Another state ranking, though this time with territories: Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Utah, Florida, Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois, West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Michigan, Idaho, South Carolina, Mississippi, California, Maryland, New York, Montana, Arkansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kansas, Oregon, Colorado, Washington, New Jersey, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Maine, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Hawaii, virgin Islands, Rhode Island, Guam, Vermont, DC, American Somoa, and Northern Mariana Islands.
Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 58
Just yesterday I was looking at the catalog of a nearby college. I couldn’t believe the courses they were offering. How to use a computer. How to make a good investment. How to get a good job. How to, how to. THere was hardly one course to make the inner man grow. If you suggest that a course in ancienthistory may play a role in a person’s growth, they laugh at you. What relevance does it have to our life today?
— Sophie Mumford (interviewed by Studs Terkel)
Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 57
There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. … A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.
— Carl Jung
Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 56
In my opinion mortals have created their gods with the dress and voice and appearance of mortals. If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods’ bodies the same shape as their own. The Ethiopians say that their gods have snub noses and black skins, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
— Xenophanes
Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 55
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
— Sir James Frazer
Pinkslips For The Orange-Clad
When discussing the nature of at-will employment (which a lot of people don’t understand), I often use the example “You can be legally fired for wearing the color purple” as an example of the lack of legitimate pretext needed to fire someone. In the future, I will have to use orange, instead:
In an interview with the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, several of the fired workers say they wore the matching colors so they would be identified as a group when heading out for a happy hour event after work. They say the executive who fired them initially accused them of wearing the matching color as a form of protest against management.
Orange is widely considered to be one of the most visible colors to the human eye. Orange vests are worn by most hunters as a safety precaution and by school crossing guards. Most prisoners are required to wear orange jump suits.
The color orange is arguably Florida’s defining color. The self-described “Sunshine State” is widely known for its orange juice exports.
The law offices of Elizabeth R. Wellborn, P.A. offered “no comment” to Sun-Sentinel reporter Doreen Hemlock, but four ex-employees tell the paper they were simply wearing their orange shirts to celebrate “pay day” and the upcoming Friday group happy hour.
Outside The Beltway has a post on the subject. Joyner thought that it might be related to St. Paddy’s day, with orange being the color of the unionists. It was, however, unrelated. More than a couple of people have suggested that a company that would do this is probably not a company one should be excited about working for. One rumor making its way around is that it wasn’t actually a lunch thing, but rather a bunch of employees making fun of an executive’s fake tan. I have no knowledge that this is true, but I am going to pretend that it is. That would make it a little more understandable, I guess, but it is still indicative of a problem.
I have the distinction of having worked for one of the ten worst employers in the nation. I worked the overnight shift. This was a notoriously bad* company to work for and it, as a coworker put it, “breeds contempt.” The overnight shift had a custom of urinating on the side of the building during our nightly round (we worked the server room, but doubled as “security guards.”). Leaving aside the immaturity of urinating on the side of the building, when you have a bunch of white collar employees feeling compelled to go out of their way to do so, you have a problem. And it’s not dried urine on the building when everyone walks in to work in the morning.
The same applies to a law firm where you can get over a dozen employees to wear orange to make fun of somebody there. Given the response, one can assume it was not “all in good fun.” And if this was a light-hearted place where it was taken too far, we should be able to assume a lighter punishment than this.
I broadly support employment-at-will, even if it does lead to circumstances like this on occasion. Forcing a company to get its paperwork in order to be able to fire someone they want to get rid of doesn’t negate the overall power imbalance. It simply turns termination-without-cause into termination-with-cause a couple months later. I don’t actually extend this to various other protections, many of which I do support. At least in part because such laws are more enforceable, because it’s easier to establish a pattern of coming down too hard minorities, women, gays, the disabled or whatnot than it is to establish a pattern of firing people who wear the color orange or, for whatever reason, the employer doesn’t want to keep around.
* – Upon starting, they gave you five logoed button shirts. You could wear these, or you could wear a suit and tie. They were actually pretty nice shirts. Whenever I am back home, I make a point of wearing one of these shirts when I am about town. Very frequently, a stranger will recognize the shirt and strike up a conversation. “When did you serve?” “2003-04.” “Did they still have that policy about posting the names of the people who used the bathroom too frequently?” “No, they got rid of that a couple weeks before. They did still monitor the frequency and durations of the break.” And from there I would go into the story about how, when my roommate quit, I was personally visited by a higher-up in the company who told me that I needed to find a new roommate.
Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 54
Only the individual can think and thereby create new values for society, nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms…. The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close social cohesion.
— Albert Einstein
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (Me)
Apparently a former FBI agent and Florida cop – now a defense attorney – named Dale Carson wrote a book on “arrest-proofing” yourself. Basically, how to avoid doing obvious things that will lead to the police targeting you. I ran across this snippit on white trash:
They’re fond of the magic herb and can be seen growing their very own shipboard marijuana bushes, which they mist and fertilize lovingly. Nothing, of course, replaces beer. They consider the 24-pack and the kegger to be the most important advances in human convenience in the last century. When in need of jollification, they hie forth to roadhouses and biker bars, where misunderstandings about women sometimes require the intervention of civil authority. When their women are in need of enlightenment, they improve their lady’s understanding with a few sharp raps to the head. Their dress code runs to jeans and T-shirts. Their hair is long or shaved off, their beards scruffy, and their skin adorned with tattoos and piercings.
Got the picture? These are petty criminals, but why aren’t more of them in jail? Because they’re not totally clueless. Using the Cluelessness Quotient chart and the Golden Rules for comparison, let’s consider manners first. Although low on the social food chain, these characters don’t have a chip on their shoulders about race. They are less likely to act out in the presence of police. Generally they can stifle the profanity during those crucial minutes and mumble “Yes, officer” and “No officer” until the heat has passed.
Most important, they don’t adopt the outdoor lifestyle. They’re almost never visible walking on streets where they can be seen by cops riding around in cars. When they drive, their cars and pickups may be junkers, but they’re street legal, so they have fewer traffic stops. They get wasted indoors, where search warrants are required, and are less likely to carry dope on their persons and in their cars. Often they grow their own marijuana, so they do not buy drugs and fall victim to police stings, undercover cops, and confidential informants. Their dress is scruffy, but T-shirts and jeans blend in better than gang colors and hip-hop gear, so they don’t get targeted as quickly by police.
Once they do get arrested, they have some resources. For time management, they generally can muster an alarm clock and a watch, and in emergencies, a calendar. They often marry their women, so they have a wife, the “old lady,” in addition to Mama and sisters to pay legal fees and bail bonds. When driving, they get their buzz from beer rather than marijuana. This means that if they’re stopped and are not legally intoxicated, they will receive only a citation for driving with an open container—and not even that if they can slide the can out the rear window and into the truck bed before the cop gets close. Rednecks have some knowledge of police procedure. They know that police do not like to find guns, so they carry the all-purpose and legal knife. When they do carry guns, they are likely to have a permit.
I quoted the whole thing because I found it fascinating, but I’m going to comment primarily on a single part: It’s a product of my upbringing, I suppose, that leads me to so completely fail to understand the dressing and grooming habits of much of the underclass. In this case, “Their hair is long or shaved off, their beards scruffy, and their skin adorned with tattoos and piercings.” Even among a criminal group that seems to have a better handle on the social cues than most, you still have all this.
Their hair is long or shaved off, their beards scruffy, and their skin adorned with tattoos and piercings. I have on a couple of occasions grown my hair out. I sometimes keep a goatee. I have here and there considered a tattoo, but only on a place easily concealed. I never cease to be amazed by the sleeve tattoos. While I would not pierce my ear under any circumstances – my wife doesn’t even have pierced ears – the shift from some of piercings to those big giant holes that make it so that you can’t reverse it… I just don’t get any of this. I do understand the desire to stand out. I understand the desire to be a little weird. I never dyed my hair blue, but the idea has appealed to me.
Some of the above is aesthetic. I just prefer things plain. But it goes beyond that. The notion of doing something to myself – to make a statement, to fit in, whatever – just horrifies me. Even when I used to dress strange, or considered dyeing my hair, I took a great amount of comfort in knowing that I could, with a good shower, become a Respectable Citizen once again quite easily. Which I guess only matters if you see the appeal of being a respectable citizen to begin with.
I’m a serial loiterer. Mostly due to my smoking. I get hassled by the cops about it occasionally (though never ticketed). But even with me, a white guy with not-long hair and a conventional goatee (if I have anything at all), I notice the difference in the way I am treated when I am dressed business casual versus when I am slumming it. I can only think of one time I have ever been hassled when I wasn’t in the latter state. The rest of the time it is a combination of t-shirt and jeans (I guess I don’t get any points for it being tucked in and wearing a belt…) and in a dubious neighborhood (where, as a conspicuous white guy, they are more likely to think I am looking for drugs than that I actually live there, I would guess).
Doing something permanent to myself that would make me forever provoke caution, or that would forever disassociate me from being Respectable Citizen, is just an alien concept. Perhaps it is because I am so weird on the inside that I tend to aim for conventional on the outside.
Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 53
The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. There is a wide difference.
— Oscar Wilde
A Local Problem?
I have, through my wife’s employment, a PPO. Consequently, I haven’t bothered to get a primary care physician since with a PPO, I pick the provider and go right to the specialist I need. When I learned of a heriditary problem potentially in my heart, I went directly to a cardiologist. (I didn’t inherit the problem, as it turns out.) But when it comes to a series of more generalized sorts of symptoms, I’m not going to make an armchair diagnosis and go to the appropriate specialist, because of the hammer-nail phenomenon, which would tend to reinforce my untrained, unskilled, and more often than non erroneous self-diagnosis.
So after my run-in with the world of illness last week, today I undertook to secure a primary physician, a general medicine practicioner, or at least an internist. My insurance gave me an impressive-looking list of local physicians from whom I might select to be my medical gatekeeper.
The first five numbers I called were out of date, not doctors, disconnected, or simply didn’t answer. The sixth doctor’s number was the local Big Medical Group, at which I’d had bad experiences poor customer service earlier. So I didn’t want them. It took until twelve doctors down the list who were credited with “accepting new patients” before I got a name that matched with what the receptionist said, and then it was voice mail. I’m still waiting for a callback.
It it just my area, or do people in other parts of the country have similar difficulties? It’s not that there aren’t doctors servicing the area — although it may be that there aren’t enough, since the doctors’ time seems to be in uniformly high demand. It’s getting an appointment with one that’s the challenge. Is this a symptom of an underserved area, or do all these doctors have enough money, or have all their practices been shut down for one reason or another, or what?