It's that time again, time for my annual anti-Christmas screed. Just can't get through the holidays without one. I did my annual torture session this afternoon, venturing out to the local post office to get holiday stamps. It was packed to the gills, as it always seems to be this time of year no matter when you get there. There are six service windows at the post office, and I've never seen more than two of them in use at any one time. It's really kind of amazing how unprepared people are when they show up at the post office. They bring some stuff they want to mail someone, buy one of those flat rate boxes, and bring everything up to the counter and expect the postal employee to pack it, tape it up, put the label on it, stamp it a couple of times with some ink stampers and then send it on its way. While observing all this I have to amuse myself in order not to get completely psychotic, so I imagine they're stamping rude stuff all over the package. Like "Eat Shit," "Bite Me," or "Christmas Crap." That should give Grandma pause when the package is delivered.
So after that ordeal was over I had to start decorating the outside of the house, so I went to the garage and dragged out the Big Box Full Of Holiday Joy. This is the 16th December that I have lived in my home, and you'd think I would have this decorating thing pretty well down by now. But Martha Stewart I am not. I do have the outside of the light boxes marked as to which lights go where and how the plugs get connected together without causing the fusebox to ignite in a major conflagration. There are several cacti growing in the front of my house, and this year has been a banner year for them (who could have known that plants will "grow" if you "water" them regularly?). They have grown like crazy and have stretched their fishhook-laden arms wide and far in many directions, which makes hanging the lights a bit dicey. I know that if I slipped off the small ladder I use and fell on one of them, my Christmas would be over in about two seconds.
The holiday season got an early start this year, and I was treated to my first Christmas TV commercial the day after Halloween. It was some jewelry store flogging tacky, overpriced baubles and they did a full-on Santa-and-the-Reindeer push. I looked at that and then I looked outside at the 98-degree sunshine and I thought to myself, this is going to be a long season. The commercials which continue to baffle me are the ones for the luxury car dealers, like Lexus and Mercedes. They encourage us to come to their showrooms and purchase a very expensive car for that certain-someone as a gift. Really? Giving a car as a present? That is so far off my gift-giving radar it's like science fiction to me. People actually do that? I think it's a ploy to keep the Gigantic Red Bow manufacturers in business.
But of course, it doesn't have to be so. As in past years, I choose not to participate in the hoopla, the blind greed, the crass materialism, and all the phony hokum that is part-and-parcel to the holiday season these days. I've reduced greatly the amount of time I waste parked in front of the TV, and what I do watch I choose with a lot more care, leaning toward HBO and Showtime, the commercial-free networks. I avoid like the plague the local Phoenix channels, which are pathetically, laughingly provincial in their deliberate lack of anything resembling sophistication. I guess I was spoiled after living in Washington DC and San Francisco for almost 15 years and watching the world-class television coverage of their local stations. Phoenix television is incredibly amateurish in nature, and much more suited to a medium-sized television market somewhere in the lower Midwest, instead of the sixth largest metropolitan area in the nation.
But, I digress. I'm really enjoying my time reading lots more books on my e-reader, writing my stories and my blog, spending time with my friends and my bunnies, and just relaxing at home dressed in my flannels and staying warm and cozy while an early December cold snap has the desert locked in an unfamiliar but refreshingly chilly grip.
While I would certainly never presume to tell anyone how to celebrate the holidays, I always recommend to my friends to say no to the hysterical consumerism of this season. Things always get off to a big bang with the loathsome, execrable pseudo-holiday "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, followed by "Cyber Monday" and "Green Tuesday." I'm sure in the near future they'll be coming up with other shopping themes for the rest of the week following Thanksgiving.
To that end, I ask my friends not to buy me any kind of gift this year. I have far too much stuff as it is, certainly everything I need and most of what I want. I suggest they send their money to their favorite charity (and mine is Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue), or spend it on themselves, their pets or someone who could really use it. But as I get older I realize the gift that is truly important to me and imparts a lasting feeling of gratitude, is spending time with my chosen family here in Phoenix. Whether it's sharing a meal, or a coffee at Starbucks, or just a long conversation on the phone, these types of things are the most gratifying and the most memorable to me. I've certainly forgotten whatever gifts I got five years ago, but I remember the times I've spent with people I love, and the warm friendship and camaraderie shared. That, to me, is the true spirit of the holiday.
Oh, and yes, it just wouldn't be the holiday season without the religious nuts whining and moaning about people using the term "holiday" or "Xmas" instead of "Christmas." Well guess what, Xians? Not everyone in this country celebrates Xmas. People of the Jewish faith celebrate Hanukkah, African-Americans celebrate Kwanzaa, Wiccans celebrate the Solstice, etc. But, with their usual narrow-minded selfishness and their unhealthy preoccupation with ramming their beliefs and delusions down everyone's throats 24/7, the Xians rail on and on about "their" holiday and how everyone is corrupting and ignoring it. As far as I'm concerned, they can have their holiday back with all the greed and avarice and single-minded obsession with buying and receiving crap. It makes so much more sense to celebrate the solstice, which is much more inclusive of everyone and really, that was the way things used to be before the Xians stole the pagan celebration for their own nefarious purposes.
Because as with our lives in general, it doesn't matter what you give or get, or how much junk you have when you die; what really matters is how you spend the time that you have.
Showing posts with label greed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greed. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Where's MY Million-Dollar Bonus?
The shrieking and righteous indignation over the AIG bonus payouts have been echoing far and wide across this great land of ours, and not without good reason. Apparently AIG rattles its metal cup and begs for taxpayer money with one hand, and shells out $160 million dollars in "retention bonuses" with the other. Ostensibly intended to retain top talent at whatever it is they do, these bonuses had the curious (and not exactly unexpected) effect of paying a ridiculous sum of money to people who were responsible for nearly running the company into the ground. Only in America can you be compensated with an obscene amount of money for being a completely incompetent f**k-up.
So I started thinking, how can something this absurd happen? I mean, you can't make stuff like this up. What kind of bizarro universe would you have to live in if the stupidest idiots get paid the most for screwing up the worst? Eventually I came to the realization that our system of capitalism is at its very core responsible for the Alice-in-Wonderland economics we have been witnessing of late. Capitalism happens to be the best economic system the world has come up with yet, but it has some very glaring and major pitfalls. It all revolves around the free market system; that is, if you perform a task or manufacture something, what you earn depends on what the market is willing to pay you. In the majority of instances this paradigm is pretty reliable, but it does engender some ridiculous, nonsensical and grossly injust situations. For instance, why do school teachers get paid so little, but a no-talent cipher like Kevin Federline, the ex-Mr. Britney Spears, gets paid $10,000 just for showing his miserable mug at some big party somewhere. Why is it that policemen and policewomen, who put their lives on the line for total strangers each and every day, get paid so meagerly while baseball player Alex Rodriguez signs a contract for a quarter-billion dollars for playing a game part of the year?
So again, how do things like this happen? Because our economic system is filtered through the prism of our popular culture, which for some unknown reason values the contributions of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods much more highly than those of teachers, nurses, or cops. In fact, Woods and Jordan get paid astronomical sums of money because they CAN! The capitalism system allows that to happen. You would never see something like that happening in Communist Cuba. Capitalism is about the only economic system ever created which would allow, and in fact encourage, contributions to be valued far outside any reasonable reckoning. Free market can also mean, "whatever the market will bear." Capitalism has run pretty much unfettered in the U.S. for centuries and when it's compounded by a celebrity-obsessed culture (where celebrities become rich people and rich people become celebrities for no other reason than because they are wealthy), it's easy to see how the accumulation of wealth becomes an end to itself. This nexus of celebrity and capitalism is also fertile breeding ground for a strange kind of parasitic life form exemplified by Paris Hilton; that is, someone with absolutely no value or redeeming qualities whose sole claim to celebrity is her proximity to family wealth. And with that comes an entitlement to indulge in whatever obnoxious, outrageous behavior they want to, since rich people and celebrities are different or somehow better than everyone else.
And lest you think I am unfairly picking on professional athletes, the same can be said for movie stars, rock musicians, and others who found a way to ride the capitalist gravy-train to stratospheric heights. In truth I am extremely unimpressed with athletes of all kind, and still maintain that any nurse, teacher, police officer, military person or firefighter in this country performs services of much more value on any given day than Jordan or Woods or any other athlete has ever done in their entire careers.
But without capitalism we would not have the high standard of living we do in this country. Capitalism fosters initiative, hard work, and enterprise. The lure of immense wealth entices people to invent and create, to make things better, to strive for the next level. But its dark side also brings greed and avarice. Capitalism by its very nature inevitably creates a class system, a "have" and "have-not" culture. Rampant capitalism coupled with a celebrity-obsessed culture creates ridiculous things like what we have now, where one percent of the population controls over twenty-five percent of the wealth in this country. Under what circumstances would that be considered healthy or fair? But anti-capitalism, also known as communism, has been a total and undeniable failure, as exemplified by Cuba, the former U.S.S.R and North Korea. Socialism keeps sputtering along in Canada and various European countries, but seems to be the most effective on a small scale, not in a country the size of the United States.
Back to the subject of bonuses: truthfully, I can't even imagine getting a million-dollar bonus. I wouldn't know what to do with that massive amount of money. What does a person have to do to be awarded a bonus of a million dollars at the end of the year? I can certainly see if a medical researcher finds a cure for cancer or blindness, they most definitely deserve a huge bonus, to be sure. But most people barely make a million dollars over the course of a lifetime. And what is it these Wall Street titans do? Create a lot of phantom wealth that only exists in the ledgers of accountants. Slice and dice a whole slew of bad mortgages, mix them up with some good ones, package them up as mortgage-backed securities and sell them to other greedy parasites as sure-fire, no-risk moneymakers. Then create ridiculous things like credit-default swaps which act as insurance policies against things that supposedly will never happen, but doggone it, did in fact happen and brought down Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, hobbled AIG to the point of collapse, and rattled the entire U.S. economy, once the undisputed powerhouse of the entire world in all of history, to its very foundations. So what do we do to fix things? Dole out bailouts in the form of trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, which we very well might never see again. And then give the financiers who are most directly responsible for this fiscal catastrophe huge, nonsensical bonuses.
This is where capitalism has landed us, surrounded by the fruits of our labors and also the poison of our greed. An astonishing, almost inconceivable amount of wealth has been both created and destroyed in this country over the past decade or so. Everyone is feeling the effects, and our lives have been profoundly, unavoidably changed in the past six months. Capitalism is the most viable, resilient economic system ever created, but it also has levied an extremely heavy price that we will be paying for many many years into the future.
So I started thinking, how can something this absurd happen? I mean, you can't make stuff like this up. What kind of bizarro universe would you have to live in if the stupidest idiots get paid the most for screwing up the worst? Eventually I came to the realization that our system of capitalism is at its very core responsible for the Alice-in-Wonderland economics we have been witnessing of late. Capitalism happens to be the best economic system the world has come up with yet, but it has some very glaring and major pitfalls. It all revolves around the free market system; that is, if you perform a task or manufacture something, what you earn depends on what the market is willing to pay you. In the majority of instances this paradigm is pretty reliable, but it does engender some ridiculous, nonsensical and grossly injust situations. For instance, why do school teachers get paid so little, but a no-talent cipher like Kevin Federline, the ex-Mr. Britney Spears, gets paid $10,000 just for showing his miserable mug at some big party somewhere. Why is it that policemen and policewomen, who put their lives on the line for total strangers each and every day, get paid so meagerly while baseball player Alex Rodriguez signs a contract for a quarter-billion dollars for playing a game part of the year?
So again, how do things like this happen? Because our economic system is filtered through the prism of our popular culture, which for some unknown reason values the contributions of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods much more highly than those of teachers, nurses, or cops. In fact, Woods and Jordan get paid astronomical sums of money because they CAN! The capitalism system allows that to happen. You would never see something like that happening in Communist Cuba. Capitalism is about the only economic system ever created which would allow, and in fact encourage, contributions to be valued far outside any reasonable reckoning. Free market can also mean, "whatever the market will bear." Capitalism has run pretty much unfettered in the U.S. for centuries and when it's compounded by a celebrity-obsessed culture (where celebrities become rich people and rich people become celebrities for no other reason than because they are wealthy), it's easy to see how the accumulation of wealth becomes an end to itself. This nexus of celebrity and capitalism is also fertile breeding ground for a strange kind of parasitic life form exemplified by Paris Hilton; that is, someone with absolutely no value or redeeming qualities whose sole claim to celebrity is her proximity to family wealth. And with that comes an entitlement to indulge in whatever obnoxious, outrageous behavior they want to, since rich people and celebrities are different or somehow better than everyone else.
And lest you think I am unfairly picking on professional athletes, the same can be said for movie stars, rock musicians, and others who found a way to ride the capitalist gravy-train to stratospheric heights. In truth I am extremely unimpressed with athletes of all kind, and still maintain that any nurse, teacher, police officer, military person or firefighter in this country performs services of much more value on any given day than Jordan or Woods or any other athlete has ever done in their entire careers.
But without capitalism we would not have the high standard of living we do in this country. Capitalism fosters initiative, hard work, and enterprise. The lure of immense wealth entices people to invent and create, to make things better, to strive for the next level. But its dark side also brings greed and avarice. Capitalism by its very nature inevitably creates a class system, a "have" and "have-not" culture. Rampant capitalism coupled with a celebrity-obsessed culture creates ridiculous things like what we have now, where one percent of the population controls over twenty-five percent of the wealth in this country. Under what circumstances would that be considered healthy or fair? But anti-capitalism, also known as communism, has been a total and undeniable failure, as exemplified by Cuba, the former U.S.S.R and North Korea. Socialism keeps sputtering along in Canada and various European countries, but seems to be the most effective on a small scale, not in a country the size of the United States.
Back to the subject of bonuses: truthfully, I can't even imagine getting a million-dollar bonus. I wouldn't know what to do with that massive amount of money. What does a person have to do to be awarded a bonus of a million dollars at the end of the year? I can certainly see if a medical researcher finds a cure for cancer or blindness, they most definitely deserve a huge bonus, to be sure. But most people barely make a million dollars over the course of a lifetime. And what is it these Wall Street titans do? Create a lot of phantom wealth that only exists in the ledgers of accountants. Slice and dice a whole slew of bad mortgages, mix them up with some good ones, package them up as mortgage-backed securities and sell them to other greedy parasites as sure-fire, no-risk moneymakers. Then create ridiculous things like credit-default swaps which act as insurance policies against things that supposedly will never happen, but doggone it, did in fact happen and brought down Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, hobbled AIG to the point of collapse, and rattled the entire U.S. economy, once the undisputed powerhouse of the entire world in all of history, to its very foundations. So what do we do to fix things? Dole out bailouts in the form of trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, which we very well might never see again. And then give the financiers who are most directly responsible for this fiscal catastrophe huge, nonsensical bonuses.
This is where capitalism has landed us, surrounded by the fruits of our labors and also the poison of our greed. An astonishing, almost inconceivable amount of wealth has been both created and destroyed in this country over the past decade or so. Everyone is feeling the effects, and our lives have been profoundly, unavoidably changed in the past six months. Capitalism is the most viable, resilient economic system ever created, but it also has levied an extremely heavy price that we will be paying for many many years into the future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
