We Don't Need Your Culture War

 

Target kicked out an Info Wars fan who relocated all the pride items to the back of the store. The man harassed employees and customers and yelled, “your kids can’t be gay” while exiting the store. pic.twitter.com/pixyVT2Unp

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) May 29, 2023

It feeds the rich while it buries the poor--does this feel to you like a wholly grassroots deal?  It doesn't to me. This whole thing is viral in a kind of "ice-bucket challenge for shitheads" kind of way, but the thing of randos vandalizing or taking "direct action" against department stores--including bomb threats? That has a lot of LibofTikTok kind of energy. That kind of ecosystem echochambering nonsense is anything but organic. 

It feels like we're in the midst of an escalation from rabid parents being told that drag and trans-awareness was a "contagion" for their kids, to hating the whole rainbow. Nothing new happened. 

Other than Trump lost an election. See, in one cynical. shitty sense, attacks on the LGBT community are about reigniting a wedge issue of marginalizing people like the 2004 attempt at gay marriage bans or the rear-guard protection of DADT in the military (probably why social conservatives are being stupid about "wokeness" in the military right now, when radicalization is the real danger, not admirably serving queers). If they can just give local bigots the high sign to deny pumping gas for suspected gays or making them cakes or whatever, they feel like that little bit of sanctioned bigotry is a "win".

Trump Doesn't Get Out Much

 

Trump thinks you need an I.D. to buy groceries pic.twitter.com/4pzPQPeyT4

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) March 13, 2023

I snarkily suggested on Twitter that this was because he's that senior citizen buying groceries with a check but you know he has people who buy his groceries--he hasn't gone into a store to buy stuff any more than he has done any number of regular person things in his life.

But I've noticed his recent video offerings are kind of dark. Like, the visual is candlelight, not regular room brightness. And Trump seems to not be using the same makeup he usually does. He looks darker.

It's like he ran out of his usual bronzer and went with wood stain from Home Depot. It really shows his natural grain. Is there a problem here? Is there some reason he can't daywalk? Why is he slinking about in lowlight? 

I'm not saying he's a vampire who made an unholy bargain to continue on this mortal plane while being himself immortal, I'm just asking questions like any normal person would. Because this brown butter basted ass looks like special directions for the parlor before his nibs homegoing more than anything you would normally see in life. 

I hope that doesn't forebode anything bad for his health. He should enjoy what is in front of him with rude good health, if anything, 

Especially if anything. 

Labor Day, Essentially

So, as a person who was determined to be essential back in March and worked with only three unpaid days off in more or less same as normal straits and the spouse of a person who was also made essential as a grocery worker who worked for a short while far more than his usual allotment, and the relative of someone who as a nurse contracted COVID on the job and thankfully, all were young and healthy! Let's just say this Labor Day, my thoughts are with all workers who had to keep up with the COVID times, whether you got shafted entirely, had your hours reduced, or found yourself working in dangerous conditions and had to function above and beyond.

There's a kind of bias to the idea of "essential worker"--someone's paying us for our labor, so it must be worth something, whatever it is. And we are worth more than what we do for a living, even if we need work to keep our very lives together, because our jobs constitute something less than the entirety of what we are capable of.  And for those who lost jobs due to the public situation of COVID-19 spread--whose industries were harmed because of the necessary public-facing nature of those industries, nothing about the value of the work you do has changed, only the demand.

Things economically have gone awry in the US in part because of a failure to appreciate that the citizen worker is both the source and consumer of value. I'm not saying I know exactly what to do about that, but I resent when elected leaders talk about jobs in glee about gaining back half of what was precipitously lost in a short while over bad public management of a pandemic there should have been planning for, and with no acknowledgement of the lives that have been lost due to poor planning and privileging the economy over those lives.

They also need to be judged based on the products of their labors. Some may need to be made redundant.

Protecting the Brand

It seems like just yesterday, then-candidate Donald Trump was offering us an opportunity to let him fix America's branding. Today, it looks an awful lot like now-President Trump is using the White House to help his (and Ivanka's) brand.

It was kind of hard not to notice that Donald Trump hasn't divested from his various holdings, and that he uses them and sort of promotes them (as does his Press Secretary) to the extent that even the Pentagon is considering renting space at Trump Tower. For convenience, of course. It might be a bit less obvious when Melania Trump's business was promoted on the White House website, although it's really hard to miss her recent lawsuit claiming damages because all the business opportunities she might have expected as First Lady were in jeopardy due to assorted scurrilous allegations. (Said opportunities were not in any jeopardy, apparently, due to possible ethical qualms.)

But Trump's Tweeted "defense" of his daughter Ivanka's brand and her "unfair" treatment by Nordstrom seems to take on a whole other level of interest. The Tweet:

I think the thing that sticks out at me is that he's implying that Nordstrom is making a kind of moral choice rather than a business one--Ivanka is great! Nordstrom is unfair! But Nordstrom has made a point of saying this isn't anything political at all--sales for Ivanka Trump merchandise simply dropped. Are they obligated to keep lines of product in stock that they can't shift? They aren't even the only business experiencing "Ivanka fatigue". (And for a switch, Trump's Tweet about Nordstrom doesn't seem to have hurt their shareholder value.) 

But that is just a father defending his daughter's brand, right? He doesn't like to see his daughter's name-value suffer. That alone would seem touching, right there--but it didn't stay right there. He re-Tweeted this comment under his @POTUS account, which is sort of an official stamp, and then the matter was taken up in a WH press briefing, with Sean Spicer baldly stating that  

"There's a targeting of her brand and it's her name," Spicer said. "She's not directly running the company. It's still her name on it. There are clearly efforts to undermine that name based on her father's positions on particular policies that he's taken. This is a direct attack on his policies and her name. Her because she is being maligned because they have a problem with his policies."

She's not running the company, but she hasn't divested from it anymore than her father has from his. If her business is undermined by association with her father's policies and her support of them, this is happening at the consumer level. People are "voting with their wallets".  Free. Bloody. Marketplace.

And then it got absurd, when KellyAnne Conway literally turned a spot on Fox News into a commercial to promote Ivanka's stuff.  She's a White House Counselor. She's a trained lawyer. She had to know this was not ethical. But there just isn't any separating Donald Trump or his daughter as political entities from their business selves--not least of all because neither of them took steps to do so. So perhaps unpopular political views will hurt their business brand--I'm not entirely sure how this could have been unanticipated.

I do believe, however, that despite the current partnership with the Trump family, America's brand should endure.

No Black Friday--Well, For Me, Anyway

So, there is movement based out of social justice on behalf of Mike Brown and his slaying in Ferguson, which encourages people not to shop today of all days--of consumerism, the most high holy.
We all shouldn't shop today, anyway, though. I don't just say this because I'm going to be at work tomorrow at 8:30 sharpish. We shouldn't do this because people have been told they will work Thanksgiving or be fired.  We can do this in honor of striking Walmart workers.  We can jointly acknowledge that Black Friday isn't even the best day, necessarily to shop. 

I know, for me, I hate crowds and noise and bullshit. On any given Friday, I would just like to go to work. My actual shopping is a long, slow, loving hunter-gatherer experience that has a lot to do with looking at circulars and hitting the mall when it is not crowded with other bodies and touching merchandise and making thoughtful choices and not going -"Shit! Now! Buy this shit now! More shit now! ARGGGHHHH!".

The idea of standing in line in the cold outdoors in expectation of some kind of crazy sale is--so not gonna be me. So I feel like a right smug tart telling anyone this should not be you, either. But really--let this not be you. Maybe, even if consumerism has its place, making a holiday of consumerism is totally out of place, and we should really make a place for enjoying a post-Thanksgiving high that does not involve swiping a card and trying to buy love from our fam by getting them discounted consumer goods.

And yeah--consumerism sucks in general and I don't know how it relates to Ferguson, specifically. I don't care. Black Friday is tacky and sometimes even violent (anarchists targeted the Macy Parade this year)*.  I have no sympathy for it. I'm just saying, shopping does not deserve a holiday. People do.

*Nota bene: by anarchists, the newspaper article means "anarchists" and I mean "people who don't understand why a movement that signifies by pissing people off, will only serve to piss people off."

Climate Sunday: Walmart is All About Coal

Since we are this close to Black Friday anyway, and Walmart often comes up as a big old capitalist cultural debaser, what better time than now to point out they love one of the dirtier fuels, coal, so very much? 

And we aren't just talking about selling manufactured crap from China, which uses so much coal. They serve areas where they hook up to a grid where the local plants produce coal energy. They have talked about renewable energy but they could do better. Solar is actually pretty cost-effective to install right now, and while we're at it, I find there's a lot to be said for them not going for growth so much as sustainability as an important aspect of their enterprise. They could pay their workers better and live up to their green-washing, and still make a tidy profit because of their size.

Then, I might even be tempted back into one.

Know Your Class War: Walmart & McDonald's Because You KNOW

Two stories from customer-service land have warmed the cockles of my holiday-readying heart, and wonder of wonders! They come from two of the biggest names in American business! The first story come from Walmart, where bins have thoughtfully been set up to let Walmart associates donate to their less-fortunate co-workers.  The second comes from McDonald's, who have some awesome tips for helping their associates weather their meager income situation, through the power of shutting up and scrimping. 

Oh, wait. By "warmed the cockles of", I think I meant "was made sick enough to pour booze over the cockles of". Because that is so very close to an awareness that their workers don't really make enough to live on, and yet such a fail at figuring out the surest remedy of that problem. Big hint: it would be that they get paid more for the whole working thing. Your welcome, major US corporations!

Now, I know that this whole "working to make a living thing" has become a radical idea in a world where there are some people who seriously maintain that there shouldn't even be a minimum wage at all. (Like, what should people even work for? Room and board and go into debt to the boss for sundries? Wow. That almost sounds as bad as rich people paying down the national debt--huh?)

But you know, if you break it down to whether the work of any person should earn them enough to afford a "living"--what are you saying? They shouldn't be able to afford--to live? Because that is the meaning of the word, and people need things like food and water and shelter and clothes and all that.  Those basics make the worker. They make them capable of doing the work. There needs to be a non-negotiable understanding that a worker is a human being and has to be treated like one.

Otherwise, the options left are that Uncle Sam (us) picks up the tab for feeding them and basically subsidizes the profits for those at the top of those respective companies' food chains, or they really decide that associates are disposable, in the literal sense. And I just don't see that as acceptable--do you?