The Right Stuff

In Gore Vidal’s Inventing A Nation, he recounts how Talleyrand, who headed the French foreign ministry under Napoleon, used to encourage his clerks to masturbate before coming to work “so their minds would be clear for at least part of the morning.”

Those were the days. Would that we could still work under that kind of management. Now they just order us to pee in a cup, although some companies prefer to swipe saliva off your inner cheek. I live in a gambling town where the casinos, presumably because they have more money to burn, go super high-tech and suck out a few of your hairs, which enables them to see what drugs you’ve used for up to the previous three months. (This method is advertised as ‘less invasive’ than urine or saliva tests.) So if you want to be a dishwasher on the graveyard shift in some c-rate coffee shop, just say no to smoking that joint three months before applying. Never mind that most over the counter cold medications show up as methamphetamine or that poppy seeds test positive for opiates; what does it matter? If you’re denied a job on the basis of a false positive on a drug test, that’s your problem. If you don’t like it, f-you. Step aside and let someone else take your place in line. You’re the beggar, they’re the choosers.

Meanwhile, you’ve tested ‘positive’ for drug use. Someone, somewhere, has this information along with your name, social security number, birth date, birthplace and mother’s maiden name. They know who you are, where you live, and where you went to school. What do they do with this knowledge? Where does it go? Who sees it? What is it used for? And why?

No matter. It’s all moot anyway if you don’t pass the ‘personality questionnaire’ first.

Before they’ve rummaged through your bodily fluids, they gauge your mind with some generic and vaguely sinister personality survey. I took one about a year ago when applying for a very low-skilled, low-wage, part-time job. The manager told me not to worry about it. “It’s all just, like, psychological stuff,” she breezily told me. “There aren’t any right or wrong answers.”

Most of it was standard, innocuous, human resources department pap: Do you embrace challenges? Do you work well with a team? How do handle disagreements with co-workers? But sprinkled throughout were some more interesting items, most of them short statements that required a simple, true or false answer. For example, People sometimes irritate me or I get angry if things don’t go well at work; I believe using company materials for personal use is theft or I often disagree with my supervisors. You get the idea.

I kept waiting for one that said, I resent having to answer probing personal questions that are nobody’s damn business but my own, but it didn’t come up.

There were also some multiple choice questions that followed a similar vein. One of them asked you how you like to spend your days off. The possible answers were something like, ‘work around the house’, ‘spend time with family and friends’, ‘play sports and exercise’, or ‘spend time alone, reading and watching TV’.

Again, this is before they command you to piss in a Dixie cup.

I wondered if the bright lights who concocted this ridiculous examination were aware that ‘reading and watching TV’ are very different activities, and that someone who’s apt to watch a lot of television probably doesn’t read much, and vice versa. And let’s ignore how egregiously innapropriate it is for a prospective employer to ask you ‘how you like to spend your days off’. Why would a company that insists upon its right to examine the contents of your bladder have any qualms about asking something so minor as that? And what’s to be gained by categorizing someone’s personality on the basis of simplistic, true or false questions?

Suppose they’re only trying to ferret out malcontents or potential mass murderers. Shouldn’t the sharp young ‘business psychologists’ who invent these tests be aware of the fact that a sociopath who plans to bring an assault rifle to work and shoot people can probably manage to lie his way through a pre-fabricated ‘personality survey’? And if they are aware of this, what’s the freakin’ point of making people take the test in the first place? What possible value does it have? Why does a company that squeals bloody murder about paying some poor schmuck’s health insurance gladly dish out money to pay for these idiotic ‘surveys’ that are such an obvious waste of everyone’s time?

To ask these questions is to sound like a dangerous introvert who spends too much time alone ‘reading and watching TV’.

Anyway, I guess I had the right stuff, because I got the job. So I endured a week of ‘orientation’ because it was paid. When Friday came around I collected a measly paycheck and quit. The whole process occurred in an atmosphere of hostile condescension where you were treated like a deformed orphan or an unwanted stepchild in some grim nineteenth century boarding school. I would describe it as Oliver Twist meets Office Space, or Jane Eyre’s Day at the Human Resources Department. It was pure fucking lunacy.

Oh yeah, it was a union job. Where was the union, you ask? Good question. Not helping the workers, I can tell you that. The job paid eight dollars an hour.

Things Could Be Worse…

Whoops. They are:

FRESNO, Calif. — As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

The only thing worse than living in Fresno, I imagine, is being homeless in Fresno. Good God, the humanity. That creates whole new categories of torment and misery that are almost unbearable to contemplate. Those of you who’ve been to Fresno will understand; those of you who, like me, have been to the Greyhound bus station in Fresno will will not only understand but commiserate, and very likely suffer disturbing flashbacks. Even now the memory of it makes me shudder.

I have to go to my happy place now.

As If We Didn't Already Have Enough To Worry About

We’ve got depression, mass unemployment, global warming, peak oil, wars and rumors of wars, and the Glenn Beck Show. Now, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s yet another disaster on the horizon: coronal mass ejection.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Rogue plasma balls are going to wipe out our power grids. Great. Just shoot us now, for fuck’s sake!

Not to worry, I’m sure our visionary lawmakers will be on the case soon, but they’ve got more pressing matters to attend to first:

Senate reviewing how college football picks No. 1

WASHINGTON (AP) - Everyone from President Barack Obama on down to fans has criticized how college football determines its top team. Now senators are getting off the sidelines to examine antitrust issues involving the Bowl Champion Series.

The current system “leaves nearly half of all the teams in college football at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to qualifying for the millions of dollars paid out every year,” the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights said in a statement Wednesday announcing the hearings.

Behind the push for the hearings is the subcommittee’s top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. People there were furious that Utah was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated in the regular season

Hatch said in a statement that the BCS system “has proven itself to be inadequate, not only for those of us who are fans of college football, but for anyone who believes that competition and fair play should have a role in collegiate sports.”

In the House, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, has sponsored legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a football game a “national championship” unless the game culminates from a playoff system.

So cheer up. We might be cascading toward Armageddon, but Utah will get a national championship, by God!

Post Moronism

Republican Vistas

If you’ve never been awake with insomnia at four o’clock in the morning watching Washington Journal on C-SPAN, you just haven’t lived. Yesterday morning they had on some squeaky clean young Republican who’s president of something called the ‘Young Conservative Foundation’ or the ‘Young American Conservative Foundation’ or some other such creepy outfit. I can’t remember his name, but we’ll all get to know him in time, I’m sure. Picture a young Craig Crawford, a few pounds lighter, buffed, polished, and freshly dipped in wax. He’s a bright-eyed up-and-comer whom I suspect will soon be popping up on on Hardball among the ubiquitous legions of ‘strategists’ that infest our discourse like swarms of disease spreading tse-tse flies.

Anyway, I was lingering in that foggy mental twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness when you either have the best sex of your life or get kidnapped by aliens (it’s a crap shoot), listening to this privileged little android recite the standard litany of Republican talking points: government doesn’t create jobs; tax cuts grow the economy; people know how to spend their own money better than government; Ronald Reagan is the Way and the Light, the fountainhead of all true American virtue and prosperity, etc. and so on, yawn. That’s when it occurred to me, beyond any doubt, the Republican party is well and truly moribund. Here was the fresh young face of contemporary conservatism, not some moldy old Republican, and he had nothing to offer but vacuous Reagan worship and empty cliches. I’ve seen more originality in a Hallmark card. I thought of Muslim kids rocking back and forth in a madrassa in some Afghan shithole, mechanically reciting verses from the Koran—too young, too sheltered, and far too ignorant of the world to understand what’s being force-fed to them.

Does this guy really know what he’s talking about when he blathers on about this or that percent growth in the economy under Reagan, or when he criticizes unions, or when he traces the origins of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s demise to the Carter Administration? I mean, whether or not he believes these things is irrelevant here. The point is that this guy is too callow, too much of a greenhorn, to possibly have any grasp of what he’s talking about. He just swallowed his parent’s and/or teacher’s and/or Rush Limbaugh’s worldview whole—fat, bone, grease and gristle—without ever even considering an alternative. The best part was when he described the biggest challenge his little campus Nazi Brigade faces… I mean his conservative foundation faces, which is answering the question: why do more young people lean center-left, as opposed to center-right? His explanation? They are indoctrinated by liberal universities, of course. His solution? Better marketing.

And there you have it. The young conservative’s vision for the future consists of wrapping up standard Republican bromides in a pretty new package, all the while hoping people will just plain forget about the last eight years. This isn’t enough to sustain a genuine political movement, and if this is the best they can come up with, they’re through. On the other hand, it’s more than enough to launch a successful career in cable news, and on those grounds alone I predict that this young man has a bright future indeed.

The View From My Backyard

Well, around the corner from my backyard. There are plenty of pretty sights around here too, but why dwell on the positive when there’s so much ugliness and gloom as well? Besides, it’s more fun to write about negative things.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Even

I don’t often agree with politicians, particularly the Republican kind, but this suggestion brought hearty cheers in my house:

Sen. Charles Grassley is so angry over AIG bonuses that he says the executives should resign or kill themselves. In a comment aired this afternoon on WMT, an Iowa radio station, Grassley (R-Iowa) said: “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.”

Of course, Senator Grassley’s suggestion is flawed because it presupposes a sense of honor among those cretins. Asking them to perform any voluntary acts of contrition is as pointless as asking Washington politicians to do the same. Neither resignation nor hari kiri will suffice. What’s needed is a practical solution that will be both emotionally satisfying for the American people and bring about a genuine change of heart in Wall Street culture, and I think I have just the thing: pillory them!