Time travel

The dining room in this part of the supper club is
 called, of course,  the Tepee Room.

We visited the 1960s last night. I'm not sure just how long this supper club has existed in Land O' Lakes, Wisconsin, but it's been there for as long as I can remember, which is at least 25 years. Going by the politically incorrect Indian motif, I'm guessing it has to go back at least 40 years, maybe more, back to the days prior to the political battles over treaty rights in northern Wisconsin. Every time we drove by it on U.S. 45, we'd say the same thing: "One of these days, we should stop there for dinner." 

The timing was never quite right, though. The Red Man is a supper club, and we'd be driving by in the middle of the day. Or maybe the timing was okay but we'd already eaten dinner at the Older Daughter's house only an hour or two before. I suppose we could have just stopped for drinks simply to see the interior, but that's not really something a person wants to do when she's still got two hours of driving ahead of her. Besides, the only true test of a supper club is to eat the food it serves.

Yesterday, however, the timing was perfect. It was late enough in the day that the supper club was open but still early enough that the parking lot wasn't packed -- that meant we could probably get a table quickly. So we stopped.

It really was like stepping back several decades in time. The interior is classic northwoods rustic -- knotty pine paneling, a taxidermy display (a cluster of fish, probably bass), a soot-covered fireplace. Service was fast and friendly, the menu completely typical for a northern Wisconsin supper club: lots of red meat in various forms plus the classic broasted* chicken. The S.O. ordered ribs, I had the broasted chicken special and then indulged in a brandy Alexander. I have no clue why I felt the urge to order an ice cream drink -- maybe it was the retro ambiance that compelled me to call for the Wayback Machine and return to the days when bartenders had to cope with sloshed housewives ordering grasshoppers and pink squirrels. I should have taken a picture: it arrived looking like a parfait from Dairy Queen with the various layers of booze and ice cream swirled elegantly in the glass.

Would we eat there again? Yes. The food was good, prices were reasonable, service was fast and friendly, and the bartender obviously knows how to do more than just pour shots of Jagermeister.

[*Why is the process called Broasting when it's actually deep fat frying in a pressure cooker?]

The Help, a review, sort of

I finally got around to reading The Help this week. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past three years, the book is a best selling novel that describes the lives of African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s. The movie version came out last year; it received several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. I didn't see the movie or read the book before we left Atlanta -- my name hadn't reached the top of the waiting list at the library.

Turned out the book was worth reading. The quality of the writing is decent, especially for a first novel, and the story line overall holds a person's interest. It didn't contain any major surprises -- I knew that life in the segregated South was a bizarre sea of contradictions, with whites paying blacks to cook, clean, take care of kids, and nurse the elderly but at the same time insisting that blacks and whites couldn't possibly drink out from the same water fountain or use the same toilets. There's some major cognitive dissonance going on when you don't want your maid pissing in the same porcelain as you, but at the same time you're eating food prepared by the maid, sleeping on sheets she washed, and living in a house she's cleaned. The servant is too dirty and/or crawling with germs to use your toilet, but you're willing to eat the soup she's cooked?

In any case, all those contradictions have been well-documented many times and from multiple perspectives, both as fiction and as autobiography (e.g., Coming of Age in Mississippi). We all also know that Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s was full of bigots, and that it was a particularly perilous time and place for anyone black who gave any appearance of supporting the civil rights movement. The Help didn't break any new ground, although there was some hoopla over the audacity of a white author daring to write in the voice of a black maid. That controversy, such as it was, struck me as flatout stupid. If writers could only write from their personal perspective, that would mean male authors couldn't have female characters in novels, young authors couldn't have anyone elderly, black authors couldn't include white characters, and you could never set a novel in a time period other than the one in which you were currently living . . . the whole point of writing fiction is being able to imagine how the world looks from a perspective other than your own.

Anyway, The Help did resonate with me. I found myself remembering my summer in Chicago as exploited labor a mother's helper many years ago. The summer of the year I graduated from high school I responded to a Help Wanted ad in the local newspaper -- Chicago families tended to advertise for  live-in help in newspapers in the western Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin; middle class urbanites apparently still viewed the northwoods as being full of potential Scandihoovian maids fresh off the boat and ripe for working for shit wages -- and was hired by a family that I'll call, for convenience's sake, the Kaplans. The deal was, if I recall correctly, $25 a week plus room and board, with Sunday morning and one weekday off.

Working for the Kaplans was an education. I went into the experience fairly naive and emerged as a nascent Marxist. It wasn't that I'd never had a job before. I'd been working since I was 12, mostly stoop labor in the summer picking strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and cucumbers but with some other odd jobs tossed in. However, the Kaplans were my first experience with an employer who seemed to confuse employees with indentured servants. They didn't go quite so far as building a separate water closet for me in the carport like one of the families in The Help does for their maid, but they came close. (Mrs. Kaplan made it pretty clear my blue collar white ass had better not ever go anywhere near the plumbing in the master bedroom.)

The Kaplans lived in a renovated brownstone in a neighborhood north of the Loop that had been posh in about 1890, had hit the skids for awhile, and was on its way back up. If I had to categorize the family politically and socio-economically, I'd say they were upper middle class liberals. Mr. Kaplan made a comfortable income working at a white collar occupation, Mrs. Kaplan got to be a stay-at-home mom (except she never was at home), and they had the requisite 2.5 kids (a boy and a girl from Mrs. Kaplan's first marriage, and a toddler from the current relationship), and they paid lip service to progressive causes like civil rights and school integration. The family was technically Jewish but thoroughly secularized -- they didn't even have a mezuzah by the door. For sure, they never went to temple and the Sabbath was a day like any other. 


As the summer progressed, I felt sorrier and sorrier for the two older kids. The toddler had it the best -- she spent her days with me. We walked to the park, we hung out with the other mother's helpers and their charges, we played with the puppy (the family had recently gotten a standard poodle), and in general the kid got to be a kid. As for the older kids, it may have been summer vacation for everyone else, but not for them. Their mother had their lives scheduled down to the nanosecond: summer school, guitar lessons, piano lessons, tennis lessons, swimming lessons, you name it. They got to rush from lesson to lesson, and come home for their evening meal of Spaghetti-Os, and then get hustled off to bed. The kids lived on a diet of Franco-American and Chef Boyardee; the poodle got chopped sirloin. When the kids weren't being hustled from lesson to lesson, they were listening to their mother's little lectures guaranteed to put them in therapy by adolescence. The son was stupid, the older daughter was unattractive. One of Mrs. Kaplan's favorite lectures to her daughter involved the crying need for rhinoplasty to "fix that Jewish nose" as soon as she was old enough. What type of mother tells a 10-year-old she needs a nose job while simultaneously instilling shame about her ethnic and religious heritage? Then again, Mrs. Kaplan's goal in life seemed to be to turn herself into a shiksa, complete with bleached blonde hair. She'd already bought herself a perfect Hollywood starlet nose.


It didn't take me long to figure out I'd been snookered. The other mother's helpers and nannies enlightened me pretty quickly to the fact I was working for a lower wage than average. The Kaplans had given me a day off that didn't synchronize with the traditional maid's day off -- no doubt a small attempt at preventing me from hanging out with other maids and finding out just how much more money and/or better working conditions I'd enjoy elsewhere. Maybe they didn't realize just how much time there is for schmoozing while sitting around watching toddlers play in a sandbox. Turned out my employers had a reputation in the neighborhood. The maids who were permanent, year-round help told me the Kaplans had a nifty habit of hiring a live-in housekeeper/nanny to work September through May for about four times what the teenage summer help got paid and then firing that person as soon as they had someone like me lined up for the summer months. 

So, in retrospect, what's the take-away, the bottom line? I guess what it comes down to is that, everything else being equal, some people are always going to be assholes. In a way, I was a lot luckier than the maids in The Help. When you're a person of color, you can never be sure if you're being treated like shit because the boss is a bigot or if you're being treated like shit because the boss is an asshat who treats everyone that way.  In my case, it was pretty clear the Kaplans were just jerks who'd try to take advantage of anyone unfortunate enough to end up working for them. Back in the 1960s, they went trolling for naive farm girls to exploit; no doubt now they're paying an undocumented immigrant with a marginal grasp of English to walk the dog.

Death might be feeling a little bummed out, but insurance companies must be rejoicing. They've just been guaranteed a shitload of new customers. One of the more amusing aspects of the entire "Obamacare" kerfuffle has been the way the tinfoil hat types (including the pundits on Faux News) have bloviated about the insurance mandate as being a government program and rampant socialism when it is the opposite -- it's a huge giveaway to private insurance companies. For me, one of life's little mysteries has been the way the Repugnicans as a party allowed their distaste for President Obama to overrule their usual love for anything that's good for big business and corporate interests -- and the Affordable Care Act certainly qualifies as something the corporatists should have loved.

Personally, I would have loved to have seen the ACA nullified so that maybe, just maybe, it would have been possible to get a single payer system in this country in my lifetime, but it looks like we're SOL on that fantasy for awhile.

How ignorant is the American public?

Every so often I think I've seen the ultimate in stupidity being mouthed (or, more accurately, typed) by the tinfoil hat types on the Internet. Then I'll make the mistake of looking at the comments following a news article or opinion piece at a site like CNN, the Washington Post, or MSN. Today's gems came from the comments opining about an article about the Supreme Court's ruling regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), television broadcasts, and indecency. Basically, the court ruled that the FCC had treated broadcasters unfairly by not warning them in advance that fleeing nudity or spontaneous profanity during a live broadcast might be subject to hefty fines. There were a fair number of reasonably sane comments along the usual lines, e.g., if people think a program is obscene they can always change the channel. Then the comment string deteriorated in a really strange direction. . . .

Bottom line, as expressed by the mouth breathers: Why was the FCC involved? After all, it's NOT a government agency.

Did these people sleep through civics classes? What type of cognitive impairment does it take to not understand that when an agency has a name like "Federal Communications Commission" the odds are it is indeed part of the federal government?

Then again, this is no doubt the same crowd that wants the government to keep its hands off their Social Security and worries about socialized medicine interfering with their Medicare. The stupid, it burns.

Trying again

I am trying again with the upside down tomato. The past two summers my efforts fizzled (sizzled?) in the Georgia heat. This year I'm hoping the plant lives at least long enough to produce a blossom or two.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with the rest of the garden, the stuff that was actually planted in a traditional fashion and is being allowed to have its roots go down and its stalks go up without any manipulation. We had so many weeks of unseasonably hot and dry weather that the cool weather crops that were planted in May are bolting straight to seed, and the stuff that went into the ground more recently has been slow to sprout, despite irrigation. We finally got some real rain, so at this point it does look like -- if nothing else -- we will have those old reliables, green beans and potatoes.

This year's variety in the upside down planter is something called "Celebrity." It's a tomato I'd never heard of before, although it did get good reviews on the Burpee's web site. (That's not where I bought it; my plants came from Pamida.)

Dirty politics

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States, and the first one to come from what today might be referred to as "outside the Beltway." Viewed by both himself and the general public as a man of the people, Jackson had never been part of the Washington elite, the political class that saw themselves as the logical heirs of Washington, Jefferson, et al.

Jackson's life was interesting, but what's intriguing me at the moment is seeing just how little is actually new in contemporary politics. You think this year's presidential campaign is turning nasty? That it was unfair of an Obama supporter to comment that Ann Romney had never worked? Every so often some pundit will call for a return to the past civility of presidential politics. Obviously, those pundits don't read history.

Back in 1828, Jackson's opponents came right out and called his deceased mother a whore who had slept with black men and sold a son into slavery. They slandered his wife, Rachel, so viciously the stress may have triggered a heart attack and caused her death -- Jackson certainly blamed his opponents, such as Henry Clay, for hounding Rachel into an early grave. Compared to early 19th century politics, we're playing the game remarkably cleanly these days.

Similarly, almost every election cycle, several suggestions for reform pop up. The two most common are direct election of the president (i.e., eliminate the electoral college and the apportionment of votes by state; make it a simple nation-wide popular vote) and change the presidential term to a single six-year stint in office instead of the current four year. You know who first proposed those reforms? Andrew Jackson in his first annual address to Congress. Today, the rationale for the latter is that it would eliminate the President's spending most of his or her first term trying to get re-elected to a second. Jackson's reasoning was that by making the presidency a single term it would eliminate the possibility of a President turning into a despot. Although the first six presidents (and as would Jackson himself) had stepped down after a second term, he had visions of a potential despot being elected who would run for repeated terms and be removed from office only by death.*

Of course, Jackson's rationale could have just as easily been that it would eliminate the perpetual campaigning. He had first run for President in 1824. Following his defeat, he immediately began building support for a second try in 1828 -- and when he arrived in Washington in January 1829, he and his supporters at once began plotting and maneuvering in preparation for the 1832 election.

There is indeed nothing new under the sun.

[*It took FDR's doing exactly that -- election to 4 consecutive terms and then death in office -- to inspire Congress to pass the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution in 1947; it limits the presidency to two terms and was ratified by the required number of states in 1951.]

I guess Communism isn't dead after all

Down in Alabama, the members of the state legislature have managed to pass legislation designed to hold off the evils of a dastardly Commie plot. As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Since September, the [John Birch Society] has sponsored a national lecture tour on the supposed dangers of Agenda 21. Using slideshows replete with images of Karl Marx and Alger Hiss, the accused communist spy who helped draft the U.N. Charter, JBS scare-mongers have fanned out across the country to warn locals of the evils of the U.N.’s sustainability initiative. Agenda 21, they claim, calls for “a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.” According to the JBS, the ultimate purpose of this decades-old plan is nothing less than a new world order in which rural regions will be depopulated and foreign bureaucrats will mandate family size here in the United States, imposing forced abortions as they do in communist China.

Apparently, these threats were enough to spook the Republican National Committee, which in January passed a resolution opposing Agenda 21, decrying the nonbinding measure as “a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” Counties in various states have adopted similar resolutions, as has the Tennessee House of Representatives. According to The New American, activists in New Hampshire are lobbying to pass anti-Agenda 21 legislation. Arizona’s state Senate this spring passed a bill similar to Alabama’s, but it died before the session ended.

Community sustainability efforts are coordinated through something known as ICLEI – the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives. Under its auspices, more than 1,000 cities and municipalities around the world, including hundreds in the U.S., have received grants (or bribes, if you agree with the JBS version of the story) that will help implement local sustainability proposals.

News of the Alabama passage heartened anti-ICLEI activists across the nation. The headline on one Virginia blog, for example, reads:  “VICTORY! ICLEI BAN PASSED ALABAMA LEGISLATURE! YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Read it and weep, globalists!”

The Alabama cities of Birmingham and Huntsville are both ICLEI members (though depending on how this law is interpreted, they may not be for long). As their residents gear up for another long, hot Deep South summer, they – and the rest of us Alabamians – can breathe a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that the communist menace of environmental protection has been beaten back from our doors.

I've been reading about the hysteria over Agenda 21 for awhile now. Paranoia about black helicopters and blue helmets has led to the defeat of land use planning for smart growth in Colorado, for example, and, as the SPLC notes, the conspiracy theorists are popping up elsewhere around the country. If it wasn't having serious consequences, it would be laughable. You know, "Omigod. The oppressive and evil one world government is going to force us to breathe clean air!!" Only the tinfoil hat types on the extreme right could manage to come up with a conspiracy theory that takes a suggestion to stop wasting resources and trashing the planet and turns it into a plot for global domination.

I'm also real intrigued by the way the tinfoil hat types are doing their best to turn sustainability ("Sustainable: a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged") into a dirty word. The stupid, it burns.