Happy Hanukkah, sort of

Happy Hanukkah – sort of

December 2nd, 2013 by Alan

“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.”
Voltaire
“Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness.”
Christopher Hitchens
“Hanukkah is…the Feast of Lights.
Instead of one day, we got
Elight CRAZY nights!”
Adam Sandler
Hanukkah, which this year began incredibly early, on Thanksgiving, is one of those holidays that serious humanists could just as easily do without. But because of our Christian friends, it has perhaps a hundred times the importance it deserves. It is the ultimate “coattail” holiday. It thus merits brief consideration here.
Hanukkah actually got a boost from the Christians, first because it happens to be a winter festival of lights. Jewish kids needed something to celebrate in the lands of the diaspora in which Christianity predominates – otherwise, as I can attest from personal experience, Christmas feels like a gigantic party that you are not a part of. South Park’s Kyle spoke eloquently for many of us when he sang of how tough it is to be a Jew at Christmas. But Adam Sandler redeemed our respect with his Hanukkah Song (”don’t smoke marijuanica”), in three versions, yet. Indeed, Adam Sandler is our Hanukkah miracle!
The second boost came when the gift of gelt – i.e., cash, a tradition which still persists – morphed into actual gifts, again in imitation of the Christians. Now Jewish kids could get gifts on eight nights!
Return of the Taliban
Sigh. Hanukkah celebrates, in part, the rededication of the temple in the second century CE by a bunch of Jewish Taliban. It was the restoration of the old-time religion. Once again, the relatively primitive, tribal Jews were in (temporarily victorious) conflict with a secular, rational, cosmopolitan culture, this time the Greeks. (We were the hillbillies of the ancient world, but we caught up quickly once the Enlightenment opened up secular opportunities.)
The eight-night thing comes from a generally Jewish tradition of weeklong seasonal celebrations. The political triumph, then, was grafted upon the already existing Winter Lights Festival, and traditions were added along the way – the dreidel, the eight-night miracle, and many others.
Hanukkah’s OK
Hanukkah is OK, insamuch as I see nothing wrong with celebrating light in midwinter, as long as it is metaphorically taken as manifest in the humanistic virtues. Thus, we can rededicate ourselves to being better human beings and to improving the world (the traditional Jewish ideal of tikkun olam). This includes advancing the cause of reason, opposing the many offenses and excesses (and the tax-free status) of religion. As we near the darkest point of the year, let us resolve that the darkness of religious ignorance go no further, that it begin to yield to the light, starting with this very day.
You might dedicate each of the eight candles to one of the humanistic virtues: love, courage, compassion, tolerance, reason, dignity, generosity, charity, and whatever personal quality one is working on that year.
Happy Hanukkah to one and all. Time is passing way too fast.
____________________

Down Memory Lane in the Land of VelveetaTM and TangTM

“Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?”

Edward Thurlow, 1731-1806

Lord Chancellor of England
Wilberforce, Life of Thurlow

 

Over the years my brother has sent me many provocative articles, but for pure nostalgia, nothing beats “Salt + Fat² Divided by Satisfying Crunch x Pleasing Mouth Feel = A Food Designed to Addict: How the processed food industry creates and keeps selling the crave,” a New York Times Magazine article adapted from Michael Moss’ forthcoming book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.”

As he knows, I spent 11 years with Kraft, much of it – as he may not know – under the boot heel of the Kraft VP whose speech is highlighted at the beginning of the article: Michael Mudd -- tyrant, toady (everybody above him on the org chart was his master; below him, a slave), bully, micromanager, liar, diversity-monger (sort of; his diversity hires kept quitting), consummate corporate politician (he rose to Operating Committee – The Highest of the High Heights), speechwriter wannabe, and master bullshitter. 

Name is Mudd.

No one is more deserving of the saying “his name is Mudd.”  He is the David Dirt I have repeatedly cited in my blog posts as the classic example of the Bad Boss (Mudd ~Dirt, get it?) who got away with it because he knew how to make his numbers and manage upper management. And he was a master bullshitter, an almost sociopathic charmer who kissed executive ass and did snarky, disgusting impersonations of people behind their backs.  I can only wonder what this schmuck did to me.

Early on, we clashed, and I realized what a control freak he was.  He had a PR message ready before we’d even talked to the exec.  Holy shit, what are you, his subconscious?  At least give the guy a chance to tell us what he thinks the company should say.  Pissed Michael off that I didn’t accept this dictation quietly.  Good. Fuck you, thought I.

Classic Bad Boss

Michael was, as noted, the leadoff speaker at a gathering of food industry chieftains, described in the early paragraphs of the article.  It took place in 1999, when I still worked for Michael, and the is the first I’ve heard of it, 14 years later. 

Not surprising.  In contrast to his ingratiating, oleaginous public charm, Michael was a Bad Boss in every possible way.

His favorite tools with me were secrecy, ostracism, and assignment-grabbing, even before I was placed within his reporting structure.  He could have included me in a lot more of what was going on, but he chose not to.  He gave others, usually women, assignments that should have gone to me. 

Job-grabbing

He tried to do my job for me.  I wasn’t the only one: a male colleague, qualified enough to be the PR VP of Unisys after he left Kraft, was reduced by Michael’s assignment-stealing to sitting at his desk and writing a column for his Porsche newsletter – what a waste. 

I guess it was Michael’s way of showing that everyone but him was dispensable.  When I resisted his assignment-grabbing, he bawled me out for insubordination.  I wore that like a badge of courage. 

I suppose he felt threatened by other men. Only one alpha male per herd, as he demonstrated by keeping the department 80-90% female the whole decade of the 90s and beyond.  His diversity numbers looked great.  As a female mid-exec once remarked by way of explanation, “Michael likes babes.” He married one of his employees.  Couldn’t keep his hands off the merchandise.

What Corporate America rewards

Michael tyrannized people of both genders and four ethnicities.  Several men worked there and left during his tenure.  All – including the Asian guy who was back at his old job in two weeks – attributed their departure to Michel’s dictatorial management style.

This is what gets rewarded in Corporate America.  Michael Mudd is by far the rule, not the exception.  Repeat: the rise and durability of Michael Mudd is due to his ability to dish out the public BS and schmooze his fellow execs, regardless of how he treats his employees. 

Michael is emblematic of everything that is rotten about American management, most especially the dictatorial boss-ocracy, the command-and-control hierarchy that ruins so many employees’ lives (the bookshelves groan with books on how to manage a psychotic boss, or the like) and, often enough, the company’s performance.

Timing the BS

Oh, yes, almost forgot: his uncanny ability to strike the right note a moment before it’s too late.  The article devotes several paragraphs to his speech.  It makes awed reference to his intricate presentation with its 114 slides and his “unthinkable” linking of the food industry’s fortunes with those of the tobacco industry. 

He compared present times with those precipitous days in the early 90s, when the cigarette manufacturers knew it was all going bad, at least in the US, very quickly.  Michael obviously  -- and understandably -- didn’t want to see food industry execs paraded before a Congressional committee and harshly criticized for the harm their products were doing.

Mudd acknowledged – what a news flash! – that what happened to tobacco  was starting to happen in the food industry.  That’s right folks, as late as 1999, the food industry was getting concerned that its salty, fatty, crunchy, artificial-color-and-flavor-saturated products were contributing to the nation’s obesity. 

A little late

This is, perhaps, a half century or more since the widesperead use of processed foods. 

It’s been decades since it was observed that in Western societies, rich people, for the first time in history, are thin and the poor are fat.  Numerous studies document that immigration to America and adoption of the local diet frequently lead to health problems in the next generation, if not sooner.  And how many years has Kelly Brownell regarded the processed food industry as a public health menace?  And in public dining, how many years has the Center for Science in the Public Interest been hollering about “heart attacks on a plate”?

And in 1999, the food industry was just getting the message.

Mudd directed an equal mea culpa towards advertising.  He recognizes – another “Duh!” moment – that kids are malleable and that what food companies put in the ads is just as important as what they put into their food.  Huzzah! 

Reminds me of when the industry adopted standards for children’s advertising in general – right about the time people were starting to draw a bead on it for manipulating small minds into buying their crap. 

He used to defend it.

This is the same hypocrite who, several years before, defended food advertising with the lame argument that by the age of 6, kids had already had enough exposure to the world to enable them to critically view the ads.  Michael, what a load of shit.

And now you’re blowing it out again.  How many time have I heard “we gotta be part of the solution” because we definitely are part of the problem? Sounds so good.  It’s the corporate PR knee-jerk reaction.  First say it, then figure out what it means.

Do you think just saying it makes it so?  No, of course not, you have to pretend to DO something.  So in your 1999 speech, you proposed, first, finding out what drives people to overconsume your products, “to gain a deeper understanding of why people overeat.”

Holy shit, Michael, they overeat because you design your products to make them overeat!  This is a classic example of appearing to do something while doing nothing, of spinning wheels while figuring out the obvious.  It's a classic government cop-out: form a committee, study the problem.

Mudd also suggested pulling back on the salt, sugar and fat in food products, but that apparently went nowhere (or at least the article contains no update, 14 years later), because Steve Sanger, the next speaker and head of General Mills, said the industry wasn’t going to budge on taste, which means crunchy, salty, and fat.  He’s right – compromise on taste, and you lose market share.

“Real food -- not our products”

Michael, there’s a reason why years ago, a Kraft CEO, planning a management conference with you and me in his lavish office, said he wanted plenty of food there – “and real food – not our products.”  Surely you remember that moment.

The name Geoff Bible also brings back memories.  President of Kraft when I was hired, he was a tough, wiry Aussie, an unapologetic smoker who said he’d match his health against that of any man his age.  A big-hearted guy who drove many corporate philanthropy projects, a twinkle in his eye, with many years of war stories about building Philip Morris’ international tobacco business when most countries had government monopolies. 

A wonderful client to write speeches for.  Very big on personal liberty and responsibility.

The other item that I can relate to is Lunchables^TM. 

It almost died before it reached the market. Top Kraft and Philip Morris execs thought it would be a dud. 

But the technical and marketing genius behind the whole thing, Bob Drane, persisted, and Lunchables^TM , satisfying CareerMom and her guilty need to have something good to give her kids for lunch…as well as her kids, who love to open little gift-like boxes and play with their food – and well, one thing followed another, drinks and desserts got in there, and Lunchables^TM became a billion-dollar-a-year business.

Complaints about the nutritional value of the boxes has been ongoing, and the company has made a few tweaks to make the products less of a public health menace.  But consumers like Lunchables^TM just fine, because it responds to the needs mentioned above, nutrition be damned..

Speechwriter wannabe

I called Michael a speechwriter wannabe.  You see, I was a real speechwriter: the speaker’s message in the speaker’s language, and where that was lacking, I supplied and supplemented it, seamlessly.  One CEO’s wife told him, “I can’t believe you didn’t write that!”  The highest compliment – perfect authenticity, perfect anonymity.

But Michael didn’t know how to be that kind of speechwriter.  His narcissistic ego wouldn’t allow it.  He simply made the exec a ventriloquist’s dummy and gave him a script.  He was good at that, but I don’t know how often the execs actually delivered his scripts.   I guess it qualifies for “Most Money Made With an English B.A.”

But as a speechwriter, Michael was less Winston Churchill, more Paul Josef Goebbels.  You didn’t know what he’d sneaked by you until he’d sneaked it by. 

Sneaking by

That’s what happened again at the High Conclave of Food Execs.  He made them think that they could do business as usual, cutting harmful, addictive ingredients just enough to make health claims but not enough to affect revenues.  It’s a fine line.  But then Sanger came along and said they don’t even have to do that.

This is the food industry’s perpetual conundrum: to produce food-like products, convince people they’re good to eat, get them hooked on salt/fat/sugar AND STILL convince the media and public that the industry is concerned about nutrition and obesity. 

There’s no question that the grocery industry has been one of the major transformative changes in modern life. 

Food preparation used to take an incredible amount of time.  Humble Jell-O, for instance, was once an upper-class dish; your servants had to start with sheets of gelatin, which they would melt before adding flavor.  Very labor-intensive.

Turning the other way

In exchange for letting others do 99% of the procurement of our food, we prefer to ignore what it takes for them to do that – all the stabilizers, colors, emulsifiers, flavors, and preservatives that enable food to be cooked, packaged, transported long distances, and kept on a grocery shelf.  The science and technology are invisible but impressive.  Even the packages have to be minor engineering marvels.

We also ignore, at our peril, the fact that we have entrusted our nutritional needs not to publicly-owned cooperatives or nonprofit companies, but to profit-making corporations.  They are BUSINESSES and as such must generate growth and rising stock process. 

Why food companies exist

That happens only if people buy more of their products, which is why food companies push snacking as a fourth (or fifth) meal, why they use the phrase ”mindless munching” (internally only, of course) as a desired state.

Again: they are not there to feed or even amuse you (as it might seem, with the KoolAid^TM  Man all the different macaroni shapes). They are there to make you eat more.  Or in the case of Coke, surely one of the vilest things you can put in your body, to drink more.

That’s just how it is.  Slick pricks like Michael Mudd help sell it by sounding all caring and earnest and touchy-feely about being part of the solution.  Consider Michael a performance artist.  He once spoke – a brief aside, but I caught it – of the importance of faking sincerity, of coming out with exactly the right bullshit at the right moment.

Truly the words of a master.

On “Modern Psychology’s God-problem”

“The Biblical account of Noah’s Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend.  Where, for example, while loading his Ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine/”

Judith Hayes

 “We have fools in all sects and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because [they were] written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals?”

Lord Byron

 The eminent and brilliant (though fiendish and fictional) psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, MD, had no respect for psychology.  He simply did not believe it was a science.  Cutting Ray Liotta’s skull open, lifting off the top,  and sauteeing parts of his brains while talking to him (in the movie “Hannibal”) – now, THAT’S science.

Science – and therapy

 But psychology can be science – when it concerns itself with the description of behavior or the measurement of cognitive capabilities. 

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, is not science.  It’s hard to say what it is.  All too often therapy, supposedly curing by talk, is a bitch session; the therapist is a paid listener, because no one in the client’s world will listen to his/her complaints.

 Classical psychoanalysis can go on forever.  Back in Detroit, I knew a psychiatrist who for years spent tens of thousands of dollars annually on three- and four-times-a-week therapy sessions with another psychiatrist.  Apparently he found himself endlessly interesting, because the analyst is supposed to say nothing.

 Goals of therapy?

Insurance companies eventually caught on to this racket and started holding therapists responsible for goals and outcomes.  Usually this means helping the client to better cope with his/her situation (because it’s typically unchangeable), perhaps helping the less sophisticated clients understand their problems, or enabling the client to deal more constructively with difficult people. 

 So far, so good.  But what happens when the client’s belief system enters the picture?  In “Modern psychology’s God problem,” Boston Globe, 10/16/11, Gareth Cook states the problem in the following words (and by “psychology,” he means “psychotherapy,” according to the above distinction):

“Modern psychology has a serious God problem.  America is a deeply spiritual country.  More than half of American say religion is ‘very important’ to them, and more than 90 percent profess a belief in a higher power.  Yet psychology, as a scientific endeavor, has done almost nothing to understand how spiritual beliefs shape psychological problems or affect treatment.”

Let’s all get spiritual

Let’s first stipulate that “spiritual” (i) is taken to be a good thing (note the praising adjective deeply, as opposed to, say, rabidly or fanatically); (ii) can mean ANY interest in imaginary supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sufi, Hawaiian, Native American (to New Agers, the last three, and all native cultures, are VERY spiritual). 

So spirituality is a very big tent: all you have to do is invest yourself heavily in an imaginary belief system, the older the better.   In the context of the article, Cook refers only to mainstream American religions.

Voice of reason

 OK, at this point the atheist hits a wall.  What is therapy if not reality adjustment?   We humans love to deny.  The therapist can be the sober, kind voice of reason.   He/she can pull the client out of denial and gently urge the client to face the reality of his/her situation and/or personality. 

This approach goes under various names: cognitive/behavioral, rational/emotive, and others.  For most neurotics, Albert Ellis’ list of Irrational Thoughts is all the therapy they need.

Debt of truth

The therapist owes the client the golden nugget of truth and insight – else what is the client paying for?  (I know, the right to gripe and have an interested listener.  If only clients knew how the therapist’s mind wanders as they prattle on.).

That’s why this atheist has serious problems with the thrust of Cook’s article: the solution to the “God problem” is “spiritually integrated” therapy.  My 2^nd wife was “deeply” into this – this craven pandering to the client’s fantasies.

 Cook correctly notes that “for those who are not religious, it is hard to understand how important religion may be to a patient, and how off-putting it can be when a therapist steers the conversation away from the spiritual.”

 And why not?  If the therapist were to blend religion with therapy, he/she would be no better than a cleric, larding his/her advice with fantasy and imaginary friends.  How does perpetuating the client’s delusions help the client?

Religion and therapy

Oh, yeah, maybe it’s a band-aid, a psychological mind-trick.  Thus Cook cites the example of a therapist who might encourage the client to think about all the things that God has given you, and this gratitude exercise will help reduce anxiety. 

How does God help?  Can’t I just list the things I’m grateful for, without crediting God?

 God harms as much as he helps.  Encouraging people to think of misfortune as “part of God’s plan” can make them passive and helpless.  People who trust in God (in a survey Cook cites) were more tolerant of uncertainty and  less prone to worry.  Yes, and less likely to see the piano falling on them. 

Plus, every day, religious clients bring their miseries to psychotherapists and ask why God would allow such a thing.  In dealing with evil and sorrow, again, God is no help.  He’s a hindrance. Didn’t he make or let it happen?  Such conundrums make it harder, not easier for the believer to cope with the traumas that life deals out.

“Meeting patients where they are”

Cook ends with the idea of offering a treatment option to the deeply faithful [there’s that adjective again – does the therapist have to first evaluate the level of the client’s fanaticism/fundamentalism? – AMP].  It’s about the field of psychology shedding its prejudices and preconceptions and returning to the first principles of therapy: meeting the patients where they are.”

 ROFGAR (rolling on floor, gagging and retching).   Earlier in the article, Cooks says the same thing: therapists must “modify the tools of psychology to treat the devout.”

This is why I could never be a therapist.  I would want to deal with the underlying delusion, religion itself.   A religious client would leave before the first session was over. 

Pandering and faking

 And what exactly happens if an atheist/agnostic therapist encounters a “deeply religious” client?  Is the therapist to pander, to fake it, to buy into the client’s fantasy/psychosis? 

And what if the client is a Hindu or a Sikh or a Wiccan or a Druze?  Must the therapist bone up on every faith, every imaginary friend of every client and play along with it?  How can you look yourself in the mirror if you do that?

Is the goal of therapy to dissolve delusions – or to encourage them?

Miss my old boss? You gotta be kidding!

CEO stands near Dilbert’s cubicle.  He says:

“Uh-oh. I’m lost and I’ve wandered into the grimy habitat of an underling.
“I feel the cold desperation of your drab and meaningless life.
“I need to roll in money to get the smell off me.  Where’s the nearest pile?”

Keene Sentinel, 9/24/12

Is it my imagination or is Dilbert getting darker?  Anyway, I think Linked-In has taken a wrong turn by offering a link that helps you reconnect with your old boss.  Who wants to reconnect with a tyrant, a petty dictator, a micromanager, a clueless ditherer (as in Dilbert)…the bad bosses are 80% of all bosses, and the types of bad boss are as numerous as the sands of the beach.

Bosses drawn and quartered

Most people would like to re-connect with their bosses only if they can watch them being drawn and quartered.  Down through the decades and centuries of the Industrial Age, as steam is replaced by silicon and robots, one thing has remained constant: most bosses practice the military/authoritative kind of managing that was supposed to have gone out of style, with so many schools of management and armies of consultants spreading the gospel of “treat people like human beings.” 

But no.  Basic as it is, they don’t get it – because they don’t have to.  The military system works, sort of: whatever the top people want is what the peons carry out.  If senior execs are lucky and the economy and marketplace are right, their strategy succeeds and they’re geniuses.  If not, they take a golden parachute and start somewhere else. 

Managing is independent of content, said Harold Geneen, and he proceeded to prove it by amassing many different companies under one corporate banner, ITT.  I don’t think it really worked out that well, though many execs change industry, with varying degrees of success.

Absolute power

The boss.  Imagine one individual with the power to cut off your livelihood at whim, and this individual is a control freak or a humiliator…or any of the countless bad-boss types.  No wonder inability to get along with one’s manager is one of the leading causes of workplace dissatisfaction and stress.   You’re in a very clean, quiet and pleasant…concentration camp. 

You are at the mercy of the guards. As in the camps, you can be targeted because of your race (white) or gender (male).  At one company where I worked, diversity was a managerial metric, just like profit and loss, headcount, and other things that really matter.  And my boss took it seriously, packing the department with women -- black and Hispanic ones where possible.

Face time: no give

Not only do they maintain totalitarian boss-cracy…THEY WILL NOT BACK DOWN ON FACE TIME.  You’d better not be seen coming in too late or leaving too early, no matter how well or thoroughly your work is done.  Today, in 2012, when so much work can be done anywhere, Robert C. Pozen of Harvard Business school describes this very scenario and adds: “You don’t want to come off as a slacker.” 

The article that reports this scenario (Keene NH Sentinel, 10/10/12) laments the “cost of long work days,” the relentless toll on body, mind and spirit.  Europeans are just as productive and they have at least six weeks of vacation a year.  The article sugfgests, again, that if workweeks were shorter, more people could work.

Happy voters

Apparently the election is to be decided in Ohio.  What’s this have to do with abusive bosses?  Bear with me.

Ohioans are an extremely important group to win over.   As I watch all the happy voters in Ohio cheering the man who saved their jobs with billions of taxpayer dollars (have they paid it back?), I cannot but point out that the root issue in the auto industry’s woes…is management (quality expert W. Edwards Deming said that quality is 85% management’s responsibility): boss-ocracy and face time, especially a cruelly repressive workplace environment (until quite recently) were the ultimate cause of GM’s distress and failures. 

The company bought the union’s compliance with lavish contracts and benefits but continued to practice the Shit Theory of Management: “I was treated like shit, so that’s how I’ll treat everybody who works for me.”

The Japanese, on the other hand, practiced a more participatory approach.  They built quality cars on American soil, with American workers!  Authority was still strong and hierarchical, but at least workers could take responsibility for quality instead of “shut up and get it out the door,” which was Detroit’s quality strategy for way too long.

Other scenarios

Auto industry jobs mean votes in crucial states, so there was no thought given to alternatives to bailing out the auto companies.  They could have broken up GM, as was suggested when GM was too successful for some people. 

Surely there would be buyers for the Cadillac and Chevrolet brands, for the components divisions, investors who could pare down these operations and make them successful as standalone companies (which they once were), instead of making the taxpayers foot the bill.  The industry could have sold off excess assets and given generous buyouts to anyone who wanted one.

I worked in the food industry, where acquisition, divestiture, and portfolio adjustments were ongoing.  We can’t make money in this (margarine, ice cream, etc.) business, but maybe somebody else can, so we’ll divest. 

Kraft Foods was independent for decades, then merged with General Foods, renamed Kraft, and spun off a decade after it was acquired by Philip Morris (renamed Altria). 

So there were other possibilities for GM – just not nearly so politically attractive.   But the company went bankrupt fundamentally because for too long they allowed cronyism, loyalty, tenure, and union contracts to replace competence. 

Reconnect with my boss?  I wonder how many takers they’ll get.

Granite State affirms “live free or die” by one vote

“I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hard-core criminals because they had possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. . .It’s time we stop locking up people for possession of marijuana. We just can’t do it any more.”

Pat Robertson
Imagine the slow, rhythmic, grim, sarcastic clapping that greets a mediocre or half-hearted performance. That’s about the size of my applause for the New Hampshire House’s passing, by ONE vote, the decriminalization of possession of cannabis up to a half ounce.

They defeated by a resounding 228-91 a measure to legalize sale of marijuana by anyone over 21. What’s wrong with you people? What have you got against freedom? New Hampshire should be a leader in enlightened drug policy.

That puny approbation is well short of medical marijuana, and I will be writing to my state legislators about that. It is nowhere near legalization, which I doubt will happen in my lifetime. The state motto, in reality, refers mainly to firearms; all other freedoms are conventionally or, as in the case of pot, retrogressively administered. New Hampshire lags many other states. Vermont has medical marijuana. Massachusetts has decriminalized larger qualities.

What part of “live free or die” do our legislators not understand? I’ll tell you: the part where freedom begins with self-ownership. If you don’t own your body, who does? The state?

By now, nearly every un-brainwashed, literate adult knows the basic facts, which are that marijuana does not induce violent or psychotic behavior, that it is no more harmful than beer, that it has a large number of medical and practical users. BUT IT’S STILL ILLEGAL!!!

I suppose this should be no surprise, since the Abrahamic religions that dominate Western politics are abstemious. What if a drug-centered religion had gained worldwide popularity and power? If everybody smoked dope, would it be a more peaceful world? Just speculating.

I’m still a 60s hippie at heart: I’m all for women’s and minority rights, against foreign wars and the excesses of capitalism…and I was sure that if we didn’t have free love by now, at least we’d have legal weed.

But NOOOOOOOOO!

A large proportion of Boomers either never got on board with drug liberalization…or got all hypocritical and didn’t want their kids doing drugs the way they did. There are all kinds of rationales. Many more found the state-approved drugs, alcohol and nicotine, both far more toxic than pot, satisfactory for their mood control. Caffeine, the other state-approved psychoactive drug, is perfect for capitalism. Gives us lots of pep to accomplish our corporate mission.

Plus: laws and policies are made by each generation’s self-selected cohort of busybody/control freaks, otherwise known as politicians. They will absolutely lie about the relative harmlessness and many benefits of marijuana. They will take a vow of hypocrisy and keep the damned drug war going strong, because they get off on making moral rules for other people…and, as politicians, can’t admit they were wrong about something as big as this.

They’re followers, not leaders – spineless, gutless followers. Easier to keep the brainwashing in place. I didn’t know of such people in my generation until I saw them in government and law-enforcement positions, perpetuating the drug war.

But it’s not unanimous. Through LEAP and other organizations, law enforcement personnel can and do express their opposition to the drug war.

Still, I couldn’t believe my eyes. People younger than I are arresting 800,000 marijuana “offenders” every year. Even Pat Robertson disapproves of that.

In the Sentinel story (March 11, 2012), Rep. Mark Warden specifically linked pot freedom with the state motto. Yes!! But Rep. Tommy Soltani made the usual slippery-slope arguments: drug dealers will lead to more criminal activity like prostitutes.

The governor’s mouthpiece, Colin Manning, repeated the party line that we’re going to make the job of law enforcement harder by saying that “some marijuana use is acceptable.”

Well, of course, SOME is acceptable -- by ADULTS. People over 18 – we regulate cannabis the same as we enforce liquor and tobacco laws. It’ll be much easier to keep kids from pot if it’s controlled.

As for other so-called, “crimes,” look, I know I’m decades ahead here in this Puritan land of ours, but there is a way to make prostitution legal. Take a trip to Amsterdam. More important, Tommy, is that the reason WHY the drug trade brings in criminals is that pot IS ILLEGAL. Black markets lead to crime, always.

Make it legal and tax it, and crime goes away. Most of the drug war is about marijuana.  We no longer have gangs fighting over liquor distribution territory. I lived near Chicago, site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Real movie stuff: guys murdered in cold blood in a basement on Clark Street, the violence of another failed drug war. Brutal black-market territorial politics. But I will bet you that the same number of people die each week in Chicago because of the current drug war, which the government will not abandon.

This willful blindness, this insistence that the horrors of the drug war are caused by drugs themselves…is the lie politicians have been spinning for decades, ever since the LaGuardia Commission (1947) found that “marihuana” posed no threat to society, ever since a DEA Administrative Law Judge in 1989 found that cannabis had medical benefits and could properly be used as a treatment.

I recall many years ago reading of a drug activist who maintained that pot was the wedge issue, the linchpin issue: if the government would do this ONE thing, admit it had been wrong all along, and just legalize pot…well, then he would seriously consider anything they say, because there might be some truth in it.

But they will not tell this fundamental truth. If so blatant a lie can be kept in place decade after decade, what, if anything, is the government telling us that is not a lie? But if they told truth about cannabis (in tincture form, it was used, in the 19th century, as a remedy for “wedding night jitters” – sounds good to me)…well, then I might consider what they have to say, since there may be some honesty in it.

But not now. Not when they can keep this most obscene of lies in place.

If there’s a hero to this sordid story – sealing the victory and affirming the truth by one vote – it’s Speaker William O’Brien, who refused to vote and thus allowed the measure to pass.

Well done, Bill. We’ll have to share a joint and talk politics sometime.

Jewish Atheist takes on Sacred Cow, Forgiveness

The latest eruption of forgiveness worship almost made my breakfast erupt from my stomach. Dear Abby (Keene NH Sentinel, 3/7/12) printed DECIDE TO FORGIVE in its entirety, and to give the enemy his due, I will do the same:

“Decide to forgive For resentment is negative Resentment diminishes and devours the self. Be the first to forgive. To smile and take the first step And you will se the happiness bloom On the face of your human brother or sister. Be always the first Do not wait for others to forgive For by forgiving You become master of fate A doer of miracles. To forgive is the highest, Most beautiful form of love. In return you will receive Untold peace and happiness.”

Bah. Humbug. Forgiveness is one of the products of New Age psychologists (i.e., often MSWs, usually women, who consider themselves psychotherapists). In this it merges with religion. It is wrought with happy, sappy, feel-good talk that is far removed from human experience.

Let’s get real. Forgiveness cannot be a warm, fuzzy blanket for all foul deeds. In real life, people do horrible things to each other. To achieve the syrupy forgiveness that the New Agers preach, one must somehow understand the offender’s circumstances (it’s society’s fault!)…and even, they advise, rewrite history to make the subject the hero/ine. This is often unachievable except by lying to oneself.

Criteria for forgiveness

Why not face reality? Some things, especially when (i) it’s a minor offense, (ii) the intent to harm you wasn’t there, (iii) the person genuinely intended to do otherwise and (iv) is genuinely repentant. This covers a wide range of behaviors – e.g., you get somewhere late because of unexpected weather or traffic – and true forgiveness is possible. Your relationship is unchanged. (BTW, forgiveness always comes from people. Having it come from the deity is a bad idea, because it allows clerical middlemen to decide when you're forgiven. Way too much power.)

Ah, but how often is the offense heinous, the evil intentional and voluntary (even allowed by the regime in power), the offender unrepentant?

Here I submit that the best we can achieve is understanding of why the offender did what he/she did and of what our role was, if any, in making things worse. This is not forgiveness.

Remembrance – and justice

I’m not referring to vengeance. Even as primitive a moral code as the Bible tells us not to bear a grudge. Just memory. To forget human evil is to allow it to be repeated.

You see, the sweet syrupy kind of forgiveness is tricky with words. It’s either forgiveness or resentment. Why not both? Or a third? You can have a little forgiveness (because of the offender’s circumstances), more than a little resentment, and a desire for JUSTICE to be done. Typically offenders (e.g., prick VPs and colonels) get away with it, and there is no justice.

Maybe that’s why we like to believe in karma.

And it does happen that offensive people offend the wrong person and get what they deserve.

The sweet syrupy kind of forgiveness says you have to forgive first, and by doing so you’re master of your fate. I would say: you’re responsible for what happens next. My guess is that your torturer, your abusing spouse, boss, or employer, will laugh his/her ass off at that.

Sadists don’t give a shit about forgiveness. If you’re in the wrong setting, a declaration of forgiveness might get you an extra shock to the genitals.

So forgiveness means understanding, to the extent possible, remembering what happened but – and this is crucial, because it’s often all the New Agers can accomplish – don’t DWELL or obsess over it unnecessarily, get on with your life, but remember…and see if justice is ever done.

Getting what they deserved Why do we love to see celebrity assholes get their comeuppance? Because it satisfies our yearning for a narrative of crime and punishment -- a narrative often missing from our own lives.

After centuries of persecution and passsivity, Jews are taking responsibility for their own defense and doing a magnificent job (not without $4B/year of American aid). They’re arguably a special case: persecuted and massacred with impunity for so long by so many nations. They had to kill back; they had to show that you cannot kill Jews with impunity. Hence the revenge killings for Munich, the hunting down of Nazis, the assassination of Muslim extremist leaders, etc.

But every group wants to close the arc, land the KO blow.

Osama hiding among our so-called friends (they knew, believe me)? I don’t think so. The US government/military was accuser, judge, jury, and executioner, and you didn’t hear a peep of protest from this nation, which was spared the spectacle of trying this man.

Sometimes justice is served quickly and quietly. (I hear the SEAL team op is going to be a great – and controversial -- movie.) Not every criminal deserves his day in court. Yeah, I know, there are probably liberals who think Osama should have been be tried in NY. Maybe, but it’s better this way. He killed 3,000 people because there were Americans on his stupid holy soil. Deserved what he got.

Yes, the most the ladies accomplish if your offense is grievous (child abuse, torture) is to get you from allowing rage and vengeance to consume your life.

Widening circles of forgiveness

The Dear Abby column also includes an ever-widening circle of daily forgiveness affirmations, but as soon as it get beyond people and off into “forgive across economic lines” and “forgive other nations,” it’s total nonsense. Nations aren’t people. They act crazy because they are collectively crazy, run by incompetents who mean me no personal harm. Nothing to forgive. Ridiculous.

I certainly don’t forgive religious fanatics – or believers of any stripe. They allowed their children’s brains to be molded at a crucial age, just as theirs were. Their pastors/rabbis/imams may be in the grip of a psychosis, but somehow, but they don’t have to close themselves off from reality, not all of them, at least. There are some secular Muslims out there – I know there are. Asif Mandvi?

Others I don’t forgive? A long list, certainly including my last wife, who refused even the most reasonable requests, and David Dirt (pseudonym), the tyrannical, employee-marrying ex-boss who’s been rewarded by retiring to photography in the Southwest. I don’t think much about him, but when I do, it’s with the hope that he gets bitten by a rattlesnake.

I was fortunate in that I never once endured bullying. Are you going to tell me that that you can forgive a bully, that the humiliations don't stay with you forever? No, you can't. Don't forgive bullies. Bullies unforgiven do not endure consequences and are simply encouraged to continue their bullying into adulthood.

Forgiveness and choice

The sweet, syrupy forgiveness is not only unrealistic (cannot realistically be applied to all offenses); it’s anti-humanistic. It completely abnegates the choice that the offender had to do what he/she did. Did Jeffrey Dahmer have a choice? Does everyone have a choice, even the schizophrenic whose voices are telling him to do it? But to blanket-forgive is to take away choice.

Was there choice? That’s for the justice system to decide. As we all know, it seldom delivers justice and can be forgiving to a small degree (i.e., mercy seasons justice, as in the famous “quality of mercy” speech in The Merchant of Venice): minor offenses are played down or pled out. There’s time off for good behavior. And a pardon from Haley Barbour because you controlled your murderous instincts long enough to be his houseboy, polite and docile (this is the setup for a murder movie).

Aside from that, there’s justice: do the crime, according to the system, and you do the time. Some of the crimes, including all drug offenses, are immoral, but the overlap between the justice system and actual justice is only occasional.

The unpunished

As for those offenders who go unpunished, we must not let them obsess us. Nor can we forget what they did. We cannot condone or excuse, much less forgive them. We can show that we disavow them. Modern Germans have made an outstanding effort at repentance, but the original offenses of the Third Reich won’t be forgiven. It’s just that today’s Germans won’t be blamed for them.

One last manipulative use of words, preceded by an implied “You are to take it as true that…”: “Only the brave know how to forgive. A coward never forgives.”

It’s NOT true! I submit that forgiveness has nothing to do with cowardice. A simple practice of realism and remembrance, coupled with the desire for justice or karma, and a general getting on with one’s life – that’s much easier than excusing the inexcusable and rewriting history.

Latinos? Hispanics? The power of a political artifact

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Martin Luther King

Here’s my suggestion for what Spanish-speaking callers should hear when they press 2 to hear the message in Spanish:

“It is obvious that by pressing 2 you do not feel it necessary to learn the language of your adopted country. This attitude is not acceptable. Please hang up and call again when you are able to do business in English. Thank you.”

I mean, really. Why Spanish? Why not have callers press any of 50 or 100 buttons to enable the conversation in any language spoken in America, from Cantonese to Urdu?

Lots and lots of them

The answer is simple: sheer numbers, Hispanics outnumber any other immigrant group, so, the reasoning goes, concessions have to be made.

Can you imagine what would have happened if my father, along with other American Jews, insisted on being able to conduct telephone business in Yiddish, the language of their immigrant forbears? What if Italians or Chinese insisted on it? There are quite a few of them, after all.

But no. Dad, along with millions of other second-generation immigrants from a hundred countries, was expected to learn the language of his new native land, and he did.

Livin’ in a Jewish paradise

To be sure, some Jews still refuse to make the full transition, but that’s because they live in an urban Jew-bubble with very little contact with the outside world. They communicate by liberally sprinkling their speech with Hebrew words and phrases – so many, in fact, that the meaning may completely elude an outsider. My wife calls it “Hebglish.” It’s an intermediary language, like Spanglish, a temporary solution until one can learn English – that is, unless one doesn‘t have to.

Ten centuries ago, some time after the Norman conquest of England, words from French and Latin (the lingua franca of science) began to creep, then to flood into the language. There were so many new and unfamiliar words that the first dictionaries listed only these, and not common words. But the grammar was and is English.

In an alternate universe, where William the Conqueror is defeated at Hastings in 1066, the French retreat across the Channel, and modern-day English sounds a lot like Dutch.

Admittedly, many Hispanics want their kids to speak English, and their desire to assimilate is commendable. They can still speak Spanish in their private lives, of course: this is all about having a single language for the public discourse and activities of the nation. Linguists call this phenomenon “code-switching.”

Division and exclusion

But companies and the government, afraid of losing sales and votes, respectively, won’t encourage that. Instead, because of their spineless political correctness, they hinder assimilation and encourage isolation by providing a Spanish alternative at every turn.

And of course, we have to brag about how color-blind we are (the truth is just the opposite, of course, by singling out the special groups. One company I worked for was so PC that in addition to Black History Month, it added Hispanic AND Asian Heritage months. The later is transparently bogus, based only on geography. Why no Women’s Achievement Month?

So for one quarter of the year, they were celebrating some ethnicity or other. A very poor way of making employees feel that they’re members of one company (which, after all, is the primary reason they’re there together – to make money as a group).

There is no better way to exclude someone – right to his/her face, in fact – than by speaking another language. All over the world, we see the problems that beset multi-lingual societies. In India, there are so many competing languages with millions of speakers that the government decided to continue using the language of the British conquerors. A good, practical move, I’d say.

So do we call them Hispanics or Latinos? A Google query generated two million hits, with answers all over the map. One questioner even asked which variant is “politically correct.” In trying to get it right for a speech, I was told that “Latino” is more common in California, while “Hispanic” predominates elsewhere.

A political artifact

There’s no authoritative answer, and it doesn’t matter. The group is a political artifact, throwing all Spanish speakers and Spanish-descended Americans into a single, artificial political group which has become so numerous (and so aware of the government benefits it can get by voting as an artificial group) that TIME magazine predicts (March 5, 2012 cover story) that they will pick the next President.

What a crock of shit.

Other than speaking Spanish, what do the people from two dozen countries have in common?

Are you going to tell me that if you put an Argentinian, a Mexican, and a Venezuelan in the same room, that they would eagerly embrace each other as Hispanic/Latino brothers? Or would national culture, pride and identity (not to mention regional and social differences in their Spanish) get in the way?

Would a Spaniard feel more affiliation to his/her country – or to his/her so-called Hispanic brethren and sistren in, say, Peru?

And how about Brazil, which is right down there with the rest of them and way too big to ignore. They don’t speak Spanish, but are they considered Hispanic on other grounds? What grounds? It’s a puzzlement!!

BTW, and as noted above, “Asian-American” is an even more ludicrous designation for people who come from even more countries and speak many different languages.

When did they start to be Hispanic?

I ought to do some research into the origin of Hispanics as a unified political group in this country. And yes, I know they were treated harshly early on. Indeed, their white bosses and masters were probably the first to lump them together as “Hispanic,” because that master/boss didn’t care about geographic differences.

But every immigrant group was treated harshly at first, including Jews from many countries. At some point, Jews started ignoring national origins and regarding their shared culture (which Hispanics do NOT have, unless you count being conquered) as primary.

In Chicago, Julius Rosenwald, the enlightened Sears CEO and philanthropist (whose foundation, BTW, helped educate large numbers of Black children in the South), encouraged the sophisticated, assimilated German Jews of the North Side to help their impoverished Jewish brethren (more recently arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe) on the city’s South Side.

Assimilating through language

But, as noted, Jews, along with every other immigrant group, did not demand linguistic equality. They did not demand bilingualism. They did not care to be educated partly in Yiddish, which would have definitely retarded their progress toward becoming full participants in American life, just as bilingual education (yet another arm of PC) does today.

Why curry favor with Hispanics? Because their high birth rates make them a political treasure – and for corporations, a potential gold mine. By some inexplicable calculus, hiring enough Hispanics in high-profile positions (and Hispanics generally) translates into market-share points – that is, if the company makes a big deal out of how many Hispanics it employs and makes sure everyone knows about it (that’s called good PR), more people will be favorably disposed to buy its products.

A hypocritical sham

Hiring Hispanics is part of the pandering diversity/affirmative action game. As I’ve pointed out in numerous posts, the whole idea of “diversity” is a hypocritical, disingenuous sham, carried out under the philosophy of “essentialism”: each Hispanic embodies some magical “Hispanic-ness” that will enable the company to better reach its Hispanic consumers.

This is anti-humanistic in the extreme, this pretense that a person’s language and ethnicity are more important that his/her individuality. I was once quoted to this effect in an interview with a PR/speechwriting publication. I asked, “What’s the point of our looking different if we all think alike?”

My boss chewed me out over that. I was proud of my stand, and I suppose this toady was just doing his job, but I will still give him a swift kick in the groin if we ever meet again. I even got a rebuke from the CEO herself, who informed me that “diversity is company policy” (translation: “your days here are numbered, white man”).

Gimme a fucking break. How exactly is some IT or finance staffer with a Spanish surname going to come up with winning product and market strategies that will score points with Hispanics? Company executives probably never heard the word “essentialism,” but that’s the doctrine they’re following.

Wasting time and money on “diversity”

Enormous amounts of time and money are wasted each year on “diversity”-related activities – not only the month-long celebrations, but recruiting and mentoring, which uses the employees as free labor in raising the company’s diversity numbers. There are Diversity councils, company-wide diversity conferences, and more.

It all distracts significantly from the resources needed to make the company competitive and successful. If you’re planning a diversity conference, that’s time and effort subtracted from the actual work of the company.

Diversity activities are a self-imposed handicap, a ball and chain that the organization drags around, despite the fact that there are no – repeat NO – empirical studies that clearly demonstrate that a diverse company performs better. Yet they keep this crap up, year after year.

You can bet that the Asian and European countries currently eating our lunch and/or owning our debt don’t give a shit about diversity. The same goes for smaller American firms that stay off the radar screen. Think of all the high-tech companies populated by Asian and Caucasian nerds. They don’t whine about proportional representation. They prefer to put their time, energy, and other resources into more practical pursuits – like winning in the marketplace.

Gotta “look like America.”

But to the diversity-mongers, there apparently is some advantage to an organization that “looks like America.”

In fact, according to the tenets of diversity policy, there must be “proportional representation:” because America is such a successful country, the logic goes (there’s room for doubt on that one – we’re surprisingly low among industrialized nations in many measurements of educational achievement and quality of life), we have to have the exact same proportion of blacks, Asians, and women as in the country at large.

Just those three. We didn’t need a Frenchman, a Zulu, or an Australian aborigine. In one company I worked for, “Diversity” was one of the managerial performance criteria, along with actual business measures like P&L; it’s one more goal the manager has to achieve.

Again, what a crock.

Do they not see that because of Hispanics’ high birthrate and immigration, they will, by mid-century, be 30% of the population (actual demographic prediction)? Are they prepared to make their company 1/3 Hispanic?

Nobody thinks about that. Instead, it’s a race for horseflesh and numbers. I’ve seen the bar graphs. They do keep count. A sharp Hispanic or Black woman (or even a seemingly sharp one) is a double-dipper and can practically write her own ticket.

Enough already!

Diversity and affirmative action will go on forever, just like farm subsidies and any other government policy that benefits a large number of voters. It’s been in effect for a generation, so can’t we say enough already? There are now Hispanic professional network and mentoring organizations (organizations of Hispanic accountants, lawyers, etc.) to help young people move up. Same for Blacks. Women are fantastic networkers. Everybody has access to an “old boys’ network.

Enough already! Why do Hispanics and others think the bar must always be lowered for them? When will we stop “race-norming” life for the no-longer-oppressed who are forever allowed to be less competent?

How many more decades of special preferences do they need before the fake debt of discrimination by people long ago is repaid by today’s while males, who suffer for crimes they didn’t commit?

Downsides of diversity

No matter. Reverse discrimination will continue to benefit this fake, made-up political artifact, far, far, into the future, even though it is not only ineffectual, diverting and wasting resources on a false goal, but also because (i) it creates resentment in the white men who are discriminated against through no fault of their own (as a Jew, I know a lot about “racial guilt”) – thus dividing the organization – and, (ii) perhaps worst of all, it allows the “protected classes” (that’s what they actually call them) to operate according to a double standard (how can they endure the humiliation?); it allows their mediocrity to pass for adequacy, thus undermining the competitiveness of the company, which needs all the brainpower it can get.

Language of the conquerors

A doctor I know is making his third attempt to learn Spanish. Again, that’s because there are so many of them infiltrating our PC society. It’s almost as if he’s learning the language of the “conquerors.”

Consider: English is the international language of aviation. It is the de facto language of scholarship, science, technology, and business. Machine-aided translation is better than ever. Given all this, if you are a native speaker of English, you are sitting on top of the world.

If you want to learn an important world language, try Mandarin Chinese. If you’re going to live and work in another country, then by all means learn the local language. Too many American businesspeople and diplomats fail to do that (e.g., there are way too few speakers of Arabic in the State Dept.), to the detriment of their organizations and our country.

But to me, absent the above conditions, learning Spanish is a retreat, a defeat for a unified America. It flies in the face of the dynamic of assimilation. I assure you this doctor does not expect to work side-by-side with Spanish-speaking physicians who know no English. No, this is a concession, such as one would make to a conqueror.

Except that here, matters are reversed: you learn Spanish if you want to speak to the hired help or the clientele – or if you’re a politician eager to kiss Hispanic ass and get Hispanic votes.

Who will dare?

What company will dare to be first to point to the Emperor’s new clothes, to note that we’ve been at this diversity thing enough, that grouping people by gender and ethnicity is odious and bogus, that it’s not worth the investment, and henceforth all hires and promotions will be made on the basis of competence and experience alone?

Do you think that someday some CEO will have the balls to do that? I‘m not holding my breath.