a solution.