Death of Newspaper Re-re-confirmed
Say what you will about his politics or his dubious interpretation of ‘objectivity’ — Rupert Murdoch got it right this time around. Back in the spring, when a very few brave souls produced a muffled murmur that resembled “Newspaper Bailout,” pundits praised Ol’ Rupe for charging readers to browse his Wall Street Journal online — a tactic eschewed by nearly every other daily in the nation.
Among the papers fearful of instigating a reader revolt, of course, was New York’s Paper of Record. The other day, we came upon this sordid scene at a craft fair in McCarren Park:
Our photo work could stand to improve — standing there, shooting away, we felt like the proverbial foot thwacking the proverbial dead horse — but the sign reads “50% Off!” The Times didn’t even bother to send out a proper sales rep — the poor sap here appears to be the laid-off mother of one of their delivery boys (they can still afford those, right?). Sad, sad days for the dead tree industry…
Symptoms: Robbed
We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.
The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined — ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne.
The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three — and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find — they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed.
Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule — someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find.
More Money, More Problems
I don’t know if it’s because (and I am so sick of hearing this…) “the economy’s in the dumps” or what, but of late, I’ve been hearing way more people saying that they don’t like their jobs, “but the money’s great,” so they stay there. What’s up with this? Think of your friends who began law school with a plan to work in child advocacy or environmental law, but who, after passing the bar, plunge into well-compensated corporate counsel positions “just until I pay back my loans.” That was seven years ago. They’re still doing doc review for Exxon. And when you call them on this, they slightly blush and repeat the above quote.
Since when is it okay for the Entitled Generation to compromise their values and justify working for evil companies or meaningless retail shops with large (or in my case, merely mediocre) paychecks?
This is totally contrary to the American dream, by golly. Yes, we still want to have the white picket fence someday. And yes, it costs a LOT to have that on either coast. But America—and, by default, capitalism—encourages life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Financial security can contribute to happiness, obvs, but does working long hours at a job you despise and feel wretched about? That, of course, is the false allure of the free market—the notion that wads of cash equate to happiness. In true hypocrite form, I’m currently working for a large oil and gas company. I’m not exactly on board with their environmental policy, nee old man corporate bureaucracy, so I am clearly projecting this issue. Am I ultimately being far too idealistic? Naïve? I refuse to believe so. At least until the system crushes my soul a little more.
FuK War
You have GOT to admire this guy: He’s so into the cause that he goes out and spends $50K on an H2 just so he can spray an anti-war slogan across its side and dump it on an East Village street to influence all who pass. The trees were so awed by this display of altruism that they got all freaky and sprouted leaves in the middle of February. Also, you may be able to make out in the background the new Upper Playground that opened last summer on East 9th. It’s right next to a Kid Robot (UP actually got the space when KR downsized into its current shop), which would seem to make for solid crossover traffic potential. UP’s NY store is about half as big as it San Fran Fillmore location, same vibe with localized references on some of its clothes (no MUNI tees here). KR carries standard KR shit, with a rather lackluster art display up front.
Photo taken with filthy Egyptian disposable camera that cost twice as much in filthy Egyptian tourist town as it would’ve at my filthy corner bodega.
Symptoms: Narcissism and the Crack Epidemic
Corporate execs and Wall Street douchebags made a big bowtied fuss over the past two weeks as President Obama considered limits on corporate executives’ pay — a logical target given these suits’ public scapegoating since September, and a sexy, easily-understood trumpeting of an aggressive effort to “fix the economy” or whatever the pundits have simplified it to. Corporate lawyers are, indeed, losing jobs, but nothing like the bankers, where companies shed ten and twenty thousand positions at a time. Most of these predominantly white and male casualties receive some months’ worth of severance pay consistent with their stratospheric salaries as well as outplacement services to help them get on the dole and put out feelers for another job.
Those who snuck past the chopping block, meanwhile — and, despite the doomsday headlines, this is still the vast majority of America’s high-end, white-collar workforce — have, in a display of avarice that’s surprised nobody, taken to bitching about salary freezes. It’s a classic example of follow-the-leader (those who aspire to being a cog in a 50,000-head machine do not typically make Jerry Maguire speeches), and when said leader is griping about his or her (but usually his) salary being capped at half a mil (stocks excluded, mind you), it’s easy to justify pushing for that lockstep $40k bonus for hitting your hours baseline on the peon chart. (Bear in mind, of course, that the mushy executive comp mandate Obama eventually signed last week only applies to banks accepting federal assistance going forward—so no, that doesn’t apply to Citigroup or GM, which accepted billions of our dollars over the past few months and still have Chapter 11 dead in their sights, or AIG, whose execs pocketed $85 billion, then embarked on a lockdown session to figure out how to best use the bailout to save their company weekend of massages, golf and Glenlivet.)
These are the same blokes who elected Ronald Reagan (along with this guy), who used the crack epidemic to court law-and-order types the same way Bill Clinton rode Silicon Valley’s success to a reputation as some sort of economic mastermind (and no, goddammit, his vice president did not invent the Internet, though he was most certainly one of its key advocates). Reagan’s demonization of crack led to the bulk of our country’s more outlandish drug laws (and all while his administration arguably turned a blind eye to coca smuggling that stoked the epidemic — but this is a complicated and disturbing aside deserving of its own examination in due time). It also provides our first example of a theme we’ll make popular in IDM: The American tradition of fighting the symptom of a problem rather than addressing the root cause.
Reagan demonized the addicts and low-level pushers. These people had been steered into their roles by a myriad of factors, from boredom to emotional instability, but most shared a common experience: An environment of poverty. This is an obvious statement: Corner boys grow up poor, attend underfunded inner-city public schools, and drop out to pursue one of the few viable options they’ve been conditioned to recognize. Junkies come from a wider range of backgrounds, to be sure, but many had unstable childhoods, often cultivated by money problems, and most of those from well-to-do families would have exhausted their trust funds and familial goodwill by the time they were freebasing on the regular. These are poor and largely uneducated people — easy targets for politicians who need a cause. Not much potential for political pushback from this grimy lot. So Reagan made it into a crusade, and today we have public prisons at 150 percent capacity, a booming private prison industry, and potent prison guard unions that keep money flowing for new prison construction while streets crumble, Muni continues to suck, and those same ghetto schools are still issuing textbooks that date back to the height of Ronnie’s War on Drugs.
