CSotD: Do the left thing
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I would so eat at this place! So, sure, have a laugh at the cartoon, but now — come on, folks — how can we get today's La Cucaracha into the hands of some restaurant moguls and marketing executives?
Because, if I drove past a burger joint and saw on the big plastic sign, "We pay our staff a living wage," that would become my burger joint and yes I would pay a buck or two more.
Note to the Brass: We don't all share your rotten values, man.
Mind you, I'm from a contentious generation, and a contentious sub-group of that generation. Plus, I pick up habits the same as anyone.
I was at a Rotary luncheon one day and talk turned to cars. A couple of us praised our Toyotas and an old fellow at the table said, "I don't buy Japanese cars. They used to shoot at my airplane."
Um … yeah, fair enough, Bill. I guess that would make a kind of long-lasting impression and possibly not a good one.
Years after the farm workers got what they wanted, I found it hard to shop at Safeway, which had been a prime target of the grape/lettuce boycott. And I suppose Arizona Ice Tea has probably been sold, merged, acquired and traded a dozen times since they tried to screw Crazy Horse's family, but I still don't buy their damn drinks.
Even I have my limits, mind you. I remember back in the day, when we were supposed to boycott Minute Maid orange juice because it was owned by Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola was trading in palm oil which enabled the Nigerian government to repress the Biafran rebels and it began to seem a little over-extended.
A few years later, boycotting all Florida orange juice because their spokesmodel was a bigot, that I could do. But it was fairly sharply targeted, both in why the boycott was happening and what would make it stop.
But that was before merger-mania struck. Now things have become a little more intertwined, and, if the Minute Maid/Biafra connection seemed tenuous in 1968, it's really hard to get a meal on the table without finding a skunk or two in this pile of corporate incest.
It's not impossible to find out who's doing what, but the workarounds are increasingly problematic, especially for those of us who don't live in major cities. For instance, I know Costco is good people, but the nearest one is 75 miles away.
Anyway, this is simple: My belief in unconditional love does not extend to corporations-as-people, but, whether or not I boycott the bad, I'm certainly prepared to patronize the good.
So, pay your people, extend some benefits, let the public know.
Oh, and please make sure the food is decent, because I'm sorry, but if KFC started paying $40 an hour and providing no-buy-in, no-deductible health care and free automobiles to their employees, I still wouldn't eat their crappy chicken.
Technology and the writing life
I've heard writers talk about the impact of new technologies on writing in general, but particularly in the suspense and mystery genre: You can no longer have a person riding into danger with no chance of anyone warning him, unless you add "I'm going to look for the spies. While I'm gone, could you call Verizon? My cell phone seems to have stopped working."
The 1954 Rip Kirby that recently started over at Daily Ink/Comics Kingdom has the opposite problem but I'd say a similarly problematic workaround. It's all well and good for Rip to have a reference book — and a damned up-to-date one, I might add, given the age of this imperiled, be-diapered heir — but now it seems he also clips and files his newspapers to an extent that seems, well, a bit compulsive.
Thank goodness he's not Doc Savage, who would have simply known all this off the top of his protean head, but, still, how much easier it would be for Rip to be able to Google the kid.
Speaking of knowing things, and corporate malfeasance
Mr Fitz has been riffing on the Grinch, and while much of it has been inside-baseball for teachers (which is fine, since that's the audience), today's is pretty universally accessible to anyone who has paid attention to the undermining of education by corporate privatizers.
I recently attended the annual convention of the New York State Reading Council, and it was positively depressing to hear some of the most involved, motivated, creative language arts and reading teachers in the state talk about the barriers that have been thrown up in their faces by reformers who neither understand teaching or learning.
There have always been new ways of doing things coming down the pike, but, in the past, good teachers could quietly pick-and-choose in order to continue to inspire and instruct. However, the mandatory nature of this top-down meddling with local control of schools and with the best practices of our best teachers is unprecedented.
Call it "Kintups" — just as "Sputnik" drove America to beef up its education system, this corporate interest in setting up profit-based charter schools to end-run around the publicly funded, publicly accountable system, combined with populist union-bashing by all corporations and their congressional minions, is little more than a drive to undermine and take over the system.
It is of a piece with the refusal to raise the minimum wage, and the opposition to affordable health care, and the cuts in food stamps, and the cuts to unemployment benefits.
Just as corporate raiders strip the value from the companies they acquire in the name of next quarter's profits, so, too, they're willing to screw the next generation for short-term gains.
Oh, I'm sorry: Was I ranting?
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