Half a Century of Thoughts -- part three (the 80s)

The 80s were seriously weird. We recently re-watched Working Girl ('88), and I was amazed at just how big the hair was in that movie. I think it added a foot to Joan Cusack's height. And I'm not even going to talk about her eye shadow. Look, I lived through the 80s, and I was still amazed. The hair, the shoulder pads (what the fuck was up with the shoulder pads!?!?), the makeup...

And I'm not even going to go into the clothing trends. Nope, not gonna touch it. Well, other than the aforementioned shoulder pads.

The problem with the 80s is that it was a somewhat schizophrenic decade, marked by both an unparalleled optimism about the future (we had space shuttles!) and a certainty that that future would never arrive (space shuttles blow up). This contrast is probably showcased best in the song by Timbuk 3, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades."


In case you didn't know, the future's so bright in the song due to the coming nuclear holocaust, not because everything was coming up roses. Unless those roses were going to glow in the dark and have radioactive poison in their thorns. I mean, at Christmas one year during middle school, my English class won the door design contest for our version of "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas," the brainchild of a friend of mine and I as we sang, "I'm dreaming of a nuclear winter..."
And that hopelessly dim view of the future won the design contest of what was supposed to be the happiest time of the year.

That should tell you something.

I'm gonna tell you: It's difficult to be so optimistic and, yet, so pessimistic about the future at the same time. But we were. We both believed that science would be the salvation of the future and that we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust before that could happen. Remember War Games?

And here's the thing: There was a kind of general understanding -- an agreement, if you will -- between Gen X and... whoever (not the Boomers) that if we could just get past the imminent doom that things would get better. We would harness science and step boldly into the future.
For real this time.

But, then, there were the Boomers, who, as a generational body (I'm not talking about specific individuals) believe only in self-indulgence, personified in our current "president" (#fakepresident), who derailed everything in the name of profit. After all, why build anything for the future (as their parents had and their parents had) when they wouldn't be around to enjoy it. Eat it all now. Eat the world. Leave nothing for anyone else. Ever.

Of course, we didn't realize that's how it was at first. We got through the 80s, the Berlin wall came down, nukes were taken off the table. The jet packs and flying cars were coming...

The problem was that every time the Boomers had a chance to do something good for the world, they chose, instead, to do something bad which would allow them to make money. All you have to do is look at what Trump (#fakepresident) has done since he got into office to see how all of this has played out. He is the epitome of Boomers and self-indulgence.

It's like coming home from school and finding out that your mother has given away your comic book collection, all of which were bought with your own very hard earned money (it was difficult, at seven, to find other people who would give you jobs to do since your own parents wouldn't give you an allowance or any way of earning money). And her only reason? Basically, she felt like it. Someone else showed an interest in them, so she gave them away.

Or, even worse, when you've spent hours and hours and hours making something and come home to find that your mom has come into your room and thrown it away. Because.
There's something in someone who would do such thing (either thing) that is just about causing pain to someone else. Like it's a zero-sum game. If someone else is happy, they are taking away from my happiness, so I need to do something to make them sad.

For some reason, Boomers have an outlook that says that life is a zero-sum game and they can't win until and unless they make everyone else lose.
I imagine that it's a sad existence for them, which is why they are so busy trying to make it a sad existence for everyone else.

And this is where I am, back in the 80s. All of the very worst parts of the 80s have sprung back into existence with the added bonus of environmental collapse.
It's like we haven't learned anything.
Or, well, the Boomers haven't, at any rate. Especially the old, white male Boomers.
You will never find a more disgusting hive of scum and villainy.

Half a Century of Thoughts -- part two

I have a lot of mixed emotions when I look back at my childhood. On the one hand, there was incredible freedom. I was largely left to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, other than going to school and being home by dark. No great hardships since I didn't dislike school and there was no one to play with after dark. Of course, I didn't feel that way about it at the time, the freedom part, much like I didn't feel anything about my ability to walk or do anything else. It just was.

I spent as little time at home as possible, most of my weekends being spent at my friends' houses.

Which is where the mixed emotions come in. My friends didn't want to come to my house anymore than I wanted to be there. Not that I really understood that at the time. Except for one friend who left crying the first time he ever tried to stay the night at my house. My (step)dad started yelling about something and scared him, and he had to go home. He never came to my house again, though I spent many, many weekends at his. I didn't get that that was the same reason none of my other friends wanted to come to my house, either, and why I always stayed at theirs.

And the freedom I had was negligence. My parents rarely knew where I was or when or if I'd be home, not that I didn't ever not show up at dusk. Unless I was spending the night with someone, but my mom, at least, always knew that because I would actually ask for permission. Of course, there was that one time... That time I ran away.

My mom knew that I ran away, since I did it because of some fight. I don't remember what happened other than that it ended with me yelling, "I'm running away and never coming back!" I made the best effort at it I could being a spur of the moment thing. I walked around the block three or four times trying to figure out where I should go. I realized fairly quickly that I couldn't go to any of my friends' houses because their moms were friends with my mom and I'd just get sent back home. Likewise, I couldn't go to my grandparents' house... though maybe I could have for a while? I don't know. I didn't try it, but it's possible they wold have let me stay. At the time, that didn't feel like an option.

[One note: When I mentioned in the previous post the "house I grew up in," that was my grandparents' house. At least, at this point. But I'm not going to explain that right now.]

In fact, it felt like I didn't have any options. So I sat down under a tree on the corner of the street I lived on so that I could think. And I thought about it for hours. So many hours that it got dark and I had come to no conclusions about where I could go, but I was determined to not go home. What was the point of running away if you just went back home? Eventually, a car came up the street and stopped next to me. The door opened and my mom growled, "Get in the car." Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to refuse on the grounds that I had run away; I just got in the car and we drove backwards down the street to our house.

I think the "running away" thing is emblematic of my childhood. Maybe of all of GenX. Sure, my mom came after me, but she got lucky. If I had been some other kid, some kid who didn't think things through and need a plan, I might have just walked off randomly through the city and never been seen from again or, at least, not without the intervention of the police. And let me be clear, this was not one of those "teaching moments" from a sitcom where a kid declares s/he is going to run away and the parent helps said kid pack and plan until the kid realizes that running away isn't a good idea. This was my mom not caring enough to do anything about it, and it doesn't matter that she believed I wasn't really going to do it, because, clearly, she was wrong about that. If she had bothered to ever know me as a kid, she would have known that I wasn't in the habit of making idle threats. It's not like "I'm going to run away!" was a thing I said on a regular basis.

The problem here is that she didn't bother to worry about me, or even wonder about me, until it got dark and I didn't come home. She just went about her business. And my dad(step) didn't care at all. It was never mentioned, and he took no action or acknowledged that anything had happened.

The number of times I almost died as a child is appalling. I mean literally almost died. Like the time my cousin and I got stuck in what can only be called quickmud and didn't realize we were in any kind of danger until we were literally in it up to our mouths and only barely got out (because she used me as a surface and pushed me all the way under so that she could get her hands on the bank and pull herself out). Or the multiple times I was chased my water moccasins while out playing in the woods so far from anywhere that no one would have known I was dead. It physically distresses my daughter almost any time I talk about things from my childhood. Which is what made me realize that there were things wrong with my childhood. Prior to that, to me, it was all just normal.

Not to mention that my mom would just give my stuff away because she felt like it. Seriously, I would come home and stuff from my room, stuff I loved, would just be gone. It was always, "Oh, I gave that to so-and-so." She didn't have any reason; she just did it. And my wife's mom would do the same kind of thing only she would throw things away.

And the Boomers are still doing that shit, even at this very moment. Fighting to protect the most corrupt "President" (#fakepresident) of all time so that they can continue to hold onto everything. Stealing the future from their kids and grandkids so that they can continue to bloat themselves. And they don't fucking care! There's a reason that Gen X has been the first American generation to not surpass their parents in wealth and success, because Boomers are like Shelob in her cave sucking the life out of everything that gets near them.

Of course, the problem is not just the Boomers. Mostly, Gen Xers have responded just as I did when I ran away. Boomers pull up in the car and say, "Get in," and we do it. Why? Because the Boomers are in the right? No. I'm pretty sure my mom was not in the right about whatever the disagreement was. My dad(step) was never in the right and my mom only rarely. No, we do it because they're our parents. We don't even think about it, not until it's too late.

And, you know what, it's too late. Or pretty damn close to it.
And we keep letting Boomers tell us what to do.

Make America Great: Stepping into the Future

While it can't be said that America was ever great in practice, an argument could be made for it having been great in concept. Or, at least, in concept in its own collective consciousness. If that time existed, and I think it did, it was in the post-World War II years and lasted up to around 1970. The assassination of Kennedy and, then, King wounded it, but, really, it was Nixon who drove a stake right into the heart of the idea of American greatness. Then he twisted it around a bit and pissed on the corpse for good measure.

Let's take a quick look at post-WWII America:
First, America had just saved the world. Almost literally. Whether that was actually true or not doesn't matter, because that's how Americans viewed it.
Second, America was helping to rebuild the world, including offering great assistance to peoples who had just been its enemies. Sure, maybe some of that was motivated by the guilt of having nuked Japan but, still, we were doing it.
Third, there was a push toward equality for all. True, it hadn't gotten there, but people began to see it, finally, as a possibility. It brought hope.
Fourth, World War II led the US into a technology boom, which was heightened when Russia launched Sputnik. We had a great focus on education and science and the future, and we really believed that anything and everything was possible.
Fifth, because we believed in the future, we began to build for the future and infrastructure expenditures show it. It was all rather altruistic because it was an idea, not for those doing it, but for those who would come after.

That was the environment the Boomer generation grew up in, one in which there was huge growth, plenty of everything which was handed to them on a platter so they didn't have to work for it, and the future was so bright they had to wear shades. Perhaps, it's no wonder they long for "the good old days."

Of course, their focus is on the physical output of the ideals of a previous generation, ideals they themselves don't hold. They are a generation of consumers and profit and, now, through Trump (#fakepresident), Republicans are engaged in an act of necrophilia. The focus on coal and other dead industries is nothing more than trying to fuck a corpse back to life.

And the worst part? Trump (#fakepresident) is doing it on live TV and twitter for the whole world to watch, dragging us along for the ride. Not that Turkeyneck McConnell, Paul Ryan, and a slew of others aren't humping away with him.

I think the only way to step into the future is to push the Boomers out of power. Probably all of them. Even the "good" ones (and I do think there are some good ones). Leave them to have their orgy of the dead on their own.

It's time to stop letting the future slip away.

Because we are well on our way to not even being on the bus to the future. It's like we were driving that bus, then let China take over, and, now, we're just getting off entirely.

There are so many things on the verge of happening:
Self-driving cars
Flying cars
Sustainable energy
Laser guns! (oh, wait, China already did this!)
a Mars colony
Asteroid mining
Feeding the whole world
Curing cancer
Well, I could go on for a while...

Do you know why none of those things are actually happening? Boomers and their fear of profit loss by not being allowed to rape the Earth and kill species.

It's time to put or focus on the technologies of the future because we can't go there by trying to make coal the fuel of the future. It's the fuel of a long-dead past, and we need to leave it there.

Look, I'm not saying you're ever going to get that personal jetpack, but, if you do, it certainly won't be coal powered. It's time to get rid of the G.Old.P. They are the proverbial weight around our collective neck tying us to the past. Personally, I'm tired of the past.
It's time to step into the future. I want to see it before I'm dead.

Concerning TRU

I've made no secret of the fact that I used to work at Toys R Us, so it's with the kind of fascination of watching a train wreck that I have been paying attention to them "suddenly" going out of business. Sure, I get that it's surprising to some, but this is by no means sudden, whatever they would have you believe. And maybe I wouldn't have said anything about this at all, but...

There's always a "but."

But TRU (Toys R Us, but I'm going to refer to them as TRU) has, evidently, blamed their woes on millennials, the seeming punching bag these days of corporate America and of Boomers in general. ["Boomers" means "Baby Boomers." More on them in some future post.] "If only millennials were having more babies, we would be making enough money to stay open. It's all your fault for not giving us your money." As if just the fact of millennials having babies would drive them into the open arms (or doors, as the case may be) of a local TRU or Babies R Us store.

The truth of the matter is that TRU has been on the verge of going out of business for at least the last 20 years, it being 20 years ago that I last worked for them, and they were teetering on the brink even then. The further truth of the matter is that TRU is a shitty company and has been for at least the last 30 years, 30 years ago being when I first worked for them when I still lived in Louisiana. They're a shitty company, and they actually deserve to go out of business.

Why would I say they deserve it? Well, because they've had 30 fucking years to do something to improve their business model and, yet, they have refused to do so. They've just gone ahead with the what seems to be the driving philosophy of the Boomer generation: Did you fail the first time? Well try again using the same method but do it faster and harder. In fact, keeping doing that same thing over and over again; eventually, you have to succeed.

Right?

Evidently not.

So, yes, Toys R Us definitively deserves to go out of business.

Oh, hey, breaking news right in the middle of me working on this piece: It seems that the founder of TRU has died. At the age of 94. One of the things TRU is saying about him is how much he loved the customer. Well, I didn't know the guy, so that may well be true, but I do know that TRU definitely did not love their customers. Their customers were only second their employees as enemies.

When I first worked for TRU back around 1990, it was official company policy to not help customers. The extent that we were allowed to help someone was to walk them to the aisle where something should be located. If something was not on the shelf, we were instructed to tell customers that it was out of stock. Even if we knew it was not out of stock and was, indeed, sitting in the store room. Retrieving something from the storeroom was a big NO. You see, it just wasn't cost effective for employees to spend time helping customers.

Note: I was once reprimanded (at the store I worked at in Louisiana) for getting something down off the overstock shelf for a customer. Now, this was a thing we were supposed to do because, if we didn't, customers would do things like try to climb the shelving units to get stuff down. But, you know, we employees had access to ladders, and the customer could see the item he wanted. As it turns out, a manager was watching me and timing me. Because I had to go get a ladder from the stockroom (and put it back when I was through), it took me more than five minutes to help the customer, so I got in trouble.

By the time I worked for them in the late 90s after I moved out to California, they had somewhat revised their customer assistance policy. We were at least supposed to look like we were trying to help them out. If someone asked for something not on the shelf, we were to go and "check" the stockroom for it. If it was something we knew we had back there, we could even go fetch it... as long as it didn't take up too much time. Otherwise, we were to go to the stockroom, wait a moment, then go back out and tell the customer that, no, we didn't have the item.

Note: This could really backfire on people. I always did the job of actually checking for an item if a customer asked but, then, I knew how to use the tools provided for us to do so and was good at it. It was always bad when a customer asked one employee about something and was told we were out of stock but, then, asked a different employee (say, me) for the item who then went and got it for them. Yeah, that happened more than once.

As bad as they were to customers, it was nothing compared to the way they treated employees. Employees were the true enemy, all of them thieves waiting to happen. Not to mention the fact that they wanted to be paid! All that and they didn't even offer an employee discount program (though they did finally institute that some years after I quit working for them; it was an effort to cut down on all of the employee turnover, but I'm pretty sure it didn't really work).

I'm not really going to get into how bad TRU was to employees back when I worked there. This post is already long, and getting into that can of worms might turn into a novel, and not a novel I would want to write. Or enjoy writing.

Back to the point, though: Even back in the 90s, TRU was struggling to avoid bankruptcy. They routinely identified parts of their business model which was siphoning off their profits, but, really, they could never convince themselves to look beyond theft prevention, both by customers and by employees, and it was this antagonistic stance they took with everyone which ultimately prevented them from climbing out of the hole they kept digging for themselves. As a company, they were very much like the current Republican run government and their fakepresident. I'm so looking forward to the day when they, too, go out of business.

Black Panther, the New Star Wars? (a movie review post)

I'm not going to try to make a "best movie ever" case for Black Panther. It's quite an excellent movie, but there are movies I think are better, even other Marvel movies, for whatever reason, though Black Panther rather solidly lands in my top five from Marvel. It's hard to argue "best," at any rate; it's too subjective. It's too favorite.

That said, I think Panther may be the most significant movie since Star Wars, and I think, from a cultural standpoint, that Star Wars (I am talking A New Hope here) has been the most significant movie ever made. Initially, the perspective on Star Wars was merely that it had changed the way movies were made, and it certainly did that; however, Star Wars has become a part of the cultural zeitgeist in a way that no other movie ever has, including supporting the Boomer viewpoint of technology being dangerous and suspicious and untrustworthy. Trust the Force, not your targeting computer.

But that's a post for another time.

The thing about Star Wars is that it was different. Not just the technology behind it, but the appeal of the story. And let's not forget the irony of a movie using cutting edge technology to tell a story about the evils of technology and how we all need to get back to our mystic roots. Feel the Force. The story also appealed to a more basic... instinct, the heroic lure of the young male. It was all about how you could make it on your own if you just... trusted. Trusted yourself. Trusted fate. The Force. God. Whatever it is that is bigger than yourself that wanted your success despite your own efforts to derail it. It was different, and it helped to bring about a new cultural viewpoint that elevated the self above all else. Or, at least, it reinforced that Boomer self focus and made it seem not just okay but preferable.

In that same way, Black Panther is different, but Panther is different in the opposite direction. Where Star Wars says it's all about the hero's journey, Black Panther says it's about community. You can't do it on your own. Where Star Wars says it's about magic, faith, the Force; Panther says it's about technology: (See the scene where Ross wakes up from the medical bed.) I suppose it's still about defeating the evil Empire, though, whatever form that takes.

Look, I get it. I get that a lot of you out there don't understand what the big deal is. When Star Wars came out, my grandmother (who took me to see it) didn't understand what the big deal was either. As a movie, all on its own, isolated, Black Panther doesn't cover any new ground. The special effects aren't anything special, which is not to say that they're not spectacular; they just don't do anything new, but, then, I have a hard time seeing how we're actually going to see anything new in special effects any time soon.

The real effect of the movie is the nearly all black cast, and that is an amazing thing. Sure, yes, I get that there have been other movies with all black casts and you can't figure out the big deal. What makes this one different? Unfortunately, if that's a thing you can't see, I don't know how to explain it to you. You just have to realize that it is different and accustom yourself to the idea that things may change. Things may change in the way movies are made, and things may change culturally. Not right away, sure -- it did take 20 years for the full effect of Star Wars to start being felt -- but eventually.

It will be a good thing if, in 20 years, we can look back and say that, yes, Black Panther has had a lasting cultural influence. It opened doors for people of color that has long been closed. It opened doors for women that had long been closed. It helped push open the door to equality for all people that had long been held closed by white men.

Which brings us to the story of the movie, the Make Wakanda Great Again conflict. The conflict of the movie is reflective our current societal conflict and whether or not you should support your country even when it's doing the wrong thing, as if it's some all or nothing choice (as the Republicans seem to believe). This is all summed up in one very powerful exchange which goes something like this:
"If you love your country, you will serve it."
"I love my country so I will save it!"

Speaking of power, I believe the most powerful moment of the movie is possibly overlooked due to how understated it is. So as not to present it in a spoilery way -- but, if you've seen the movie, you should understand the part I mean -- I'll say it this way:
An old white man looks at T'Challa and says, basically, "What do you, a black man, have to offer that can possibly be of interest to us white people?" Yes, I know that's not what he said, but that was the context. It's what white men have been saying to black men for hundreds of years. To all people of color. As Black Panther shows, people of color have more to offer than we can imagine. We just have to give them room to do it.