The Humble Nailbanger

I used to run a fairly successful political blog, which no longer exists.  When out of work, I have several hobbies, the biggest of which is politics.  You have no idea how difficult it has been to avoid the topic here….several of the big lulls were at least partly because all I could think about was this country, the state we’re in, where we’re at as a people…and I went back and forth with myself many times about whether I should write about it.  There are a million political blogs (at least), and I don’t know that I really have much that’s productive to add to the conversation.

That being said, I’m really, truly jarred and happy with last night’s election result.  I think that my cynicism about this country and my fellow countrymen had reached such a nadir that I didn’t think that our leaders and representatives who – seeing that the plane was headed into the side of a mountain – just couldn’t bring themselves to do what was necessary to pull us up and out of the impending disaster.  I’m still skeptical, but at least I have the slightest echo of hope.

Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of satisfied and hopeful USAians today….

Ah, the internet.  Where you’re only as good as your host.  My host has seen to it that I haven’t been able to post at all, check email more than once a day or so.  It’s great, I love it.  Sorry about that.  Good thing I’m not trying to make a living on this site….

So yes, the strike is over.  And now we enter into the always awkward phase, where now you’ve been subjected to almost three weeks of how much you don’t work, and how badly you’re overpaid for the privelege of not working in their particular theater, and how x-number of you are only there because the union says you have to be, so often and venomously spewing out of the mouths of people who then whirl around and expect you to go work around the clock to get their shows back up and running.

*Awkward*

I’m glad everyone can get back to work now, and return to making a living.  We all love what we do, and I know it was bothering a lot of people that they couldn’t do it.

I’ve written before, earlier on, that this strike has been very educational for me.  I’m very pessimistic about America as “a political experiment,” or however goes the usual phrase.  Having gotten pretty radical in my younger days, I generally call it along pretty predictable lines, and in most cases rich vs. poor.  That was my feeling here, too: “Same old story, rich vs poor.”

Now, admittedly, stagehands are not poor.  But we are also not without skill, and we provide a service that makes boatloads of cash for the people we work for.  And our base rate of pay is not far above the median income…most of what we make is overtime, working long hours.

So in this case, call it “rich vs. working people.”  Call it millionaires taking money from people who have to work more than 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week to send their kids to college, own homes.   Call it millionaires charging outrageous ticket prices, blaming their labor costs, and pocketing profits so large most of us down here among the “regular people” can’t even conceive of them.  And that’s every week.

What has failed about the American experiment?  Something pretty large, when the people from whom the rich take as much as they can absolutely get away with at every opportunity actually fight so they can take more.  I’ve actually been losing sleep over this very thing.  Of course, I’m treated to the usual shit about unions by most everyone I know, I went into the business and back into union life knowing full well what I was in for, so there’s a base level of consciousness about these matters I walk with most of the time.
Or maybe that was the great American experiment….to take a country founded by the rich, set it up so they can get richer, and ensure that your best source of income, the lower classes, actually side with you to keep you that way.  In that case, bravo.  It’s working.

Or is it that the anger I felt directed at us was from people who felt slighted, and that this was actually just “little people” fighting for scraps, in these case tickets to the shows?  And that they just chose to couch it in anti-union rhetoric and talking points handed out by the League and published by most major media?
And no, I’m not a communist, not in the least.  I’m not exactly a capitalist, either, though, and it’s situations like this one right here that keep me that way.

What with the potential for strikes or lockouts in my very near future, I’m hearing a lot of blather and bluster, stories whipping all over the place. Basically what’s happening is the stagehands might strike against some of the theatres on Broadway, while the owners are threatening to lock us out. The strike is what it is, there are many issues. From where I’m standing, in television-land, it looks to me like the owners are making some serious money these days….ticket prices are through the roof, there are big names everywhere, every show is sold out, yet still they’re crying poverty. Interesting.

Now again, this is second-hand, and I really have been too exhausted to do a whole hell of a lot of research, but I’ve heard that one cost-cutting measure that was proposed was taking away the Sunday differential, which pays more for Sunday work. Sounds reasonable, right? These guys work crazy hours, 6 or 7 days a week, never see their kids (and I know, I’m the son of a stagehand, and my father left the house at 5am and got home well after 8pm for most of my childhood….), and they get paid a little extra for that on Sundays, which is what? The traditional day of rest? And now, I hear, that might be taken away.

So you’ve gotta wonder what the owner/executive/whoever was thinking in this story, which the person who told it to me swears is true:

During some of the recent talks, a head at one of the theatres asked the aforementioned owner/executive/whatever a question.

“So. Let me ask you a question. What do you do on a Sunday morning? Do you sleep in a little bit?”

“Yeah, I might get an hour or so extra.”

“Sleep in, have a little breakfast with the kids?”

“Sure, eat with my children, hang out with them, you know.  Spend time.”

“And then what? Mow the lawn, have a couple drinks?”

“Maybe. Get in a few rounds of golf. You know, relax.”

“You spend your Sunday just hanging out, relaxing, playing a little bit? Seeing your family?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, you know what I do with my Sundays? I get up at 5am, kiss my sleeping kids goodbye, and I come in here and run your fucking theatre. And you want to pay me less now?”

And from what I hear, there was no answer. The only thing that surprises me is that the guy ever answered any of those questions in the first place. He had to know something like that was coming….

DoD 101.  An introduction to the military.

I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan and I have again and again run into situations where my thinking has been fundamentally changed as a result. One good example is in this ask.mefi thread.

The asker, a waiter, talked about how he runs into “vegetarians” who say “I don’t eat meat. I’ll have the chicken.” I’ve encountered this way of thinking an untold number of times….almost as many as the number of meals I’ve had to start out explaining why I don’t eat meat and then spending the entire meal listening to long conversations about the best steak all 15 people at the table have ever had. But until now I’ve always sort of laughed it off, rolled my eyes, and said “Vegetarians don’t eat chicken. Or fish.” and just sort of let it go when whoever I was talking to started to protest.

Now? No more. Basta. For after reading Pollan’s excellent book (I really can’t recommend it highly enough) I know how much even such a seemingly unimportant thing as the name of a movement or way of life can have huge unanticipated impacts. He used “organic” as an example. Quickly, organic meant one thing for maybe 20 or so years, until agribusiness (“big food,” “corporate food”) stepped in and lobbied the government to set a definition which included a number of things which were antithetical to the movement.

It’s relevant to this discussion because I can see how a prolonged period of people referring to “vegetarians” who eat basically anything but beef really dilutes the word, and could have one or two end results:

First, as history shows with the organic movement, if big food ever lobbies for a strict “vegetarian” label on foods (which I would love), they could point to aaaaaalllll the millions of the people in the US who call themselves vegetarian but who still eat chicken, fish, pork, whatever. Then, we would have foods labelled as vegetarian but which are actually not, by the dictionary definition as well as what millions of people think and live by. As a result (along with the tendency of beef/chicken/pork producers “using everything but the moo/squawk/oink” of their respective animals) people will actually eat more meat, all while thinking that they’re being “vegetarian.” Also, as many people know, there is a tendency in this country for the press not to cover these things, or to gloss over issues which might put a crimp in the sales figures of large corporations…especially if those corporations also own newspapers. So you can throw a pretty large number of actual vegetarians into that mix, who are unsuspectingly buying “vegetarian” products and eating chicken broth, fish oil, bacon bits, whatever.

Secondly, it perpetuates the practice of ignorant people everywhere who will make dishes that have chicken or fish and then call them “vegetarian.” Like the person who asked whether the Caesar Salad (which contains anchovy paste) was vegetarian, was told yes, and then had an allergic reaction. Or the apoplectic blowout and subsequent hurt feelings all around when I was told by an Italian grandmother whose house I ate at that the sauce was vegetarian, even tho I watched her fork out huge pieces of pork and bone and whatever else and could point at the plate still sitting there on the counter. Her answer? “There’s no meat in it! I took it all out! IT’S VEGETARIAN!!!”