Entries from September 2002 ↓

Last week, my wife was summarily fired from her position as a store manager for one of the largest bookstore chains in the world. She worked for the company for seven years, in three stores, rising from a part-time seasonal position to manager of a multi-million dollar store. The reason she was given for her firing was that “… her employees felt that they couldn’t work with her.”

Seems strange, doesn’t it? Over the years, the company has invested tens of thousands of dollars in training Jenn to perform a store manager’s duties. They’ve mentored her, interviewed her, flown her to training sessions by the latest management gurus, provided her with books, workshops and all sorts of learning materials to get her to this position of trust and authority. Her reviews have been uniformly excellent, her store is performing 20% above expectations, the secret shoppers who come into the store have given her high marks in all the observed categories. So, you would think that the company might weigh all those positives against such a fuzzy reason as “… her employees felt that they couldn’t work with her.”

Who are these employees? She doesn’t know because the company felt they had a responsibility to protect the privacy of the individuals who complained. She also doesn’t know because these employees never came to her or to her district manager with their complaints. They didn’t have to.

This company, generally regarded as a somewhat enlightened company, has instituded a policy called “We Listen.” The way it works is this: an employee who encounters a problem in his or her day-to-day duties is encouraged to call a toll-free number and report the problem to a voicemail system. They are allowed to remain anonymous, although they are promised that there will be no retribution if they choose to surrender their anonymity. The call is logged and information about the call is forwarded to district managers and regional managers, but not to the individual store manager who may be the subject of the complaint. It is then up to the district manager to decide whether or not to take action.

My wife received several complaints — all anonymous — over the past year. The complaints were often vague and contradictory: “She very rarely praises employees for their hard work”, “She spends too much time in the back office”, “She spends too much time on the sales floor”, “She delegates too much of her duties”, “She doesn’t let other people help with her managerial tasks.” The complaints often seemed to come right after someone was passed over for a promotion.

Her district manager sat down with her once to discuss an “Action Plan”. The company has instituted formal procedures for plans such as this, including forms filed in triplicate, with one copy going to the employee, one to the district manager and one to the Human Resources department at headquarters. Jenn’s district manager used an informal process, leading Jenn to believe that the problem wasn’t terribly serious. The regional manager was reported as lacking confidence in the complaints because they were all anonymous.

Still, Jenn felt paranoid, looking at all her employees with suspicion: Is this the person complaining about me? Are they all complaining about me? Are they smiling in my face and stabbing me in the back? She thought she knew who the trouble-makers were, but she couldn’t be sure. What also bothered her was that when she asked other store managers if they were getting “We Listen” complaints, most of them said, “no”. Maybe she was doing a poor job, she thought. Maybe she was a bitch. Maybe she was unlikable. Her self-confidence began to weaken, she was having trouble sleeping, she was miserable most of the time.

Eventually, I believe, it came down to this: The number and frequency of complaints became an issue to the higher-ups. The sheer number of calls must be indicative of a problem, right? If employees are having so many issues with the manager, then something must be wrong in that store. The complainers were anonymous, but the target of the complaints was well known, so any action would have to be taken against the source of the problem. Get rid of Jenn and the problem goes away. Shine a big enough spotlight on someone and you are sure to find some petty problem or impropriety. So, they inflated some technicalities and fired my wife. And despite the weak claims otherwise, it was because of the number of anonymous, vague complaints against her — not because of the content of any of the complaints.

I believe it’ll be for the best. She’ll find another job or use the time to pursue her long-dormant photography career. She’ll be less depressed and less paranoid. She’ll have more energy instead of having the life sucked out of her by phantoms and suspicions.

Meanwhile, in Ashcroft’s America, we have our own society-wide “We Listen” program. Although the scope of TIPS has been reduced, the intent is still there and still dangerous. Don’t like your boss? Just call the TIPS-line a few times and wait till the Feds start poking around. Can’t stand your neighbor? Call the local Child Protective Services bureau on them and watch as they haul their kids away. We already look at the parent of every child with a broken bone as a suspicious case, every black man as a potential criminal, every Middle Easterner as a terrorist suspect, every cop as a baton-wielding brute, every priest as a pederast. We’re empowered and encouraged now to act on our every suspicion, our every prejudice. The Salem Witch trials and the McCarthy red-hunts of the 50s are going to pale in comparison with what we are moving into.

And it’s time to ask yourself: could your life withstand the scrutiny of Big Brother’s gaze?

In an article entitled: How to Survive in Ashcroft’s America, Anis Shivani writes about his thoughts on staying below the FBI’s radar in this Age of TIPS.

Wonder if I should file a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI to see if they have a file on me from ten years ago as a college activist. ..

But isn’t that likely to make me hot instead of cold and trigger an inquiry? Why would I be asking for it unless I had something to be concerned about? All right, save that for informational (and bragging) purposes until after 2008. . .

Occasionally visit National Review and Weekly Standard sites in case library Internet habits are being tracked; just to throw them off. . .

Boy, I’m glad I’m a regular reader of Volokh… and there is that online subscription to the Opinion Journal from the Wall Street Journal… Maybe I’ll be safe…

Log on to eblots, a fun, internet age interpretation of the Rorschach ink-blot test. Of course there’s no diagnosis offered, but — this being the internet and all — you can see everyone else’s responses… and wonder about them! [Via Stephen's Web]

Remember Tommy Flanagan? He was the pathological liar from Saturday Night Live, played by Jon Lovitz. Incapable of telling the truth, Tommy’s lies would grow, in an externalized interior monologue, punctuated with drawn out “yeaaaah”s and finished up with a “That’s the ticket!” Caught in a lie, Tommy would make the lie bigger and more outlandish, until it was so far-fetched and so unprovable that… well… could it be true?

I think our president and his cronies have quite a bit of Tommy Flanagan in them. First we were going to go after Iraq because it was part of the “Axis of Evil” and a state sponsor of terrorism. Then it was because Saddam Hussein’s government was in cahoots with al-Qaeda. Then it was because the Taliban and al-Qaeda members who’d escaped our half-hearted attempts to capture them in Afghanistan had made it over the border and were hiding out in Iraq. Then it was because they had weapons of mass destruction which they were planning on unleashing against their neighbors or us. Then it was because we had to protect the Kurdish minority in the North who were in the process of building a democratic state. Then it was because they were helping to fund the Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah in their suicide bombing campaigns against Israel. Then it was because they had been buying fissionable nuclear material from the Russian black market. Then it was because they’d been trying to buy aluminum tubes which are necessary in the centrifuging process for creating fissionable material.

Then… yeah… that’s the ticket: We’re going after Iraq because they’ve failed to heed the UN Security Council resolutions for the past 12 years. Suddenly, we had a reason which the rest of the world could support. Now the Bushies could go into their long-planned war with the world’s backing. After all, if Saddam could keep thumbing its nose at the UN, then perhaps the UN had become meaningless. You could see Perle and Wolfowitz and Rummy and Cheney all rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of imminent war. And best of all, if the UN decided to pass a new resolution against Iraq, the Imperial Boy President could ignore the niceties of Congressional approval because this was a continuation of a war which had never ended. A nice little war, no pesky Congressional inquiries, and yet another issue to keep Halliburton, Harken, Enron and the economy off the front pages. A Trifecta!

So, when Iraq announced in a letter to UN Secretary-General Koffi Annan that they would unconditionally accept the return of weapons inspectors, the Hawks were angry. “You can’t trust the Iraqis,” they said. “It’s another ploy,” they said. You could see them scrambling, and then… “This is not a matter of inspections. It is about disarmament…” So… until the weapons are destroyed, we’re going ahead with our plans for war! Yeah… that’s the ticket!

Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for his work on the Chinese resistence at Tiananmen Square, writes in his New York Times column [reg req'd] about books, easily available on the internet, which provide recipes for chemical and biological weapons. And then, in a sentence which scares me — a First Amendment absolutist — he writes, “But still, do we as a nation really want to permit books that facilitate terrorism and mass murder?”

His answer, explained in the rest of the column, is “No. We should censor these kinds of books.”

I don’t claim to speak for the nation, but, as for me, my answer is: “Yes.” I want to permit any and all books. I want to permit any and all speech. I do not want government prohibiting any kind of information whatsoever, for any reason whatsoever.

This is the slippery slope we hear of all the time, because: who will decide what information is too dangerous to publish? The Department of Homeland Security? The Justice Department? A secret court? (It must be a secret court because otherwise, the book will be entered as evidence at the trial and will be available to the public.) How will we know what books have been banned? How will we know what information is not getting through the censors. What limits will be placed on the censors?

This column particularly scares me because I don’t expect to read of the advocacy of government censorship in the pages of the Times, the newspaper which defied government bans and published the Pentagon Papers.

And I certainly don’t expect to read it in the words of a reporter who, just a week earlier wrote that one of the most regrettable aspects of these times will come to be seen as “…the way some people’s civil liberties have been steamrolled since 9/11. I fear we’ll look back on this with a hint of shame, much as we recall the abuse of ‘Reds’ after the Bolshevik Revolution and of Japanese-Americans during World War II.”

According to an article in New Scientist, a couple of scientists have moved pulses of electricity at 4 times the speed of light over a distance of 120 meters with equipment costing less than US$500 and taking less than 40 minutes to set up.

It is the peak of the pulse that “moves faster than light speed, [but] the total energy of the pulse does not. This means Einstein’s relativity is preserved, so do not expect super-fast starships or time machines anytime soon.”

A good caveat, but you have to wonder what can be achieved with this technology when the big money boys get their hands on it.

Stephen Downes writes an excellent article on why pay-for-content business models aren’t going to work on the web. Basically, he argues, the cost someone is willing to bear for even such an excellent daily newsletter as NextDraft is so ridiculously low that there is no way it could ever pay. Using some pretty interesting economic reasoning, Downes puts a value on content such as the NextDraft newsletter at approximately US$0.05 per YEAR! His advice: keep your day job and — instead of looking for direct economic benefits from the newsletter or blog or other type of website — concentrate on the related benefits. Become known as an expert in your field and generate speaking fees. Develop your blogging into a book. Use it as a reference when you jump into the world of professional journalism.

One of Downes’ points really struck me as being in accord with what I’ve been saying to anyone who’ll listen (especially my mother, who’s first question about my blog was, “Are you getting paid for it?):

[The] major issue isn’t the fact that I won’t pay. It is that you are by no means alone.There are hundreds of thousands of blog writers (half a million, according to a recent (free) MSNBC article. On top of that, hundreds of thousands more authors of various sorts, including university professors (each of whom thinks he has the one best way to teach calculus, and that the would ought to pay for it), politicians (who will now and always write for free), sports fans, pundits and consultants, and more. heck, there are even software programs out there that will do much of what you already do…

When cable TV first started, many of the channels we watch today were offered on an ,em>a la carte basis. But cable operators and cable channels soon realized that people weren’t going to pay monthly fees of US$10 for every single channel, so they packaged them into things like “Basic Cable”, “Family Cable”, etc.

I get about 100 channels and I pay about $US40/month for my cable service. Assuming US$10/month for overhead and the basic connection and taxes, my package works out to about US$0.30/month/channel. And this is for information and entertainment which I probably couldn’t find elsewhere. There is no software program (that I know of) which can gather all the entertainment and original content of Animal Planet, and yet I am paying less than US$4.00/YEAR for this programming.

Subscribing to Salon would be wonderful. It would be nice to read the non-rabid-right-wing parts of The Wall Street Journal online. I already pay for the New York Times crossword puzzles. I’d love to drop a couple of bucks here and there into the donation boxes of the dozens of blogs i read regularly. How much of the content in the blogs is original content and how much is links to other content? The commentary is the value, I know, but how much is an opinion worth?

What about if someone put together a package of newsletters, blogs, ezines, games, music and entertainment and offered it as a package deal? How do you think that would work?

I’m not a big sports fan… never have been. While my friends all collected baseball cards and played pick-up games of touch football, I collected models of spaceships and dinosaurs and read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian series. But even I, a New York City kid, knew who Johnny Unitas was. I remember thinking that the Baltimore Colts’ helmet should have a sideways horseshoe to represent a “C” for “Colts” and the fact that it was oriented in a “U” shape must have been a tribute to their most illustrious team member.

As an adoptive Baltimorean, very aware of his contributions to this city — both in action and in symbolism — I mourn his passing.

I feel so much better now, knowing that such international powerhouses as Bulgaria and Portugal are ready to support the US in its pre-emptive strike in the ongoing war against Osama bin Laden al-Qaeda Taliban Terrorism Afghanistan the Axis of Evil Saddam Hussein Iraq tyrants.[NYTimes reg req'd]

(Its probably not necessary to say, but: I’m being facetious. I mean no disrespect to the people of the great country of Bulgaria, and particularly the two Bulgarians who may, through some unlikely coincidence, be reading this. I realize that Bulgaria is the president of the UN Security Council for the month of September, and a member of the Council until next December, and therefore does have some influence in the outcome of the debate on Iraq. But I also realize that China, France and Russia are permanent members of the Security Council, and each have veto power over the Council’s decisions. None of these three seem amenable to the US’ insistence that Saddam must be removed now!)

As I drove in to work this morning through suburban Maryland, I noticed — or failed to notice — the American flags which instantaneously materialized everywhere last September 11. The red white and blue sprouted from car windows, clothing, flagpoles, televisions, even radios. “God Bless America.” “United We Stand.” “Remember the Heroes.” It even made its appearance in the form of a tiny little flag on our lawn, placed there by my wife, and now standing tattered and faded among the un-mown grass and the drought-stricken day lilies.

A confirmed cynic, I reveled in the campiness and hokiness of the jingoism of last autumn. I loved the look of confusion which George W. couldn’t wipe from his vapid face. I listened to the forced solemnity with which my friends and relatives told me, “This changes everything.” I stifled laughter as I observed our leaders attempts to rediscover the innocence and unity which permeated the country in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, knowing that this post-modern society is incapable of suppressing the self-awareness which such innocence requires.

The images that haunted me in those days immediately following the attacks were three. I still see the desperate men and women — more of them than we will ever have a full accounting of — who, faced with the impossible choice of death by fire or death by suffocation, and knowing that rescue was not in the cards, gambled on a third option and leapt to their deaths from the triple-digit floors. Cameras turned away, tapes were edited, and people only whispered about the leaps. We never heard about what happened when they hit the ground, so, in my mind, those people remain forever suspended in mid-air, hanging in the sky with the ghost-limbs of the Towers themselves.

And that is the second image which stays with me. I drove by and stepped inside the World Trade Center hundreds of times in my forty-one years. I have a very early memory (perhaps faulty) of visiting the excavations, where my father pointed out to me the massive shapes of the Holland Tunnel tubes laid bare amidst the rock and dirt which were being removed to make way for the deep roots of the towers. The Twin Towers were a yardstick for me: four towers laid end-to-end equalled the distance from my apartment to my school; one-quarter mile high meant that the Apollo astronauts travelled a distance equal to about one-million of the towers. I couldn’t picture a million, but I could certainly picture a stack of towers disappearing into the blue sky. Disappearing into the blue sky…

Now I’m older and living in Maryland, and I make the trip to New York once a month, on average, to see my parents and friends. Sometimes, it might mean extra traffic, but even now, we always make a point of driving up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway because, for a short distance, as we pass under the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, we are driving along the East River where we are afforded a magnificent view of the southern tip of Manhattan. I am always amazed by the scale of the skyline, the way it seems as impressive and eternal as the mountainscapes near my brother-in-law’s house in suburban Seattle. Watching the towers come down that day was akin to watching Mt. Rainier suddenly vanish from the Seattle landscape. The towers were a so-solid presence in my life, a symbol of a decade of progress and of the era when our country had big dreams — of building buildings to the sky, of putting men on the moon, of exploring the ocean floors. Now what small dreams does this country dream of? And first and foremost: how much will those dreams cost?

The third picture which stays with me is of the firefighters — or ironworkers or policemen or whomever — raising the flag over ground zero. All I could think of when I first saw the picture was the self-consciousness of that act. How could they create that tableau without realizing or planning their mimickry of the Marines at Iwo Jima? How could photographers not instinctively point their cameras at the sight, just like tourists coming upon a “Kodak Picture Spot” at Disney World? How could newspapers, swept along in a tide of stars-and-stripes fervor refuse to splash that picture on their front page? And how could so many fail to see that appropriating an image of do-or-die heroism does not make one heroic?

Were the people who set out to reclaim the Trade Center site heroes? Does anyone with a risky job qualify as a hero? The cops and firefighters and EMTs who went rushing into the building with no thought of personal safety, with no idea of the nature of the situation –was it over? was it just starting? — to help rescue the victims and survivors of the attacks — those were heroes without a doubt. The men and women who spent the next six months cleaning and disassembling the ruined structures, amidst a field of smoking iron, body parts and the mundane wreckage of office life — they are most of them virtuous and reverent and dedicated and worthy of respect for taking on and completing such a horrific job — but “heroes”? Use a term too lightly and it loses all its meaning.

On Iwo Jima, there were bombs falling, Japanese soldiers who had already vowed to die on the island firing at the Marines from bunkers beneath the ground. The men of Easy Company slogged up a mountain of bloodied volcanic ash to raise the flag on the highest point of the island so that every Marine would see that victory was near and continue their seemingly-hopeless fight. Three of the six flag-raisers were killed by the enemy within a week. The other three maintained for the rest of their lives that they were not heroes — that the only heroes were the dead friends they’d left behind.

The photo of the WTC moment is as false as the multi-culti recasting of the same image in bronze, where the some of the white men raising the flag were replaced by Latinos and African- and Asian-Americans — real men replaced by a metaphor, just as our retribution was aimed at a metaphor. The photo of that moment is as false as our leaders’ deciding to wage war on Iraq, then scrambling for reasons to justify the inevitable carnage. It is as false as our projecting expectations of greatness on the mediocrity who inhabits the White House, merely because he happens to inhabit the White House during a time of national crisis — and doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth, doesn’t cry for his Mommy, doesn’t do anything criminal, and doesn’t immediately launch our entire newkyoolar arsenal at whoever is “evil” or an “enemy combatant” today.

Although my company suggested I do, I’m not wearing red, white and blue today — not because of any disrespect to the thousands who died so senselessly, but because I want to show my friends, neighbors, relatives, co-workers that this country does not speak with one monolithic voice. I love my country, but I hate what the opportunist hypocrites who control it have done in my name over the past year. I would gladly die defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but those who would ask me to defend it are even now dismantling it, removing its protections one by one, until the only right that will remain is the right to carry a gun.

This screed could go on forever. I could talk about my disappointment in the Democrats who have remembered the first part of the term “loyal opposition” while completely forgetting the latter half. I could rant about the likelihood that Nike, Coke and General Electric are sponsoring some of today’s memorial services, with one eye on the flag and one eye on the up-and-coming Afghani market. I could talk about the rotten-to-the-core corporate culture whose putrescent slime-trail leads to the White House and to whatever subpoena-free hole in which our Iraqi-oil-tainted Vice President is cowering.

Instead, I’ll go home and sit with my wife on our driveway and look at our little flag and think about the thousands of New York dead and the hundreds of Pentagon dead and the dozens of Pennsylvania dead and the American servicemen and reporters dead in Afghanistan and the Oklahoma dead and the Afghani dead and the Palestinians and the Israelis and the hundreds of thousands in the original “ground zero” and the millions dying of starvation and of AIDS and of the effects of global warming… I’ll think of my nieces and nephews and how, I have suddenly realized, I don’t envy them the world they are inheriting.