Infantile Fantasies of Omnipotence

I know, I know -- I'm saying that like it's a bad thing.  Anyway, some brief items as I sit at home today, confined by the cold weather.

"Love it," wrote a friend as she linked to this online comic about a young kid's introduction to role-playing games.  She's bi, educated, happily coupled with a woman, culturally sensitive, a Unitarian.  The kid in the comic learns that he can, within the game's world, decapitate an enemy with a broadsword and toss the head derisively aside.  "I can do that?"  Yes he can.  "A childish action, steeming [sic] from a morbid, juvenile fury," the narrator says (though such fantasies remain a staple of gaming, including computer gaming, for adults -- it's one thing if you outgrow it, but many people never do).  The boy discovers that he can play "without board, without figurines ... then even without a character sheet or dice."  "They can call you childish, huge nerds, say that you're trying to escape reality, but your brains are a tangible component of this reality ... and within their fathomless synapses ... everything is possible" (ellipses in the original).  But "this reality" isn't reality, and even in gaming, everything isn't possible -- each world has its constraints and limits; that's intrinsic to gaming and world creation.

I suspect that these panels were intended as the beginning of a longer story.  But standing alone as they do here, they're tremendously creepy.  (Especially when they're recommended by a person who's scornful of the detachment from reality of fundamentalist Christians and conservative Republicans.  Let her who is without sin ...)  Partly my alienation is probably generational, though I grew up on superhero comics and I know the appeal of infantile fantasies of omnipotence.  Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur gave me useful insights into what they mean and why they must be outgrown.  If you want to indulge in them -- and it's valid to do so as recreation -- you must have a critical distance from them at the same time.  I don't see that critical distance here.

Democracy Now reported today that Senator Bernie Sanders is inquiring whether the National Security Agency is spying on members of Congress.  The NSA replied reassuringly that "members of Congress have "the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.'"  Which means none at all, so that's all right then.  Just asking!

Emptywheel has a useful post today on corporate media / corporate government attacks on Edward Snowden, particularly the allegation that he violated his sacred vow to be obedient and keep government secrets.  (Similar attacks were made on Chelsea Bradley Manning, you may recall.)  First, as emptywheel points out, the documents Snowden signed as a government contractor do not contain any such provisions.  Snowden recently argued (via), quite reasonably, that by revealing those secrets he was defending the Constitution.  There has been talk about an offer of "some kind of amnesty" to Snowden, but emptywheel sensibly dismisses it "as I think he could never accept the terms being offered, it arises in part out of NSA’s PR effort, and distracts from the ongoing revelations." Real amnesty or clemency would be acceptable, but who in his right mind would trust the Obama administration and the national security to offer the real thing?

But it popped into my mind as I read the post that there's an echo in the attacks on Snowden of the attacks on Phil Robertson, who was suspended by A&E because his offensive remarks about homosexuality and African-Americans and teen brides violated his sacred contract with his employer.  Those arguments came from liberals, at least some of whom approve of Edward Snowden's actions, but many of whom don't.  As I've argued, the control that corporate entities and other private-sector employers want to (and largely do) exercise over their employees is just as disturbing a threat to liberty as repressive actions by the government.  Vague and open-ended promises of compliance in order to get a job are about as morally (as opposed to legally) binding, it seems to me, as the open-ended giving of consent in the marriage contract, which was used for many years to justify forced sex in marriage.  (A wife had already given her consent to her husband as part of her sacred wedding vows, so she couldn't shirk her marital duty until death did them part.  It seems that many institutions like to extract open-ended commitments from weaker parties in contracts.)

Which reminds me, last night another liberal friend posted a link to a post -- from the corporate business rag Forbes, yet! -- about the blowback to some corporate CEOs after they announced they were going to cut back on workers' hours so they wouldn't be eligible for medical insurance.  The post mainly discusses "brand identity" but also mentions that some chains have seen declining business and therefore profits as a result of their contempt for their employees.  Papa John CEO John Schnatter, says the writer, "was forced to publish an op-ed piece where he sought to convince us that he never really intended to cut back worker hours but had simply been speculating on what he might do in response to the legislation."  This isn't exactly news, but I'm pleased to hear that the public's memory is ill-disciplined enough that these businesses are still feeling the pain a year later.

But it occurred to me: if Phil Robertson could be suspended, however temporarily, for bigoted remarks that only potentially affected A&E's ratings and bottom line, shouldn't Schnatter and other CEOs whose political agenda has demonstrably embarrassed their companies and hurt stock prices and profits be disciplined too?  Surely their employments contracts have clauses about such things. It would never happen, of course: CEOs get their salaries and stock options and bonuses even when they run their companies into the ground.

Finally, speaking of bigoted remarks, at the end of Alternative Radio today our community radio station played a song by Santee Sioux singer/songwriter John Trudell, "Bombs Over Baghdad."  I don't know if it was part of the program or a space-filler before Democracy Now, but a few lines caught my attention.  I've bolded the ear-perking bits:

Bombs over Baghdad, Bombs over Baghdad
Bombs over Baghdad, Dancers of Death
Murder in the air, with the next breath
Macho Queens selling war-makers toys
Raining Destruction, Good Old Boys
Death bringer In Queen George's Eyes
Read his lips, war-maker lies

Ah, once again a progressive shows his righteousness by calling his enemies queer.  How very Sixties.  It's good that Trudell is so harshly critical of the invasion of Iraq -- not all Native American singers have been -- but what is this fag-baiting about?  Understand, I'm not calling in the drones, nor am I saying that Trudell is a monster beyond redemption; I'm not calling for a boycott of his music; I'm saying that he's a homophobe and should called to account for it.  This isn't a white vs. Indian issue: some two-spirit folks should have a talk with him.

(That's the St. Joseph Lighthouse on Lake Michigan, encrusted in ice and snow.  Someone posted the picture to Facebook; I don't know if he was the original source. [P.S. Turns out the photographer is named Thomas Zakowski.)

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

As I'm sure everyone has noticed, after the elections there was a flurry of pronouncements by several corporate bigwigs, more in anger than in sorrow, that they were just going to have cut costs some more because of Obamacare.  Probably the most notorious was Papa John's CEO John Schnatter, but there were others.

Papa John's CEO John Schnatter says that Obamacare will result in a $0.11 to $0.14 price increase per pizza, or $0.15 to $0.20 cents per order, Pizza Marketplace, a trade publication, reports ...

“We're not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry,” Schnatter was quoted as saying in Politico. “But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb Obamacare." 

Schnatter has thrown his weight behind Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney this election season, even hosting a campaign fundraiser at his Louisville-area mansion in May. "Don’t you love this country?" Romney, who attended, asked during the event. "What a home this is, what grounds these are, the pool, the golf course."

Not too surprisingly, Schnatter backtracked almost immediately, and claimed he'd been misquoted and misunderstood.  Poor baby.  (It's hard for me to believe that a damn pizza-industry publication would misquote or misunderstand one of its own, but maybe some Communists infiltrated it.)

Today I stumbled on an interesting article, also from an industry source, which reported that

The brand perception of Papa John's, Applebee's and Denny's took a beating after high-ranking representatives of the companies said Obamacare would force them to stop building restaurants, cut worker hours and raise prices.

As the article reports, correlation doesn't equal cause, so it isn't certain that the lowered approval of these brands was a reaction to the announcements.  But it's noteworthy that people like Schnatter found it prudent to repudiate their earlier remarks, even to pretend that they hadn't made them, even before data like this turned up.  But there's something else that I take from this story.

Not all the Obamacare warnings came from the top dogs: some came from franchise owners who ran numerous restaurants, and some came from individual restaurant owners in the franchises.  We hear a lot about the practical common sense of those great job creators, the small businesspeople of America, no less than we do about the wisdom of the great entrepreneurs.  But I think that stories like this should make us all skeptical about what we hear on that score.  Schnatter, for example, claimed that Papa John's would have to raise pizza prices by 11 to 14 cents apiece to make up for increased costs entailed by providing insurance to their employees.  Those numbers have been disputed, but who knows?  Some will call me just a reflexive hater of rich people, but that's not true; I only reflexively hate rich people who are stupid, vicious, and dishonest. 

Just from a shareholder's point of view, there'd be good reason to have doubts about a CEO who took advantage of his prominence to run to the media and make Scrooge-like pronouncements that made the company look bad.  Papa John's stocks took a dive right after he vented, which probably had something to do with his recantation.  (I took that information from the same Forbes article I just linked to -- again, a business-friendly source, not the Daily Worker.)  I suspect that Schnatter pulled the 11 to 14-cent numbers out of his ass, just because he felt like throwing a tantrum over Obama's survival and the very idea of having to provide health insurance to his employees.  Which is his right in a free society, just as the reactions he got were everybody else's right.  It's nice to be reminded, though, that it wasn't just the little people, the mob, who were put off by the hysteria of Schnatter and his ilk; even the real America, the 1 percent, turned against him.

Still, the next time you hear someone babbling about the wisdom of entrepreneurs, their competence, their practical common sense, remember that you're hearing about people like John Schnatter, and he's evidently not unrepresentative of the breed. Rich guys all over America are stamping their expensively-shod feet and screaming like two-year-olds at Obama's socialist agenda.  At the very least, this is imprudent of them, since he is all that stands between them and the pitchforks.  (O faithful servant! no matter how much they abuse him, still he offers himself as a human shield, again and again.  I trust he has his reward in the life to come, by which I mean after January 20, 2017.)

Speaking of Obama, he's still making it clear whose side he's on.  The other day he told the Business Roundtable:

We’ve seen some movement over the last several days among some Republicans. I think there’s a recognition that maybe they can accept some rate increases as long as it’s combined with serious entitlement reform and additional spending cuts. And if we can get the leadership on the Republican side to take that framework, to acknowledge that reality, then the numbers actually aren’t that far apart. Another way of putting this is, we can probably solve this in about a week; it’s not that tough.

The key word for my purpose here is "entitlement."  Several of my liberal friends have been throwing tantrums of their own over that word as used by Republicans, typically having hissyfits over words rather than what they refer to.  (This, for instance.)  But they're less attentive to their god-king's use of the word.  Bear in mind that part of what Obama means by "serious entitlement reform" is cutting Social Security benefits for new retirees by raising the age of eligibility -- again -- as part of his program to cut the deficit, though Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.  The reason for making such cuts is to appease people -- mostly, but not all, Republicans -- who want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs for other, Scroogier reasons.