Americans Need To Ask Better Questions

When the newly-elected governor of Michigan announced last year or year before that he planned on balancing the state budget on the backs of teachers, it made me mad. You know what made me madder? The drive to recall him.

When he rode into office on a wave of "I'll do whatever's necessary to balance the state budget", no one bothered to say "Really? And what are your plans?" If he had said "Well, i plan on cutting the pay, benefits and pensions of teachers", then i'm sure that he wouldn't have been elected. As it is, no one bothered to ask, so he didn't have to tell.

But that's one of the big problems with America today. We don't ask enough questions. Like when Walmart promises that they'll always have the lowest prices. Heck, sometimes they'll drop their prices so low that a competitor will have to go out of business because they can't compete. But it seems like no one asks "How?"

Well, since the majority of Americans today have no idea how retail works, let me explain it to you.

Contrary to what it seems, retailers don't just randomly assign prices to things. It's actually a formula. This isn't exact, but it goes more or less like this... overhead (payroll, electricity, advertising, taxes, etc) plus profit margin equals markup. Markup plus wholesale cost equals the price of the item. I can tell you that in our "get rich or die tryin'" 21st century mentality, profit margin is the last thing to get cut. You know what's usually first? Well, they can't change the amount of taxes that they pay... they can't significantly change the cost of their electricity... i mean they can, but only to a certain extent. So what does that leave? Payroll. The first thing to go in payroll is usually benefits. Like Walmart setting it up so that only about 45% of their employees (most of that 45% being management) have access to health benefits. But we don't have to worry about that because we don't pay for that, right? Except, when one of these people, unable to afford to see a doctor for that cold goes into the ER to be treated for pneumonia and can't pay their bill, who do you think does? You and I. Another thing that they do is pay the absolute minimum that they can for labor. But we don't have to worry about that, either, because it just saves us money, right? Except that a lot of these people end up on government assistance of one sort or another (food stamps, energy assistance, whatever), which we pay for. Another trick that not just Walmart, but a LOT of retailers do (Target seems to be the only one that doesn't do this) is to have one employee performing four or five tasks at once. This doesn't actually cost us money, but think of this the next time that you're in a Walmart and see one employee going crazy trying to process returns, money orders and bill payments and answer the phones all at the same time. These hidden costs are what retailers call "backend" expenses. You don't see them... but they're there.

I saw this first hand years ago when i was working for Costco. A customer said "Why doesn't Costco have bags like everyone else does?" I responded "Because, ma'am, we don't charge you for bags." Her response? "The grocery store doesn't charge me for bags." Of course they do. That's part of their overhead.

And it goes deeper than that, too. Every since the Reagan administration, we've allowed slave labor to assemble our crap. And i don't want to hear that garbage about how anything that we pay them is better than what they could get otherwise. When you look at an outfit like the Chinese company Foxconn, which builds Apple products, and take into account that many of their employees are working sixteen hour days and six hour weeks for almost no pay and no benefits, it doesn't become worth it. When they had five employee suicides in five months because of the working conditions, it doesn't become worth it. When you realize that (i think that the figure is) 40% of the money that we send over there goes to enrich and prop up the Communist government, It doesn't become worth it.

We're full of big talk about how we're working to bring democracy to the world, and that we want everyone to have the same quality of life that we do. But that's all that it is... talk. Unless you mean, like Newt Gingrich apparently does, that we should lower our quality of life to match the average Chinese quality of life. And trust me... most of them ain't living high on the hog. We're really perfectly okay with propping up a repressive government like China as long as we can get an HDTV for $200, or overthrowing a democratically elected government like we did in Iran in the forties or Cuba in the fifties. In both cases, we disliked the duly-elected official, so we performed a coup and put someone that we liked in power. In Iraq it was the Shah. In Cuba it was a bright young up-and-comer named Fidel Castro.

Now. Having said that, i would also like to say that it may be too late to change our massive sell-out of our economy to Communist China. We are so deeply in debt to China that our politicians have to convince us that we're really doing something good over there, because if one of them actually had the balls to suggest that we change the way that we're doing things all that China has to do is call that debt home and our economy sinks like an anchor. The republicans are right... we need to change the way that we're doing things. But cutting the salaries of Americans, denying Americans health care and robbing our teachers and public officials isn't the way to do it.

Peace.

Randal

Movie Review: Ringmaster

Year: 1998
Director: Neil Abramson
Writer: Jon Bernstein
Stars: Jerry Springer
Jaime Pressly
Molly Hagan

I've been meaning to watch this film for years because i like the two female leads. Really i have. Just not enough to... you know... actually RENT it or add it to my Netflix queue or anything. I kept thinking "I like those two... i'd like to see that one of these days." So a couple weeks ago it was on one of Showtime's innumerable channels, so i dropped it on the DVR and finally watched it a couple of days ago. Why the delay? I hate the Jerry Springer show, as well as his new show on GSN, "Baggage". I mean, i don't dislike Springer himself, he strikes me as a man of some intellect and talent. One of those talents just seems to be making crappy TV shows. At my old job they would watch his show in our breakroom and... i swear that this is true... every time that i heard that "JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!" it would give me a stomach ache. I'm not kidding. In the interest of full disclosure, i have watched two almost full episodes of the show. One because i was channel flipping and i saw that he had as his guests the Shappell twins, two of my heroines. These two women have lived their entire lives (i'm not even kidding here) joined at the forehead. They've even managed to make a bit of an acting career for themselves. It's amazing. The other time it was the whole freakshow element of the thing. I don't remember how i started this one, but there was the gorgeous girl on there breaking up with her schnook of a boyfriend. I couldn't help but think "how'd this guy let himself get into this?" Then they brought they guy out that she was sleeping with, and, of course, the two guys fought. After the commercial, they had everyone calmed down. Then she dumped the SECOND guy on national TV and they brought out the girl that she was now sleeping with. The girls kissed. What did they guys do? They couldn't beat up a girl. So they fought again. That's my shameful confession of the day. You don't get another one.

Oh, the movie? It was pretty good, actually. Molly and Jaime were both as sexy as all get-out and their two "guys" seemed adequately like whipped dogs through the whole film. And Jerry was... Jerry. If you don't know, the movie is like a behind-the-scenes story of the Springer show. Molly and Jaime are mother and daughter who were going to be on an episode called "I slept with my step-daddy". That about sums it up.

The good: This actually seems like a pretty honest look at the Springer show. I mean, at one point, a reporter is interviewing Springer when a tussle breaks out in the hallway between two of the guests. After Jerry helps to break it up and scolds them, he returns to the interviewer, who asks "Are they okay?" And Jerry says "Of course they're not... they're on my show."

The bad: With the exception of Jerry, the male characters in this movie are like cardboard cut-outs. They're more male stereotypes than men. You have the unemployed, hard-drinking horny redneck. You have the dumb, whipped young redneck. You have the dog of a black guy who will sleep with anything female that moves, but is especially drawn to white girls. There are also some major editing and continuity problems with the film. Like at one point the young, dumb redneck locked his key card in the hotel room that he shared with his girlfriend, Jaime. So he goes out to see the town. He returns later and somehow opens his door to find Jaime having sex with the dog of a black guy. Molly Hagan gets her t-shirt signed by Jerry, who signs it "love, Jerry". In the next scene, the writing on the T looks completely different and it says "thanks, Jerry".

The ugly: The Jerry Springer Show. This show generally shows no respect for humanity at all. Like those "Which of these five guys that i slept with over the course of a week is my baby's daddy?" episodes. I mean, you know that this crap is going to be in syndication for ever. What happens when that kid's twelve and his friends recognize his mom on a rerun? It's awful.

Peace.

Randal

Sexuality

I realized after i wrote that blog entry on gay marriage that i should probably make myself clear on sexuality in general.

First off, as a Christian, i believe that God WANTS us to enjoy the gift of sexuality responsibly. If God only wanted us to enjoy sexuality within the confines of marriage, then that's what we'd be able to do. I mean, God's pretty good at making things work the way that God wants them to work. Besides, as some great wit once said, if God didn't want us to masturbate, then our arms wouldn't be the right length.

Also, i believe that heterosexuality and homosexuality are not only misnomers, but a false dichotomy. I say that they are misnomers because it's not really about sex. It's about who you love. It's about who you want to spend your days and nights with. Let's face it, you don't have sex with everyone that you love and most of us don't always love everyone that we have sex with. My preferred terms, because i think that they're more accurate, are heteroamorous or homoamorous. I say that it's a false dichotomy because, except for maybe John Wayne at one of the spectrum and Harvey Fierstien at the other end, there are no perfect homo- or heterosexuals. Years ago, in the fifties, the great sex researcher Alferd Kinsey came up with his scale of human sexuality. The scale runs from zero (absolutely heterosexual) to six (absolutely homosexual). I think that most of us tend to fall somewhere on that spectrum outside of zero and six. Kinsey, for instance, classed himself as a two. I would class myself as about a zero point five. I think that homophobes (or heterophobes, they do exist) would class themselves as a perfect zero or six, but tend to be more like a two, three or four.

Good information on the Kinsey scale can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale

Peace.

Randal

Gay Marriage... Again

When are we going to get over our brainless obsession with who people are attracted to or have sex with? Seriously.

This "debate" has been going on for... what... twenty years now? It's time to just get over ourselves and let homosexuals be as miserable as the rest of us. I realize that my words here won't settle this debate, but maybe they'll give people some stuff to chew on...

1) The Religious Issue

Marriage is not now, nor has it ever been in modern times what it was in Mosiac times or even in Jesus' time. In Biblical times, marriage was a way to have legitimate sons to leave your property to. Since women were not allowed to own property at that time, were, in fact, considered nothing more than incubators for a man's "seed", they were considered property and were "given" in marriage as such. And the modern idea of dating? Forget about it! No father would leave his daughter alone with a man who wasn't her husband.

As far as the Biblical quotes about homosexuality go, these fall into two camps. The Old Testament and the New. In the old, the ban on homosexuality was exclusively a ban on MALE homosexuality. Why? Well, again, women were only considered peripheral in the issue of children. Also, women were not considered sexual creatures. They were not believed to enjoy sex at that time, but to endure it. So it was unthinkable that a woman would seek sex the way that a man did. The New Testament ban on homosexuality, if you read those passages closely, also refer to "revelers" and "gossips". And yet there's no religious group outside city hall carrying signs that say "Big Mouths Go To Hell!"

What about Sodom? Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality, right? It's pretty clear. Except that it's not. First off, the term sodomy refers to ALL oral and anal copulation, not just those between people of the same sex. Also, if people would READ their Bibles instead of simply taking someone else's word for what it says, they would find Ezekiel 16:49. "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." Doesn't that pretty much describe the republican platform in the twentieth century? Add to that everything that Jesus said about loving your neighbor and not judging one another and you have a very different view of the Biblical view of how we should treat homosexuals.

2) Unchanging Marriage

Another argument is that marriage should be defined as a union between a man and a woman because that's the way it always has been, amen.

Except that it hasn't.

I've already pointed out that marriage was an entirely different concept in Biblical days than it is now. Among other things, men could have multiple wives in Biblical times, while women were limited to one husband.

But that's not the only change. Through the twentieth century Jews were not allowed to marry Gentiles. In my lifetime, marriage has been changed again, allowing marriage between white and black people. And the debate over that looked an awful lot like the current debate.

Another thing to remember is that, until the last couple of hundred years, their was no such thing as a secular authority. All authority was religious authority. Heck, up until the 1400's, priests, bishops and popes were allowed to marry. This changed because it muddied the water that divided the priest's property from the church's property.

3) Civil Opposition to Gay Marriage

We have NEVER decided civil rights in this country based on popular opinion. Ever. As a matter of fact, if you look at the two big civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, the equality of women and black people with white men, these things were passed in the face of overwhelming civil opposition. In the first case, when sufferage was passed, only white men were allowed to vote. If it were left up to a vote, do you think that white men would give that portion of their power away? The same thing happened during the civil rights era when only white men and women could vote. I repeat that we have NEVER granted civil rights based on a vote and we shouldn't start now.

I laud the president for taking such a clear stand on gay marriage, especially in an election year. I was gravely disappointed during the 2008 election when he said that he wouldn't support gay marriage, and am proud of him now.

Peace.

Randal

Seinfeld

Year: 1990-1998, 2009
Director: Various
Writer: Various
Stars: Jerry Seinfeld
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss
Michael Richards
Jason Alexander

Throughout the original run of this series, i know that i watched one episode (The Puffy Shirt) and may have watched two. I didn't like (and still don't like) Seinfeld's comedy. All of my friends raved about it of course, and you couldn't look anywhere in the media without seeing it, but it just didn't interest me.

So last year at the urging of my (then) wife, i started to watch the series from the beginning thanks to Netflix. I watched the series finale last night. Here's the conclusion that i've come up with. Seinfeld was... okay.

THE GOOD: There are some truly hilarious moments in the series. I think that i lol'd once or twice per season. Like the scene where a telemarketer calls Jerry, and he asks if he can have the telemarketer's home phone number so that he can call him back later. When the telemarketer says "no", Jerry says "So you don't want people calling you at home?" The telemarketer says no again. Jerry says "Now you know how I feel." Granted, for me, most of the truly funny moments were Michael Richard's physical comedy, but he's always been brilliant at that.

THE BAD: This group of friends is truly, deeply unlikeable. Except for Jerry, who has his moments, i think that i would cross the street to avoid these selfish, shallow people if i knew them in real life. I like sitcoms where i like and care about the people in the show. Like the group on "How I Met Your Mother". I would genuinely like to hang out with this group, even Barney. But not the Seinfeld crew. The series finale where they're videotaping and mocking the fat guy getting carjacked without helping or even calling 911 typifies this group of losers for me.

THE UGLY: When Seinfeld was on, i couldn't avoid hearing about how it was a "show about nothing". A show about things happening to these people that happen to all of us. Thaat may have been true in the beginning, but as the show progressed it got more and more intricately plotted and became less and less about ordinary things happening to ordinary people. It became less a ground-breaking show and more a typical sitcom, in other words.

In summation, if you want to see Julia Louis-Dreyfuss in much better roles, watch "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" or her new HBO series "Veep". If you want to see Michael Richards at the top of his physical comedy game, watch "UHF".

Peace.
Randal