Thursday, August 29, 2013

Put The Chicken Before The Nugget

There’s a fast-food worker strike brewing.  What started in NYC as essentially a protest has gained populist steam in larger cities across the country.  People working in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and similar places are agitating for an increase in their wages. The workers state that it’s impossible to live on $7 or $8 an hour in New York.  Or Chicago.  Or San Franscisco.  And they’re right.

But they’re also wrong.  These jobs – unskilled and entry-level – aren’t supposed to be jobs you make a living wage at.  These are the kinds of jobs the minimum wage laws were designed for, the kinds of jobs that the employer would absolutely pay you much less to do, if the Federal Government would only let them.  Once you’ve gone from table-wiper to order-taker to fry-o-later wrangler to grill guy, there’s really nowhere else to go unless you want to be the manager, which requires an entirely different set of skills.  Sorry, fast-food workers, but you’re not doing the kinds of jobs you’re supposed to support a family doing.

Yet… many of them are trying to do exactly that.  And failing, of course, simple arithmetic proves you can’t feed a family of four with two parents doing minimum-wage jobs.  The profile of the fast-food worker has changed over the past decade, and what was once the province of the high-school first-job-taker or retiree with too much time on his hands has now become the land of uneducated mid- to late-twenties fathers and mothers.  These are people who would once have been receptionists, or simple laborers, or factory workers.  Except those jobs don’t exist any more, and the living wages those jobs provided vanished too.

The real problem here is not that McDonald’s pays minimum wage for horrible jobs, it’s that people who would otherwise be productive members of the American workforce are relegated to those horrible jobs instead of working a solidly middle-class job they might have enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago.  Do you think a grown man with a wife and two kids actually wants to take your order at McDonald’s?  Of course he doesn’t, but it’s the best job he could get.  Which is a modern tragedy.

So what’s the solution?  If it were a simple problem I’d have a simple solution and I’d be a billionaire.  Full disclosure: I’m not a billionaire.  I do know that employers – even evil corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart who routinely abuse and take advantage of their workforce – cannot pay a family-supporting living wage for unskilled labor.  But they could pay more than they do now.  And they could pay for health care benefits.  And they could work with local employment agencies to help their mid-twenties workers who shouldn’t be trying to make a career out of a minimum-wage job in the first place.  At least part of the solution is for these fast-food companies to recognize that their workforce is drastically different now than it was even five years ago, let alone twenty, and to adjust their wages, prices, and expectations accordingly.

Another part of the solution would be to repair the middle class that the NeoCons have so expertly dismantled over the past 30 years.  That’s going to take a lot of work, because older people have just accepted the terrible changes to our society and younger people have never known anything else.  Maybe this new wave of activism and populism will shake things up again.  Fingers crossed.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

A Book A Week - Week 34: City of Bohane

This week's book:
  City of Bohane  by Kevin Barry

Grade:  A+ for originality 
             B for accessibility

You have not read this kind of novel before.  I can guarantee it.
   Many times, with many books, you know the story.  There are only supposed to be seven plots after all, which means that if you read eight books you're guaranteed to encounter a plot you've read before.  I suppose that's at least partly true with City of Bohane, it's almost like Julius Caesar as far as plot goes.  Generally speaking, of course.

But, man, the execution is stunningly unique.

I've said many times that I want fiction to transport me, to take me somewhere else, and Mr. Barry certainly did that.  Set forty years into a bleak version of the future Ireland, the plot follows Logan Hartnett - the current criminal kingpin of the city - as he deals with a challenge to his authority in the form of the man he replaced twenty-five years prior, The Gant Broderick, who has come back to town for reasons only known to himself.  That's as simple as I can make the plot, but it's far, far, far more involved than I can relay.  There are minor characters who become major, major characters who 'disappear,' twists, turn, double-dealings, triple-dealings, and base betrayals.  It's a ride.

Anybody ever read 'Ulysses' by James Joyce all the way through?  Of course you haven't, no one has.  I've read parts of it, and this book is reminiscent of Ulysses, but in a very good way.  Joyce was Irish, as is Mr. Barry, and those Irish are a clever people.  The Japanese might be weird, the Germans efficient, the Russians melancholy, and Americans crass, but the Irish are clever.  And literary.  And poetic.  I think Mr. Barry adds to the proud Irish tradition of amazing fiction.

Now for the down side.  I don't know how far my tastes will translate to the average reader.  I loved this book, but I can easily see where someone else might find it so dense and stylistic that they might abandon the effort it takes to read it.
   The author has his characters speak in a made-up patois - and there are even upper- and lower-class variations on it between characters - which I think adds to the mood and tone.  Defines it, even.  But other people hate reading dialect.  Plus, it's dialogue-heavy, so if you're not inclined to make the effort there's nowhere to go to avoid it.
   The narration is also stylized, though not as much as the dialogue.  It's not plain-jane, it's peacocking.
   Finally, while sympathetic, the characters are not particularly likeable.  This is as much by design as the dialogue and the narration, the City is intended to be a rough, corrupt, terrible place.  But sometimes readers want their heroes to be heroes instead of the least villainous of a disreputable bunch.  I loved it, but I can see where others might not.

I learned a long time ago that some of my tastes aren't for everyone.* For instance, when I drink wine, which happens very infrequently, I prefer the kind of dry red wine that makes most people pucker.  I like seriously overcooked lasagna.  I think Picasso was a better artist before he moved to Paris.  I actually like the look of the Disney Concert Hall.  You get the idea.
  I also loved this book.   I just don't think everyone will.  Maybe I'm second-guessing myself, I don't know.

If you only read certain things and don't like moving out of your comfort zone, then give this one a pass.  If, however, you like your fiction to slap you around a little before it takes you on a ride to some unknown destination, definitely give City of Bohane a read. 


* and some are very, very, very proletarian.  I do watch NASCAR every weekend, after all.


Next week:
 Bad Monkey  by Carl Hiassen
 No sci-fi, this is a contemporary mystery.  Set in Florida.  America's wang.  Where the underwhelming Book of Fate was set.  Why did it have to be Florida?

Monday, August 19, 2013

Another Day At The Grind...

This past weekend I was having breakfast with a friend of mine and I happened to look out the window to see two men passing by the cafe.  They looked pretty much like any of the other people passing by, and they seemed to be having a pleasant conversation.  I didn't really notice them other than to see that they both needed a shave.  So did I at that point - nine days without a razor - and it was no big deal, beard brothers one and all.

Fast forward about thirty minutes.  Our breakfast finished and paid for, my friend and I walked out of the cafe and on our way.  A few blocks later we came upon those same two men again.  This time they were propped up against lamp posts at a busy intersection, now wearing dirty, ripped t-shirts, with cardboard signs on their stomachs that said 'homeless, please help.'  Evidently their leisurely stroll and polite conversation had been a prelude to fraudulent panhandling.

You ever see those Roadrunner cartoons where the sheep dog and the coyote are just regular Joes working a shift?  They walk in with their lunch boxes, punch a clock, and then get to the business of cartoon anvils?  That was these guys.  Except they were going to their work of... not working.

I was incensed at first - how dare they?  Then I realized I hadn't finished that thought.  How dare they what?  Walk past a restaurant where I was eating?  Plant themselves at a busy intersection to increase the odds of getting a handout?  Ask for the handout in the first place?  What, exactly, was I getting upset about?

Then it hit me.  I was upset that this seemed to be their job.  When I saw them they were going to 'work.'  But that work involved putting on a grody shirt and pretending to be homeless.  They had probably driven in, parked down the street from the cafe, three or four blocks from their 'office' and then planted themselves where gentle souls would be assured to see them.

I used to live five blocks over and four blocks down from a Salvation Army residence, and I walked to work essentially across the street from it.  I encountered the destitute, the barely-hinged, the drug-addled, and the hopeless every single day.  I bought them cigarettes and handed them spare change and gave them $5 bills on Thanksgiving.  I know homeless people.  These guys weren't.  They were lazy.  That's what I objected to.  Sons of bitches.  They could have honed a talent - that same intersection hosts sax players and tap dancers - but instead they sat around, trying to look pitiable.

I left them alone, and later I saw them run off by the cops.  Who did not, regrettably, use their tasers.  And that's the pity.


Sunday, August 11, 2013

A Book A Week - Week 32: Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

This week's book:
  Zealot   by Reza Aslan 

Grade:  A

Score one for the academics.  In prior nonfiction by academics I have graded the work down because it tended to be... honestly, a little boring and didactic.  This one, however, is the exception.  Reza Aslan is a working academic, a scholar of religions.  He is also, no coincidence, a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside.  So he's kind of like Meg Wolitzer there.

This is the way to write a scholarly book intended for a mass audience.  If you have an idea for a nonfiction book and you need a template of how to go about writing it, this is the book you absolutely need to read.

The format is simple, hook 'em early.  The very first chapters, in which the author sets up everything else he's going to argue later, are all short.  Eight, nine pages.  Easily read, easily digested, and focused on one major point.  Each chapter made me eager to read the next, and that's always a good thing.
    After about the halfway mark the chapters get longer, about twelve to fourteen pages, and by the end of the book the chapters are twenty pages long.  Slick.  Well done.

As for the content, it's clear that the author has researched the historicity of Jesus thoroughly.  The bibliography is 20 pages long, and the Notes are 108 pages long.  Yup, 108 pages of notes.  In a mass-market book.  The author takes his scholarship very seriously.

The whole point of this book is to put the historical Jesus in context.  Not Jesus the idea, or the Savior, but the man.  The dude, if you will, who lived in Palestine in the First Century AD.*
   I know a bit about this already, I studied Latin, and I have a degree in History, and read several of the original sources he cites.  In Latin, so, yeah, I'm kind of a smarty-pants.  Mr. Aslan gets it all right.  That part of the world - the Levant - has been contentious and poorly-behaved as long as people have been alive to write about it, and the first few decades of the First Century were no exception.  Lots of politics, lots of conflict, lots of strife, lots of malcontents, lots of death.  LOTS of death.  Crucifixions all around.  The 'good old days' were actually very deadly and horrible, and the author makes this point well.

His main point, though, is that Jesus was a rabble-rouser.  He was a man very much of his time and place, and a man of his his people.  That is, of the Jews under Roman occupation of Palestine.  He dissects Jesus's words in the context of their time, showing that utterances that seem benign or even pacifistic in our age were actually very politically charged and seditious in his time.  Jesus was a zealot before there were official Zealots, is what he's saying.  Jesus was a man who challenged the status quo, when the status quo was Rome at the height of its oppressive power.

Who should read this book?  Well... if you're a particularly churchy sort that's kind of a hard call.  Sometimes people don't like their assumptions and prejudices called into question.  But if you're churchy and really want to know more about the geographical and historical context of Jesus's teachings, then by all means read the book.  If you're churchy and more of a tortoise - meaning you don't want to hear anything that contradicts what you've already decided the truth is - then you should probably give it a pass.
   If you're not churchy at all, and you want to have your head filled with details about that era, then by all means read this book.   It's really good.

* the author, being a scholar, uses CE instead of AD.  Which I hate.  The dividing line hasn't changed, and changing the name of your date designation is just an exercise in pointless, mealy-mouthed political correctness.  But it's accepted scholarship these days, so what are you gonna do?

Next week:
 City of Bohane  by Kevin Barry
 Techincally it'll be in two weeks.  I've got stuff to do next week that'll keep me from writing a review.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

A Book A Week - Week 31: The Panopticon

This week's book:
   The Panopticon   by Jenni Fagan

Grade:  A

Brutal.  So very, very brutal.  Yet lovely.

Good news, now I'm batting .500 with first novels.  The Panopticon was a very entertaining read.  And, like The Interestings, completely outside my genre comfort zone.  Maybe I can't say that any more.  Maybe this now is my genre comfort zone.  Freaky.  Mind bendy...

This is the story of a forgotten girl, Anais, someone who's fallen between the cracks of the social welfare system and is on her way to a permanent place in the criminal justice system.  It's also the story of how she copes with her bleak reality, and how she tries to make a family when she has no real family of her own, and how she deals with having very little control over her own life while abject incompetents and outright hostiles move her around like a pawn.

Drugs.  She deals with it mainly by doing drugs.  Lots of drugs.  The heroine is, essentially, high on something for most of the novel.  And the novel takes place over the course of about two months. That's a lot of drugs.  But as the reader comes to understand the bleak reality she faces daily, the reasons for her constant drug abuse become clear.  Almost acceptable.

The novel opens with Anais - not the name on her birth certificate - being taken to The Panopticon, a home for troubled youth in Scotland.  It's a tough-love facility, and her last chance before being put in a double-max security penitentiary for juveniles.  She has to make good at The Panopticon or else she's going to big-girl jail.  But the decks's stacked against her, she's got a long history with the local police, and they have her pegged as a 'Lifer,' someone who's always been in trouble and who always will.  But Anais isn't like that, not really.  Until she is.
   The thing is, Anais is convinced there's something called 'the experiment' that has been monitoring and controlling her, her family, her friends, and everyone at The Panopticon.  They're the ones responsible for her situation, they're the ones who made her, and who took away her adoptive mother.
  But is Anais really paranoid, is she making it all up, is it a coping mechanism?  Or is 'the experiment' real?

The Panopticon is written in first-person dialect, kind of like 'Huckleberry Finn,' but with a Scottish accent.  That sets the mood, and defines who Anais is.  I bought into it completely, after a few pages you get used to it, and then it becomes almost poetry.

I think the author did a great job conveying the mood, and giving the reader insight into Anais's character and the deep emotional scarring that makes her act the way she does.  Her inner dialogue reveals her as a dreamer, a gentle soul caught up in a terrible reality that was never intended for her.
    Also, the situation felt very real to me.  The kids caught in the middle, forgotten, neglected, given-up-on.  I don't know if the author has a background dealing with troubled youth, but it sure feels like she's writing from dirty, bitter experience.  Tell you the truth, in parts I got kind of pissed off, no one should be treated that way.

If I had one quarrel, it would be that one huge plot thread the author never quite wraps up.  Not sufficiently for me.  I guess that's a first novel for you.  But we do get to know, in the end, exactly who Anais really has become.

Get the damn book and read it, already.

Next week:
 Zealot by Reza Aslan
 A book about the historical Jesus, written by - gasp - a Muslim.  The human shit stains over at Fox News blew a gasket over that one.  Just made me want to buy the book all that much more.