A great comic at DailyKos by Jen Sorensen who’s also picked up the rubbish pundit meme that American workers are obsolete in the world, incompetent for all the new work in the global economy. Like making Fender Telecasters, toilet seats, and the fancy goods furnished by the army of hexane swabbers for the Holy Steve Jobs Empire.
“These workers need retraining to compete in the 21st century!”
I gotta get a guitar … Call me Rock Pud! … Siri: From now on, I’ll call you Rock Pud, OK? I found 9 million websites and 12 magazine stores that sell pictures of puds for you!
Over the Christmas holiday I read Neptune’s Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer, a book on the naval battles that took place off Guadalcanal in the Second World War.
Post Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy was still exceptionally powerful.
It fell to the US Navy to keep what became known as the Tokyo Express, the IJN’s resupply sorties to its army on Guadalcanal, from tipping the campaign against the United States.
It was a near thing.
Casualties were great. No quarter was asked, none given. And the US Navy almost always went into action out gunned. American naval men expected to lose their lives against an enemy considered highly trained and possessed of fearsome night-fighting warships.
It’s an excellent account, one that underlines how different things are today.
The US war machine never clashes with someone who stands a chance. It faces no IJN. It isn’t ever in combat with anything like the Wehrmacht in Normandy.
I can’t dredge up a single instance of the US fighting anyone it could have lost to in my lifetime.
As a consequence we have a country where everyone pays lip service to the military on holidays out of a guilt and obliged behavior coerced by being allowed to be largely exempt from war and its consequences.
And we have an entire class of people in the national security apparatus who spout rubbish about how they’re underwriting and guaranteeing my right to say stuff like this by dint of their patriotic
duty. It’s like being in a bad movie.
How many Americans can even name the generals who are in charge of the fighting?
By contrast, Osama bin Laden was killed a decade after 9/11, at a time when, if one measures by operational tempo, al Qaeda was and is for all intents and purposes, destroyed.
There will be nothing good from this, no nobility, no feats of military leadership to be remembered years later, no stories worth repeating.
It will be another case of the world’s biggest, wealthiest and most fearsomely armed military, taking a couple weeks to crush the over-matched, in the process uniting another entire middle eastern country against us.
The country, the military, the people in Neptune’s Inferno are all long gone.
Reading it raised the question: Do our current military leaders think of themselves as those who have common tradition with the sailors who went down fighting in the Slot?
Maybe. If so, perhaps they’re also greatly deluded. In 1941, the entire country took part in the war. In 2012, not so much.
Just don’t bother us here, please.
Culturally, we now we make two types of war movie. It is proof of the
uncomfortable split and shared guilt in American society. It shows
the recognition that the military does things in our name, things most
people have no interest in coming to grips with.
The first type of war movie are those audiences are reluctant to see because they’re too close to the real. The second kind, which so many like to see, have no connection with reality.
The first kind, based on books published in the last decade on the war are made on small budgets. They comprise documentaries or recreations.
None of them make money. Hardly anyone sees them. They’re painful, all unpleasant. No one pays them the slightest attention except a few entertainment critics.
The second kind are done on giant budgets, no expenses are spared, and the heroic US military is engaged against giant talking robots or unspecified alien invasion forces with firepower far in excess of anything the good guys bring to bear until the final ten minutes of the last reel.
Lots of people see the latter. Big names like to show the square heroic jaw while acting in them.
The latest, Battleship, advertised during the Super Bowl, has Liam Neeson as everyone’s favorite grizzled military leader.
It’s another in the line of couldn’t find anyone big enough for a fair fight so they made someone up.
It may be fair entertainment but it’s nothing to be proud of. The psychology exploited may have something to do with the lack of overwhelming enthusiasm for national war-on-terror victory parades.
Who would we celebrate victory and success in an existenstial struggle over? Aliens? Robots?
No, those people on the other side of the globe, who it has been decided need pre-emptive destruction, ten years after the fact, because the fear-based economy says so,
After reading the, oh say, one hundredth time, what Google human resources people are said to ask prospective employees –“You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?” — would you even want to work there?
Fuck Google. I bet even they’re sick of reading the tripe. It’s also probably occurred to someone on site that when what you thought was a brain-tweezing question gets tossed around in public it starts looking more like some turd from an asshole rather than the intellectual fruit of a critical thinker.
In an economy of diminished prospects career advice columns in magazines and newspapers have taken up repackaging interviews in which company supervisors torture job candidates with weird questions and outlandish behavior as testing the ability of workers to think on their feet.
It’s intelligence-insulting, the opposite of how it’s peddled.
No longer satisfied with sorting through resumes and screening applicants the traditional way, some companies are using offbeat interview techniques to test the mettle of job seekers. Skills, education and good references are still important. But firms increasingly want a real-time look at how prospects tackle problems, gin up new ideas, handle change and work as part of a team.
To assess these amorphous qualities, interviewers at some firms have adopted aspects of reality shows, quiz programs or Broadway auditions …
Companies are running job seekers through a gantlet, in part because they can.
Minneapolis advertising agency Campbell Mithun asks candidates for its internship program to apply in a series of 13 Twitter messages. Limited to 140 characters with each tweet, candidates are challenged to show their stuff in a small space.
“We’re looking for digitally savvy, creative thought leaders, and the 13-tweet process gives applicants a real opportunity to demonstrate these capabilities,” said human resources director Debbie Fischer.
Want to sling sprinkles at Pinkberry? The chain requires applicants to brainstorm commercials for its frozen yogurt and then work in teams to devise a marketing plan for a hypothetical product such as a paper cup …
Most of the comments are appropriately supercilious.
In the spirit, I’ve thought up some potential interview questions to add to the see if they can think on their feet pile.
1. You’re a human resources manager and you’ve been asked to give prostate exams to all male job candidates. What will be your procedure from start to finish? Remember, some but not all will react very negatively to your work.
2. You’re a tampon. Tell me three famous women from history who you’d have liked to have been in.
3. You’re a drone operator flying a Reaper over Somalia. Your CIA boss has ordered you to destroy a hut made of garbage and sticks because it is said a terrorist lives inside and is there now. You see two children and a woman right next to it on your screen. What are you going to do?
“And sent from on high, would come a prophet, in simple sleeveless vestments, to help the faithful defeat the wicked king, before he spreads his health care seed!”
Mark Fiore cartoon animation on the wisdom of the bishops. The guy who does the voices is teh shit!
AP Ticker takes on Charles Murray who’s latest bit of genius tries to make the case that shiftless downwardly mobile white people are that way because they don’t share the core values and ways of the more upscale tribe.
Krugman destroyed Murray and the thesis that the upper class has morals and that’s why it’s successful last week.
The Scrapple News bit features footage of old black and white film from when Philadelphia was a factory town a long time ago. Then the jobs all went to Mexico. And, finally, China. It’s congruent with the old 8mm of Fender yesterday, which went, first, to Mexico, and then to China.
The Murray argument also fits with the idiot claims that Americans simply lack the skills to fill manufacturing jobs in this country, as if making guitars or much worse, cleaning glass touch screens with organic solvent in the Chinese manufacturing district, requires some kind of right stuff the lazy non-upper class white tribe no longer possesses.
Trivia: The Nation’s submissions editor liked the “Mitt Romney Blues.” “Love it,” were the words. Not quite enough, or easy to fit for the magazine though.
So how do you catch a break around here? Anyone know?
Today Fender, the “iconic American” guitar maker, employs more people in China and Indonesia than it does in this country. However, at one time it was an obviously proud-to-be-American company. And average Americans, as seen in the above home movie, worked in guitar manufacturing for it. There was no rubbish spouted in newspapers about Americans not being skilled enough for a manufacturing economy.
Leo Fender and his fellow businessmen trained people and put them to work.
An aerial view [of the old Fender factory] in “The Soul of Tone,??? a coffee table book on Fender, shows old pre-CBS Fender filling nine medium-sized warehouse-type buildings. CBS then immediately doubled the company’s manufacturing floor space.
The American manufacturers of rock and roll equipment have all offshored to China.
What remains in the US is essentially custom shop business. The American-made items are ten times or more the expense of the same models made in China. And the former are reserved largely for people with major label music contracts and that part of the upper middle and plutocrat class which dabbles in guitar playing. For them, the expensive American made guitar is a status symbol for a gilded age.
All down the line in the Guitar Center showroom, all the famous American-made guitar lines are now produced in China. Gretsch, like Fender, divided into two tiers. The famous big semi-hollow body guitars popularized in Nashville and Memphis, played by the inventors of rock and roll — the guys in the bands backing Elvis and Gene Vincent — are made in China. If you want to pay ten times or more for one, the premium models are still made here.
The middle class jobs and factories that produced those instruments which made the sound that went worldwide are gone. And this country, and the rest of the world, isn’t better for it. It was profit driven decision-making in a race to the bottom. And it destroyed tradition and a proud legacy in something the made the whole world a brighter place. You could be proud of working in a factory that made guitars and amplifiers for everybody in the USA.
Am I bitter? You bet your ass I am. The people who did this deserve stoning.
It’s an easy choice. Leprosy is treatable. Rick Santorum isn’t. And the incidence of him in this country is a lot greater. Rick Santorum is one of the most singularly repugnant politicians in a group characterized by cavernous personal faults and flaws. Of an unlikable and impossible to admire bunch, Santorum takes the cake.
He’s a Catholic — the worst, someone straight from the church I knew as a very little boy, a mild-looking conservatively dressed sociopath with a pasted-on smile.
It’s virtually inconceivable to me that Republican voters are so nuts they’d actually vote for someone who holds beliefs pitting them against women over birth control and everyone else for having sex for lots of reasons outside procreation.
Santorum is emblematic of the beamish and out-of-touch orthodoxy, the unbending unbeliever-hostile unreason of the Catholic church in the US.
I got married in the Catholic church decades ago and while divorced for a good long time, in the eyes of it I am in that relationship forever.
Fortunately, we still live in the US.
Now for the second part of the story.
As a requirement for getting married in the church in the late Eighties partners had to take a course on marital relationships, administered by the parish in which they were to be joined. This was put in place to battle the merciless statistics on divorce.
Worked good, didn’t it?
Part of the course was on birth control. The church chose one of its local parishioners to teach this subject, feeling he was qualified in some way not apparent to anyone else.
The man counseled the class on the rhythm method, the monitoring of the woman’s temperature and her cycles of secretions. Really, that’s how it was phrased.
The fellow revealed he had five children, or maybe it was six, in the space of about four years and some change. The rhythm method was working very well for him.
It was hard to contain a natural superciliousness.
Of course, the idea wasn’t to teach birth control. It was to get you to have children, a lot of them, and as quickly as possible. Contraception, even the rhythm method, was not OK, to paraphrase and embellish slightly on the wisdom of Rick Santorum.
At one point a priest must have gotten the impression I wasn’t an ideal candidate for Roman Catholic marriage. So he asked me a question he presumably thought could be used to slow things down: “Are you on drugs, George?”
So I got married in the church after saying “No,” anyway. After that I never went to a single Mass. It was the end of having anything to do with the religion.
About a year after having been married a priest from the Allentown diocese showed up at the apartment door wishing to chat. He wanted to know why I had lapsed. I told him I wasn’t going to waste any time on him with an answer and I did it through the intercom security system apartments use to keep out the riffraff.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” the man asked. It apparently stunned him that someone married by the church could be so rude.
Like the Catholic clergy in Allentown, when I see Rick Santorum I see someone who’s idea of righteousness is getting in everyone else’s business in the name of their own warped code. They are worth only scorn. If you saw Santorum approaching on the sidewalk, you’d cross the street to get away.
People who support Rick Santorum seem from another planet entirely. Either that or they’re so desperate and rendered stupid by a hatred of Mitt Romney they cast their votes for a person worse than an Old Testament disease.
I regularly run into people who rant against the government, vote Republican, who’s lives are utterly dependent upon various aspect of the social safety net.
The working class’ earning power has been so squeezed by corporate America it has fallen to the government to keep many from abject poverty.
Yet large numbers of the people dependent on government programs watch nothing but Fox News, detest the current President and argue vehemently to destroy all the things that make their lives survivable.
The New York Times has done a long story on them. It is a must read.
Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.
“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,??? said KI GULBRANSON, who counts on an earned-income tax credit and has signed up his children for free meals at school.
He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
[Dean P. Lacy], a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.
And, here, the man who resent others who spend “his” money, doled out by entitlement check, in the same boat:
Brian Qualley, 49, has a sister who survived a brain tumor but was disabled by its removal. The government pays for her care at an assisted-living facility. Their mother scrapes by on Social Security.
Mr. Qualley said that the government should provide for those who need help, but that too much money was being wasted. Mr. Qualley, who owns a tattoo parlor in Harris, north of North Branch, said some of his customers paid with money from government disability checks.
“They’re getting $300 or $400 tattoos, and they’re wearing nice new Nike shoes that I can’t afford,???
Having played in a biker rock band for many years I’m intimately familiar with the tattoo parlor crowd. The logical mind is not one of its defining characteristics. You find no gentleness, expansive spirit or progressive value in tattoo parlors and this can hardly be news. Momentarily, I wondered why the Times even saw fit to interview someone who ran one. (The paper also uncovered a bigot — the resentment over “nice Nike shoes” being the giveaway. The reporter and editors certainly know it.)
However, scapegoating is a common characteristic of societies enduring hard times. And Paul Fussell noted in Class that the afflicted kick down at those of their own circumstance.
There’s a very thin line between disdain or contempt and outright hate between the divisions which make up our various middle-class tribes. And often there are no lines at all. Needle someone hard enough in a tribe different from yours and see it erupt.
It is easy to understand the great anger in the Tea Party, or anywhere in the hinterlands. The urge to give a presumed tormentor a good punch in the face when you get the opportunity to swing is strong and human. The presumed tormentor is usually someone within arms reach.
Here I often marvel at the many folk music videos the opposition puts on YouTube, all with more enthusiastic fans than anything from my side.
The music may be bad, the lyrics awful, the sentiment horribly misguided. It’s easy to laugh at material by people who couldn’t pass an introductory college economics course singing about Ron Paul’s love of “sound money” and returning to the gold standard.
However, one thing it doesn’t lack is gutsiness; the willingness to be taken for a fool in letting the raw shout of hurt out.
A predatory economy has set into stone conditions in which Americans now always find themselves moving down. So they’re always going to be bitter. How many people on food stamps vote for pols who want to destroy the food stamp program?
A lot more than you think, I imagine.
“There used to be room at the top,??? Paul Fussell wrote in Class.
There’s never any shortage of hand-clapping and delight for taking an old cheap wind instrument, made to be played by hand, and rejiggering it into a software emulation that’s not quite as good but lots easier, for the iPhone. Even the cigar box guitar isn’t immune to being screwed up.
The top app orchestra in the list at YouTube is from Stanford University. And I stole a bit of it for Steve Jobs & Meat Blobs. The hopeless nerds in black body-stockings, not even particularly good as imitations of Dieter from Sprockets, were too priceless to pass up.
If you hang around until the end of the Stanford video you’ll find one of the iPhone mavens has made an ocarina for it. One that also tells you when other people around the world are playing their fake iPhone ocarinas, too.
Now if you wanted to be famous for dressing in black stockings while playing the ocarina, the New York Times would probably tell you to piss up a rope.
“If you have open ears and open minds, you see the value,” says one of the iPhone ocarina players.
“Somebody said it was revolutionary,” remarks another. Somebody said, surely.
iPhones nudge people into being creative, expressive.
Ultimately, these all fail for me because they lack any real physical resonant structure that along with a person, makes a wind, string or percussion instrument. You can beat a guitar and it will very much contribute to the music you make. iPhones? C’mon.
