Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

1967 was dubbed the Summer of Love, but the following summer, the summer of 1968 was filled with violence, rioting, and assassination. The War in Vietnam was dividing families as images of American troops committing atrocities against Asian families were broadcast nightly on the TV News. Civil rights crusaders were being beaten and killed. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated just weeks apart. Blood flowed in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic convention. With all of this turmoil, it was easy to forget about America's pastime: baseball.

But like the nation itself, major league baseball was in its own ideological crisis during the summer of 1968. Termed the “Year of the Pitcher” 1968's baseball season was delayed two days (from April 8th to April 10th) due to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exactly 21 years earlier, Jackie Roosevelt Robinson had also made “black” history by becoming the first black player to play in the Major Leagues (followed by Larry Doby three months later for the Cleveland Indians). Those were different times though.  America was freshly rejuvenated from victory against Hitler in WWII and Americans were looking forward with optimism in 1947. That autumn Jackie Robinson would appear in the first-ever televised World Series, as his Brooklyn Dodgers lost 4 games to 3 to Joe DiMaggio's crosstown titans, the New York Yankees. In many ways that kicked off a true golden era for baseball and for America. During the 50s and 60s, as the roads of America were becoming populated with muscle cars, the baseball stadiums of America were being populated with swaggering, slugging, stylish, speedy, athletic hitters: Willie Mays, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Ernie Banks, Stan Musial, Duke Snider, Hank Aaron. But by 1968, the muscle cars were all found on the pitching mound. Major league baseball had become dominated by pitching in a way it never had before and it never has since. The “Year of the Pitcher” saw such memorable events as back-to-back no-hitters (by Gaylord Perry and Ray Washburn). It saw Dodger ace Don Drysdale set a record by pitching 58 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings. It saw the Mets and Astros play a scoreless game for 24 innings! It saw the average batting average for an American League hitter at an all-time low of just .230. In fact, only one American League hitter even batted over .300. Carl Yaztremski of the Red Sox hit .301 to lead the league. Meanwhile Detroit Tigers hurler Denny McLain won 30 games (the last pitcher ever to win 30 games in a season). And perhaps the greatest pitcher of the era, Bob Gibson – who had struck out 26 batters in 27 innings and pitched 3 complete game victories in the 1967 World Series – posted an unbelievable 1.12 era for the 1968 season, as he went 22-9 with 268 strikeouts and 13 shutouts. It seemed like no one in the majors could hit that year – no one except for Pete Rose that is. Rose lead the majors with 210 hits and a .335 batting average. A decade later Rose would set a NL record by having a 44-game hitting streak – second in the majors only to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941.

It was obvious that major league baseball needed a change as many fans were becoming bored with sitting on their seats watching two guys play catch, with an occasional hit here and there. Pro football meanwhile was gaining in popularity, with its fast action and hard-hitting play, and charismatic personalities like the fur-coat-wearing QB Joe Namath, who boldly predicted and then delivered a victory in Superbowl III for his underdog New York Jets. So before the start of the 1969 season the league elected a new commissioner, Bowie Kuhn – a lawyer – and they voted to lower the pitching mound from 15 inches down to 10 inches and then officially shrunk the strike zone as well. After a bump in popularity (sparked by the Miracle Mets of 1969) major league baseball had one last great decade: the 1970s – a decade remembered for domes, astroturf, colorful uniforms (even short pants), wild promotions, a kissing bandit, wife swappers and all kinds of facial hair. A decade that was not tainted by steroid use or daily headlines of ball players who behaved badly (not that ball players didn't behave badly in pre-cable tv times – they did.  But that kind of stuff just wasn't part of the narrative at that time and ball players weren't as high-paid, privileged, and egotistical at that time). It was the last decade before millionaire ball players. It was the last decade when baseball was still a game, instead of a business.

The Man Who Sold The World

On the campaign trail in 2008 Barrack Obama correctly identified Ronald Reagan as one of the few presidents in our nation's history who actually "transformed" the American government.  If there was ever an era when the U.S. was ripe for being transformed it was the late 1970s.   The "era of malaise," to paraphrase a term that Jimmy Carter inspired, was a low point in U.S. history that compared to the Great Depression and the Civil War.  

Americans of the Malaise Era had not only spent the last decade watching America lose its first war in our military history, but they watched U.S. soldiers commit unspeakable atrocities to Vietnamese women and children and weaklings on a nightly basis.  The TV was loaded with soldier's testimonies about young girls being raped, savagely beaten and killed in front of their parents and siblings.  The magazines and newspapers were filled with confessions that detailed innocent children being burnt in their villages.  Furthermore, the Americans of the Malaise Era had just witnessed Watergate, a televised live action national tragedy that questioned the very soul and purpose of our nation.  Doubts about America's soul were compounded further as, after 30 years of economic prosperity and expansion, the nation's economy slowed and sunk so low that new terms actually had to be created in order to describe it (i.e. "stagnation" and "the misery index").  The malaised Americans watched hostilities in the Middle East lead to an oil embargo by OPEC and an Iran hostage crisis.  

If this wasn't bad enough, the malaised lived through the disintegration of the American nuclear Family, which added to the general confusion of the era. Everything Americans had grown up believing in - God, country and family - was suddenly being pulled right out from under them.  The assassinations and turmoil and civil right's activism of the 1960's had ushered in the "culture wars" of the 1970's - which not only pitted father against son, but father against mother, mother against daughter, and daughter against son.  The divorce rate doubled in America every single year from 1965 to 1975.  The Pill was suddenly available.  Abortion was legalized.  Gays were not only coming out of the closet but demanding attention and equal rights.  Blacks were forcing controversial affirmative action laws upon legislatures.  Women were burning their bras and speaking up for equal rights.  There was wife-swapping, disco music.  The Malaise Era American witnessed the happy, hippy recreational drug use of the 1960's give way to frequent overdoses of drug addicts and street punks.  Crime was running rampant, hitting all-time highs, urban areas were experiencing white flight and cities were going bankrupt.  The headlines were full of hi-jackings, kid-nappings and cult abductions. By the time Jimmy Carter made his famous "malaise" speech in 1979, the average American was not just in a fog of malaise, but they were exhausted, out of work, resentful and suspicious of their government.  They were confused about the present, afraid of the future and without any hope for tomorrow.

And then right on cue, as if scripted from a Hollywood screenplay, with his easy smile, in rides the tall, handsome hero on his white horse to save the day, to give our nation the sure-footed direction that it so badly needed, to give our citizens hope and to bring America back to simpler more wholesome times. 

That was the promise at least.  But of course, instead of steering our nation to greater heights, as William Kleinknecht explains in his book The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, Reagan actually transformed our nation into a vehicle of Greed and set in motion America's seemingly irreversible spiral downward.  

The Reagan administration created the corporate political economic model that continues to this day, a system where corporations and politicians work hand-in-hand to line their own pockets at the expense of the working class minions.  A system that every Administration since has perpetuated, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and even Obama.  But as Klineknecht's book explains, it was the Reagan Administration that really started it all.  It was Reagan who let the foxes into the hen house to such a degree of infestation that they were able to grow to the status of "too big to fail".  It was on Reagan's watch that corporate interests were allowed to become so entrenched in our political economic system that it would take nothing short of a revolution to actually get the corporations out of the political economic system.

Obama actually talked about this as he campaigned in 2008 but maybe he didn't fully understand it.  He spoke a good game, but once in office what has he done to reverse the corporate takeover of our government?  To be fair and to be honest, maybe Obama just doesn't really have the skill or the will or the ability to institute the change that he promised in 2008.   Maybe he does not have the mojo to transform America as Reagan had.  To really understand exactly how Reagan transformed America, a good place to start your research would be William Kleinknecht's book, The Man Who Sold World.  But that is only if you can overcome the one huge flaw in Kleinknecht's book, which is his tone - especially in the introduction - which was overly partisan, petty and even pointless at times. For instance, in the opening pages, Kleinknecht seems outraged that the mainstream media's coverage of Reagan's funeral in 2004 did not bad-mouth Reagan enough. I mean come on, first of all its a funeral. If there is ever a time that the old adage "If you can't say anything nice about someone then don't say anything at all" applies it is at a funeral. And second of all, its the fucking mainstream corporate media - what person with half a brain really gives a shit what the mainstream corporate media does/says? 

Kleinknecht is obviously an intelligent guy, so to be so petty and to give so much importance to the "toilet paper of documentation" that the mainstream corporate media is, was really a distraction that would have served the book better had it been edited out.  The amped up faux-rage only went to discredit his authority.  It made Kleinknecht immediately seems less reliable as he comes off as hyper-Partisan - just another typical close-minded, lock-step, knee jerk hack who goes into his research with his conclusions already drawn without looking at all sides of the argument. 

But if you can get past the introduction you will see that Kleinknecht was somewhat more balanced as he detailed Reagan's biographical material and Reagan's eventual conversion to the Conservative ideology. Then Kleinknecht goes into a left-leaning but accurate account of the progression of thought and the influences on the American economy for the last century, starting with the Progressive Era, continuing onto the New Deal Era and then up to LBJ's Great Society. His even-handed explanation of the back and forth pendulum of American thought in economic theory from the ideas of Adam Smith, to John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman, allowed the scope of the narrative to widen and open up to an examination of the unique conditions of the 1970s that set the stage for the rise of Reaganomics.

At that point in the narrative, Kleinknecht introduced the ranchers, oilmen and developers from the booming sunbelt who were among Reagan's largest supporters.  These were all men who had pulled themselves up by the bootstraps to make their fortunes in the post WWII American economy.  They shared Reagan's sensibilities - they were men with conservative social values and buttloads of new money who were looking for ways to make more buttloads of new money.  They were men who saw high taxes and government regulations as the main obstables between them and their desired buttloads.  That desire would be the main motivation behind Reagan's disasterous policies of defunding government regulatory offices and routinely placing white-collar criminals in charge of regulatory agencies. 

To begin his case against Reaganomics Kleinknecht explains how Reagan reached into the boardrooms of large corporations to fill his administration's cabinet: Sec of Defense Casper Weinberger, Sec of State George Schultz, Sec of Treasury Donald Regan, Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan.  Then he goes on to detail how Reagan installed business leaders to fill the positions at the top of the Federal Government's regulatory apparatus. For the most part these were men from within their respective industries who had made a career of violating business regulations and finding loop holes around the laws. Robert Burford, James Watt, John Crowell, C.W. McMillan, Richard Lyng, Joseph Tribble, Thorne Auchter, John Van de Water.

From there Kleinknecht's bombardment against Reaganomics (aka 'trickle down' economics) kicked into high gear as he specifically took aim at Reagan's deregulation policies.  One illustration of how Reagan's most effective tactic to undercut deregulation policy was simply to appoint white-collar criminals as heads of the various agencies that they were supposed to regulate can be seen in the communication industry.  Klienknecht explains how in just 6 years time, Mark Fowler, Reagan's chairman of the Federal Communication Commission(FCC) abolished 89 percent of the regulations governing broadcasting (even doing away with the fairness doctrine). He also points out the ramifications of Fowler's “liberalizing the multiple-ownership rule” - which essentially allowed a few large companies to control all the radio and TV waves with in just a few years.  Unfortunately, Kleinknecht's partisanship tainted the narrative at times as witnessed in such far-reaching passages as this from page 132: “[Because of Reagan] we find the beginning of a movement that would pick the pockets of American consumers, penalize rural communities, and reduce radio and television to commercial drivel.” As though radio and TV had such high standards prior to Reagan. In the next sentence Kn actually blames Reagan for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an act that was passed under Clinton, almost 8 years after Reagan had left office. 

But Klienknecht's argument was more effective as he detailed Reagan's deregulation process toward other industries.  For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services's 1982 proposal to put a warning label on aspirin after scientific evidence concluded that aspirin was causing Reye's syndrome in young children. The proposal was shot down by Reagan's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This deregulation policy directly resulted in the death of 1500 children over the next five years--until finally, in 1986, the OIRA flip-flopped its stance and required the warning labels to be displayed on aspirin bottles. Reyes Syndrome in the US then dropped from 555 cases in 1986 to only 36 the following year.  

Although Klienknecht pointed out how abusive Reagan's policies of deregulation were in various industries, he was at his most convincing when demonstrating how the banking and commerce industry was completely transformed by Reagan's deregulation policies.  It began with Reagan's appointment of  Donald Regan (chairman of Merrill Lynch and the creator of cash management accounts) as his Sec of the Treasury.  Secretary Regan set out to transform the banking and investment industry by diminishing the industries regulations to the point that the market would come as close to a free for all as anytime in the history of American capitalism.  Immediately he went after the McFadden Act of 1927 – which prevented large national companies from gobbling up smaller community banks.  Then he took aim of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which prohibited investment banks to be housed under the same roof as commercial banks and investment companies.  The intention of the Glass-Steagall Act had been to prevent the kind of “self-dealing” that largely contributed to the Crash of 1929 where commercial banks and brokerage houses had colluded to artificially inflate their books by lending to themselves.  The result of these artificially inflated books was that they attracted investors, but under false pretenses.  Secretary Regan also immediately began eliminating regulations on ceilings for interest rates and regulations on the types of loans that financial institutions could make.  Basically he set out to get rid of all banking and investing regulations.  With the help of FED chairman Alan Greenspan, the result of Reaganomics, as administered by Sec. Regan, was a total transformation of the American banking and investment industry.  A transformation, which as Klienknecht noted, has been responsible for the multi-trillion dollar fleecing of the American tax payer over the last 30 years in the form of everything from the Savings and Loan scandals to the Too Big To Fail Bailouts during the Bush/Cheney Recession of 2008-2010.

By the end of The Man Who Sold The World its easy to understand Klienknecht's partisan tone, for you would be hard-pressed to argue against the notion that Reagan transformed America into the corporate greed pit that it is today.  Klienknecht sites example after example, including the far-reaching cause and effects of Reagonomics on America.  He explains how Reagan invited the corporate foxes en masse into the government hen house.  He explains that Reagan's policies had not shrunk Big government - as Reagan promised - but they had in fact, just redirected the influence of big government from the working class people to the needs of corporate enterprise. Reaganomics was a champion for Greed.  Business leaders who had spent the 1970s funding free market think tanks flooded into DC once Reagan took the white house. Their corporate industry lobbyists were no longer at the gates of the government looking in, they were now inside the government, soon to BE the government.  It started a trend that has become an institution and none of the four presidents since Reagan have done much, if anything, to reverse that.  In fact, they've all pretty much enabled the corporate political economic model to grow and to strangle the American working class - as is evident by the accelerated disparity in the earnings between the lower/middle and the wealthy class over the last 30 years.



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the Outsider Music Boom of the 1980s

Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music takes on a task that Rockists have been awkwardly fumbling with for years. The terms 'Outsider music' or 'Outsider Rock' were not in common use until the mid 80s when the genre catapalted its way into cult popularity status through the work of three distinct musicians: Jandek, Daniel Johnston and Charles Manson (Yes, that Charles Manson).

Jandek, the unibomber of Outsider music, began to make his mark in 1986 when several late night radio shows in New York coordinated a "Jandek Across America" event in which nothing but Jandek was played from 1pm to 2pm on each of those stations. Meanwhile, Outsider poster boy Daniel Johnston (the artist that has blessed us with such wisdom as: 'don't play cards with the devil cuz he'll deal you a hand thats awful') reached the national consciousness after being featured on Mtv's Cutting Edge (a 1985 profile of the Austin Texas music scene).  At that same time Charlie Manson's early recordings were faring well thanks in part to the 60's Rock Renaissance that had become so huge in the mid 1980s*.

Also cropping up from the thrift store dustbins at that time were several other Outsider-ish recordings from the 1960's.  Rock musicians like Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Skip Spence along with two Frank Zappa finds; Captain Beefheart and Wildman Larry Fischer (whose 1986 duet with Rosemary Clooney called "It's a hard business" became an instant Outsider anthem) were finding their ways to college radio station turn tables in greater degrees than ever before. But it was the The Shaggs' Philosophy of the World that really sets the stage for Outsider Rock's emerging presense.

The Shaggs were made up of four sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire who were managed by their (some claim abusive) father, Austin Wiggen. Initially, Philosophy of the World sold less than 100 copies upon its release in 1969, but when it was name-checked by Frank Zappa in a 1976 Playboy poll, it was suddenly put on the Rock map. After that, there was so much demand for the album that it was eventually re-released, this time by Red Rooster/Rounder (in 1980 as an LP and then on CD in 1988). The LP was so well received at that time that it inspired Rolling Stone magazine to name the Shaggs as the "Comeback band of the Year" and has since been the bench mark of the unpretentiousness, the honesty, and authentic, naïve, childlike qualities that have come to define Outsider Music.

But to pin down an exact definition of Outsider Music is like trying to take a bottle of ketchup and turning it into a tomato. If you define it as music that is outside the mainstream music industry, then that includes anything from punk to polka. If you define it as music that is recorded not for popular consumption, then that too is not exactly correct, since Outsider musicians often dream (perhaps delusionally) of mainstream success. If Outsider music is defined in relation to Outsider Art, then it has to be put in the context of music that is created by folks who are mentally imbalanced (for that is what Outsider Art was originally meant to define: the artwork made by mental home patients). Jack Mudurian, whose musical repertoire was recorded in 1981 by the activities director at the Nursing Home where he was a resident, would be a classic example of this definition. But not all Outsider musicians are mental patients. Some seem more like novelty acts, but at the same time it is also wrong to define Outsider musicians as simply novelty acts because Outsider musicians are not necessarily "in" on the joke, so to speak. The only undeniable unifying aspect of Outsider music is its genuine expression of feelings, ideas, emotions, etc., that can't be effectively expressed otherwise. Sometimes, often times even, these ideas, emotions, etc., come from the most demented reaches of the brain, which may make us wonder, "What is insanity anyway?" Is it a disconnect with reality? But then, what is reality? After all, if someone can effectively communicate something that is insane, or something from the demented reaches of the brain, in such a way that it causes others to understand it, then isn't that a sign of Sanity and not insanity? Isn't that connection a sign that these demented ideas, etc., must be grounded in reality? For otherwise, no one other than the so-called insane person would understand these ideas, emotions, etc.  Now that's some deep shit, huh?

Well Kurt Cobain must have thought so for in the mid 1990's he was constantly being seen on magazine covers wearing t-shirts designed by Daniel Johnston and Outsider music suddenly became cool. By that time, Indie Rock (or Alternative Rock if you will) had already become just another sprocket in the music industry machinery instead of the cog it had once promised to be, and in a smaller version of that process, it wouldn't take the music industry long to try and manipulate Outsider music into a similarly neatly packaged commoditized consumer niche as well. One blatant example of this was when one The Shagg's song "My pal Foot Foot" (which is about a lost cat) became the inspiration—along with outsider Tangela Tricoli's "Stinky Poodle"—for the song "Smelly Cat" that was sung by a character who was portraying an outsider musician on the number 1 rated tv sitcom of the time, Friends. To Outsider music aficionados, this act was not only very representational of how the mainstream belittles Outsider music instead of celebrating it, but it was also a clear signal that corporate music industry was processing Outsider music into its fold.

Two of the biggest names in Outsider music during this process of being conformed into the mainstream were Chicago native Wesley Willis (the Tiny Tim of the 90s) and B.J. Snowden, a laid-off music teacher whose 1989 demo tape (released in 1996 by the DeMilo label as Life in the USA and Canada) is considered a classic of the Outsider genre.  Other than the fact that Willis and Snowden are both African-American and that both of them would have never been discovered if Cobain hadn't made Outsider music cool, Willis and Snowden seem to be exact opposites. Willis, who commonly peppers his speech with profanity, has several twitchy physical gestures that may have been the residue of child abuse he withstood from his parents. He became homeless at a young age, wandering the streets of Chicago, scrounging for loose change wherever he could find it, and is basically considered to be one sandwich short of a picnic. Snowden, on the other hand, lives peacefully with her mother and her son, has a degree in music, was under long-time employment throughout the 90s, and wouldn't utter a curse word if you pounded her big toe with an oversized hammer. Willis's music is considered Outsider Music because it seems to be created by a madman. Snowden's music, on the other hand, seems to be created by a very happy, caring, forgiving woman. The music of both artists seems to be off somehow, although neither musician notices it one bit. In Snowden's case, that is part of the charm, while in Willis's case, it is part of the humor. This dichotomy would suggest that the unifying equation in modern Outsider music, then, is simply that the music must kind of suck in terms of the technical aspect or at least be almost childlike in the fact that it appears to be unconscious or uncaring in regards to musical convention and etiquette.
     

In the mid Naughties (2000s), the age of MySpace Rock and ProTool Cowboys gave rise to any number of pimply-faced Middle-class teenagers and lovelorn office workers in America, for suddenly they all had the the ability to cast their musical ambitions to hundreds and thousands of listeners the world over - all at the click of a mouse.  Outsider music became more accessible than ever, which actually caused even more of a problem in terms of defining it. Outsider music for a short minute, become a part of the Industry. MySpace pages for the Beatles or the Stones were just as accessible as the MySpace page for Joe the Drummer or Tammy Faye Bakker - and the gulf between Outsider and Insider was shrinking every day.  By the late Noughties, MySpace lost steam and was replaced by various corporate-sponsored and spam-regulating social media platforms - which meant an ugly death for any chance that Outsider music had for garnering any mainstream acceptance.  Instead, Outsider music was quickly relegated back to the underground - where it belongs.    

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*For example Sonic Youth's "Death Valley 69" off of their 1984 Bad Moon Rising LP expresses their intrigue regarding Manson, while their co-hort Lydia Lunch had this to say about Uncle Charlie: "You could not not love Charlie...You could not not love what he stood for. Yes, it's got to come down. Yes, this was injustice. The guy's a brilliant spoken-word artist."

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Old Weird America's Last Stand, part 4

The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality by Thomas Borstelmann is an insightful examination of one of the most confusing decades in America's history.  The decade was mired in government corruption (Watergate, etc) while at the same time people were struggling with an unprecedented change in social values (skyrocketing divorce rates, gay rights, women's lib, minority rights, a rise in religious cults and counter-culture communes).  There was also a series of failed U.S. foreign policies (military loss in Vietnam, the loss of the Panama Canal, debacled rescue attempts of the Mayaguez in May of 1975 and of the Iran hostages in 1979) plus the creation of new foreign governments that were hostile to the U.S. (Cambodia, Angolia, Iran and Nicaragua).  On top of all of that Americans were facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (inflation, unemployment, stagnation, oil crisises, energy blackouts, etc).

As a collective identity America was having an identity crisis during the 1970s. Prior to the civil rights advancements of the '60s the social order in the U.S. was fairly cut and dry. The economy had been prosperous and expansive since WWII. Our military superiority was clear and our moral compass was intact. We knew who our enemies were--those Godless commie rats in Russia and China. But all that had become topsy turvy by the 1970s and that is when something interesting started to happen. It started with Americans becoming increasingly apathetic in regards to politics (and the government) as well as the ethics of big business.  Instead, Americans trended toward concentrating on themselves as individuals (the effect was the creation of what Thomas Wolfe famously decreed the Me Generation).  Borstelmann does an excellent job of illustrating this apathy and its causes through documentation and examples. More importantly he lays out how all of this apathy provided a vast opportunity for mechanisms to be put in place that would lead to economic inequality. Eventually the Reagan Administration promoted and instituted many of these mechanisms during the 1980s which in turn has led to the corporate globalization that has been putting stress on the American people ever since.

But this book isn't a partisan criticism of Reaganomics or right-wing politics.  In fact it examines something that Liberals/Progressives do NOT want people to think about: that the Liberal/Progressive ideology is PRO-globalization. At the core of Liberal/Progressive thought is the idea of equality among everyone. This idea has led to Free Trade agreements. It has led to nation building experimentation and financial support for third world nations. It has led to other countries starting to catch up to the standard of living that has been widespread in the U.S. for most the the 20th century.  For most of the 20th century we have seen that the overwhelming majority of the world's citizens held a gripe against the USA--a gripe that is pretty similar to the gripe that the Americans who are protesting at Occupy Wall Street have against Big Corporations. The irony is that it is the Liberals/Progressives OWN policies of globalization that has allowed the rest of the world to start "catching up" with us economically. So of course Liberals/Progressives don't want people to know that, because no American is going to vote for a policy that "shares the American wealth" with the rest of the world.

As the subtitle of his book suggest; A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, Borstelmann keeps this conflict at the center of his focus.  Afterall this idea that racial, gender, sexual orientation, religious equality has actually led to economic inequality is prety fascinating. And as Borstelmann tackles this conflict and shows how it happened, it starts to seem that it was inevitable and, in fact, pretty much a natural part of evolution. And understanding this natural force is important in finding ways to move forward. Inequality is not something people generally stand for. Again, look at the Occupy Wall Street folks who are protesting the economic inequality that is largely defining our own decade. But a huge obstacle in getting rid of economic inequality exists, and it is illustrated in the false assumptions made by capitalists such as Milton Friedman who Borstelmann quotes at the beginning of the book:

The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want.

This of course simply isn't true. Today the market gives people what the Big Corporations think they ought to want. Big Corporation have used ethically questionable predatorial business practices that have skewed the playing field so far in their favor that consumers no longer are given a fair choice.  I mean, why do people really eat crappy tasting pink slimed McDonaldland/DisneyWorld chain store fast-food that will give them a lifetime of health problems?  It's because the corporate consumer culture has made that crappy food 9 times more accessible than healthy food (not to mention that they have brainwashed Americas children into sugar-crazed Happy Meal daze that parents have little defence against). But this is NOT giving the people what they want. That is giving the people what the Big Corporations want them to want.

So where does this leave us? 

How is this corporate consumer culture ever going to be change?  A good start is for "the people" to get a good understanding of how this climate really got traction, back in the 1970s. And Thomas Borstelmann's brilliant book is a good place to start that education. For this and numerous other reasons I give The 1970s: A New Gloabla History a solid 5 out of 5 WagemannHeads.

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©2012 Rockism 101. All Rights Reserved

21 Reasons Why the Noughties Were The Worst Decade Ever

 

I can recommend Tim Footman's The Noughties 2000 2009: A Decade That Changed The World for the simple reason that it uses the term "Noughties" to describe the first decade of the 21s century.  

Every decade since the 1980s, I have engaged in a strange activity.  Usually within the first few weeks of a new decade, I will compile a list of reasons why the closing decade was the worst decade ever.  The Noughties were no exception.  So here is my list:

Reason #21
Freedom Fries.

No explanation needed.


Reason # 20
The Metrosexual

I somehow found myself in the unfortunate position of working as a stock boy in a retail outlet in downtown Chicago at the turn of the millenium when I started noticing all of these guys in their mid 20s who hung out Banana Republic stores and who owned 30 pairs of shoes, 30 pair of Calvin Kline boxer-briefs, a dozen pairs of sunglasses and just as many watches. These same guys had bi-weekly appointments with a stylist (not a barber, a stylist--because barbers don't do highlights). These guys would talk about hair and hair care products and skin products as if they had a Phd in the subject. These guys would shave areas of their bodies that the Good Lord had not intended man to shave. They would exfoliate and moisturize daily and walk around with a small fortune in beauty products tucked away in their "man-purse".

Obviously these guys must be gay. At least that is what I thought, until I found out that these guys had female dates lined up every Friday and Saturday night of the week. Of course they would make their Friday night dates a lamb shanks and risotto for their dinner and then whip up some Eggs Benedict from scratch on Saturday morning mind you. But at least their dates were female.



Reason #19
The Superbowl halftime show

After Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" in 2004 no other act, not the Rolling Stones, not Bruce Springsteen, not Paul McCartney nor anyone else has produced one minute of entertainment during these corporate halftime extravaganzas that has come close to distracting my attention from the chip and dip table.



Reason #18
The Axis of Evil of Hair styles

Kim Jong Il, Donald Trump and the faux hawk placed the Noughties as the worst decade in hair fashion since the 1980s...again, this may have something to do with the metrosexuals.



Reason #17
The Death of the Record Store/the Rise of Nu Metal and Disney Rock

The transition from CDs to digital downloads shrank the record industry throughout the decade, leading to mass layoffs and artist-roster cuts at major labels. CD sales dropped 48.9 percent during the decade. Approximately 2,680 record stores closed in the U.S. between 2005 and early 2009. In the UK, all the national specialist music retailers collapsed except aong with Woolworths, a variety retailer that was once the UK's largest music retailer.

Meanwhile monster-Rock pop artists Evanescence, Linkin Park, System of a Down, Staind, Papa Roach, and Disturbed littered the radio waves with some of the least creative and most annoying sounds since Gangsta Rap polluted the radio waves in the 1990s. The only thing worse was the over-saturation of Disney Rock. High School Musical, Hannah Montana, The Jonas Brothers and The Cheetah Girls, etc. (all of which was leading to Justin Beeber-mania). In 2006 and 2007 both High School Musical and Hannah Montana albums were among the best-sellers and reached the number 1 position. Another result of the corporate trend of targeting 'tweens was Guitar Hero and Rock Band. In fact Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock became the first single video game EVER to surpass $1 billion in sales.


Reason #16
(TIE)The Snuggie and Text Addiction

And even worse: wearing a Snuggie WHILE texting!



Reason #15
"Awareness" Bracelets

Awareness bracelets gained in popularity in the early Noughties when the Lance Armstrong Foundation introduced its trademark yellow silicone Livestrong wristband to raise support for cancer research. Silicone wristbands quickly became popular with every charity under the sun, but the bracelets also became linked to a sex game popular among teenagers in which various colored Sex bracelets implied the various sex acts the teen wearing the bracelet was willing to engage in. In October 2003 the principal of Alachua Elementary School in Gainesville, Florida banned the bracelets which led to subsequent bannings in other schools around Florida and elsewhere.



Reason #14
American Idol

Can someone convince me that the The Sham Wow guy, the Extreme Home MakeOver guy, and Seacrest aren't actually all the same guy? American Idol was the pinnacle of the Reality TV (an oxymoron if ever there was one) phenomenon that dominated the decade's TV landscape. Basically these were just elaborate game shows that had very little to do with "reality". Still, they changed the way America viewed TV and helped propagate the emergence of internet participation in tandem with the likes of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.


Reason #13
The Total Loss of Credibility of the Mass Media News

From the NY Times Jason Blair scandal, the leaking of national security information by Bob Novak to Fox News' ridiculous mockery of "Fair and Balanced", American's faith in Mass Media News is all but gone.


Reason #12
McMansions

Reason #11
Energy Addiction Reaches New Extremes

Not only were Earthlings becoming addicted to 'energy' drinks during the Noughties, are addiction to energy-producing oil went to Red Bull levels.  While countries like China and Brazil made Green Energy a national priority, the USA continued to lag behind while continuing to consume more energy than any other nation in the history of the solar system.


Reason # 10
The Slacker Mom/the Cougar/Desperate Housewives and the FemiNazi

During the Noughties, the first time in history, the number of womyn in the workforce eclipsed the number of men. Perhaps this explains the glut of negative female stereotypes that the decade produced. Replacing such harmless or positive stereotypes from years past as the valley girl, the soccer mom, Rosie the Rivoter and the all-american housewife, the Noughties saw the Slacker Mom, The FemiNazi, the Cougar and the Desperate Housewife come to the fore within the mainstream culture.

More disturbing was the number of stories in that news of mothers that commits infanticide.

*In 2009, Texas state representative Jessica Farrar proposed legislation that would define infanticide as a distinct and lesser crime than homicide. Under the terms of the proposed legislation, if jurors concluded that a mother's "judgment was impaired as a result of the effects of giving birth or the effects of lactation following the birth," they would be allowed to convict her of the crime of infanticide, rather than murder. The maximum penalty for infanticide would be two years in prison.

*Dena Schlosser, born in 1969 in Plano, Texas, killed her eleven-month-old daughter Margaret Schlosser in 2004, amputating the baby's arms with a knife, supposedly believing that she was offering her to God. On November 22, 2004, the Texas Police arrived at Schlosser's apartment to find the mother of three sitting calmly in her living room listening to hymns. She was covered in blood and holding a knife. Schlosser, euphorically confessed she had cut the arms off her eleven-month-old baby daughter, as the song He Touched Me played in the background. The child later died in the hospital.

*Andrea Yates (born July 2, 1964) a former Houston, Texas resident, killed her five young children on June 20, 2001 by drowning them in the bathtub in her house. On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury ruled Yates to be not guilty by reason of insanity. The ABC-TV show Desperate Housewives was inspired by the story of the Andrea Yates drownings, according to creator Marc Cherry.



Reason #9
The Brokeback Election and the Policizations of Gay Love

How in the world did Gay Marriage become the wedge issue that gave the 2004 Presidential election to the Republicans? Here are some of the stepping stones:

*April 25 2000 – The State of Vermont passes HB847, legalizing civil unions for same-sex couples.
*June 21, 2000- Section 28, a law preventing the promotion of homosexuality, is repealed by the Scottish Parliament.
*April 1st, 2001 - In the Netherlands, the Act on the Opening up of Marriage goes into effect. The Act allows same-sex couples to marry legally for the first time in the world since the reign of Nero.
*May 7, 2002 - Gay Canadian teenager Marc Hall is granted a court injunction ordering that he be allowed to attend his high school prom with his boyfriend.
*November 18, 2003 – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, rules anti-same-sex marriage laws unconstitutional in Massachusetts.



Reason #8
The 2000 Presidential Election











Reason #7
Terrorism

On September 11th, 2001 twenty Muslim extremists hi-jacked 4 commercial airplanes in the US, successfully crashing one into the Pentagon and two into the World Trade Center buildings in New York while another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. This led to the NASDAQ, the American Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange being close for six days (the longest close since the Great Depression in 1929). It also sparked a major change in airplane/airport rules and gave the Bush/Cheney/Rove administration their "Pearl Harbor". Although terrorism has been around seemingly forever, it received unprecedented exposure in the Naughties, starting with the bombing on October 12, 2000, in Aden, Yemen of the USS Cole. Then after the events of 9/11 the mass media became obsessed with reporting any event that even remotely reeked of terrorism--thereby playing right into the terrorists hands.



Reason #6
The Lost Decade

The Noughties contained two recessions. The first occurred from 2001-2003 and was in part due to a major downturn in the value of dot-com shares. The US dominance over the world economy continued, but economically rising nations and organizations like China and India showed signs of contending for world power. The second recession was much more sever. As Michael Lind writes in his Book Land of Promise (2012):

"Even before the Great Recession began in the crash of September 2008, the first decade of the twenty-first century was a Japanese-style "lost-decade" in the United States. Compared to the 24 percent overall growth of the 1990s, the US economy grew by only 6 percent in the 2000s.

What little growth there was went to a tiny plutocratic minority. During the Bush years, two-thirds of the income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the US population...By the early twenty-first century, the Gini coefficient, a measurement of economic inequality, showed that the United States was radically different from other developed nations and [instead] resembled other highly unequal nations including Rwanda, Ecuador, and the Phillipines."



Reason #5
The Catholic Church Child Molestation Scandal

After a rash of major lawsuits emerged primarily in the United States and Europe, claiming that some priests had sexually abused minors, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a comprehensive study that found that four percent of all priests who served in the U.S. from 1950 to 2002 faced some sort of sexual accusation.



Reason #4
A Golden Decade Of Corporate Scandals

In the era of Bush/Cheney/Rove deregulation and a general attitude of not having to be held accountable for unethical actions led to a rash of corporate scandals including:

*Parmalat falsifies accounts to the tune $5 billion.
*HealthSouth Corporation, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama.
*Enron and other major accounting and corporate governance scandals (Tyco, WorldCom, Merck, etc) prompted reviews of corporate government legislation worldwide (eg Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
*Pharma Companies rushing untested products onto the market and the rash of overdiagnosis by medical personnel who have stock in the pharma companies.
*Bernie Madoff, operator of the Ponzi scheme that was the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history.
*Heck, even Martha Stewart got in on the action and was indicted for using privileged investment information and then obstructing a federal investigation.



Reason #3
Disasters/Mass-Deaths and the Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur

Like any other decade the Noughties had its unique print on the phenomenon of non-war mass deaths. This included man-made acts of violence like the attacks by the Beltway sniper and the Anthrax Scare (that came right on the heals of 9/11). There wre also a number of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrini in which the U.S's government response was less than stellar. Most shamefully is how our country stood by and watched the Genocide, torture, destruction and rape in Darfur. It is calculated that the killing of 300,000 men, women, and children has taken place since 2003. Another 2.6 million have been displaced from their homes. An unknown number of women and girls have been abducted, raped, and abused while an entire generation of children have reached school-age never knowing a home.



Reason #2
Globalized Corporatization

Multinational corporations took over the world during the Noughties, make no mistake about it. The Noughties saw The People's Republic of China admitted to the World Trade Organization. It saw the The WTO, which began in 1995, grow to 153 members, representing more than 95% of total world trade. The Noughties saw the Euro become legal tender in twelve European Union countries in 2002, making it the largest monetary union in history.



Reason #1
The Bush/Cheney/Rove Regime and their gross mismanagement of the War for Oil In Iraq

Where to start? How about we begin with the war in Iraq actually started BEFORE 9/11 even happened. In fact less than a month after taking office, George W. Bush ordered US war planes to carry out bombing raids in an attempt to disable Iraq's air defense. One of these bombings in a Baghdad suburb killed 3 civilians. Another attack on June 19, 2001 (3 months prior to 9/11) an American missile hit a soccer field in northern Iraq (Tel Afr County), killing 23 and wounding 11.

It wasn't until October of 2002 that Congress passed a joint resolution, which authorized the President to use the United States Armed Forces as he deemed necessary and appropriate, against Iraq.

The debacle that followed has been well documented. But beyond the Mess in the Mesopotamia, the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime perpetrated a number of terrible acts and stupid policies. Among them are:

- Limiting support for federal funding of research on embryonic stem cells.

- The Bush tax cuts for the Rich which in turn leads the US into The Bush Recession.

- Dec 13, 2001, George W. Bush announces the United States' withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

- No Child Left Behind

- CIA leak scandal: Washington Post columnist Robert Novak publishes the name of Valerie Plame, blowing her cover as a CIA operative, after this information is leaked to him by Karl Rove.

- George W. Bush signs the Homeland Security Act into law, establishing the Department of Homeland Security, in the largest U.S. government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.

- George W. Bush lands on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, where he gives a speech announcing the end of major combat in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. A banner behind him declares "Mission Accomplished."

Why Didn't Bush Go After Bin Laden?

There was a program that BBC aired in November of 2001 (just days before the famous incident in Tora Bora where U.S. troops had cornered Osama Bin Laden) in which news anchor Jeremy Vine produced an FBI document that revealed U.S. agents were told to "back off" from investigating the Bin Laden family. That seemed out of sorts but it became even more relevant a few days later when the Pentagon ordered American soldiers to stand down in Tora Bora eventhough they now had Osama bin Laden cornered.  Dalton Fury, the commander on the ground at Tora Bora, reveals the details of the Pentagon ordering him to 'stand down' in his book, Kill Bin Laden.  Which brings up the obvious question: Why? If you have Bin Laden cornered, literally just feet from where our troops are dug in, just weeks after 9/11, then why order our troops to stand down? 

At the time, the reasons behind the order to stand down were not known to the public at large and the Bush/Cheney gang pivoted into high gear toward a costly effort to misled the America people into supporting an invasion of oil-rich Iraq.  Bush/Cheney famously claimed that they knew that Saddam had WMDs and that they knew exactly where those WMD were, yet when WMDs never actually materialized there was only a slight grumbling of a 'bait and switch'.  For the most part America went along for the ride and soon enough the world was tuned into their mainstream media of choice as the Bush/Cheney Gang mounted a pre-emptive strike that kicked off an unethical war that was not paid for and which eventually nudged the U.S. economy spiraling into the worse recession it had seen since the 1930s.  A large reason for the faint resistance to a war that resulted in the death, displacement and injury of millions of innocent Iraqi citizens along with the death and dismemberment of thousands of U.S. troops was because Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack was still at large.  Americans were either afraid or pissed off and they wanted the government to do something about it.

But once the tanks started rolling into Iraq, the mastermind of the largest attack on US soil in history was no longer a concern for Bush/Cheney. In fact, at a press conference Bush43 famously came out and admitted that he didn't care about Bin Laden and wasnt interested in going after him. Such a comment sparked disbelief in some - especially soldiers in Iraq who had joined the military after 9/11 to fight in retaliation of bin Laden's brutal attack on innocent U.S. civilians.  It also prompted serious questions whether Bush43's loyalty was to the American people or the corporate oil industry.  Then, on top of that, reports came out about how the Bush family had deep business ties to the Bin Laden family - ties that began when Bush43 and Osama's Bin Laden's brother Salem Bin Laden founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas.  As research uncovered that a bank controlled by the Bin Laden family had bailed out one of Bush 43's failed businesses during the 1980s Bush's reasons for not going after Bin Laden came under even more scrutiny.  And then eyebrows were further raised when reports came out of the ties between the Bush Family and the Bin Laden family via The Carlyle Group, a private global equity group whose senior advisor was Bush41.  

The Bush family's connections to the Bin Laden family was interesting and certainly grist for conspiracy theorists, but to understand the real motive behind the Bush/Cheney gang ordering Dalton Fury's troops to stand down in Tora Bora you must go back to 1997 when a rightwing think tank called The Project for the New American Century produced a document outlining how America needed to be transformed. Members of this think tank included Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Several of these future members of the Bush Administration took their plans for a war in Iraq to Bill Clinton with the hopes of convincing Clinton to invade Iraq.  After presenting Clinton with a fully detailed plan, Clinton refused and the wheels were set in motion for the Cheney-led cabal to groom a candidate for the White House who would promote The Project for the New American Century's agenda.

The designs that the The Project for the New American Century had in mind are clearly laid out in a report they issued titled Building America's Defences - which states "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."  Or a 9/11 perhaps?

Again, conspiracy theorists have since jumped on Building America's Defences report to argue that 9/11 was more than just coincidence.  And in fact, Congressional investigators such as John Farmer, a Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Comission, has said this about the Bush/Cheney gang's involvement in the events of 9/11: "At some level of the governmet at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened."  While Senator Bob Graham added that "the White House was directing the cover-up".  

But the important thing to take from the Bush/Cheney cabal's Building American's Defenses report is that it makes it very clear that when 9/11 (the new Pearl Harbor they needed) actually occured, the Bush/Cheney Administration was already prepared to use such a tragedy and, in fact, was able to quickly ratchet together the machinations for exploiting 9/11 to justify public support for a build-up to a war for oil in Iraq - after all, they had been planning for nearly a decade. Combine this with the Bush Administration's blatant dishonesty, their misinformation campaigns and the military-indusrial complex agenda that they were beholden to, it would suggest that their entire reign was full of evil-minded plots that reveal their obvious intentions. 

In hindsight, you would think the American people would have been quicker to catch on, or more vocal and assertive in their opposition.  After all, Americans had been doubting the government and expecting cover ups in large numbers since the assasination of JFK and the crimes committed during Watergate.  Yet, in general, the American people reacted more like fearful citizens during the rise of Hitler's Third Riech.  There were a few in the Land of the Free however who stood up on the right side of history.  One of those few would become Bush43's replacement who was very vocal against the War in Iraq.

For more writing by Ed Wagemann click here:  ED WAGEMANN

©2010 Rockism 101. All Rights Reserved

Are Corporations People? And Is Mitt Romney a Robot?

There is a very simple reason why Mitt Romney isn't going to be our next president and that is that he is not 'human' enough.  He doesn't sound like a regular human being, he sounds like a robot that spews CEO talking points instead of heart-felt views and opinions.  This tendency to sound rehearsed and stiff has gotten him only so far, but to become president there are going to be those inevitable rare unguarded moments of candor that are caught by cameras and microphones.  And it has been during these unguarded moments that the real person, Mitt Romney has been revealed.  And the real Mitt Romney has some very strange things to say. In his climb for the 2012 Republican Presidential Nomination, he has let slip such statements as he "likes to fire people", that he's "not concerned about the poor people" and possibly most puzzling of all that "corporations are people".

These quotes are taken out of context and easily spun by Romney's opposition. Still though, when I hear things like "corporations are people" I find it pretty baffling.  I know that Romney spent the majority of his adult life as a corporate sapien, but does he really believe that corporations are people?  And are there really other people out there who think corporations are people?  

To figure this thing out, I did what any inquiring 21st century mind would do:  I posted a question on a Conservative Republican internet message board to provoke a discussion and perhaps get my explanation. Here's what I got (my user name on this site is Jack btw):
 

Jack (me): Question. Are corporations people? Yes or No.

Nellie: Yes.

KD: Corporations are designed BY PEOPLE, operated BY PEOPLE, employ PEOPLE and are made or broken by people....so yes, Corporations are PEOPLE!

Mertle: Yes they are!

Me:  KD, movies are designed by PEOPLE, operated by PEOPLE, they employ PEOPLE and are made or broken by PEOPLE. So therefore following your line of logic. Movies are People also. And so are lamps and so are poems and so is Preperation H.  If that is your argument, then you are sounding like the Steve Carell character in the movie Anchor Man "I love lamp!

And Romney's statement that "Corporations are people" sounds like it belongs in a Matrix movie...If corporations are people and corporations can own other corporations that means that people can own people. Which is slavery. I'm not sure but I imagine if you polled all the people in America at LEAST 80% of those people would disagree with Romney's statement that 'people are corporations'. Of course if you polled corporations the results would be much less. Oh wait a minute...you can't poll a corporation, can you?

Dr. Rose: yes, they are people!

Me: If you are a Republican then I think you have to worry about this quote by Romney, because this question is going to splinter your Republican party.  The goofball knee-jerk Right-wing exrtremists will HAVE to side with Romney. And that will only make them look like fools as they trip all over themselves trying to rationalize this bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque statement.

The more Independent thinking Republicans here will realize that Romney is completely off his rocker with this statement and it will make them look like fools if they vote for a man who would say such a thing.

Butch: Corporations are people in the legal sense.

Me:  So if Romney is saying that corporations are people in he legal sense, then does he think that the U.S. Constitution should be changed to "We the Corporations of the United States...

Mertle: Do you even know what Corporatism is Jackhole?

KD: ‎Jack Squat - please run along and sue the ever living crap out of your UNION TEACHERS and the Dep of Education for scr3wing you out of a proper education and then your Parents for scr3wing you out of some common sense!! Thanks - the 53% of us who pay taxes!!!

Me:  Come on, face reality people. It is idiotic to think or say that a corporation is a person. Does a corporation have a soul? If you believe that God created people, then you cannot believe that corporations have souls and that they are people. Maybe Romney thinks that corporations go to heaven/hell when they die--I mean he has some pretty unconventional religious beliefs anyway.

KD: Jeffrey Dhalmer didn't have a soul, but he is considered a person! Just sayin'!

Me: So you are comparing corporations to Jeffrey Dalmer then KD? Oh there's a real peak to strive for!

KD: I was making a point Jack Squat - I do not expect you to comprehend this

KD: Do animals have souls Jack Squat? Yes they do, but animals are not people...... can you get THIS point?

Me: So you were making a point that you were not expecting me to comprehend KD??? That's weird.  I mean why bother to make the point if you don't think I'm going to get it...And now you are comparing corporations to animals??? Its wall to wall entertainment here!!

KD: TO sum it up - Clearly Jack Squat - you do not know JACK SQUAT~~~

Me:  Look, if any of you women here have souls and have given birth to a child, you should be able to understand what humanity is all about. You should be able to understand that people can love. Can corporations do that? Can corporations love?

KD: ‎Jack Squat - I have TWO CHILDREN you tool ......and yes, if it were not for compassionate CORPORATIONS whom give money to CHARITIES, the homeless, help the poor go to college, then those people would be SCR3WED.......

Rose:  I work for a corporation. In exchange for my contribution towards the success of this corporation, I am awarded a salary, health insurance, paid vacation, annual raises and bonuses based on my contribution and the success of this corporation. I am an asset to the corporation, therefore I am the corporation along with the other individuals who contribute to the success and, therefore the existence of the corporation. Corporations ARE people!

Me: Corporations give to charities for tax breaks and to improve their public image. It has NOTHING to do with Love. Corporations are NOT about love. They are about the bottom line. They are about money. Plain and simple. And if you or anyone here is comparing the love they feel for a child with what they feel for a corporation, then I truly feel sorry for that child...

Harvey:  Corporations ARE people.  Deal with it, hippie!  

Me: Let me ask you folks this - If corporations are people, then can I marry a corporation? And if I am a mormon, can I marry multiple corporations???

...This discussion went on, quickly descended into a rash of schoolyard name calling and nonsense.  However it did show me that some people actually DO think that corporations are people--or at least that is what they say they believe.  But what about Romney?  Did he actually believe his own statement?  To seek the answer to this I headed to my local library and picked up a copy of The Real Romney by Michael Kranish.  And after reading it I feel that I gleaned a better idea of what makes Romney tick.  A person's values have quite a bit to do with who they are. Romney has some very good values, but I honestly think that his values include the idea that corporations are people. And this value, is the worst possible value a President of the United States could have.  The worst thing for this country would be if we elected a CEO-in-Chief. (CEO=Creating Employment Overseas).  Because not only are corporations not people, but the United States is not a corporation, or at least it shouldn't be.  Corporations put monetary concerns ahead of humanitarian ones.  And if that principle was ever to become the core of our nation--the greatest, most powerful nation on Earth--then quite frankly, humanity is doomed.

Overall The Real Romney was easy to read and well researched and it rates 3 out of 5 WagemannHeads.

NEXT!

For more writing by Ed Wagemann click here: ED WAGEMANN

©2012 Rockism 101. All Rights Reserved

Player One

"It was the dawn of a new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame."

If the 1980s was "Morning in America" as the transformational Ronald Reagan famously dubbed them, then the 2040s that are imagined in Ready Player One by Ernest Cline could be called "Midnight in America", i.e. the logical end result of Reagan's trickle down corporate dream.  In this bleak future imagined by Cline, in the midst of a 30 year Great Recession, after a global oil crisis, mushroom clouds and even a short-lived Retro 80s fashion fad, comes the story of Wade, a pimply-faced, overweight, no-income teenager in Oklahoma, who like everyone else seems to be sitting around, escaping into an alternate reality (whenever he can) and basically awaiting the doom of mankind's fate. Kinda sounds like the 70s doesn't it?

In the tradition of George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and William Gibson's Neuromancer, the entertaining question that Ready Player One dances with is: "Could this really be what the future might look like?"  Could mankind go on existing in a reality so bleak that spending nearly every waking moment inside the virtual reality of an internet video game becomes the only way to cope with it?

Ready Player One is filled with enough clever details and plausible tweaks to convince most readers that this vision of the future is not so far fetched. Some details are subtle, like certain characters, pop culture references, video games, events and "things" that accurately echo their counterparts in today's reality. For instance, the creators of OASIS (the videogame at the center of the novel), are suspiciously similar to John Carmack and John Romero who are the Lennon and McCartney of video game creators (and whose life stories are documented in Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner).  Other details are more universal however, for instance the depiction of the all consuming vidoe game/pop culture addiction that so many people in 2040 are inflicted with doesn't seem vastly different from the video and pop culture addictions of the dozens (maybe hundreds or thousands) of "friends" we all know on facebook.

There was however one central aspect to Cline's depiction of a future that was not at all believable (to me, at aleast).  And that was that in this future there is nearly a total lack of actual face-to-face human contact that anyone has with anyone else.  For instance in this excerpt, after finally meeting the character that Wade considers to be his best friend in person, he admits:

"As we continued to talk, going through the motions of getting to know each other, I realized that we already did know each other, as well as any two people could.  We'd known each other for years, in the most intimate way possible.  We'd connected on a purely mental level.  I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend." 

Then, at the conclusion of the book, Wade meets his love interest face to face for the first time and we are led to believe they will live happily ever after.  None of this rang true to me however - this idea that people can fall in love over the internet - and it made for a lackluster ending.  But overall, although Ready Player One has a fairly formulaic plot and relies heavily on stereotypical young adult character devices and it is chock-ful of played-out comic bookish dialog and its share of clunky descriptive passages, it is none the less an immediately gratifying, guilty pleasure/page turner with several interesting cultural matters at play.  For pop culture junkies and folks who like to ponder upon what the future might hold, Cline's novel will be a must-read.  For these reasons and more I give it 3 out of 5 WagemannHeads.

©2012 Rockism 101. All Rights Reserved