this awful, awful war

I think that like many people, the war in Iraq is like wallpaper. It's somewhere there in the background and you don't' really think about it unless something changes, like someone moves a picture and you can see the difference between the faded and unfaded material. Or you look up and notice that part peeling away where you did that half-assed job of pasting.

But unlike wallpaper, we have to notice that in Iraq the unchanging fact is more and more people are dying every day. The government has decided to let in 7,000 lucky souls as refugees. But there are something like 3.2 million refugees or displaced people as a result of this disaster.

What's really gotten me going lately is listening to Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" about the complete fuckup of the post war (dis)organisation and now today I discover this. First of all it looks as though the US government had been thinking about Iraq in less than friendly terms for years. But in the run up to the invasion the planning became a fucking *PowerPoint presentation. As the officers interviewed for "Fiasco" (my next listen) said

Lt. Gen. McKiernan later told Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks (Fiasco, p. 75):

"It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense... In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides... [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

and

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told Ricks (Fiasco, pp. 75-76) that PowerPoint war planning was the ultimate insult:

"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology -- above all information technology -- has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness."

Jesus wept. So they didn't plan much, they completely disregard decades, hell centuries of experience, they drop what few plans there are, they steal everything that's not nailed down, put their cronies in positions of power, ruin a country, and we're supposed to just let them go on doing it.

Ok, I'm beat. Let's impeach the asshole.

*If you know me, you know how much I hate PowerPoint.

looking for work II

I think I should have mentioned that the second encyclopedia job was in DC and I was out in Virginia when the n-word incident happened.

But I was back in Jersey for the Smuggler's Attic job. I was in charge of the psychedelic section, the one with the little brightly colored plastic boxes, black lights, and posters. I can't imagine the same thing in a mall now. Selling that sort of drug paraphernalia (including screens and poorly made pipes) would likely get a place closed down now - or papered with unconvincing protestations that everything in the store is ornamental or for tobacco. (Who are these things fooling?) The store also sold heavy "Spanish" furniture, easily chipped enamel kitchenware, light inexpensive cotton clothes, and cast iron candlestick holders. The floor was this red, yellow, and orange shag that had to be raked free of detritus, including gum, every morning.


Seventh job, age twenty (maybe) working in a bookstore, I think it was Waldenbooks. I'd gone back to school, art school this time. All I remember about this was shelving poetry books when I showed up after having taken acid the night before.

[Wait a minute, just before the next one I worked like a day selling sandwiches in someone's brother's shop. I'm not sure that counts, but call it 7.2.]

Eighth job, age twenty two, housekeeper for a rich family in Nantucket. They raised Weimaraner dogs. I lived in a tepee that summer. I listened to the Watergate investigation as I cleaned because the old guy in the couple was a rabid Republican and he ranted at the tv set for hours. I cut my hand open rushing to do something or other. I had the scar for years, but it's just a trace now.
I met one of my best friends that summer.

Ninth job, age twenty-two, kitchen help in a Nantucket nursing home. I don't know about now, but back when I lived on the island, there were no, zero, not any jobs after Labor Day. Smart people had saved enough or had something to tide them over. I'd actually saved some money and was planning to go to Mexico and paint, but things sort of took a detour. I never left and this was about all there was for jobs come October. I rarely saw the people in Our Island Home, I sliced butter and put it on pats, arranged plates and shoved dishes into the dishwasher. I lasted two months, which was something of a record for summer people.

Tenth job, age twenty three, nanny for a rich family in San Francisco. Through some judicious lying and support from back East (thanks, Susan!) I got this job through an agency. Come to think of it, they'd probably have sent anyone short of an ax murderer out to the Hamm house. They'd gone through something like thirteen nannies in nine years, according to the nine-year old girl. Living in jobs are the worst. Unless you're out of the building, there's no way that you're off duty until everyone in the house has gone to sleep or passed out. I went out dancing a lot when I had that job, stumbling in at three, up at six-thirty for the kids' breakfast. But I saw La Jolla and Jupiter Island in Florida. I smelled my first swamp fire and had my first grapefruit from the tree, little brownish, greenish fruit, incredibly sweet.

Eleventh job, age twenty-three, cashier at Stanyan Street Foods. I don't think this lasted very long, because U can barely remember anything about it. This was my first job in natural foods, but not my last.

Twelfth job, age twenty-three, handyperson for a woman who bought houses, rehabbed them and sold them. I think one of the houses that I worked on isn't too far from where I live now in Emeryville, though I couldn't find it for the life of me. It was a nondescript little bungalow, but the wainscoting in the bathroom was pure redwood under decades of paint.
Margaret Pillow, the boss, paid women less than she did the men she hired, but considered herself a feminist because she was hiring women in trade work in the first place. I'm not sure that attitude's all that uncommon even now. I made five dollars and hour, but I didn't always work. I had no car and walked everywhere.

looking for work

I might have been doing this seven or so months ago if I hadn't gotten sidelined by working at Trader Joe's. I made a couple of shaky attempts at finding a new job before I left CSUMB, but my heart, or perhaps my brain, wasn't in it. Now, by quitting TJ's, I haven't left myself much choice.

So I've spent today (from about ten-thirty) to now (about one-forty) trying to type out a list of the things that I'm good at , so that I can make a new resume and start really looking. Most of the time has been spent reading blogs and my email and feeling very, very tense. I know that this stupid on a cerebral level, but on those lower (say reptilian brain) levels, I'm terrified. I can't remember when I last looked for a job. I mean look at my job history:

First job, age sixteen, receptionist for my best friend's dad. I think he asked me. It happened to be the summer of the Newark riots. I didn't listen to the radio then much more than I do now, so I had taken two buses, wondering all the while why they seemed to be running so late, before I flagged down a cab. The driver asked me where I was from and told me that I'd better get back there. "All hell is breaking loose down here." But stupid and responsible, I persevered and got to the office just in time for Dr. Nichols to look at me in shock, toss me in his car and drive me home. I saw cops driving by. One held a rifle out the window of the car, his hand wrapped in a bloody bandage. I saw a tank coming up one of the big streets. I saw kids grabbing watermelons out of a store whose window had been broken in.
That summer, aside from the riot, I learned to file, answer the phone, and discovered that I really liked canned iced tea and tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.

Second job, age eighteen, selling encyclopedias door to door in NYC. I think I found this job in the newspaper. I remember going to some office near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. They'd drive us to these poor neighborhoods uptown or in the boroughs. It seemed like the poorest people were the most anxious for their kids' futures, willing to buy these crappy (worse than World Book) encyclopedias. I got to feel so bad about it that I'd end up bobbling a sale that I could have closed. After a while, the team would get dropped off at different places, then meet up to spend the day playing handball and hanging out. They even had a field trip up to New Haven, not that I sold anymore books there.
This summer I started drinking coffee (black with three teaspoons of sugar) and smoking cigarettes (tried a bunch but settled down with Kools at some point). I went to a sensitivity workshop (I think in New Haven) which left me thinking that they're not quite bullshit, but easily gamed. I also started smoking hash that summer, so ended up (with a bunch of co-workers) too high to get it together to go to Woodstock. The day of the moon landing, it was raining with the sun shining and we were all dancing around in the street.

Third job, still eighteen, selling baby's bargain clothing at Bamberger's (long gone). Since I was making no money selling encyclopedias and college was looming, I got this job. My first for a big company and I guess my first in real retail. I had to clock in and ate lunch in the cafeteria, usually by myself because I was real shy. I saved up enough to buy a nice grey, imitation leather trench coat. (Hey, I was eighteen.)
Again a job that showed me how much most people care for their kids. The sun suit sets ten for a dollar were sort of depressing. So thin, so bright, so badly made.

Fourth, eighteen yet, doing phone sales. This has got to have been the worst job I have ever had and is why I'm usually pretty polite to telemarketers. The bosses had a phone list from who knows where that had all phone numbers by neighborhood, whether or not they were listed. That last part pissed off any number of people, who had no problem yelling at the people who'd interrupted them in the middle of dinner to sell real estate. I think it was real estate.
That was a bad one. There were I don't know how many of us working inside a smoky, windowless room that I got to on the bus, looking at lists of names and numbers.

Fifth, nineteen, selling encyclopedias again. Why didn't I learn? It's an easy job to get because no one wants to do it for very long and very few are any good at it. The guy who ran the office was a phenomenal salesman. He could have sold someone a set if he came to their door in his pajamas with a rubber chicken on his head. I think I sold two sets in a single day and then quit.
It was on this job that I got called nigger for the first and only time. It came from a couple of little kids in a yard. I wasn't afraid of them, exactly but it gave me the feeling that I wasn't very safe out there. In these door to door things, you get dropped out somewhere and hook up with your ride at the end of the shift. So you're out there all by yourself. Was coming back past their yard on my way to the pickup when a woman (I remember that she had dark hair, was on the smallish side) called out to me. She had a German accent. She made the kids apologize and said to me that she was trying to keep them from being like that, " . . but these people around here . . . ."

Sixth, nineteen, working in The Smuggler's Attic. This was a Pier One sort of place in the Willowbrook Shopping Mall in Wayne. New Jersey. I got the job because the guy who was hiring had up a side that said only people over twenty one could work there. I bullied him into hiring me.


I think I've procrastinated long enough. Time for a nap, I think. More on Smuggler's Attic and my job history later.