What White People Like

Maybe I'm the last person among the connected to learn about this delightful blog, What White People Like, but since I've been out attending Writer's Workshops and liking the idea of soccer, I guess I can be excused. To my mind, this site is a hoot. The author, whose race isn't entirely clear from what I've read so far, is about as far from a purveyor of white self-hate or black resentment as she can be. While I might protest that her blog would be more accurately described as "What Educated and/or Affluent, Blue-State White People Like," it's still a bit too much on-target for me to read without laughing and cringing at the same time. Frankly, I don't think the camo-wearing, NASCAR-watching crowd is all that likely to identify with these entries, but who cares?
I mention this not simply to spread the word about this site to the two and a half people who might read this entry--one and a half if my proofread is excluded--but to draw attention to the rather bizarre comments that one can find sprinkled around the various postings on the site. These range from abusive to clueless. It's astounding how humorless some people can be when someone pokes gentle fun at them. It's amazing how completely bereft of the irony gene many readers appear to be.
All of these comments simply confirm in my mind the absolutely essential nature of literacy education in our world. This blog could be used as an exit exam. Those who don't get it should be shuttled off to a remote location and allowed spend the remainder of their lives shopping at big box stores and eating fast food.

Exploiting Charity

It's Sunday evening and ABC is running hour after hour of generated generosity. First we have Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and then it's Oprah's Big Give. I admire the spirit that we have here. After all, EM:HE is miles better than the gratuitous self-indulgence that we have in the original Extreme Makeover, where people would abandon their families for weeks on end in order to get injected, nipped, and tucked.
I have two hesitations when it comes to these shows. First, there are thousands of families with problems in this world. Why do these programs feel it appropriate to shower buckets-full of blessings on one family or individual while all of those thousands of others are left with nothing. Oprah, it seems to me, is far worse about this than EM:HE. I've seen Oprah dump all manner of good things on people who have simply dug themselves into stupid circumstances. Don't get me wrong. A mistake should not be held against somebody for all time. Just because you incurred $50,000 in student loans in order to attend clown college should not condemn you to poverty for this life and the next, but does that person need more than to have their loans paid off?
I know, I know. I might be falling into that old excuse for doing nothing: "Since I can't help everybody, I'm not going to help anybody." That's not it at all. Think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan encountered the crime victim. He attended to the man's wounds, took him to an inn, and paid the bill. That's great, but did he also build the guy a house and put his kids through college? No. If Zeebo the indebted clown has his loans paid off and gets a new car and gets a bunch of new appliances and receives a $12,000 Panera gift card, I think that's a bit absurd, especially when some other clown has outstanding student loans.
But let's face it. Giving a modest gift to a bunch of people rather than an enormous gift to a single person just doesn't make good television. It's much more dramatic for an individual to receive a whole kitchen full of Kenmore appliances than for everybody on the block to get a new microwave.
My second problem with these shows is with motivation. Sears and various other vendors give "generously." I quotate "generously," because they're truly not generous at all. What does a house full of Kenmore's best appliances cost? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's a lot less than a single thirty-second ad during a prime-time TV show.
Whatever happened to giving because it's the right thing to do? Do we have to have giving that winds up putting our name on something? Giving that can be charged to the advertising budget?
Hey, it's their money. They can do whatever they like with it. And a generous person can dump huge amounts on a single individual or a smaller amount on hundreds. That's their call. In no case do I consider myself worthy of that sort of largesse, so I'm grateful in my own way. I'll still watch those programs now and again, but I'll always have the feeling that there's something not quite right about them.

Scoundrel Alert: Tax Preparation

The world, I am convinced, is full of scoundrels. My latest discovery in this area is the refund anticipation loan debit card being offered (and endlessly shilled) by H. & R. Block on television. The ad in question shows two guys sitting at a bar, one of them covered with money. This is his tax refund. It's a refund suit. His counterpart asks him if this form of refund isn't inconvenient, to which the dullard in the money suit says, "Do you know a better way?"
This question, of course, leads our hero--or at least Block's hero--into a plug of the debit card. Interestingly, however, it doesn't lead him to say, "Yeah, I know a better way. A check!" or "Direct deposit!"
How would a debit card be better than one of these traditional methods of getting your refund? First of all, Block isn't offering you your refund. They're offering a refund anticipation loan. A couple of years ago, the company got hammered for the obscene fees they were levying on these loans. Now, they've found a new way to perform income redistribution.
What a sensible consumer needs to ask is why would Block want to put money on a card. Is a card cheaper than a check? I can't imagine that it would be. It seems, from my research, that Block charges people $20 if they want their loan on a check rather than the card. I'm certain that a check doesn't cost any $20 to produce. If they do, then I'm going to get into a check issuing business.
Block wants the money on a card because then they can still get their greedy paws on it. Once that money is on a check, they've seen the last of it, but if it's on the card, they can still play nasty games, charging you for ATM usage and the like.
This company, headquartered in Kansas City I must confess, charges (too much) for doing taxes. Then they charge a fee for the refund anticipation loan. Then they charge (excessive) interest on the loan. Then they charge fees when you use the card that has your money on it.
I'm also curious as to what percentage of money on these debit cards gets used. If I get a check for $1,000, I'll put it in my bank account and I'll eventually spend all of it. If I have a debit card that's down to $2.39, however, I might never get that last $2.39 spent. That's $2.39 that Block can just keep. Imagine if a million taxpayers all left an average of $2.39 on their cards. Wouldn't that be a sweet little pile to clean up?
So why does H. & R. Block want you to take out a loan and put it on a card? Just like the guy in the money suit on TV, they want to fleece you of your dollars. They're scoundrels.

Shusaku Endo and My Guilty Conscience

In making my way through a recent short-story anthology, I encountered a troubling biographical entry. The anthology’s editor, Bret Lott, describes the Japanese author Shusaku Endo as “the internationally renowned Japanese novelist, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and short story author.” This introduction leaves me feeling quite inadequate as a literature student for I had never so much as heard Endo’s name before opening Lott’s book.
In the broader view, of course, any reader must recognize that there is an almost infinite amount of worthwhile material, an almost endless phalanx of “internationally renowned” writers whom one ought to know. I’m reminded here of the elite fighters of the Persian army, the Immortals, so called because they attacked in deep ranks. When one fighter went down, another stepped up to take his place. So it is with worthwhile writings, except that once you knock down Shusaku Endo, you discover perhaps two or three or twelve others lurking behind him. This was the discovery I made several years ago when I ventured into Japanese fiction for the first time. I read Haruki Murakami, but then realized that to fully—or even marginally—understand him, I needed to read Mishima and Kawabata and Oe. To understand the fiction of Japan, I also needed to learn something of the poetry. And to understand Murakami, I found myself frequently thrown back to Europe and America in the influences of Kafka and American jazz. In moments, I could find myself overrun and trampled by the onslaught of the Immortals.
Some twenty years ago, I sat in a class for my master’s degree, listening to the professor, Linda Voits, talk about the novels of Anthony Trollope. To this day I can’t recall why she told us this, but the story sticks in my mind. “I read the Barchester novels of Trollope while on sabbatical last year as I was taking the train from Cambridge into London each day. I’d never read them all . . . in order,” she explained, quite offhand. I’m not sure that Professor Voits actually paused between “all” and “in order,” but that’s how I remember it. I recall sitting around a seminar table with a dozen other students, all of us thinking the same thing. We’d never read any of the Barchester novels, much less all of them, much less in order. We had other things to read in order to feel as if we had some claim to those letters, M.A., after our names.
To this day, I maintain what seem like appalling holes in my reading. Proust? No. Goethe? I’ve read nothing beyond The Sorrows of Young Werther. Dickens? Only a few bits here and there. Spenser? I couldn’t get past the first book of The Fairie Queene. And I’ve never even heard of Shusaku Endo!
In the end, we who would be literary, must confess to these gaps. Unless you surrender yourself to reading eighteen hours a day, you will not read everything of significance. A bit of math will confirm this truth. Let’s take Shakespeare as an example. If we accept that Shakespeare has perhaps twenty plays of significance, that gives us a starting point. After all, who reads The Two Gentlemen of Verona? If each of these plays takes an average reader some five hours, then simply getting through Shakespeare will take 100 hours. That doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s only Shakespeare. Add in Marlowe and Kyd and Jonson and Spenser and Sidney, just to get a good grounding in Renaissance England, and you’ve taken the pile up to perhaps 300 hours.
If you had a job paying you to read forty hours a week, you could dispatch the Renaissance English—or at least a healthy sample of them—in some eight weeks. However, this doesn’t give you any time to read criticism, biographies, history, philosophy, theology, or any of the other fields important to understanding Shakespeare’s world.
Furthermore, few people can land a job that allows for forty hours of reading per week. I’ve read and taught Hamlet a dozen times, but I’m unlikely in my present employment to be able to work Titus Andronicus, which I read for the first time last year, into the curriculum. I’ll almost certainly never teach Dryden or Samuel Richardson, and I’ll never get to put Shusaku Endo on the syllabus. Those of you who do not read for part of your living have even a greater constraint placed on your achievement.
In the end, the reader cannot cover the entire field of literature. Anyone who claims to have done so is either lying or named Harold Bloom. Since your name is almost certainly not Harold Bloom—because is desperately attempting to keep up with the deluge of titles necessary to keep him Harold Bloom—you must either surrender yourself to prevarication or accept a partial knowledge of human letters as an acceptable state. (I suppose you could collapse in despair, but I don’t recommend that.)
What a sick art would be literature if it were designed to be completely mastered while at the same time making that design less attainable with each new creation. Happily, literature is not intended as some sort of obsessive mental collection. Literature helps to reveal the human condition, it explores the meaning of human existence. In that way, it is somewhat akin to human friendship. Would we consider ourselves failed humans if we were not to meet all the people on earth? Obviously not. In fact, measuring our happiness by a checklist of acquaintances would be a very facile and foolish thing indeed.
The rich literary life embraces many friends in the world’s texts. Some of these friends are boon companions, while others are passing experiences. Some we meet and don’t get on with particularly well, while others come to us, late in the day, leading us to wonder how we ever existed without their companionship.
Shusaku Endo is a new friend for me. Should I feel guilty not to have crossed his path before? Certainly not. I doubt that we’ll ever be best of friends, but that’s hardly the point. Frankly, I’m not sure that this relationship will grow further, but I am pleased to have made his acquaintance. I can ask no more from a text.

Of Cows and the Economy

Why do we have recessions in the economy? For the past couple of months, there’s been all sort of chatter in the press. “Are we in recession?” “How bad will the recession be?” “When will the recession end?” We take boom times and busts as if they were as predictable as the changing seasons and just as fickle. Does this make sense? I don’t see why it would.
Imagine if you will that we live in a cloistered little community of perhaps fifty people. Of those fifty, perhaps forty are involved in agriculture of some sort, growing crops, animals, and the like. Some of them might be bivocational. Perhaps the community’s doctor splits time between patients and potatoes. Other people might work full-time in a field that does not involve fields. Regardless of the exact numbers, we can hope that our population of fifty will produce sufficient food, clothing, housing, and the like to meet everyone’s needs. Perhaps they’ll sell off excess cream or some other commodity in order to purchase the cloth that the people in a nearby town of fifty produces in excess, but mostly, this group is self-sufficient. Would such a community ever experience a recession? If so, how would it happen?
If an agriculturally-based community were to experience drought or potato blight or mad cow disease, then we would understand a recession. In fact, in the old days, that sort of “recession” went by a different name: a famine. Is the current recession the result of such a production shortfall? No, because we aren’t ultimately an agriculturally-based community (or economy). We’re a dollar-based economy.
In an agricultural economy, wealth is measured in terms of production. For example, if my cows produce not ten but twelve healthy calves this year, then I’m twenty percent wealthier in that category. It’s a good year. Good management and good fortune can lead to this sort of result, and it benefits the entire community. The law of supply and demand suggests that if the three beef farmers in the community all have extra calves this year, then the price of steak will go down in the future. If the supply of milk cows rises, we can expect milk, butter, and cheese to be plentiful and relatively less expensive in the future. Everybody wins! The farmers sell or barter more of their product, leading to more carrots and eggs and blue jeans on their counters, while the beef-buyers get a better price.
But here’s the rub. If Farmer Abe runs fifty head on his hundred acres this year, that’s dandy. If he experiences a ten-percent increase, then he will have fifty-five head next year. As the boom times continue, he’ll have sixty and then seventy and eventually a hundred head of cattle jostling around in his pastures. What are Abe’s options? He could attempt to buy more land on which to run his blossoming herd. That’s fine, but it’s not a long-term situation. Land, as the real estate agents are apt to remind us, is something they’re not making more of. Eventually Abe’s herd overwhelms the carrying capacity of the land at his disposal. He’ll either pen his herds up in feeding pens, creating sub-standard beef, or foul his land, rendering it less useful tomorrow in order to enjoy profits today.
Now let’s think about a money-based economy rather than a cow-based one. When we expect a corporation to increase revenue and profits year after year, don’t we eventually ask them to exceed the carrying capacity of the financial system? No, money doesn’t leave manure lying around, nor does it eat grass, but it does have limits. We can’t continue to expand forever without repercussions. Those repercussions, I would argue, are called recessions, when the chickens come home to roost (or the cows come home to graze).

Envy is not a Lovely Thing

Last night I sprawled out in my living room and watched “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” where Ty and company built a new house for a single father/Marine who had lost a leg in Iraq. Since this family lives in the Kansas City area, our local news decided to make the most of the broadcast, running a one-hour special before-hand in which they, among other things, spoke with the two other families from the area who had been featured on the program.
One thing really struck me during that hour. The mother from one of those previous families told of overhearing somebody saying this: “Maybe we should adopt a bunch of kids and then we can get something for nothing.”
Why do so many people struggle with appreciating the good-fortune of others? If you want to be jealous of Eli Manning or Brittany Spears, I think I can understand that, but do these people really believe that somebody would adopt a bunch of kids just on the off chance of getting on that show? Do they think that last night’s dad lost a leg and a marriage for a new house?
Now I’m not totally naïve—a little bit, but not totally. I recognize that these people aren’t pure as the driven snow. Probably Mr. Gilyeat, the Marine from last night’s show, has his flaws. His ex-wife might well tell some unflattering tales on the man. Maybe he’s even bought a few lottery tickets or otherwise mismanaged his money, but who cares? Who among us doesn’t have a flaw or ten?
Envy is an ugly thing. When we can’t look at somebody who has experienced a blessing and simply think, “Wow, good for them!” we’re living with an impoverished spirit.
Don’t think that I’m suggesting that I’m perfect. I’ve looked at coworkers, neighbors, and friends who have something that I’d like to have myself with an envious eye. Since I’ll never slash their tires or steal their identities, the only harm in this transaction of envy comes to me. I’m diminished when I resent someone else’s good fortune, even if they don’t deserve it.

Artificial Drama

Perhaps the single stupidest television show I’ve ever encountered is Don’t Forget the Lyrics, the Fox program in which people sing karaoke, supplying a few of the words along the way. Okay, that last sentence isn’t true. The single stupidest show in history is a sit-com from the 80s in which a little girl plays a robot.
What’s stupid about the lyrics show is not the premise, which is kind of fun. The creators of that show must have immediately thought of the spin-off possibilities. They could—and maybe already have—produced computer-based games, CDs, and all sorts of other merchandise. What’s stupid is the artificial drama that these people attempt to pump into their show.
Here’s the scene. Somebody sings part of a song. A few words are left out. They have to supply the missing words. After a moment’s hesitation, the singer is asked to “lock in” their supplied lyrics, this show’s equivalent of Millionaire’s “final answer.” So far so good, but the host then makes them wait a painfully long time before revealing whether or not the answer is correct. In one case, a player had used two different “cheats.” His song was “My Eyes Adored You.” When he couldn’t nail the words, he asked to be given a multiple-choice menu. One of those three lines was correct. When that didn’t settle the answer in his mind, he asked to be given two words. The words supplied eliminated two of the multiple-choice answers. In other words, any sentient creature should have seen that only choice C could possibly be correct. There was absolutely no suspense here. Did that lead the host to immediately reveal the correctness of the player’s answer? Of course not. He made us all wait.
Artificial drama is the common denominator for reality shows. With a tension-evoking music and absurd pauses, we get dragged from commercial break to commercial break. Artificial drama attempts to make Donald Trump seem interesting. It drives Howie Mandel’s suitcase-opening game. Artificial drama is the stock-in-trade for Survivor, Amazing Race, and Oprah’s new reality competition.
The killer is that this main ingredient of “reality TV” is incredibly unreal. Forget the contrived situations and laughable premises, the phony suspense is what makes me gag at most of these offerings.