Category: social commentary

Costco at Thanksgiving and the Battle for Pumpkin Pie

Everybody wants a slice of the pie.  Pumpkin pie, that is.   It is tasty and seasonal.  Pumpkin pie is well worth fighting for.   Just ask some of the customers at Costco.

Mumbai had its terrorists.  Wal-Mart has its trampled workers.  Costco has its pumpkin pie.   While the world recoils at the horrible slaughter in the Indian City, or the poor guy who was run over at 5 A.M. by a brutally zealous Long Island crowd,  Costco shoppers kicked off the holiday season by shoving each other out of the way in quest of the great seasonal dessert.   I mean, if you can’t find your pumpkin pie at Costco, where else can you find it?

This, of course, to the saner among us is a rhetorical question.  Pumpkin pie is everywhere this time of year. Albeit it, is is neither as large a pie as those served up at Costco, nor is it as cost-effective.   Costco pumpkin pies are big and relatively inexpensive.    When you are watching your bucks, it’s a good place to pick up three or four for the Thanksgiving dinner at a very good price.   It’s not worth the risk of getting hurt for it.   Not offended, but physically hurt.

There was a battle for the pumpkin pies.  For dozens, it was a principle worth fighting for.   They needed dessert and they were going to get it no matter who got in their way.    Old women, small children, the nerdy, the needy, doesn’t matter.   Keep you hands off my pumpkin pie.

You see,the Costco bakery ovens can handle a mere sixty pies an hour.   That is going full tilt.  This of course is usually more than sufficient.   But come the holiday season when the craving comes for pumpkin pie, things are very, very different.  When you have hundreds of customers standing around waiting until the next round of pies come out of the oven.  And when there aren’t enough to go around, the flimsy veneer slides off the patina of civilization, and the battle is on.

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In this case, I expect some attorney will claim Costco was negligent by using bakery ovens that could only turn out sixty pies an hour.  And when the Costco workers, attempting to be fair, tried to limit one pie to every party, this poor excuse sharing the wealth elevated mere negligence to cruelty and deprivation.  Human rights were violated.

Human rights?  Don’t laugh.  Family values were violated.  Every family member needs at least a couple, few slices.  Piece of the pie!  Isn’t that what America is all about?   Otherwise, what will do with all that extra whipped cream?  Because any fool knows you can’t eat the whipped cream without the pumpkin pie.   You can’t have your turkey without the expectation of pumpkin pie.   Lack of pumpkin pie could result in serious disillusionment and a grievous sense of loss.

Sharing was not an option.  Customers elbowed and shoved each other out of the way.  A melee broke out in the bakery section.    People weren’t getting their pumpkin pie.  And those that did, were only allowed to buy one instead of the four they were planning to have for that special Thanksgiving dinner.

I am not one to mince words about the assault on the quality of life and the decline of manners and etiquette.  And certainly there are things to be said for our national obesity and smaller portions of everything would best promote the general well being.  A trip through Costco should tell you that.  Double wides in every aisle.  Double wide shuffling through in somnambulistic stupor.  Until you take away their pumpkin pie.   Then they come to life.

We have heard candidates and pundits talk about the quality of life and the need to make adjustments.   For the sake of our country, they say, we need to sacrifice.  We have to learn to do without, and we have to think more about our neighbors.   So come election night we hold hands and look to the future.  We are promised change.  Or not.  But what we didn’t get was pumpkin pie.

At Wal-Mart You Can Shop Till You Drop

By now most of the known world has read in the New York Daily News or elsewhere about the tragedy  at a Long Island Wal-Mart, where an employer died after being trampled by a couple of hundred people.   Apparently, he made the mistake of trying to hold them back and paid the price with his life.   Other people were also injured and there was a controversial report that a pregnant woman miscarried.

If this episode wasn’t so tragic we could find it funny.   There have been numerous comedy scenes in television episodes and feature films, comic strips, even, where overzealous shoppers trample each other in search of the ultimate bargain.   The old comic strip, “Dagwood,” comes to mind.   The artist had regular strips depicting women fighting each other, playing tug-of-war for bargain goods.

But the fact is it is pretty tragic.  It is also very telling.   It is telling on different levels.  On one hand we can view this as a reflection of the  bad economy where the need to save money has driven people to wait outside the doors of a department store for it’s special opening at 5:AM.   Some stores even had special midnight openings.   For a country that goes to bed after the Jay Leno or David Letterman monologue, it says something about the need to find a bargain.

It also says quite a lot about consumerism.   I have to wonder, what are people doing out there at five A.M.?  How much can you really care about buying something that you would stand there like cattle waiting for the doors to open so you could fight you way under fluorescent lighting to get something for your wife and kids, girlfriend, whatever?  What does this really say about us, and the fact we cannot cure that disease, that we are consumer addicts.

Seventy percent of this economy if built on consumerism.  We buy stuff.   We buy a lot of stuff we don’t even need.  We buy stuff to impress our friends.   We buy dumb stuff, and in good economic times we pay a lot of money for overpriced, status seeking stuff that has the requisite branding.   We don’t save; we spend.  We buy.  We don’t buy things that last, most of the time, anyway, we buy instead things that are fashionable.   Things that we buy are built to be obsolete.   We even buy quality cars that were built to last and trade them in because we are bored with them.

We are so obsessed with buy, apparently,we don’t mind elbowing and even trampling a few people to buy more stuff.  Okay, so it’s the holiday.  It is a holiday in the worst economy in perhaps 100 years, and here we are buying.   Hang out Santa Claus and a few pretty lights, and we kick into buying mode like so many Pavlovian Dogs.
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Of course others have a different take on the incident at Wal-Mart.   Some are blaming the greedy retailers for having the temerity to open their doors in the wee hours of the morning.   At least for me it is a wee hour of the morning.   Some are more racist in tone and issue forth deplorable comments that the writers don’t even bother couching in more acceptable, or polite, racist content.   Pretty amazing.

As for the consumerism itself, it would seem a bit obsessive to be buffeted around by crowds at pre-dawn hours, waiting for a store’s doors to open.  I would think you have to be nuts, but then there were so many standing there, they couldn’t all be crazy.  Just sick.   Sick with what, I’m not sure.   And if not sick, not real logical.

The fact when the stores are stuck with unsold merchandise, say three weeks from now, they will practically be giving it away.   You can waltz in, make a better deal, and walk out without fear of getting trampled.  Or if you are really smart you can wait until after the holiday when they may be paying you to take this stuff out of the store.   You could buy on line and save gas and sanity, life and limb.  Or you can be really, really smart and be more discriminating and not get so caught up in shopping it becomes a major distraction.

Whatever you do for the holidays, this is certainly not the way to do it.  If you are that bored with your life, and your life is that stale that mobbing the front of a store, in cold weather yet, seems like a good idea, perhaps you should seriously consider ceasing to populate the earth any further.   We really don’t need more people, and we certainly don’t need more shoppers.

You may see the light.  Or the only lights that may penetrate the huddled masses are the twinkly lights of Holiday Season.   I would say Christmas, but it really has little to do anymore with the birth of Christ, Winter Solstice or whatever else you celebrate.   It is about you and how much you can shop.   It is about shopping, and not really so much about the giving.   You shop till you drop.  Or kill someone.

No matter how you see this, there is one thing you definitely won’t see standing in the middle of a department store, either at 5 A.M. or any other time where getting frazzled and frustrated is considered part of the experience.   Definitely one thing you won’t see.   Me.

The Good Thief, Exit Ted Stevens

There is a great Bob Dylan line from his song, “Sweetheart Like You.”   The line goes, “Steal a little, they throw you in jail.  Steal a lot they make you king.”

Ted Stevens was a king in his own right.   Alaskans adored him.   He was a major earmarker who saw to it that his home state received more than its share of government money.   According to the corruption charges for which he was convicted, he apparently made sure he had received his own morsel from appreciative constituents.   In the end, at 86 years of age, he was convicted of corruption.

He lost his last election to the Senate and was forced to yield the Senate floor for the last time.  He looked good,kspiffy and dignified.   He was a tough old bird. His fellow Senators spoke highly of him and gave him a standing ovation.   Few get standing ovations on the Senate floor.   Were they just being kind to this senior legislator, or were they applauding because they were relieved, if not happy, to see him go.

We shouldn’t find the ovation surprising, although a good many pundits were outraged over it.   They found it at best disingenuous.   I think it is actually quite ingenuous.   America tends to love its more notorious thieves and will turn them into mythic figures rather than cast them into ignominy.   I don’t know why we do that, exactly.   But we do.

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From Bonnie and Clyde to Al Capone, our criminals are mythic figures.   We are amused by the corrupt insider traders of the eighties and deal well with presidential pardons and commutations of sentence in a good many cases.   A Scooter Libby can violate one of the prime codes of the intelligence community and out an active operative, but few demanded his head on a platter.   His feeble sentence was good enough, and when that was commuted, nobody really cared.

We will anger ourselves over the faceless Wall Street thieves of recent times, but for some reason we pay little heed to the mortgage scandals and the thieves who either alone or in rings, ran real estate scams well into the millions and billions.  Perhaps the more complicated the scheme the less we feel capable of paying attention.  We are not much for attention spans, after all.

We often laud the criminals of the earlier years, the Prohibition Era.   But we do tend to be harder on our ethnic criminals, our Hip Hop Era Gangsters and leaders of our drug cartels.   Killing over booze seemed more romantic than killing over drugs.   We are fascinated by the Italian Mafia and can watch “The Sopranos” for days.   As for the Russian mob, the Asian mobs, and the other mobs that permeate our society, we are decidedly less enthralled.   They’ll just have to wait their turn before getting their own television series.

If sex is involved in the crime, then we are titillated.   We are more concerned about Larry Craig, who solicited sex in a bathroom, than Ted Stevens who was convicted of screwing people out of money.   We spend years on the Jon Benet Ramsey story and a few minutes on the countless murders of children that occur every other week.   Jon Benet was pretty, a beauty queen, if you can even say such a thing.   The other kids are just kids.

So Senator Stevens gets his final adieu, his standing ovation, and even a pension.   He will be rewarded for her service and if his convictions are remembered at all, it is only because they will be chronicled in his book.  And possibly a movie.   As a thief, he was one of the good ones.   We deem him worthy of applause.

Leave Your Child in Nebraska–No Deposit, No Return

There are many laws, many rules, in fact, that seem almost like a good idea.   Without the, I suppose, the road to hell would never be paved with good intentions.   Case in point is the State of Nebraska and its “Safe Haven” law which was passe for all the right reasons.

What are those reasons?   The law enabled distraught, unstable and otherwise messed up mothers to dump their children at a fire station  or hospital, rather than abandon them, totally.   Clearly, the Nebraska Legislature had its hard in the right place when it passed this bill a couple of months ago.   What this means in general is rather than drop a kid in a dumpster or leave him on the street, an irresponsible parent can legally relieve himself of the bouncing baby.

The thing is, the same Legislature didn’t foresee the challenges in not putting an age limit on the kids left behind.  But since then people have been driving in from distant states to drop their kids on the doorsteps of Nebraska institutions.   Sometimes these kids are a little older than bouncing babies, like seventeen years old.   In fact nearly three dozen kids were dropped off.  None of them were infants.

One poor kid was left calling after its mother, “I’ll be good, I’ll be good.”   But the mother kept right on walking.   Amazing.   The allegedly lesser developed mammals don’t abandon their young.  But for some of us, this is obviously plausible.
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Now I hear people are abandoning their pets due to difficult economic times.  I realize also we have all seen the vintage black and white movies where the distraught but guilt and depression ridden Mom  leaves her kid on the doorstep.   But for adult to leave their somewhat advanced children to the fate of the State is beyond the imagination of many.  In fact, it is pretty deplorable.

Maybe the so called problem kids are better off without these parents.  Maybe they will be allow to straighten out and lead productive lives whereas living with destructive Moms and Dads would result only in their own destruction.   With these things it is always difficult to say.

If this weren’t so sad, so pathetically deplorable it would almost be funny.   It is not funny.   But it is telling.  It tells about some of us and what our sense of responsibility and accountability is, even with raising our very own children.    In some ways, that is beyond words.

The Nebraska Legislature has seen the error of its decision.   It is amending the law to stipulate only newborns.  It is a wise choice.   Still, there are at least dozens of people out there who are seriously considering abandoning thei childen.  Some have already done so.   The rest were either ignorant of the law or merely too lazy to make the drive.

California Wildfires Are the Lesson We Never Learn

It is wildfire season in California.   The first typically come in early to middle autumn when the land is dry as a bone and the Santa Ana Winds blow hot air to fan the flames.   A spark here and the fire is started.  A few burning embers caught up in the winds, and the fire spreads to catastrophic proportions.    If not every year we are treated to this disaster, it is a good many years.

Later, when winter comes and the rains pour down, the burnt vegetation and barren landscape will never hold back the waters.  We will have mud slides.  More disaster.  Sliding mud, believe me, is a horrible menace.  Water running downhill can cause tremendous damage.  Think of mud as dense, heavy water, and you begin to see its capability.  I saw it one year roll through a house like a mucky wrecking ball.  Good thing my neighbors weren’t home that day.   Would have killed them, for sure.

So with the first we have the news crews.  We have the stories.  We have the macro stores, told from helicopters and from the fire lines, dealing with the overall intensity of the fires, where it is spreading, its percentage of containment, and the number of houses the first have destroyed.   We get to see the burning hillsides, the houses bursting in flames like Maison Flambe.   We see the fire fighters struggling bravely to contain and push back the surging conflagration.   Every year.

And every year we also get the micro stories.  The up close and personal stories.  We see men adn women sharing tears, sifting through the ruins of their houses, the charred remains of their personal possessions.  We see them looking for their pets, looking for what remains of family heirlooms and photos.  We hear them trying to console themselves by showing gratitude for the fact that they are still alive and all the lost were the material possessions.   We see these people go from a multi-million dollar house to a cot in a gymnasium shelter in twenty minutes time.  Fires move quickly in the mountain and canyon areas.

It is hard not to feel sorry for them.  You feel sympathetic, share at least a modicum of pain.  You put yourself in their shoes.   You wonder what it would be like.  And while I feel the sympathy and empathy for people who have been victimized by natural disasters, I also wonder what they were thinking when they decided to build their homes there.
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I realize this is an age old question.  People wonder it about those who build their house to closely to a river that is prone to flood.   People wonder about trailer parks and domiciles built in the path of hurricanes and tornadoes.   Sometimes you can’t help it.  Sometimes the hurricane, fire, flood or tornado just takes a wrong turn and comes barreling down your boulevard.

But the fact remains many of these houses should never be built on hilltops, canyons and wooded areas where they are just inviting disaster to come for a visit.   We have seen this movie enough times to realize as beautiful as it is in these places, we just can’t afford to be building there.  It is stupid.  It is even more stupid when the same people build and then rebuild, after a previous disaster.

I know, you live there, you love the view,  it’s so romantic, the great whatever, but it seems like it is my tax dollars that are bailing you out.   It is me who has to smell or the charring that is exacerbated by the housing developments.  Days of foul smoke and smoky stench.  Yes, it would be there anyway, but it would never be the disaster it is if the houses weren’t part of the equation.  It would just be burning woods, canyons, the natural cycle where fires eliminate the surplus vegetation.

This is a lousy economy.  It doesn’t have to be made worse by stupid planning and development.  We do not have to build on every square inch of the natural landscape.  We don’t have to transpose the natural landscape with an ugly housing development that is destined to be destroyed by wildfires.  And in a time when neither federal government or state government has the money to maintain what mediocre civic services we already have, we really don’t need to be shelling out money via emergency funding so homeowners can indulge themselves in places they don’t belong.

I believe the first time there is a disaster, the government helps you out.  The second time, if you persist on living where you shouldn’t be building, you had better have adequate insurance or be prepared to be on your own when the disaster strikes.  Sure, the fire fighters will be noble and try to save you, your pets, and your house.   But if they can’t, then it is up to you to pick up the tab.    If you can’t pick up the tab, if insurance rates are so dear that you can’t afford homeowners’ insurance, then be prepared to suffer mightily.  Be prepared to suffer financially.  Be prepared to move elsewhere.   Instead of where you don’t belong.