I am not ready for my childhood to be "retro" -- but it is.

When we first bought our house, a friend came over with her mother on the day we closed, took one look around, and said "You are going to be working on this house until the day you die."



After fifteen years and about $60,000 worth of siding, windows, roofing, gutters, a refinished basement, two water heaters, a furnace, and an upgraded electrical panel, I'm still ashamed to have a party. The longer you live in a house, the more daunting it becomes to have work done in it.



My next project (and I know my limitations so I don't end up on Renovation Realities), was going to be the downstairs bathroom. It's a 1950's cape cod house, so the bathroom is one of those tiny 5 x 7 functional-only bathrooms. I had a bath designer come out, and explained to her my vision of a step into yesteryear with gleaming white subway tile, a pan shower replacing the hulking seafoam-green tub with the massive rusting chip in it and the curved bottom that plots to kill me every time I step into it, and white hex tile with black accents. I knew the minute she walked in the door that her company would not try to get this job, because she came armed with a fat stack of glossy brochures from the kind of high-end cabinetry companies to which I'm sure the Real Housewives of New Jersey refer when remodeling their bathrooms every five years, sending the old fixtures to Green Demolitions.



Then Mr. Brilliant was laid off in January, and I started looking around said bathroom, and suddenly it seemed like a waste of $10,000-$15,000 to gut a bathroom with plaster walls and replace it with sheetrock. Yes, it's one of those 1950's tile bathrooms, but while most bathrooms of that era that are seafoam-green-and-black have the black tiles as accents, mine has black wall tile with the green accents. So I started to reconsider. We're hoping not to have to age in place, because the property taxes in New Jersey will kill us, assuming we're ever able to retire. So it may not pay to do the shower conversion right now. The tile is in good shape, and while the floor is a dull green that needs replacement and a new subfloor, and the holes in the ceiling that had to be punched so that a leaking pipe from the upstairs bathroom could be replaced have to be patched, but it occurred to me that perhaps this bathroom could be saved for the cost of a new vanity or sink, a few boxes of hex tile from Home Depot, a new mirror and a couple of well-placed shallow wall cabinets, a new light bar, and the labor to deal with the difficult stuff.









So I started looking around for photos that others had taken of their sow's ear bathrooms turned into silk purses. It isn't so much that I wanted to return it to its 1950's glory, though I did recently find on Freecycle a listing for an original seafoam green sink and toilet and thought about it for about five minutes until remembering that the seafoam green is the part of this bathroom I loathe most. But in these austere times, the days of the $20,000 Zen retreat seem to be over.



While looking for others who had scaled back their plans, I stumbled on Pam Kueber's very cool Retro Renovations site. Pam isn't just about learning to live with mid-20th-century tackiness, she's about reveling in it as some kind of Golden Age of Design. For someone like me, who is old enough to remember chrome-wrapped boomerang kitchen tables and who worships regularly at the altar of Gustav Stickley, it was difficult to wrap my mind around this concept. But Pam's enthusiasm, and that of her readers, is so infectious that I almost found myself starting to appreciate the design sensibility of my childhood.



Almost.



But who knew that there is, in this country, an entire subculture of people who, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to make their midcentury houses look like McMansions, have chosen instead to restore them to their original hideous glory, with pink bathrooms and ugly Don Draper sofas and pink kitchen appliances and tulip chairs.



If you watch This Old House, or read the magazine, there's always a bit of self-importance about restoring an old Queen Anne, or a Victorian, or especially a Craftsman house (which is my own particular favorite design aesthetic). Perhaps it's because these eras all pre-date anyone who's still alive today, which gives them a hushed museum quality to which that kind of reverence fits. But the mid-20th-century aesthetic, with its absurd turquoise kitchens and seafoam green bathrooms and bright orange sofas and kidney-shaped coffee tables, has a kind of gleeful tastelessness that after you read Pam Kueber's blog, makes you kind of understand it, even if you aren't quite ready to contact that guy getting rid of the seafoam green bathroom sink.



Today Pam Kueber has attained that revered condition of Blog Nirvana -- a LONG profile in the New York Times. Go check it out, and then check out Retro Renovations.



As for me, next time I go to get my hair done, I'm going to check out World of Tile on Route 22 in Springfield. Who knows, they might have the same seafoam green and black floor tile that I have now, and perhaps when it hasn't been trod on for fifty years it looks awesome.

And I'll bet he doesn't tip, either

I have a thing about tips. I believe in them. Usually I leave at least 20% as a tip, more if the service is exceptional or if it's a holiday. I think it all goes back to the time in high school when I interviewed for a job at Friendly's, which was allowed to pay less than minimum wage because of the tips. Or a childhood memory of a diner waitress in her fifties balancing a half-dozen plates without spilling even a crumb. Jobs that relied on tips always seemed to me to be the crappiest jobs in the world, and as an adult, I've always felt a responsibility to do my part to make them not quite so crappy.

One area where I always tip generously is hotel housekeeping. It's not that cleaning up after me is such a chore. For some reason, I'm a better housekeeper on the road than I am at home. It's just that the monotony of changing beds and cleaning toilets and tubs after strangers, even on holidays, seems like a particularly depressing way to spend one's work life. For all that I'm working ridiculous hours again on a project with a timeline that I'll be lucky to meet, the work I do is interesting, varied, and I hope, meaningful. Hotel housekeepers don't have that luxury. So the only things I can do is to a) not make their jobs even more difficult, and b) tip well.

When I'm just crashing over someplace because of weather, or I'm too tired to drive any longer, a Comfort Inn or Holiday Inn Express is fine. If I have a clean bed, a clean bathroom, a TV, and an internet connection I'm happy. But when I travel for work, it's usually for a conference or a intra-company meeting, so the hotels are pretty nice. In 2009 I lived in a Hilton in Europe for two weeks. I've stayed at Westins, Hyatts, Doubletrees, and yes, even a Sofitel. The Sofitel in Philadelphia has the most awesome beds I've ever slept in. They have these down mattress toppers and duvets that make you feel like you've gone to heaven and are sleeping on a cloud.

There's an interesting thing, though, about what happens in these hotels. A generous room tip means that I come back to a room with a fistful of Andes mints instead of just one. Or a full extra complement of toiletries. Or extra pens. And on the day I leave for good, I leave an even larger tip. It's as if we are exchanging, through hotel swag, a bond of female solidarity. Acknowledging that the person who cleans up after you is a human being too can be a powerful force for good.

I thought of all this while reading this op-ed in the New York Times today by a hotel housekeeping manager, about the risks these women take every day when they go into a room. And then I thought of the news segment I watched last night, about an Assemblyman from Queens who has proposed a law requiring hotels to provide housekeepers with "panic buttons" -- small electronic devices that a housekeeper can press to alert hotel security. The segment asked for the opinions of random New Yorkers, and most seemed to think it was a good idea -- except for the obviously wealthy woman in the posh neighborhood who thought it was "too much government interference" in people's private lives; too much "nanny state."

Because ensuring worker safety is too much government interference into the "private affairs" of giant hotel companies. This woman's attitude so perfectly encapsulated the greedy scumbaggery, the utter lack of empathy, the doctrinaire illogic of today's right-wing conservative, that it got me thinking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and men like him who believe that the peons who wait on them are somehow less than human. I'd be willing to bet that Strauss-Kahn never, ever, ever leaves a room tip.

Why do they have such a need for hell?

Just in time for Easter to be over, Ross Douchebag over at the New York Times makes himself an almost-too-easy punching bag in an essay in which he laments the decline of belief in Hell.

In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a consequence of growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative question: Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.

But the more important factor in hell’s eclipse, perhaps, is a peculiar paradox of modernity. As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press. Hell means the Holocaust, the suffering in Haiti, and all the ordinary “hellmouths” (in the novelist Norman Rush’s resonant phrase) that can open up beneath our feet. And if it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

I understand the need to feel that there's a reward for the tribulations we experience in life. Without the promise of goodies at the end of it all, it would have been difficult to do things like convert slaves to Christianity, but it's Douchebag's insistence that there be a Hell to go with Heaven that is so emblematic of the conservative mind.

I'm not necessarily an atheist, but I sure as hell don't believe in some Great White Alpha Male in the sky who micromanages people's lives, knocked up a girl and then told his son "I'm going to let them kill you so that 51-year-old John Ensign can screw around with his best friend's wife and then ask his parents for money to keep said best friend quiet," and who told Abraham to sacrifice his son to him and then just as the latter was about to do it, said "Kidding! Just wanted to see if you'd do it! Hahahahaha!" But I have about as strong a moral code as anyone I know. I would cite the Incident of the Bell Pepper at the Grand Union as evidence. I once found a bell pepper wedged in my shopping cart when I took it out to the parking lot. I found myself with three choices:

1) Put the pepper in my bag and go home;
2) Leave the pepper in the shopping cart;
3) Take the pepper back into the store and put it back;
4) Take the pepper back into the store and pay for it.

Almost everyone would agree that Option 1 would be the wrong thing to do, except those who believe that as long as I believed that Jesus died for my sins and that I was saved and forgiven, I could have taken the pepper, gone home, and had a clear conscience. It's arguable that option 2 might be a moral choice, because I wouldn't be taking something I didn't pay for. But the pepper would be out in the hot sun and wouldn't be saleable, which from the viewpoint of the store (if it were, say, a mom 'n' pop shop instead of a supermarket) is the same. To me, Options 3 and 4 were the only moral choices, so I took the pepper back into the store and paid for it.

It wasn't God who made me do it. It wasn't some Jewish guy getting nailed to a tree that allowed me to do it. It's simply being able to tell what is right and what is wrong.

Douchebag's insistence that "If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either" may be the most profoundly twisted thing I've ever read. Are we simply infants who respond only to carrot or stick? Maybe Ross Douthat needs to have the threat of punishment hanging over his head to keep HIM on the straight and narrow (and given some of his columns, it wouldn't surprise me, as you can see from this Tbogg compendium of Doutiana), but some of us are capable of making moral choices on our own.

And that's what infuriates culture war conservatives, isn't it? This idea that someone might actually be able to navigate a path through life that involves honesty, hard work, fidelity, and truth, for its own sake rather than because of some punitive parent figure we conjure up who also offers unconditional forgiveness? What are we, five-year-olds?

It certainly explains their insistence on implementing laws to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow -- because they can't do it without the threat of punishment, and the simply cannot understand how some of us can -- and do, every day.

There aren't many things that make me wish I was young again, but this is one of them

For the most part, I really don't have problems with getting older. Sure, I worry about the future; about money and the environment and how the crazy weather we had this winter is just an early warning sign of things to come. I think about what it's going to be like to be old, and whether I'll be able to just check out in my sleep like my father-in-law did, or if I'll be tethered to a bed in a nursing home, full of bedsores and lying in my own urine until the next overworked and underpaid aide comes in and smacks me around out of sheer frustration. If that's how it all ends, and I'm lucky, I'll have Alzheimer's and won't have a whole lot of awareness of what's happening.

But for the most part, getting older has freed me of many of the things that bothered me when I was young. I refer to myself as fat in my crusade to take back the word from people who use it as a value judgment associated with all kinds of things I'm not, like lazy and gluttonous and gorging myself constantly on MacDonald's hamburgers and Dunkin' Donuts. I no longer feel like I have to try to be tall and thin and WASP-y with silky blond hair even though I'm short and chubby and Jewish and have hair that's thinning and never behaved anyway. Instead of competing with other people at work, I can be the "elder statesman", explaining to younger colleagues that getting up at a full-division meeting and complaining to your boss' boss' boss that not having full development access to the system isn't fair is not the way to get what you want.

Some of this is luck. I'm fortunate in that I was laid off from my last job just before the economy went into the crapper and managed to luck into a related but very different area in a company where a department was being built from scratch and having a pulse and a brain was enough to get hired. But it's required sheer, hard work and 80-hour weeks to build the skill level that I've needed. If anything happened to this job, it remains to be seen if any other employer would look past the crows feet and the size 16 and the gray that creeps back into my temples barely two weeks after I have my hair done.

For the most part, I have no regrets about not being young anymore, except that there are things I would do if I were young now and the same person I am now that I would never have had the guts to do then. I first had the inkling of this in the summer of 2009, when I spent two weeks at the Hilton in Cologne on the company nickel, taking the train to work every day and muddling through a city where I didn't know the language at night. The hotel isn't far from a youth hostel, and the city was full of backpackers enjoying a European Adventure before jobs and marriages and families tied them down. I sometimes found myself envying their youth and freedom; their ability to drink beer and go dancing till the wee hours and make temporary European friends, some of whom might even become permanent. But in my own little way, with a full weekend on my own, taking photos of goofy things like cigarette machines and pastry cases and sidewalk artists and shop windows decorated with hookahs and photos of Aishwarya Rai...and tourists clutching cups of Starbuck's while standing in front of a charming German café; I had my own mini-European Adventure.

Like so many other bloggers, I was intrigued by writer/photographer Todd Bieber's request to spread the word about the roll of film he'd found in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and his quest to find the owners. I wrote about it, and reposted his videos, here and here.

I actually got word a while ago that he'd found the owners of the film, but haven't had a chance to repost the video until now:

Thanks to Todd for giving this particular oldster the chance to vicariously enjoy his European Adventure. And if you read this blog and you've found Todd's film, e-mail him at brooklynfoundfilm-at-gmail-dot-com. Then hide your own roll of film (if you can still find film!). Because infinite projects like this don't have to always involve cats.

Everything is relative

Awful:

Unfathomable:

I suppose it's easy for me to say, when my house is dry and I do not live near a river that's going to crest at four feet above flood stage today. But for those of us who are dealing with the kinds of suckitude that mark life in 21st century America -- religious witch hunts, unemployment in our families, a lack of jobs and rampant age discrimination in those that are out there, high fuel prices, John Boehner advocating for nuclear power here in the US even as the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan approaches meltdown -- the nightmare unfolding in Japan ought to put our own problems into perspective, at least temporarily.

Because I have work colleagues in Japan (Osaka, not Tokyo), my first thought upon hearing of the earthquake in Japan was for them -- for M., who greets me in e-mail as "Dear Jill-san" and whose charming formality and cheerful demeanor mask a disciplined and detailed mind; for Y., he of the endless patience with the raucous American women he has to deal with regularly, who loves the Yankees and who just got married a few months ago; and for A., who is an avid scuba diver and takes photographs of astonishing beauty. As at turns out, some were in Tokyo for a conference, but managed to get out on the bullet train between the quake and the tsunami. A disaster like this is something we watch on television. Brackish mud and water overflows a neat row of greenhouses that look from the helicopters taking the footage like cigarettes neatly lined up on a table. Our minds simply cannot fathom what is unfolding in front of us. We've seen scenes like this done with CGI any number of times in the movies, but this is no movie. And yet, we watch with a kind of detachment, because such things just don't seem possible. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen" Real disasters play out in real time and we watch them from our living room sofas as spectators. We empathize but can't actually FEEL that it's real.

I'm not sure what there even is to say at this point. I can't recall anything like this ever happening before during my lifetime. It's enough to make you think the 2012 kooks are on to something.

A few plutocrats cannot keep an economy this size going all by themselves

The American economy post-World War II was built on a thriving middle class. Henry Ford may have been a vicious anti-Semite, but he recognized as early as 1907 that he could sell more cars if more people could afford them. It seems obvious that you will make more money selling a million four-dollar widgets than if you only sell a hundred of them at ten dollars because only a few people can pay ten dollars for a widget.

My parents both lived through the Depression. My father's parents were always poor, but their sons took advantage of free education at City College and both achieved advanced college degrees. My mother's family fared better, moving out to Altoona, Pennsylvania from the Bronx. I always picture their house as resembling the one in the movie A Christmas Story -- and I'm sure I'll get a call either confirming or debunking that very soon.

My sister and I grew up in a time of unequalled prosperity in this country. We knew about riots in Watts and in Newark, and we knew about poverty, but for white suburban kids like us (and there were a LOT of us), life wasn't the kind of luxury that kids of the McMansion generation have known (and likely will never know again), but it was comfortable. Some kids still shared bedrooms in larger families, but no kid had a private bathroom. Television was something that was in the living room and you largely watched what your parents wanted to watch, which in our house was shows like Ben Casey and The Defenders and The Twilight Zone. We had meat every night but steak rarely. And of course without the sheer number of electronic gadgets available now, we amused ourselves by building outdoor forts of empty cardboard boxes, playing with dolls or Kenner building sets, or playing board games. We had no "play dates"; if you wanted to play with another kid you'd just go to someone's house.

I'm not trying to paint some kind of 1950's-60's idyllic existence, certainly not in MY dysfunctional family. But my father, who was a biochemist in cancer research at Merck, worked a 9-5 day. My mother was a legal secretary and one of the only women in any of the neighborhoods we moved to who worked outside the home. There was none of this business of working 80 hour weeks to try to prove your value to the company. When we moved to Westfield in 1965, I became aware of people who were far more affluent than we were. They were the old-money WASP families who lived in the big Tudor mansions in the Wychwood section of town. But in our neighborhood, it was people like us. Not all worked white-collar jobs; there were trash haulers and manufacturing workers, but all could afford a three-bedroom, bath-and-a-half split on the outskirts of a town with a top school system.

In the late 1970's, I was out of college and renting a $350/month garden apartment in Linden. We were already starting to see the prosperity of my childhood disappear, what with the first oil shock in 1973 and the second in 1978. I began working weekends at the gas station around the corner, partially for extra money, but also so that I could be guaranteed to be able to put gas in my car. The station was run by a guy who worked full-time at GAF and also had this gas station. Joe wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he had a house in a decent neighborhood. He could probably have made ends meet with just the GAF job (which had health insurance and a guaranteed pension), but he wanted to be sure that he could do right by his kids in case he got laid off.

The bottom line of all this is that while there were always people who lived lavishly, my childhood and young adult years were populated by people of varying degrees of intelligence from varying backgrounds, some working blue-collar jobs, some white-collar jobs, but most of them didn't walk around with the kind of constant, gnawing fear that those of us who still have jobs do today.

For the first half of my life, corporations seemed to recognize that you could sell more stuff if people could afford to buy them. Globalization increased markets for American goods, except that somewhere along the line, American goods became something not worth having. In towns across this country, there are still people driving 1972 Dodge Darts like the one I had. But when the gas shocks hit, the U.S. auto industry responded by making crappy cars like the Ford Pinto and the Chevy Nova, while Toyota and Honda were ready with reliable, fuel-efficient cars to welcome us with open arms. Television may have been invented here in the US, but Zenith and RCA's color TVs couldn't hold a candle to those made by Japanese companies like Sony and Panasonic, who took our technology and instead of only looking at the financial performance of the next quarter, took the long view and made quality products that people wanted to buy. And instead of trying to compete on quality, American companies gave up and either closed up shop or shipped jobs overseas.

Mr. Brilliant has always said that we make nothing anymore in the US except paper and talk, only now it isn't even paper; it's a series of ones and zeroes being fed over a wire -- or through the air. Even American companies whose products ARE in demand, like Apple, don't manufacture here. Software development became a skill that commanded a high salary -- and so companies decided to offshore this work. Now X-rays can be read overseas. Financial back-office transactions can be done overseas. Accounting can be done overseas. The jobs that created the American middle class and a working class that could look forward to watching its children graduate college have been disappearing for thirty years, and continue to do so, as this race to the bottom among those who do the work in order to further stuff the pockets of those at the top shows no signs of abating.

And when it's all over; when Ronald Reagan's Shining City on a Hill is populated by a few billionaires in gated estates while the rest of us scramble for scraps, what then? When Thomas Friedman's dream of a flat earth in which wages even out worldwide -- at a far lower level than required to maintain a middle class, what then? The plutocrats simply cannot buy enough STUFF to keep an economy the size of ours afloat by themselves.

But that's where we're headed, and we see it now:

The good paying, predominantly white-collar jobs that once sustained many American communities are disappearing at an alarming rate, keeping the unemployment rate stubbornly high despite the end of the Great Recession.

More troubling, these jobs in accounting, financial analysis, commercial printing and a broad array of other mostly white-collar occupations are unlikely to come back, experts predict.

There isn't a single cause to the trend. Some of it is explained by changing technology, some of it is the result of automation. Sending well-paying jobs to low-cost centers abroad is another big part of the story. So is global competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

The result is the same in all cases, however. Jobs that paid well, required skills and produced vital communities are going away and aren't being replaced by anything comparable.

"Unfortunately, the evidence is that you see a form of downward mobility of workers who are displaced from middle-skilled, stable career occupations," said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview.

Autor published a much-discussed paper in April, suggesting that the U.S. labor market has become polarized, with employment growth in the high-skill, high-wage end, and the low-skill, low-wage end. The vast middle, he concluded, is shrinking.

"The Great Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the direction of the U.S. labor market," Autor concluded, pointing to an accelerating trend that he said has been underway for more than a decade.
In a 2007 study, Princeton University economist Alan Blinder estimated that 1 in 4 U.S. jobs potentially could be sent offshore because of technology, low-cost labor and the fact that service sector jobs are so much more abundant in the U.S. economy.

"I'm not totally convinced that the deep recession has accelerated the trend toward offshoring. There are certainly examples of that. But the main effect seems to be that firms learned to get by with less labor, whether domestic or foreign," said Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. "That said, as employment expands and labor markets normalize, we should see the offshoring trend reassert itself."

Blinder identifies accountants and providers of similar financial services as prime targets. Accounting blogs set up to lure these jobs to India boast of a $47,000 saving per U.S. accountant whose job is sent offshore.

Historical trends also reveal the mounting loss of middle-skill jobs.

According to data in the MIT study by Autor, skilled professional employment rose by 28 percent from 1979 to 1989, while employment in office and administrative jobs jumped 11 percent.

Then, from 1999 and 2007, those employment gains slowed to 11 percent and 1 percent respectively. And from 2007 to 2009, spanning most of the Great Recession, there was no job growth for professionals, while office and administrative employment fell by 8 percent.

This loss of middle-skill jobs — what Autor calls polarization of the job market — intersects with another discouraging trend, the concentration of wealth at the highest rungs of the wealth ladder.

Research from University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez shows that from 1993 to 2006, average real income per family grew by an annual rate of 1.9 percent. But when subtracting out the top 1 percent of income earners, the rate of growth is 1.1 percent annually. Instead of income growth of 28 percent over the 15-year period, it's almost half that, 15 percent.

This suggests that the top 1 percent of earners in the nation captured almost half of the growth in income over a period of stellar growth in the U.S. economy. And this came against the backdrop of disappearing good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, and what now appears to be an escalating departure of well-paying middle-skill jobs.

"The middle class think they will be rich someday. The chance that people are going to become super rich is negligible. In fact, what we know is that income mobility up the ladder is slowing down, it's not increasing," said Robert Reich, an economist and former U.S. labor secretary, in a recent interview. "It's harder now for a kid born into a middle-class family to make it. It's harder for a kid in a lower middle class to do well . . . the story is obvious and so clear that it really needs to be laid out to people."

But as long as we are willing to vote for people who get out on the stump and say, "Look! Look at that [black guy/illegal immigrant/Muslim/Indian guy/welfare mother/pick a boogeyman any boogeyman]! HE's your problem!" -- while they lift our wallets from our back pockets; as long as Americans jump at the red meat tossed at them by opportunistic hatemongers like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul; as long as we persist in this fantasy that if we just stuff enough taxpayer cash into the pockets of the wealthy they might hire a few people, we're going to continue to be like the proverbial frog in the slowly-heating water on the stove -- unable to see our participation in our own doom.

Security Theatre

As I write this I'm sitting at a Chili's in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport in sunny Florida, waiting for a Continental flight that since I got here two hours early has already been delayed over an hour.

I wasn't quite prepared to have to deal with full-body scanners, since Terminal C at Newark doesn't have them yet. But since I get a mammogram and dental x-rays every year, administered by medically-trained professionals, I really don't want to get x-rayed by bored TSA staff, thank you very much. So I opted for "alternative screening."

It's clear that the TSA staff here doesn't deal with people like me very often -- short fat middle-aged Jewish ladies who refuse to follow conventional wisdom, and my decision to opt out of being essentially strip-searched in order to get on an airplane left them somewhat nonplussed. They read me the spiel, hoping I would change my mind. Other travelers looked at me curiously, perhaps thinking I'd been pulled aside for extra screening.

It took a while to get someone to do the pat-downfeel-up, but I have to admit that the process is highly impersonal, the screener tells you exactly what she's going to do, and if you treat her (or him, if you are male) like a human being, it is a far more civilized way to be screened than to have to put your arms behind your head and have someone who may or may not know what he's doing zap x-rays through you. Of course that being frisked by a stranger is preferable to a full-body scan tells you something about what air travel has become these days. It mostly just makes me wonder if the luggage being loaded into the cargo hold is scanned as thoroughly "for our safety" as the passengers are.

So here we are, nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, still scratching our heads trying to stay one step ahead of some highly resourceful people who find this level of reality so intolerable that they not only want to leave it, but take a few hundred people with them. And every time we take off our shoes, send our laptops through scanners being monitored by people who often don't seem to know what they're looking at, or undergo virtual strip searches, I have to wonder if a step ahead is really where we are.

It's surprising -- and appalling, actually -- to watch people blindly and unquestioningly go into these body scanners. When you get dental x-rays, the technician leaves the room. It's also appalling to think what risks the TSA staff incurs every day at work, because they don't get to leave the room, and the scanners are not enclosed. It may be easier to think of this here, where the TSA employees are largely pleasant and professional, unlike Newark, where they tend to be surly and largely inattentive.

UPDATED 11/10/10: The ACLU cites Jeffrey Golberg's account of HIS dealings with the TSA in the Atlantic, and also notes that the "safety" of the scanners is disputed.

The politics of hair

Last week I posted a Sesame Street video featuring a clearly African-American Muppet singing about how she loves her hair. A few days later, I heard a segment on NPR featuring the man who wrote that song for his daughter, and about the highly emotional response that many women of color have had to the video.

Hair seems to be more fraught with emotional resonance with women than it does even for men, who have long tried to be creative about the hair loss that comes with middle age. And it doesn't matter how old you are, hair is perhaps second only to weight in the emotional baggage it often carries.

I never had great hair. Photos of me as a child show your standard-issue blondish child-hair, cut in the obligatory page-boy-with-bangs Scout Finch look that was inevitable in the early 1960s. I came to adolescence just in time for the flaxen-haired folk singers like Joni Mitchell, and spent years trying to tame my hair into being long, straight and fine. We did this by rolling the crown on two giant rollers while wet, then wrapping the hair around our heads and securing it with giant clips, and sleeping on it. And for about five minutes after getting up in the morning, my sister and I had straight Joni Mitchell hair -- until we stepped outside. Any humidity at all, and it clumped right up.

My mother has always had really thick hair. Even at 83, her hair is still quite thick. My sister has thick hair like hers, only hers is coarse and not-quite-curly -- the kind of hair that others have at times when it's fashionable, managed to have with body waves and perms. My head shows archetypal male pattern baldness genes -- thick around the sides and thin on top. I've been through many hair iterations in my life. There are lame and failed attempts at the Farrah Fawcett 'do of the 1970's, sleek pageboys, the long, wavy luxurious look of my high school graduation photo which lasted about as long as it took to take the photo. There's the chin-length perm that I hoped looked like a late 1920's wavy bob but didn't, the short, poodly perm that's cropped close on the sides with curls on top, and finally settled into the short cut I wear today.

Until I cut my hair short, hair care always took at least a half-hour in the morning, what with blow dryers and curling irons. The perms gave me my first taste of hair care freedom -- just wash, pick, and go. But when my hair started to go gray, not in a nice salt-and-pepper way, but rather, changing color from a kind of autumn wheat shade to a dull mouse brown with gray wires coming out of it, I went the dye route via my hairdresser -- the one thing I'm not frugal about, for all that he gives me a good price for my hair care by virtue of having been his client since 1986. The color is darker than my natural shade, but has some bottle-red highlights that border on purple, which makes me feel kind of punk-rockish. In the morning, it's wash, comb, and go -- a virtue when you have the kind of schedule I do.

My first short cut was a botch job, and I remember sitting in my therapist's office crying as if I were Samson and Delilah had just cut my hair off. I hadn't wanted it this short, and I felt as if I'd been de-womanized somehow. The therapist, who had long, wavy, salt-and-pepper hair, talked to me about the joys of Really Big Dangly Earrings, and for the most part, that's the route I've gone since.

With middle-age has come even more thinning on top, but the short cut keeps me from having broad areas of no hair. There's no combover here, but the short hairs cover the top of my head nicely. I'm sure I'll end up as one of those old ladies who has the four remaining hairs on her head teased into voluminousness to try to cover the baldness, but I'll worry about that when I get there.

It took me a long time to get to some peace with my hair. Sometimes I still wish I could wear it long, but I'm OK with it as it is. At 4'10" tall, hair that's too long creates a look reminiscent of Cousin Itt from the Addams Family anyway. My hair is what it is. The hair of other women is what it is. I'm fifty-five years old and I long ago learned that I'm not the center of the universe and most people I pass by in my day-to-day life aren't even looking. And I don't understand why it's necessary to waste perfectly good keystrokes on screeds like this, from last Thursday's New York Times:

MY mother hates it. My sister worries about it. My agent thinks I’m hiding behind it. A concerned friend suggests that it undermines my professional credibility. But in the middle of my life, I’m happy with it. Which is saying a lot about anything happening to my 55-year-old body.

I feel great about my hair.

I have long hair. I’m not talking about long enough to brush gently on my shoulder — when I tilt my head. I’m not talking about being a couple of weeks late to the hairdresser. I’m talking long. Long enough for a ponytail with swing to it. Long enough to sit against when I’m in a chair. Long enough to have to lift it up out of the sweater I’m pulling over my head. Long enough to braid.

What’s worse (to my critics) is that my hair is graying. Of course it is. Everyone’s hair is graying. But some of us aren’t ready to go there. That’s fine with me — I’m not judgmental about dyes. In fact, I find the range and variety of synthetic hair color to be an impressive testament to our unending chemical creativity. I’m particularly fascinated by that streaky kaleidoscopic thing some blondes do that looks kind of like Hair of Fawn. For my own head, I’m a tad paranoid about smelly, itchy potions.

No one seems to have any problems when a woman of a certain age cuts her hair off. It is considered the appropriate thing to do, as if being shorn is a way of releasing oneself from the locks of the past. I can see the appeal, and have, at times in my life, gone that route. Some women want to wash the men (or jobs) right out of their hair. Others of us have to have at them with scissors. Again, I do not judge. Go right ahead, be a 60-year-old pixie.

Uh, what was that about judging?

The author of this drivel, Dominique Browning, goes on to point out a bunch of crap about long hair that no one seriously believes anymore, particularly about how men find long hair sexy. I have no doubt that most men do, though the preponderance of women in the local A&P still in their yoga pants pushing shopping carts full of children tells me that long hair is not necessarily a prerequisite in the allure department, and let's face it -- once you get into your fifties, that horse may still be in the barn, but the kid at the local gas station isn't going to be asking you out anymore.

I really hate to tell Dominique Browning this, but most people really don't give a shit whether she has long hair or not. I suspect that this judgmentalism she writes about is coming from the messages playing in her own head that have been given her by her judgmental mother and sister, not by others. We're too busy worrying about our weight to even notice.

Living in your own head

Wow...Maron must have really been hitting the WTF Roast before going on Craig Ferguson last night:

It's surprising to hear a man talk about the nonstop dialogue in one's head. I always tell Mr. Brilliant that if he's ever away and puts listening devices in the house, he'll think I had someone move in while he's away, because I carry on entire conversations with myself. I don't even direct them at the cats. When I need to rant, the walls are as good an audience as anyone.

My brain is always talking. Always. I dream in color, with large casts of characters, sometimes in exotic locales, and there's always talking. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it's a challenge to get to the bathroom and back without thinking "Now what do I have to do today? You know, this room really needs painting. Do you think I can get around to those closet organizers this weekend? Shit -- I forgot to call the exterminator again. When is that meeting? God, [annoying person] is a pain in the ass. I wonder if I'll get out of work on time today. I'd really like to blog about what Rachel said last night. Is the car due for an oil change? Jim DeMint is a fucking idiot." Because once this kicks in, it's all over. Wanda Sykes did a bit on this once, and unfortunately I can't find it on YouTube. Every woman I've asked says the same thing -- that the mind is always going. I can be in Savasana, and I'll be making shopping lists. It just never stops.

I once read someplace that when a woman asks a man "What are you thinking" and he replies "Nothing", he's telling the truth. I asked Mr. Brilliant about this and he concurred that yes, sometimes he just doesn't think about anything. I simply cannot fathom how this can happen. So when Marc Maron talks about his inner dialogue looking at someone's new ice cream maker on the subway, I know exactly what he's talking about. Except mine will continue at around 2:30 AM. There might even be recipes.

My heretical view: One more year, and that's it

It occurred to me while listening to the car radio this morning as the names of the 9/11 dead were read that perhaps after next year, the 10th anniversary of the attacks, it's time to leave the ritualized mourning to the families.

I'm not saying we should forget what happened nine years ago today. You don't forget something like that any more than those who were at Pearl Harbor and survived ever forgot that. But the names of the Pearl Harbor dead aren't read annually in perpetuity either.

There's something that I variously call "The Book of Old Grudges" or "The Garden of Old Grudges", depending on what metaphor I use on any given day. It's the syndrome, and I know you either have varying degrees of it or know people who do, characterized by an unwillingness to let go of bad things that happened in the past and a seeming sense of gratification one gets from reliving those bad things over and over and over again. You see it in people still bitter over divorces that happened decades ago, even if they are happily remarried. You see it in women who persist, twenty, thirty, forty years later in describing themselves as "survivors of rape". You see it in people who are unable to find a way to live with the scars of childhood trauma. They are unable to in any way get past something awful that happened to them and instead nurture the trauma, sculpting it into something lasting, something that pervades everything about their lives. They get "stuck" -- unable to live, unable to move along, unable to find a place for the terrible things that happen in life.

A friend of mine lost her 24-year-old daughter very unexpectedly a few years ago. One day her daughter was here, and the next she was gone. One of our colleagues said something at the time that I thought was very wise. She said "You never really get over it, but you find a place for it -- like a room in your mind that you visit every now and then." When we both started work at the same place after being laid off, my friend wondered how to answer the question about how many children she has. After all, she didn't want to pretend that her daughter had never existed, but didn't want to have to be "The Woman Whose Daughter Died." My friend is not "The Woman Whose Daughter Died." She's a colleague, a professional, a mother to her remaining daughter, a friend, someone with interests and plans for the future -- someone with a life.

I keep thinking of that scene from the otherwise hokey movie Tuck Everlasting, in which William Hurt explains to Alexis Bledel why being immortal and staying the same forever isn't all it's cracked up to be:

Look around you.

It's teeming life.

It's flowers and trees and frogs.

It's... it's all part of the wheel.

It's always changing; it's always growing...like you, Winnie.

Your life is never the same.

You were once a child. Now, you are about to become a woman.

One day, you'll grow up and you'll do something important.

You'll have children, maybe, and then one day you'll go out...

just like the flame of a candle.

You'll make way for new life.

That's a certainty.

That's the natural way of things.

And then, there's us.

What we Tucks have, you can't call it living.

We just... are.

We're like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream.

[snip]

There's one thing I've learned about people.

Many will do anything, anything not to die

and they'll do anything to keep from living their life.

Do you want to stay stuck as you are right now, forever?

I've just got to make you understand.

(Winnie) I don't want to die. Is that wrong?

No. No human does...but i-it's part of the wheel...

the same as being born.

You can't have living without dying.

Don't be afraid of death, Winnie.

Be afraid of the unlived life.

I don't pretend to be able to tell anyone who lost a friend, a spouse, a brother or sister, a father, mother, uncle, or neighbor how to grieve, or how long to grieve, or how they should remember this day. I do think that some reflection is warranted, not just about the horror of that one day, but about all the horrors that day has wrought since then, some of it wrought by the very people we looked to on that day to provide reassurance. Since that day we have endured needless, endless war, limits to our freedoms that produce no added safety, divisiveness that rivals that of the Jim Crow era. The circus that has filled the 24/7 news cycle for the last few weeks about the Park51 project and about a lunatic in Florida and those who would copy him, do nothing to commemorate or pay respects to the dead.

The endless flogging of 9/11 for political purposes has forever sullied any kind of public observance of this day. Next year on this day we will have read the names of the dead in each year of the decade since the attacks. We should never forget what happened. But after a decade, it will be time for those of us lucky to have been personally untouched by the tragedy to put it away and get on with the business of living, instead of being stuck, like rocks at the side of a stream.

Who in their right mind would major in computer science now?

It wasn't that long ago that tech skills were touted as the key to landing a job in the "new service economy" or the "new information economy" or whatever it was called in any given year by Thomas Friedman, whose own job is about dead trees. And yes, for a while, anyone with the right degree, or even a willingness to learn, could get into IT.

But the days when someone like me, who was able to get an entry-level programming job simply by transferring my secretarial skills into the IT department working for the department heads, expressing a desire to get into programming, and starting a couple of graduate courses, are over. I was extraordinarily lucky, even by the standards of 1988. I had a basic knowledge of programming concepts from struggling through an Introduction to Pascal course, but I required training in the 4GL that was being used, and the VAX operating system on which it ran. I learned as I went. I stopped grad school because I had to learn how to do my job. Two years later I saw that PC programming was the way to go, taught myself C out of a book, and got a job with a smalll investment consulting company writing C programs, working with the database application Paradox, and doing some Novell Netware administration -- all learned on the fly, on the job. Three years later I took a job that in short order I grew to hate, working on voice response systems. But it was walking distance from home, there was no commuting time, and I was able to go back to school and have it paid for. I stuck it out for a year and moved to another small software VAR, where I wrote Visual Basic programs after teaching myself THAT out of a book before even starting the job, and where I got into basic HTML web sites in 1996 -- again, teaching myself out of a book.

IT was like that in those days. The ability to learn quickly, a willingness to just jump in, initiative, some smarts -- that was all you needed.

Not today. Today, you can teach yourself out of a book till the cows come home. You can have skills in fourteen different programming languages, and if you are missing the fifteenth, you are out of luck. Ads for IT people contain a laundry list of skills that no one person can possibly have, because they involve completely different kinds of left brain/right brain dominance. You'll see ads for someone who has experience in a dozen programming languages, who's an experienced network administrator, a computer security expert, a graphic designer, a technical writer, and a trainer. And that's an ad for one job.

None of these jobs exist, of course. They are designed to have nobody qualify for them so that companies can wail that there just aren't enough qualified people and they simiply HAVE to outsource the wrok to countries that pay a dollar an hour at most.

And so, while politicians of both parties are continuing to laud education and "retraining" as a panacea for the unemployment situation, as they continue with the old chestnut that it's simply a question of workers gaining new tech skills, those who have lost their tech jobs, especially if they are over 40, might as well be auto workers:

“We are talking about people with very particular, advanced skills out there who are at this point just not needed anymore,” says Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business and economic research organization. “Even in this sector, there is tremendous insecurity.”

Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.

Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.

“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.

Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.

Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.

“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”

Perhaps companies are still chasing workers because they have absolutely no idea what to look for. You are not going to get a graphic designer and a guy who can bang out thousands of lines of bug-free code in a day in the same person. Network administrators usually don't have experience with technical writing. A C# programmer isn't going to be able to design your logos or write your marketing copy. However, a 49-year-old C++ programmer can get up to speed with C# in a matter of weeks simply by just starting to do the job.

But of course companies don't think like this. The hiring process tends to be run by human resources departments the staffs of which have no idea what the difference is between a programmer and a network administrator, between a web designer and software engineer. Resumes are culled out by keywords, and if yours doesn't have every keyword they're looking for, you are out of luck.

I contrast the plight of IT workers with my own situation over the last two years. Looking back, I'm astonished at how spectacularly unqualified I was at the time I was hired for the job I currently have. Oh, I had some passing familiarity with the process of the job from my previous one, but for the last three years on my previous job, most of what I did was build web sites, not the kind of medical applications for which I interviewed. I remember interviewing for this job, and answering questions with "No....no....I don't have experience with that....no, we had a guy who built that...no...no, but I did do...." I walked out of there thinking "Well, that was a waste of two hours", and two weeks later I had an offer.

As it turns out, the department was building a staff largely from scratch. Some people who couldn't handle the move to data capture systems left, others were hired, and I am after a mere two years the #3 person in seniority. The learning curve has been at times like climbing Mount Everest. I'm largely balanced between left brain and right brain, with slight right brain dominance. I gravitate towards writing and words and emotion rather than numbers and logic. Science programs on television make me glaze over, but I'll watch intently a program on how to build a kitchen cabinet. This balance allows me to do more quantitative work than a purely right-brained person would be able to do, but it does not come naturally. But I was fifty-three when I took the job, I am fifty-five now, and I've not only been able to learn almost from scratch new tools, new concepts, and also how to lead groups of people, but I've also won two employee awards for doing so. My experience makes every single argument that companies make for not hiring in the US ring completely hollow.

For better or worse, our society is organized around work, much of it around working for someone else. If we are evolving into a race to the bottom, in which the companies that used to employ us are chasing ever-cheaper, ever-more-exploitable workers, then this notion of work is going to have to change. I'm not sure what it should or will become, but simply demonizing those that corporations have left behind, or believing the claims of "We can't find qualified people", is not the answer.

Labor Day musings

I'm actually somewhat surprised that we actually still celebrate Labor Day, given it's history of having been created by unions to celebrate union workers. Yet the very same people who have been excoriating unions for the last thirty years will be out at block parties and other holiday events extolling the working man while ignoring their own histories of outsourcing jobs (Carly Fiorina) or calling those who have lost their jobs due to downsizing "spoiled" (Sharron Angle) or railing against labor unions, even though unions have next to zero clout in labor negotiations these days.

Today is the day when many people have their last barbecue, their last swim, their last outing of the white pants before the fashion police come and beat them with sticks for wearing white after Labor Day. Here in New Jersey, it's yet another beautiful day, as it's been all weekend, with the kind of bright blue skies that set off the remaining oak trees -- a color that only exists when the humidity is low and the air is clean enough of pollutants. There's a certain forced gaiety about Labor Day weekend that doesn't exist on the other summer holidays. Memorial Day's meaning gets lost in its symbolism as an unofficial kickoff to summer. Independence Day shows us relaxed and still looking forward to another month of summer. But Labor Day is a winding down, a reminder that we still have to paint the wrought iron railing in yet another vain attempt to keep the rust away, that soon the heat will cut on at night, that we can actually sleep at night without an air conditioner or a fan in the window, and find ourselves staring at the ceiling because it's just too darn quiet.

What Labor Day isn't about anymore, is about working people. Last week The Hill ran a piece about the "blitz" that business groups plan against Democratic candidates today:

Business groups plan to go on offense against vulnerable Senate Democrats in their backyards to mark Monday's Labor Day holiday.

Local groups will target Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Rep. Paul Hodes, the Democrat running for Senate in New Hampshire, and Kentucky Senate Democratic candidate Jack Conway in their states over their records on labor-related issues.

Local chapters of groups like the National Federation of Independent Business, state Associated Builders and Contractors and other commerce and retail groups will hold events on Monday targeting the incumbents and candidates, particularly on their stance on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, or "card-check").

Because nothing demonstrates the true spirit of Labor Day by big spending by greedy corporatists who are making record profits and keeping those profits in their pockets like using the terminology of war against candidates who might want to do something for those who have to work for a living.

Yesterday I read either a column or a letter to the editor -- I'm not sure which -- opining whether most of us would give up being able to dress casually for work and instead put on a suit and tie if it meant working from 9 to 5 and being home by six. Mad Men may be about people caught between a postwar world of conformity and the upheaval to come, but as usual with pop culture, the Mad Men phenomenon has been all about the style -- the clothes, the drinking, the constant cigarettes, the furniture. It's a stunningly-wrought set piece, to be sure. But lost amidst all the lamenting of the bygone days of Canadian Club and Parliaments are people like Christopher Hitchens, now dying from esophageal cancer, the primary risk factor of which is the combination of alcohol and nicotine. It's hard to argue that these days Don Draper is one iota happier because he gets to leave work at 5.

And yet, for those of us lucky enough to have jobs, but find ourselves leaving the house by 7 and getting home at 6:30 -- and that's during a slow time when we aren't working every weekend -- there's this constant feeling of having no life. We find ourselves in this never-ending cycle of feeling thankful that we still have a job even if it means we stumble home every night, eat a dinner of reheated Trader Joe's food, watch Countdown and maybe Rachel Maddow and then go to sleep to repeat the same thing tomorrow; then saying to ourselves, "Yeah, but that's what THEY want you to think!", and then looking around and seeing that we have a roof over our heads and being thankful again.

Why has it come to this? Why are employer and employee now enemies? Perhaps conformity is no longer the price we pay for being employed, but having to constantly prove our devotion to the company above all else in our life is. And yet we are the lucky ones, those of us who have jobs doing something meaningful, with supervisors who may be tough but are usually fair, with co-workers who are diverse, interesting, and intelligent people. What about those for whom the mind-numbing sameness is of getting out of bed every day with nowhere they have to go, nothing they have to do, other than scour the job boards for eight hours in the hope that something will show up for which they are completely qualified, and hoping that their resume comes over the fax first?

Is this what the two possible paths in America in the 21st century are -- having no life because you have no time or having no life because you have no job?

Sometimes I go with some colleagues to a local Fuddruckers for lunch. At the Fuddruckers, there is a woman who is clearly in her seventies. She works there. Her job is to bus tables. Every time I go there I leave a tip on the table and hope she's the one who gets it. Every time I go there seeing her simultaneously breaks my heart and frightens me to death. Because this is the future that Americans are going to vote for in November -- a future where you work into your seventies and eighties busing tables at Fuddruckers -- and that's if you're lucky.

A year ago, Alan Grayson took no end of shit from Republicans and the media for saying that the Republican answer for health care was "Don't get sick, and if you get sick, die quickly." Grayson was right, but he didn't tell the whole story. Today it's "Don't get old and don't lose your job, and if you do, die quickly."

Republicans demonize the unemployed because they think (rightly so, unfortunately) that if they can make the unemployed yet another hated "other" (like illegal immigrants or their latest favorite boogeyman, Muslims), they can distract the attention of the still-employed DOWN the economic ladder insted of realizing that the rich guys are stealing the few singles and fives they still have their wallets. Wages are flat, but more health care costs are being passed on to workers. Corporate profits are up, but hiring is down.

We live in a country where everyone was told from birth "If you work hard and play by the rules, you too can be a millionaire." If the hatefulness of their words didn't infuriate me so much, I would feel sorry for the unemployed truck driver, the out-of-work machinist, the guys bussed to the Glenn Beck rally by an organization funded by giant corporations and industrialists. These are people who believed the bullshit, the nonsense that everyone gets an even shake -- and now find themselves looking for someone to blame that it isn't true.

Today is Labor Day, and unions lie in wreckage around us. People who are out of work are getting ready to vote for the very people who would yank the very unemployment benefits that allow them to avoid homelessness. The Koch brothers aren't demonized by these people, but those with even less are. The reality that George Carlin spoke bitterly about in 2005 has come to fruition, making me think he died just so he wouldn't have to see multimillion dollar media "personalities" like Glenn Beck be greeted as practically the reincarnation of Christ by these people.

Labor Day always has a certain melancholy to it. This year it seems more melancholy than most.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: I Go Away For A Few Days And The Entire Country Freaks Out Edition

It's hard getting old when you're the kind of person who always felt you were put here by mistake; that somewhere out there is a world where people don't look at you strangely for using words of more than two syllables; where irony is worshipped the way piety is here, and where an aging iconoclast can go without feeling that vacation spots have passed you by.

After 20 Caribbean trips, 19 of them to Jamaica, which until a few years ago felt like the one place in the world and time in the year where the soul could heal properly in order to get through another 51 weeks of life in These United States, the relentless ritual of sunscreen, bug spray, and moisturizer has seemed less appealing than it used to. It's true that improvements in the Jamaican tourism infrastructure have meant an end to the days when the rickety car the hotel would put you in to take you to back the airport no longer ends up either pulled into a gas station with smoke coming out of the hood and the driver and station attendant both looking under the hood and shaking their heads (actual experience), or the days when the driver would stop and pick up people in need of a ride to Montego Bay, one of whom would expire on the way to the airport right there in his seat (also an actual experience). But for all that now the transport buses are air-conditioned and work properly, and everyone has a cell phone, a certain unspoiled aspect of the place is gone. Gone are the delicious six-dollar dinners of grilled snapper, rice and peas, and steamed cabbage cooked in a hut where God only knows what sanitation practices are used, eaten on paper plates at a picnic table on the beach, and topped off with a piece of banana cake made by the proprietor's mother. Gone are the long stretches of beach in Negril where you could walk without hearing bad reggae covers of worse American pop songs. Gone are the days when the sound of tree frogs isn't punctuated by the thump-thump-thump of disco music. So after three years without taking a vacation, Mr. Brilliant and I wanted to do SOMETHING this year, but Jamaica just didn't appeal as much as it used to.

So we decided to join all the other middle-aged people and take a cruise -- and head in the opposite direction.

So we sailed to Canada on the Carnival Glory. Yes, I know, Kathie Lee Gifford and all that...and yes, there was that thing of the "fun ship" when we are not just old fogies, but cynical old fogies at that. But we got a great price on a room with a balcony, and given that much of our Jamaica time is spent sitting on a hotel balcony staring at the water and drinking coffee, it seemed like it might just work. Add in the convenience of less than an hour to New York City and you're on vacation, and that sealed the deal.

St. John and Halifax in Canada are lovely small cities that are about five years and an economic recovery away from being really viable cruise ports. You're only in port for about six hours, which leaves you enough time for one excursion at most in each port and some shopping. We planned on continuing our lifelong quest for the most tasteless souvenir ashtrays we could find, except that with fewer people smoking, the truly tasteless ashtray in the shape of a foot with "I got a kick out of Halifax" printed on it seems to be a thing of the past. There's a long and boring story behind all this, but suffice it to say that this development has meant an expansion into just tasteless ashtrays and tasteless souvenirs in general. This expansion's greatest find has been a cheap ceramic ashtray in the shape of a foot with "Jamaica" written across the toes, and a handle that's a hand giving the finger. But that was a long time ago, and my trek through Cologne, Germany last year revealed nothing more than those ridiculous cuckoo clocks, which are too big and too expensive to be in the true spirit of the cheap and tasteless souvenir. Tourist tastelessness, the Carnival activities notwithstanding, just isn't what it used to be. The closest thing we found was something you can buy in St. John called "Moose Poop", which is basically chocolate with anything they could find in it -- jellybeans, pretzels, crisp rice, marshmallows. But fun tastelessness for me stops with anything called "poop", and Sarah Palin has ruined anything having to do with moose forever. Oh yes, there was the jiggling plastic lobster that sang "Sea Cruise", but that didn't quite cut it. Now if it had a recording of the B-52's "Rock Lobster", then we might have had something. But alas, 'twas not to be.

Anyway, we went on a whale watch boat in Halifax, where we saw some dolphins (which we also saw from our balcony) and a harbor seal sticking up his head to pose for photos, but no whales. This caused a minor fit of pique in one guest, who later showed up in the promos for the souvenir video you can buy on ship of a bunch of ugly drunk people playing "Bounce your Boobies" in some kind of Lido deck game. Said guest professed to be pissed off because of his kids' disappointment, but he confided in Mr. Brilliant that he would have been satisfied with a free drink.

Halifax is also one of those towns that seems to be a haven for young hippie re-enactors and old burnouts who used to be the real thing. Halifax is rumored to be the Amsterdam of Canada, and with little to do other than some beachfront seafood joints, souvenir stands all of which sell the same one-of-a-kind hand-carved wooden birds that you can get at the craft market in Ocho Rios on the southern cruise route, it's no wonder that it's full of guys in their late fifties with a few teeth missing muttering as you pass by in search of overpriced lobster lunches about where you can find the best headshop in the city. If you can find a taxi, you can take one to the top of a steep hill and browse around the rest of the city -- something we didn't even think about until we got to St. John, because we were exhausted after the whale non-watch. But the coastline was pretty, and we had beautiful weather, and after a return to the ship, copious quantities of Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion rubbed into our aching feet (rather than going for the $150 spa pedicure) and a nap, we were as good as new and ready for a glorious melting Canadian sunset viewed from the Serenity deck, the 12th-level deck on the Glory which despite its location right by Camp Carnival, is a very pleasant adults-only area that miraculously is out of earshot of the relentless concert films that are shown all day on the big pool deck movie screen.

They must buy a package of concert films and not pre-screen all of them, for tucked away in the middle of Celine Dion shrieking something or another (and WHY oh WHY, twelve years after That Boat Movie, are cruise ships STILL playing this woman singing the a song about a ship that sinks?), Mike Love singing Be True To Your School, and the Jonas Brothers (who really aren't bad), Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue sneaked in on Night 2, when the fog was rolling in and no one was watching except Mr. B and myself, who had already seen it years ago at Lincoln Center. It was almost as fun watching the "What the fuck is this?" reaction from the few people who decided to check out the night's movie as it was watching the actual movie, especially for someone like me, for whom Miles' Davis electric period makes me want to stick an icepick in my own forehead. Call me Stanley Crouch, but I just don't get it.

Anyway, we continued on to St. John, sucking down $2.95 mochaccinos at the coffee bar, which was the closest we ever got to the 1,487 bars that seem to be on board this ship. One of the less-charming things about Carnival, and it may be true of all cruises, is the relentless haranguing you get to spend money from the minute you get on the ship. The worst job on ship, aside from the poor soul who has to play (yes, really) "Funship Freddy", who has to wear the line's signature "Whale Tail" as a head, which makes him look as if Mr. Met had split his own head open with an axe after having to listen to Celine Dion on the Lido deck all afternoon, has to be the poor souls who carry trays laden with $12.50 drinks in souvenir glasses around all afternoon. There are gift shops full of tchotchkes and jewelry the value of which is open to question, a bar around every corner, a casino full of grim-faced people trying to pay for their vacations with the deck literally stacked against them, spa treatments, paid fitness classes, the aforementioned video, and on and on. But after a few days, you start tuning it out, and a few extra tips handed to the barista at the Creams coffee bar makes you a new friend.

I'm not trying to rag on Carnival, which really does put out a very good product, nor am I saying we didn't have a good time, because we did -- once we got a bit accustomed to the whole cruise ship thing. This did not extend to embracing the extremely lameass entertainment, however. After the first night, when we decided to just hit the buffet for dinner and found the menu there to be EXACTLY THE SAME as what was being dished up in the dining room, except that it was quiet and you could sample small pieces of both the tilapia AND the chicken without ordering two entrees and feeling like a pig, we decided to bag the main dining room for the rest of the trip. I mean, here we had perfectly acceptable food, in a quiet room without waiters doing a song and dance, with panoramic ocean views which the main dining rooms did NOT seem to have. But no matter how uncool we realize that we are, we draw the line at bingo and hairy chest contests and Vegas-style floor shows. To Carnival's credit, they did have some interesting things that we just didn't get around to, like a presentation on Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture, and I give them TONS of credit for coming right out (so to speak) in their daily activities newsletter and noting that "Friends of Dorothy GLBT" meets at 11:30 PM in the Colors bar on Deck 3. And if you are a person for whom 1,487 bars is like navigating a minefield, there is a "Friends of Bill W" meeting every day as well.

We had decided to just wing it in St. John, rather than take one of the excursions, all of which seemed to involve an hour and a half on a bus. We had planned to take the 3.5-kilometer walk to the Reversing Falls, but the walkway was closed about halfway there, and as it turned out, nothing was reversing at that time anyway. So instead we walked around St. John, in which there is a fabulous little city screaming to get out. There is TONS of original late-19th century architecture that practically BREATHES the 1870's, and there's great local seafood. We splurged on a ridiculously expensive lunch so that Mr. B. could have a lobster and I could have some fantastic clam chowder and bacon-wrapped scallops -- then walked around the city. This is a port that needs to either become like New Hope, PA -- with lots of galleries and funky shops; or else become Williamsburg, VA -- and embrace the history that's demonstrated by the architecture. It looks as if such a process had started, but the recession stopped it dead in its tracks.

The Glory is pretty in that ongepotchket cruise ship kind of way, and the most impressive thing is just how well run this whole operation is. I mean, this staff of about a thousand people has to take in nearly 3,000 people; digest all the ready cash (or credit) out of them over a course of 4-7 days (depending on the cruise), spit them out at the end, and take in another nearly 3,000 people. And they do it without a hitch. You give your luggage to a guy in a yellow vest at the dropoff point, and by 8:00 it's outside your room. You have ice in your ice bucket, towel animals, nonstop lemonade, iced tea, coffee, and soft-serve ice cream any time you want it, good quality bed linens, decent food, and the behemoth that takes you out to sea is immaculate every minute of the day. And when it's over, you put your luggage out the night before, you get out of your room around 8 AM, have breakfast, wait for your debarkation number to be called, and in 10 minutes you have your luggage, you've had your customs card collected, and you are out of the terminal. Compared to the nightmare that is today's airports, it's enough to make you start listening to the Jonas Brothers all the time if it only means you can have as easy a "getting there and back" time. Carnival is clearly designed more for families (though I cannot IMAGINE spending a week in one of those inside cabins with a spouse AND two kids), and outside of the Nation cruise or Jam cruise, I'm not sure there's any cruise that really "fits" the likes of Mr. B and me. But we had a good time, the ship is lovely, and Carnival really runs a top-notch product for the price.

I was able to keep up online a bit, thanks to spending 48 bucks on discounted internet time. But at sea, the only news you get is for some reason from Denver, where the traffic reporters at the local CBS and NBC affiliates are named -- I shit you not -- Amelia Earhart and Jennifer Zeppelin; CNN, and HLN. I remember when HLN was Headline News, it was owned by CNN, and it had the fabulous kickass martial arts chick Lynne Russell reading the news. Now it's like Entertainment Tonight, only with less gravitas and newsbots that make Megyn Kelly look like, well, Lynne Russell. CNN is no better, with Rick Sanchez spending an entire show shaking his head because Dr. Laura Schlessinger is -- surprise! -- a racist. Now I know why Americans are misinformed -- it's because the ones who aren't watching Fox News are watching CNN.

So...I'm wondering just a little bit, if Steve Slater would have gone from folk hero to villain in just three days if he were straight. Because it sure seemed that the coverage changed the minute we heard the word "partner." Sorry, but I'm with The New York Crank on this one. And Slater gets extra style points for grabbing a beer on the way down.

I really wish Obama had stayed out of the Cordoba Center fracas. How can he actually still believe that he can somehow re-meld the parted waters of American political discourse? Mike Bloomberg already made the most eloquent comment possible. He should have left it alone. Maha is right, of course, but still -- why expend what little political capital he has on this when someone else has already done it?

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

Last week I had a letter published in our local paper in response to a letter whose writer opined that African slaves who were brought here were "civilized" by a "superior civilization". The assumption is that whoever has the biggest guns is somehow a superior "civilization". When I got back today, I found an envelope with no return address (they never do unless they are telling me I am wonderful and they read me all the time -- which is what I usually get), opened it VERY CAREFULLY (you never know these days), and found a racist screed with the usual claptrap about how Italians and Irish came here and obeyed the law (excuse me, asshole, but where do you think the expression "Paddy Wagon" came from?) but blacks are all in prison. Badtux grew up in the south and heard this sort of crap on a regular basis -- and notes that it's also now being used against Muslims. I say we start saying things like this about hypocritical faux-Christian assholes who want less government except when it comes to womens' reproductive systems.

Lisa Wines doesn't post nearly often enough. Come on, girl, being over 50 is no excuse. This is a few weeks old, but this month she takes on the advertising slogan for Wendy's.

To Elayne: Is this why people hate the Mets too? (explanation) On a related note, 10 bucks says Gary Cohen talked about a no-no.


While I was on vacation I read a book about Henry VIII's "other" children -- those born to his many mistresses. If you're going to be a Tudor geek, you have to plow through this stuff. The thing that strikes one, looking at all those English family trees, is how inbred they are, and how weak subsequent generations are. We already saw the watering down of the gene pool with the Bush family. Now the spawn of Potatoehead joins the slope-forehead brigade.

Mr. B. and I just came back from a cruise and our pants are LOOSER. This is not supposed to happen. Of course, if you eat your three squares a day, focus on the meat, fish, and vegetables, eat a big salad and stay away from the 24-hour pizza and soft-serve ice cream, you can do that. I still really, really need to try and do something with a little of this excess avoirdupois. I know I'll never be a size 6 again; I was only a size 6 when I was eating nothing and crying all the time. I'm not sure even a 12 is in the forecast. How about a 14? Then I look at the crazy society we live in and want to say, "Ah, the hell with it."

What would a week away be without a nice hot steamin' cuppa CrayZee? Even in a world that has Sharron Angle in it, Louie Gohmert is the gift that keeps on giving. Batocchio on "terror babies."

And finally....Please tell me this is parody.

Special thanks to jurassicpork for picking up the slack while I was away, and to Melina for comment moderation.. Now would someone please tell me how long it takes after a cruise for the ground to stop feeling like it's moving?

And one final observation: I've been on the Circle Line and I've done the Spirit cruises around Manhattan. But nothing prepares you for how profoundly moving it is to stand on the deck of a huge ship after it's gone under the Verrazano-Narrows bridge and approaches the Statue of Liberty on a beautiful, mild, low-humidity morning in August. There she stands, torch gleaming, at the gateway to America, as if to say, "Come on in...you're welcome here and everything will be OK." If your grandparents came here that way in the early part of the 20th century, as mine did, you should do this once in your life. Put yourself in their place -- young, probably scared, but with their whole lives ahead of them and the memory of pogroms or other forms of persecution behind them -- and this beautiful lady beckons them in. You'll never look at immigration in the same way again.

How the hell did this happen????

Today is my 55th birthday.

55

Fifty-fucking five.

That's the age when state governments let you retire. (Too bad I haven't spent my life working for the state.)

It's also another of those "five" birthdays that lets you know that you are closer to the next decade milepost than you are to the previous. It's one thing to say that 50 is the new 30. (It isn't.) It's quite another to try to get away with saying that sixty makes you still a kid. (You aren't.)

I've never been one to lie about my age. I don't care how much plastic surgery you have, or how much botox you have, none of it is going to make you one iota younger. Sooner or later, you are going to make a reference to the Beatles appearing for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show and you're going to give yourself away. When I was laid off in 2008, I put my year of college graduation back on my resume. The way I figured it, I was going to be depressed enough about job-hunting; why create a situation where I'd get all dressed up and hopeful about going to an interview and then the minute the 25-year-old interviewer got a look at me and his/her face fell, knowing that I had zero chance at the job and had to go through the interview anyway. If a company was going to rule me out because of my age, I wanted to know up-front, before I waste my time. (P.S. I got a job anyway.)

For the last fifteen years, I've kind of reveled in being middle-aged. When I hit 40, I realized that I was finally comfortable in my own skin. It was as if I'd been forty since I was twelve, and my chronological age had finally caught up with my mental one. The forties are great. You still look relatively good, you feel good, and you can still delude yourself that you have some youth left. At fifty-five, you can't.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. For those of us who were never "hot babes", losing our looks is less painful than it is for some others. Most of us have had to develop a sense of humor, or a musical talent, or a nurturing nature, because our packaging wasn't going to serve us to draw others to us. The invisibility of being an aging woman isn't all bad. I used to feel unable to go out without full makeup, or be unwilling to be seen in a Pathmark alone on a Saturday night. How silly is that? Aging gives us the freedom to Just Not Give a Shit. Except that we often still do. We do because we're still human. We do because if we allow it to, experience gives us wisdom. And there are worse things to be than the cool old lady that younger people go to for advice, or to just talk to. Society may wish us to just go away, but that doesn't mean we have to.

And so I am not depressed today. It is sometimes disconcerting to realize that "It's all downhill from here" -- and not in a good way. There are real worries about getting older in our society today, not the least of which is the financial one. In true "Nixon goes to China" fashion, our Democratic President seems bound and determined, as Sam Seder notes in his latest podcast, to prepare for his post-presidency Wall Street job by sucking up to those who would eliminate Social Security. Participation in a 401(k) is one thing, but you're trusting your money to the same people who brought down the economy in the first place. There are health care issues. People in my family have a habit of living into our nineties. That doesn't mean we never need health care. Being old in our society is not something to look forward to, but it's better than the alternative -- or so we can hope.

But today I have made it in this God-forsaken level of reality for fifty-five years. I'll take that deal.

It can be hard to step outside your own baggage, but sometimes it's necessary

When you grow up in a family where you're not "the pretty one", and you learn early on that "pretty" is more valuable currency than "smart" or "funny", especially when "pretty" is also "musically talented" and "just as smart as you are", it can be hard to step outside that particular little dance.

I was estranged from my sister for many, many years. I don't even know why anymore, except that I knew she was "the pretty one", and through the filter of my own short, constantly weight-challenged misery, things always seemed to be so easy for her. Of course like most filters, it distorted the truth, and in many ways she was more unhappy than I was. But in the currency which so often matters to the exclusion of all else -- the realm of male attention -- it was easy for her.

In the last ten years we've often had opportunities to talk this out, and it will pain me to my grave that she spent all those years with hurt feelings that she always felt (sometimes rightly) that I hated her and she never knew why. I hope she reads this and knows how much I regret those lost years.

One of the things about aging, provided you aren't obsessed about beating a clock that can't be beat, is that it's the great equalizer. No matter how much Botox or plastic surgery you have, you are going to get old. If you have too much of it, you end up like Joan Rivers, who looks neither young nor old, but just masque-like. At some point we have to become comfortable in our own skins.

But when you're young, if every time you WALK PAST a bakery, even without going in, y ou gain five pounds, "pretty girls" just piss you off. And the problem with this is that the way extremely attractive women are treated is, in its own way, just as bad as the way we "funny ones" are treated.

Take the case of Debrahlee Lorenzana, who is filing suit against Citibank, alleging that she was fired for being "too attractive." The fourteen-year-old that still lives in my head sometimes wants to think "I wish I had such problems," until I remember that the fact that I am under five feet tall and more often in my life overweight than not has never prevented me from getting jobs, and that I have only been harassed in anything approaching this way once in my life (and it was the catalyst that got me out of the hell of retail department management).

But while invisibility may not seem like a blessing when you're young, reading about Debbie Lorenzana makes me think it wasn't so bad after all:

This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn't concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: "They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention," she says.

As Lorenzana's lawsuit puts it, her bosses told her that "as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly 'too distracting' for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear."

"Men are kind of drawn to her," says Tanisha Ritter, a friend and former colleague who also works as a banker and praises Lorenzana's work habits. "I've seen men turn into complete idiots around her. But it's not her fault that they act this way, and it shouldn't be her problem."

Because Citibank made Lorenzana sign a mandatory-arbitration clause as a condition of her employment, the case will never end up before a jury or judge. An arbitrator will decide. Citibank officials won't comment on the suit.

Her attorney, Jack Tuckner, who calls himself a "sex-positive" women's-rights lawyer, is the first one to say his client is a babe. But so what? For him, it all boils down to self-control. "It's like saying," Tuckner argues, "that we can't think anymore 'cause our penises are standing up—and we cannot think about you except in a sexual manner—and we can't look at you without wanting to have sexual intercourse with you. And it's up to you, gorgeous woman, to lessen your appeal so that we can focus!"

This isn't your typical sexual-harassment lawsuit, if there is such a thing. For one thing, such suits often claim that women are coerced into looking more sexy or are subjected to being pawed. Lorenzana claims that her bosses basically told her she was just too attractive. And when she raised hell and refused to do anything about it—as if there was anything she really could do about it—she lost her job.

[snip]

Citibank does have a dress-code policy, which says clothing must not be provocative, but does not go into specifics, and managers have wide discretion. But Lorenzana points out that, unlike her, some of the tellers dressed in miniskirts and low-cut blouses. "And when they bend down," Lorenzana says, "anyone can see what God gave them!"

Then the managers gave her a list of clothing items she would not be allowed to wear: turtlenecks, pencil skirts, and fitted suits. And three-inch heels. "As a result of her tall stature, coupled with her curvaceous figure," her suit says, Lorenzana was told "she should not wear classic high-heeled business shoes, as this purportedly drew attention to her body in a manner that was upsetting to her easily distracted male managers."

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," Lorenzana recalls. "I said, 'You gotta be kidding me!' I was like, 'Too distracting? For who? For you? My clients don't seem to have any problem.' "

The managers instructed her to wear looser clothing. Lorenzana refused. "I don't have the money to buy a new wardrobe," she says, referring to her work outfits. "I shop where everyone else shops—at Zara!" Lorenzana recalls leaving the meeting feeling humiliated. Other female employees "were able to wear such clothing because they were short, overweight, and they didn't draw much attention," she later wrote in a letter describing the meeting to Human Resources, "but since I was five-foot-six, 125 pounds, with a figure, it wasn't 'appropriate.' " She was also furious. "Are you saying that just because I look this way genetically, that this should be a curse for me?"

Based on this article, which is admittedly Lorenzana's side only, it does seem that because men at Citibank are creatures so primitive that they can't get their brains out of their dicks for even eight hours a day while at work, someone who does a perfectly good job was unable to keep it. This is something I have never had to deal with, and after reading this article, I feel fortunate that I haven't.

Yes, I've had to deal with more-attractive women getting better projects and being favored by the boss. I've also seen more-attractive women in the same place being treated less well than I was. I work with a woman, now in her mid-thirties, whom I've known for ten years. We worked together in a previous job. When she started at our current place of employment, it was as if Angelina Jolie had joined the company. And watching men talk to her, they look ridiculous much of the time. But she frets constantly about her looks, and the fretting becomes more intense as she gets older. I'm kind of glad I never had to go through that.

Our culture's obsession with how women look is about more than primitive biology worming its way into the culture. As long as thin women are encouraged to feel superior to fat ones, or older women feel threatened by younger ones, or attractive women feel threatened by men who can't keep their brains in their craniums where they belong, women will remain at war with each other. And with us being 52% of the population, it behooves the existing power structure to keep us that way. Because if we ever realized that the issues we face are often two sides of the same coin, there'd be no stopping us.