Free Lunch

I used to wonder why white-collar workers in America jumped at every opportunity to attend a conference somewhere. But I finally figured out the real reason why office workers flocked to conferences like flies took to shit way before conferences were even called conferences. I was in the know and even hip about the secret world of conferences and the underground cult of conference goers when most conferences were still called “conventions”.

A convention was an overnight conference held in a hotel in some far away town. Convention goers were bored office workers and frustrated white-collar middle managers who needed a little break from their daily paper-pushing routine and a lot of eagerly anticipated, devilish diversion in someone else’s back yard. Have fun and let someone else clean up the mess afterward became America’s new service-industry corporate motto. This went hand-in-hand with America’s new white-collar corporate mission: Don’t get caught.

When paper-pushing was tossed out the service industry door in the 1990s, along with the single-tasking “pencil necks” who earned their living via telephones and filing cabinets, a new age of multi-tasking “computer keyboarders” and e-mail processors took over. Still, they got just as bored and frustrated as anyone else and needed a night or two on the town. Somebody else’s town, that is, and at the company’s expense. So, they invented "conferences" because the word sounded more progressive and high-end. After all, pencil necks went to conventions to skip convention meetings and to play poker all night long, if a tawdry one-night stand or a schoolboy shaving cream battle wasn’t in the offing. Computer keyboarders, on the other hand, would attend conferences mainly to “eat free food”. As Y2K approached, the all-you-can-eat buffet replaced lascivious carousing and unfettered mischief in white-collar corporate America.

When America’s service industry discovered that its over-tasked office staffs were signing up in droves for free food, managers stopped planning so many big-budget conferences and started offering conferences on the other side of town. Lavish business conferences became simple day-trips to a prepaid food trough.

Windows 95, therefore, spawned the biggest service industry perk of all time. White-collar workers had finally found their gastro G-spot. And no one ever looked back.

Like Disco, the “Free Lunch” had arrived.

Quest For Chocolate

Way back in elementary school I’d often stop in at one of three places in town where you could buy candy and one of my favorite confections back then was a chocolate bar. Back in 1950's Appalachia there wasn’t much of a selection to choose from. You had your Hershey Bar and your Nestle bar and then in the 1960s the chocolate wizards came out with the blocky chocolate bar they called a Chunky. Still, I’d found Nirvana at an early age and it was wrapped in foil and paper and it melted quickly in the sun.

As I grew older and started getting off the school bus, I still had chocolate fever, but I was grooming my taste buds for the more exotic candy bars like Mallo Cup with the vanilla cream center, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, Three Musketeers and Snickers. Then, when I was totally hooked on nuts with my chocolate, I discovered Almond Joy, Fifth Avenue, Mars Bar and Hershey’s With Almonds. I never looked back. Well, almost.

Of course, that’s when I liked a chocolate candy bar with a soda. Now, as a grown man, I wouldn’t even think about washing down a mouthful of masticated chocolate with a bubbly soft drink. Now it’s either cold milk or hot coffee, the latter of which can cause certain unwanted side effects that will make you wish you’d had the milk instead. Or even a caffeine-free soda.

It wasn’t until I reached my forties that I discovered that I hadn’t really been enjoying chocolate all along. I’d been eating “milk chocolate”. The snobby experts on TV food shows told us that milk chocolate wasn’t even chocolate, as far as they were concerned. Real chocolate, they said, was “dark chocolate”, which contained more cocoa and less milk. I had to remind myself that these were the same people who looked down their noses at yellow mustard and who took great pains to hold their wine glass by the stem at all times.

Later, in the 21st Century, more experts explained on TV and in magazines and health pamphlets that cocoa contained “bioflavonoids” that had health benefits and could even prevent cancer. But, still, I thought, dark chocolate was bitter and tasted like a candy bar that someone had forgotten to add the rest of the ingredients to. Like sugar and milk.

By now, at age 56, I have the answer to it all. I’ll just eat two or three times as much milk chocolate and wash it down with twice as much milk. And, once in a great while, I’ll eat a little piece of Hershey’s Dark with a cup of coffee, just to be health conscious. Gain weight? Get fat? Well, yeah, there is that. Still, I’ll be better off than most Appalachian men who mellow out with Jack Daniels and Budweiser. Plus, after I’ve had my chocolate fix, I can still get behind the wheel of a car with a clear conscience.

There you go. Who says you can’t teach and ol’ dawg new tricks?

Dust Bowl Parade

America’s Great Depression began in 1929, right after the great big Stock Market Crash that same year, and it was economic hard times on a grand scale, partly caused by the Crash itself. The other reason for the Great Depression, which lasted a full decade, was the unequal distribution of wealth in America during the 1920s, which was basically a non-distribution of wealth.

In the Twenties 58% of America’s total wealth was owned by the top 1% of the population. That would be the Fords and the Carnegies and the Mellons and the Rockefellers and all the other big movers and shakers, including all the barons of oil, coal, lumber, railroading and manufacturing.

Henry Ford’s personal annual income was more than $14 million in 1929 while the average American made a mere $750 that same year. In other words, Henry Ford made as much money in 1929 as 18,000 Americans combined, which drastically illustrates the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States at that time. Industry controlled most of the wealth in America the Beautiful and the farmers – the real producers of America’s great bounty – controlled zilch, nada, nothing. Although they fed everyone. And no one in America thought this gross inequity would cause any problems for them down the road. Boy, were they wrong.

Basically, there was no middle class in the United States during the 1920s, which was America’s biggest banner decade for making money and lots of it. The only trouble was that only 1% of the country’s people were making it and we already know who they were. It gets worse.

Not only did the rich and famous and powerful have just about all the money, they wanted it all for themselves. That’s why the people who worked for the rich didn’t earn enough to do much of anything with their pittances except buy things from the rich. Often at company stores owned and operated by their employers. The U.S. didn’t want Europe selling its goods to Americans, either, and to ensure that they put such an outrageous tariff on anything coming into America that nobody in Europe could afford to ship anything over. If the rich Yanks wanted anything from Europe, hell, they’d just go over there and get it for themselves.

The American rich also liked to play with their money and their favorite game was Wall Street. They traded over a billion shares in 1928 and artificially drove the stock prices up so high that the prices of stocks no longer reflected the actual economic and fiscal performance of the companies they represented. The stock market soared. It flew high on a wave of pure confidence in American big business. But that all came to a head in October 1929 when the moneylenders and the money tenders wised up and became afraid of what they’d been doing for the past decade. That fear drove the prices of stocks back down so fast that even the ticker tape couldn’t keep up. A nation built on confidence had suddenly gone belly up due to fear. Fear of being wiped out. A self-fulfilling prophecy, indeed.

Suddenly there was no money for investment and none for paying America’s mortgages. Farmers were kicked off their farms. Folks lost their homes. People were laid off. The only real money to be made was in crime.

But the real criminals were America’s moguls and magnates, the rich who always got richer by the sweat of someone else’s brow. And these barons of bullshit never did a single day of time in a federal pen and they were all just as guilty as Al Capone. Maybe even guiltier.

The only thing “great” about the Great Depression was that it was somehow a great big surprise to everyone when they should have heard it knocking on their front door all along. Then they could have booted it the hell out before it ever had a chance to enter.

The Korean War in 100 Words or Less

This was the big retirement party President Harry Truman threw for General Douglas MacArthur in June 1950 on the Korean peninsula between mainland China and Japan. This military bash lasted clear until July 1953, long after Truman departed the White House and a grateful America put Dwight Eisenhower at the helm.

It even lasted after Truman booted MacArthur out of his own retirement party in April 1951 for being a spoiled, bad boy by trying to invite China and Russia to join the festivities. And that was because the food, lodging and fireworks had already been bought and paid for.

“Hanoi Jane” in 25 Words or Less

Jane Fonda, spoiled American actress, Jet Setter and “peace activist”, betrayed her own country with impunity as a Vietnam-War-Era traitor, anarchist and Viet Cong spy.

Always on Sunday

Back in the 20th Century, and especially before 1970 when the American family as an American institution began its fateful journey toward extinction, Moms and Dads all over America loaded up the kids into the family car and went on a Sunday drive.

The Sunday drive was as much a part of American family life in that part of the last century as the Saturday shopping trip into town and a big Sunday dinner the day after that. When both parents of many American families had to go to work in the 1960s because a dragon called inflation began burning up their pocketbooks, the weekend was the only real time for family activities.

A drive into the countryside was the most popular kind of Sunday drive in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, even though most of us here already lived out in the country. But it was great to get out of the house and out of town and on the road, to nowhere in particular. That’s what the Sunday drive was all about. Having no destination other than arriving back home after spotting as many deer as you could and listening to Mom and Dad remark about the budding trees or the mountain laurel or the fall foliage. Some Sunday drives, however, took place in the early evening and with the kiddies already in their pajamas or otherwise dressed for bed. The purpose? To put the kids to sleep and carry them out of the car afterward and directly to bed. Then Mom and Dad would have a rare evening all to themselves.

I don’t think many people go on Sunday drives anymore. If they do, it’s probably to get to Walmart and back as fast as possible. Or to get to work. That’s sad, because some of my fondest memories of childhood are being in the back seat of our Chevy Bel Air and hearing Mom suddenly exclaim, “Oh, look at all the deer!”

“The Twist” in 25 Words or Less

This early 1960's dance style, made famous by Chubby Checker, was basically just dancing with yourself and looking like you had to pee really bad.

Slam or Be Slammed

As I look back on them from the vantage point of almost forty years later, I can see why the faculty and administration at my high school disapproved of "slam books". Any grownup with any decency about him or her would have done the same. But, as juniors and seniors doing time in a penal colony as punishment for the crime of being a teenager, we prisoners needed a little diversion. And one of those diversions in 1968 and 1969 was creating and/or signing a "slam book".

What the hell was a "slam book"? It was a tablet that you had converted into a guest book of sorts so that other students could sign it. But there was a sick twist to that. A "slam book" was a way to "slam" or to get back at other kids whom you hated or disliked. Here’s how a "slam book" worked:

1) On the inside cardboard back of the tablet was a vertical list of numbers, such as 1 to 25. Beside each number, a fellow classmate would sign his or her real name or initials.

2) On each page within the tablet was the same vertical list of numbers, 1 to 25.

3) At the top of each page was a question. Some of them were quite innocent, such as "What is your favorite meal?", but most questions were loaded guns just waiting for someone to pull the trigger. Those kinds of questions made up the bulk of the "slam book" and read like this: "Who is the stupidest guy in our class?" or “What do you think of so-and-so?” or "Do you think so-and-so is ugly or cute?" and "Who do you hate the most in our class?" And so on and so forth.

4) Students answered these questions by writing on the numbered line that corresponded to the name or initials inside the back flap. Of course, you weren’t supposed to look back there. Unh, hunh.

Personally, I didn’t like "slam books". Like the faculty and staff, I thought they were a waste of paper, terribly bad behavior and very cruel to others. But I’d occasionally sign one, and I’d only answer the innocuous questions like "What is your favorite meal?". Where most other students had answered "pizza and Pepsi" or "burger, fries and Coke", I’d write "filet mignon and a nice hearty Burgundy" or something aloof and high-brow, just for the hell of it. Just to be different.

I never heard of "slam books" from any kids in the next generation that followed me. They probably had their own version of hurtful snobbery. And the kids in high school nowadays are probably text-messaging each other the same insults and nastiness, without leaving a paper trail that can get you in really deep do-do with the warden.

“Fairy Loops”

A “fairy loop” was an American slang term for the little fabric hook on the back of men’s and boys' shirts in the 1960s and they were put there by the manufacturers to hang these shirts on a locker hook or whenever a hanger wasn’t available.

These nifty little clothing hooks were not intended to show that you were a homosexual, daring bullies to call you a “fairy” while ripping them off your shirts — often tearing the shirt — as you walked down the corridor in high school. Bullies back then liked to call any male student a "fairy" if that student was better looking, well groomed, got better grades or was better liked by the girls. Go figure.

I was as "girl crazy" as the next guy in junior high and especially in senior high school. I had serious crushes on several girls in my class and carried a torch for at least one of those girls throughout my freshman year in college. None of us regular students (actually we were "pupils" because we didn't pay tuition) were fully prepared for the onslaught of hillbilly, farmboy and "greaser" redneck hatred regarding these so-called "fairy loops". The same bunch of fairy loop hunters, who were either serious "fairy phobes" or just seriously mean and hateful, even went so far as to declare that any boy who wore a red shirt on Friday was "queer".

By my senior year of incarceration for being a teenager, the incredibly stupid and nasty boys with "queers on the brain" added the warning that wearing yellow shirts on Wednesday and pink shirts on Thursday was also proof that you were "queer". This extended bully-ass manifesto gave these white-trash freaks access to a lot more "fairy loops" and the chance opportunity to destroy more personal property belonging to the smarter, friendlier and better groomed boys in the process. These guys were so stupid they didn't even realize that their ridiculous queer criteria made most of our class "queer" and the rest "queer phobes".

Now, don't jump to conclusions. I wasn't for or against anyone's "personal lifestyle choice" back then and that wasn't because I was so opened minded. No. It was because that shit wasn't even an issue back then and also because I just didn't give a shit, one way or another. I was more concerned about getting good grades to get into college and about the girls I had crushes on. For several years, I secretly imagined the "deaths" of these Nazi  fairy loop hunters and I vowed to never return to those "hallowed (hallowed, my ass) halls" ever again or, worse yet, to attend a class reunion, once I was finally set free of them and that place on graduation day. And that was a promise I never broke.

And I made that promise to myself and kept it because, unfortunately, in my 1960's high school experience, hostile redneck hillbilly asshole students were on a continual quest for “fairy loops”.

Talk about queer.

Post updated 11-9-13 for image link and for clarity.

Happy Holidays!

Michael Casher is taking a break from blogging until after the new year. He wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday season.

Big Wheels

Being ambivalent about most things allows me the freedom to sit on the fence for a spell and see both sides of the pasture. Then I don't have to jump off unprepared and step in the manure. That's the way I like it.

When I look back on America’s love affair with the automobile in the mid-20th Century, what I remember most about it was that it was both a wonderful thing and a ridiculous social phenomenon at the same time. But it was a great time to be alive and your car was as much a part of who and what you were as anything else and most Americans wouldn't have it any other way.

Cars in the 1950s and 1960s were very distinctive looking and there was a lot to look at. Not like the clones today, which are first designed in the wind tunnel for fuel efficiency and then copycat designed for style, with that cowardly fear of losing a particular market share as the second driving force. Back then, however, no one gave a damn about gas mileage and, back in the Fifties and Sixties, being different was an automaker’s key to marketing success.

Fins were in, especially on Cadillacs, Chryslers and Plymouths, despite the fact that they served no aerodynamic function whatsoever. But they looked really cool to me, as a kid growing up at that time, like fins on a rocket ship. Today they would look nothing but ridiculous but I’d love to see them make a comeback. Along with the fender. And, while they’re at it, they might as well throw in the running board. It made a great step for kids and older people.

And, man, did these big, boxy babies have real power steering and power brakes or what? You could literally stop on a dime if you touched that big-ass brake with anything more than just your toe. And you could steer a 1962 Pontiac Catalina (pictured) with only one finger. I once saw a man steer his 1962 Dodge Coronet with just his nose.

A lot of the cars in the 1950s and 1960s also rode like Cadillacs. Hell, just about all of them. They had big, sixteen-inch, bias-ply tires, a massive chassis and thick-rolled bodies that made some of these cars weigh in at two tons or more. I could lay down in the back seat of the 1968 Buick Wildcat I bought in 1980 as a grown man. And my head and feet never touched either door.

I miss the bench seat in front and the shifter on the steering column. That’s back in the days when the ignition key went into a slot on the dashboard. Right next to the Delco radio and the glove compartment with a lock on the door and a light inside. It was big enough to hold your lunch.

I think about those cars a lot these days and I pine away for one every time I squeeze into my aging 2000 Daewoo Lanos and bump my head on the rearview mirror and skin my knee on the door handle. But at least it still hasn’t rusted in the seven years I’ve been driving it. And that’s worth an awful lot to me.

“Leave it to Beaver” in 25 Words or Less

This was a 1950's TV sitcom about a brainless boy repeatedly getting into trouble and exasperating his clueless, micro-managing parents and his too-perfect-to-be-real older brother.

The Frisbee in 25 Words or Less

Playing catch with a little, plastic, flying saucer replaced baseball as the national pastime for youngsters in the 1960s and 1970s. Now dogs could play.

The In Crowd Through The Peephole

I’m going to take a big stab in the dark and suggest that the first idolized members of the American “In Crowd” were quite possibly those who disdained the boredom and responsibility of middle-class life back in the 1920s. These were the devil-may-care folks who ran with one another in a futile quest for rebellious fun that would somehow prove to be worth all the effort of deliberately trying not to fit into the everyday social landscape.

These were the people for whom the prohibition of alcohol meant very little, or nothing at all, and to whom listening and dancing to “devil music” was a freedom they felt they somehow had to earn. Most of the older folks back then, who had to stay home and keep up appearances, were Jazz Era wannabes, moms and dads who would have dropped that broom and apron and abandoned that pipe and those slippers in a New York minute (how I hate that phrase and that’s why I just had to use it here) for a chance to imbibe bathtub gin and cut a rug with someone other than their spouses.

For my money, this is where and when the “In Crowd” cut its teeth. In the “Speakeasy” world of Prohibition. And had I lived back then, I, too, would have been one of them. For me, it would have been mainly for the jazz but also for the beer and Canadian whiskey the holier-than-thou feds should have kept their stupid paws off in the first place. But, for me, it wouldn't have been an effort on my part to be “in” or to “be cool”. For my money, that’s always been a low priority, if not a total waste of time.

Before the Keepers of the Cool were alluded to as “The In Crowd”, they began cutting their wisdom teeth in the basement nightclubs of New York and Los Angeles as part of the 1950's “too cool to care” Beat generation. That would be those goatee-sporting wannabe poets and the long-haired mavens who played flute that they ran with, all wearing trademark black clothing, including the omnipresent black French beret. These rebels were more about being rebellious, in my opinion, than the Jazz Era fun junkies of the Roaring Twenties. But the Beatniks didn’t need to sneak out of the house to act "cool" and be deliberately unfathomable. They were like that at home, too.

Then along came the infamous Sixties where youths, like me, decided that it was high time to turn the world upside down and inside out under the guise of political and social responsibility. Yeah, right. The truth of the matter was that college students of that decade simply wanted to have fun with alcohol, drugs, sex, and loud music while just pretending to have a socially-responsible bone in their bodies. What the hippies and yippies and "freaks" of the 1960s inadvertently caused, however, was the birth of the most famous “In Crowd” of all time. That was the phenomenon called the “Jet Set”.

The "Jet Set" were people (mostly from Beverly Hills, Aspen and The Hamptons) who had so much money and so little time for continued observance of those damn boring American values that the USA was built on that they flew all around the world repeatedly without a mental flight plan just to prove that they could. These people were the parings that were left after the Big Apple was carved up by television and publishing movers-and-shakers who at least did something tangible with their time and money. The unwritten code of the new “In Crowd” was to spend money like it was water and hope that those who were merely middle-class and who lived in the “fly-over country” between New York and L.A. would dare to idolize you instead of wanting you dead.

The “In Crowd” in the 1980s did their bogeying in hotspots like Xenon in New York and their chomping at trendy troughs like Spago in Los Angeles, again in the hopes that their “being cool” was being noticed and worth the all the effort of getting “dressed up” or “dressed down” and spending all that money on door covers, expensive cocktails and food with European names that looked like art on their dinner plates. The “In Crowd” of the 1980s took shallowness to a new level. Their turned-up collars, pushed-up jacket sleeves, glitter makeup and shocking hairdos were part of their visual trademark of not wanting to be like everyone else. Unfortunately, when half the world thinks you’re cool as hell and copies everything you do and say, your coolness begins to wear thin, especially when the “In Crowd” moved to the high schools and shopping malls of the 1990s, where everyone was equal.

This blog is not about the 21st Century but I’ll venture to guess that members of “The In Crowd” in the new millennium are youths comprising the "inked" generation who flock to tattoo parlors the way their great-grandparents flocked to speakeasy nightclubs during Prohibition. These are the sons and daughters who have turned the movie-going experience into a confusing battle between Surround Sound and the high-contrast nano-second images of bellybuttons and butt cracks, a digital vying for what’s left of your caffeine-kicked and sugar-laden mind.

“The In Crowd” somehow grew and grew during the latter portion of the 20th Century until it's now the bigger part of who we are as Americans. That’s the part of us that rebels against just about everything we were once taught and told. How this can be any degree of “cool” is a mystery I, myself, may never fathom.

The First Great Big War

Before the world started numbering its global conflicts, the war in Europe that began on August 1, 1914 when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, was called ‘The Great War” by the many hapless soldiers who fought in it, not World War I. Of course, the word “great” meant “on a grand scale” or “bigger than normal” back then. That kind of thing. Not “wonderful”, as the word “great” is often misused today.

The underlying cause of this so-called “Great War” was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the presumed heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This touchy, rich and spoiled prick was shot and killed by a Serbian assassin in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia on June 28th, 1914. Apparently, this royal jerk had slapped some touchy and defensive Serbian prick beforehand with his royal gloves, an act which, naturally, demanded retribution in the archaic, Old World tradition of vengeance. Of course, this cause-and-effect has never been verified. But it sure sounds like a good reason for Neanderthal thinkers to start a great big war.

What ensued after the declaration of war against Serbia by Austria-Hungary was a war on a scale the world had never seen before. And that was because Germany saw an opportunity to turn this local European conflict into wartime prosperity. Hell, nothing boosts a country’s economy like a long, dragged out war. And World War I was certainly that.

Costing $186 billion (don’t forget, this was between 1914 and 1918, when a dollar was worth 100 cents and not 2 cents) and eventually involving 32 nations, the lives of over 8.5 million people, with 22 million more people wounded, “The Great War” may have been stylish as hell for the British and German officers who fought in this grand exhibition of nationalism (called “patriotism” today) but it was a four-year hell for the rest of the world.

Germany — a nation that needed to be squashed like a bug for its deadly, evil opportunism — would pull a similar stunt in 1939 when it would invade Poland and start World War II, an even greater war that would leave over 52 million people dead worldwide.

Say, is there an Act Three in this great big show?

The Cold War in 25 Words or Less

After World War Two Russia and the United States pretended they were now enemies instead of the allies who helped put Hitler out of business.

Disco’s 15 Minutes

Future Past
Disco  Link

By the late 1970s a lot of people had gotten pretty tired of what had been left of the American pop music scene after the British Rock invasion in the mid-1960s. Rockers were a dime a dozen by 1977 even though their music was still very popular with the beer-drinking and pot-smoking counterculture that had spawned on the heels of head-banging American rock-and-roll. Southern Boogie bands and Heavy Metal bands and even Glitter Rock were about to be upstaged by a pop music phenomenon that had less to do with rebellion and more to do with celebration.

Disco had arrived.

Disco music was much more than just another wave of night crawlers who had come out of the American nocturnal woodwork to act up, act out and carry on until three in the morning. It meant people could now dress up again when they went out. It mean that there were more musical instruments in the world than the electric guitar, harmonica and drums. There were brass horns, electronic keyboards, electronic percussion instruments now. Violins and flutes were making a comeback, only they weren’t playing stiff-necked, watered-down versions of old worn-out rock songs for elevators or mood music for a new generation of Beatniks or Hippies with no place to go as 1980 rapidly approached. Disco bands played upbeat dance music for couples to dance to while touching one another once again.

It wasn’t Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey but Disco was certainly something to celebrate in its own right. It’s just too damn bad that the new counterculture that invariably attached itself to Disco music eventually turned out to be twice as socially rebellious, drug-related and lascivious as the previous rock-and-roll and just plain rock culture. Beer and pot were quickly replaced by cocktails, cocaine and an unflagging desire to be bad when the world so desperately needed people to start being good again.

By 1980, all the counterculture freaks had arrived, as they always do whenever creative minds give the world something new and wonderful, and by 1982 Disco's death rattle was heard around the world. And, yes, Disco may have “died”, as its retractors are always fond of saying, but the Punk Rock, New Wave, “Grunge” Rock and other flash-in-the-pan musical fads that eventually replaced it unfortunately played host to the same counterculture of predictable moral decay and wanton behavior, just like a mutating virus that simply moves on once its host is sucked dry and all washed up.