Entries from October 2005 ↓

Wal-Mart, that swelling corporate behemoth, has lately been having some trouble moving into markets in New York and Los Angeles because of the fact that it pays its workers shit and gives them shit benefits, thereby effectively foisting their needs on the surrounding civil infrastructure.

Our government should be the one taking care of those needs, of course, but it’s just not set up to do so. “We” made a decision as a country to lay that burden at the feet of the corporations that employ us, despite the fact that a corporation is a pitiless amoral entity whose sole purpose in life is to make money. So it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that it will gladly screw its employees over if they stand in the way of that goal.

Wal-Mart’s employees have it worse than most, though. They’re disproportionately dependent on the services of Medicare. They make an average of $17,500 dollars a year, and many of them are intentionally given a couple of hours less than a full workweek so that they can be classified as part-time, and thus ineligible for the full suite of shitty benefits that Wal-Mart provides. Only 45% of their employees actually get healthcare.

These practices have garnered Wal-Mart enough bad press recently that they’ve decided to splurge on a makeover:

Answering its critics, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has unveiled a plan to institute environmentally friendly policies, offer employees lower-priced health care and lobby for a higher minimum wage in the U.S.

Wow! That’s sounds awesome! Maybe this soulless corporate leviathan has actually turned over a new leaf! Maybe it’s discovered a conscience under its thick layers of vileness and sociopathy! Maybe the paradoxical dream of a socially-conscious evil profit-whore isn’t so crazy after all!

Except for this. A secret internal Wal-Mart memo that made it out into the wild tells us that the company’s black hole of a heart is still firmly in the wrong place:

An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer’s reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

How do they discourage the unhealthy without seeming to discourage the unhealthy? By taking advantage of their disabilities, of course!

To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”

Nice. I can see it now: some oily Wal-Mart exec sauntering up to some sickly ailing customer service representative and asking him to please gather up all the shopping carts in the parking lot. Oh, you can’t do that? Well, I completely understand. Maybe you can do this, then. You see the front door over there? Yeah, that one. Can you go over to that door, and open it, and go outside, and close it, and never come back? Think you can handle that? You can? Good. Great. Thanks. Have a nice day.

The memo goes on to say that old people are liabilities:

[Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits] wrote that “the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity. Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart.”

As part of their old-person elimination plan, I fully expect Wal-Mart to implement a policy wherein, as soon as an employee reaches his seventh year, he or she is captured in an anti-gravity device and pulled up toward the ceiling of the store, where a matter incinerator will reduce him or her into subatomic particles, which will then be placed in an urn and given career counseling before being deposited in back next to the dumpsters.

Really, though, I shouldn’t be so hard on Wal-Mart. It is what it is, what it was designed to be. Might as well blame a vulture for eating carrion. No: the blame lies squarely at the feet of our government, which, unlike a corporation, is supposed to be looking after the health and well-being of its people. That is the point of being a government, isn’t it?

Art has power. Words have power. Music has power. That’s because we’re essentially a mass of chemicals and ganglia wired to a big chunk of meat. Besides giving us the illusion of free will, this insanely complex glut of neurons makes us vulnerable to abstractions that have absolutely no physical or practical effect on our lives.

There’s this song in The Phantom of the Opera, a not-very-good musical with occasional moments of sublime perfection, where some primadona actress who’s complaining about her shitty billing suddenly raises her voice in this amazing, piercing cry that completely chokes me up every time I hear it. I don’t understand what she’s saying, and it doesn’t really matter; the sound of it sends my chemicals into this crazy frenzy, and I suddenly feel like crying for no reason at all. I feel like crying right now, just thinking about it. This is why you should keep your boys away from musicals, Gentle Reader.

Another thing that affects me deeply is well-executed sentimentality. As a rule, I despise naked sentiment in the arts, not because I have anything against it per se, but because it’s usually done so badly. Which is understandable. The margin of error for successful sentimentality is vanishingly small. But when it’s done right, it kills me every fucking time. I just got done reading The Kite Runner, a book that, underneath its patina of violence and pain, positively reeks of sentiment. But it reeks good. Very good. I spent a good portion of the book alternately smiling and fighting back tears. I could see the author doing what he was doing, too, feel his authorial finger poking out of the page and pushing my buttons. But I didn’t mind; was powerless to stop it anyway.

I just came across another one of these little button-pushers, unexpectedly, in an article about this paleo-conservative writer named Peter Viereck. It’s an interesting story about the arc of his life, and of the conservative movement as a whole, though I wouldn’t call it emotionally stirring or anything. But it ends with this quote, from Viereck:

I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts; attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.

This completely floored me. I was on my lunchtime walk, head down against the cold spatter of a staccato autumn rainshower, squinting at the magazine; and then I read this, and a huge smile spread across my face, and I heard myself laughing, felt something swelling in my chest. I hate it when words cut through my carefully-laid layers of cynicism and ennui. I don’t really understand how it happens, but I know it’s the goddamn brain chemicals, conspiring against me.

I can’t understand why evolution decided it was a good idea to build us this way. It doesn’t make any sense, from a purely logical perspective. It makes me question my non-belief in a Creator. Maybe I should switch over to the other side. At least then I’d have Someone to blame.

I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything for a couple of months now. Every thought I have breaks into a hundred thoughtlets that shatter into a million thoughtules that crumble into dust and flutter to the bottom of my mind and lie there in great undifferentiated piles of silt. The inside of my head is beset by snowstorms of confetti blown by hurricanes and lit by strobe lights.

I don’t read newspapers anymore. It’s hard to concentrate on all those words, so I just skim them. Lately I can barely make it all the way to end of the headlines. Here’s what I read in the Post today:

Harriet Miers Ba

Goss’s CIA Is Still In Tur

Wilma Bec

Every time I think about stopping to smell the roses, something else intervenes. I haven’t looked at the little buds blooming on the tree behind our house. I see flecks of scarlet in a green blur as I rush by, but that could just be the redshift. Whenever I consider slowing down to look, the notion is immediately set upon by a hundred others (buy batteries change oil get mail take vitamins call Stan pay bills). They drag it down and tie it up and hack it to pieces. I keep moving, the frenzied barker perched on my shoulder spurring me on. Go faster! he says. Read faster! Be faster!

There’s this piece of spam making its way through the nation’s mailboxes. It features a paragraph shorn of all its vowels, but you can still read it so long as you let your eyes skate over the words and your brain fill in the blanks. Which proves that you can rely on your preconceptions to wring some drab shred of meaning from this confusing and gnomic world. My shoulder-barker loves shit like that. To him, it’s proof that 80% of the universe is noise that you can ignore, must ignore if want to get to kernel of the nut of the core of the meaning of things.

I think that’s pretty depressing. I like lingering over vowels, and I like the sounds words make, both alone and in conjunction with other nearby words. I think there’s more to life than just meaning. It’s kind of unfair to expect the universe to mean something all the time. We should give the universe a break. We should sit back and enjoy its meaninglessness, and all the beautiful useless things it contains.

But there’s no time, that’s the problem. I have this code to check in and this workout to do, this meeting to go to and this article to read. I have these blogs to skim, these headlines to half-finish. I have this vacation to enjoy, this dog to walk.

The world observed in fast-forward devolves into a series of dissociated atoms, like a pointillist painting seen too close, until none of it makes any sense. Until it’s just the featureless landbridge between your first breath and your last.

Joanna had just penned an extended (and inspired) diatribe on the tendency of certain men to appraise members of the opposite sex as if they were things:

What I object to is the blatancy with which I’m being appraised - as if it were an intrinstic part of being female to be judged by some balding, middle-aged, bridge & tunnel gutlord. I’m not here to do my job or be your friend or whatever; I’m here for you to look at. That’s it. That’s the sum total of my purpose on earth: for you to look at. This morning, I was standing in the elevator, alone, with this dude (who I’ve never seen before in my life) and he actually stepped back a foot, turned to look at me and slowly looked me up and down for 6 floors until it was my stop. I wanted to punch him in the face.

You should go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful. But I have to confess that it did made me feel just a little bit … squeamish. And guilty. Which I don’t understand, because I’m not one of these people.

Am I?

Well, no, of course I’m not, I’m happily married, for one thing, and besides … I’m not into objectifying people. I’m a secular humanist, for God’s sake! Every person is a spirit sheathed in a body, and there’s no more sense in obsessing over people’s sheathes than there is in obsessing over their clothes. So, ok, if I am staring at someone, I’m staring at their spirit, alright? I’m spirit-gazing!

I was going to write a whole big essay on this subject, but … yeah, I don’t think so. Too much introspection involved, too much peering into the seedy underbelly of male psychology. So I’ll just leave it at this: men are cads. Every one of us. There’s no question of a man not being a cad; the only question is the amount of caddery involved. We should all be required to wear one of those t-shirts that changes color to reflect its owner’s fluctuating caddery rating. So it would turn white, say, for a Level 1 Cad (the lowest level, in which the appearance of a woman is marked, assessed, and cataloged, but no staring or unseemliness occurs); orange for a Level 5 Cad (mid-level, in which the head snaps up the eyes bug out and a narrow thread of consciousness reaches into the mind of a thinner, less bald antecedent in an attempt to extract an old pick-up line before (a) sense is regained; or (b) something hard and unyielding is walked into); and red for a Level 10 Cad (maximum caddery, which involves obvious, prolonged staring and perhaps even some sort of wolf-whistling ). Of course, Level 10 cads don’t need to be identified: they’re quite obvious.

Anyway. That’s all I have to say about that.