Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

  To those about to be married: Welcome, friends. It’s good to have you here.

  THE

  PERMANENT

  UNDERCLASS

  After bagging on Salon so much in recent weeks, here’s a plug: An article today on author Barbara Ehrenreich’s descent into the underworld of the just-above-minimum-wage worker, the folks who are making $6—$8 bagging your groceries or trimming your lawn or dusting your mantle or whatever. Ehrenreich did these gigs to see how people get by near the bottom of the economic ladder, and her conclusion, which comes to no surprise to anyone who has ever actually had to work in a Joe Job: A lot of these people aren’t actually making it at all—they just live in a sort of limbo in which they make just enough to get to choose between eating and paying the gas bill every few months. And God forbid any of them ever get sick. Then they’re really screwed.

  The article struck a chord because, not to put too fine a point on it, I come from fairly white trashy background. We’re talking a real live welfare cheese eater here, folks (it comes in a metal can the size of a tom-tom. So does welfare peanut butter). I’m not ashamed of my welfare days—among other things, it’s not as if I had a choice in the matter—but I’m also fairly pleased that I’m no longer dragging along the bottom of the social net.

  However, I’m also aware how little it takes to get trapped into the permanent poverty cycle. If you ever want to know what the real difference between being poor and not being poor is, the answer is truly and astoundingly simple: It’s education. It really is. I’m the walking, talking, Web-writing proof of this. I’m the first person in my immediate family to finish high school, much less college. Consequently, I make more than all the other adult members of my family combined.

  To be sure, there are other factors involved, relating to personality and particular circumstances. However, ultimately, the only difference that counts is that I had a college diploma to wave around when I first went looking for jobs. Simply put, if I hadn’t gone to college, I wouldn’t have gotten a job working at the Fresno Bee—you can’t get a job at a newspaper of any size without a college degree anymore. If I hadn’t had a high school diploma, well. I can’t even imagine. The world would be full of jobs I couldn’t have. There are millions of Americans, with no handicap other than the lack of one or two of these diplomas, who open the want ads and see nothing but jobs that someone else will get. So, damn it, kids, stay in school.

  Every time I hear a well-fed conservative fart about how there’s no need to raise the minimum wage, I have to fight the urge to give him a punch right in his fat face. I dare any of them to make a go of it at $17,229 a year, which is the official US poverty level for a family of four. That comes out to $8.61 an hour, presuming a 40-hour work week and 50 weeks of work a year—well above minimum wage. Find an apartment (‘cause you certainly couldn’t afford a house), find a car that you can afford that won’t crap out on you and whose tank you can afford to fill, pay your gas and electric bills, pay for food and for clothing, and hope you don’t fall ill, because there isn’t a chance in hell you can afford health insurance.

  If you can manage that, then try it on the actual Federal minimum wage, which is $5.15 an hour ($10,300). Anyone who thinks the minimum wage is adequate for anything but beer money has simply never had to exist on it.

  Ironically, while I have immense sympathy for the poor schmucks who earn $6 an hour washing cars or whatever, I find that I am utterly and entirely intolerant of college-educated people who gripe about their finances. A friend and I were e-mailing each other about it the other day; she wrote “If you’re able-bodied and have a college education, there should be no whining allowed,” and I have to say that I agree with this philosophy completely.

  Despite the downturns in the new economy sector of things, unemployment nationwide is still at really low rates, 4.5% or something like, and unemployment for the college-educated is of course, even lower. Generally speaking, there is no reason a college graduate cannot work and make enough to get by pretty well. Even those people with useless degrees. After all, I have a degree in philosophy. What the hell am I ever going to do with that?

  I cheerfully note that “get by pretty well” is an economic standard, not a mental happiness standard—i.e., lots of college-educated people make enough money but are desperately unhappy with their jobs because the jobs “aren’t them,” or however you want to phrase it. I’m actually very pleased whenever someone tells me they’re unhappy with their job for a reason like this—it means the economy is so good that people can allow themselves self-pity because all their job gives them is money. You know that in the Depression, people weren’t bitching about the fact their lousy jobs didn’t allow for self-realization. Eating takes precedence over self-realization. If shallow 20- and 30somethings can gripe about needing to find themselves in their work, you’re in good times. Live it up.

  (I’ll also cheerfully note that I was one of those shallow 20somethings—I left my job at the Fresno Bee specifically because they cut my humor column and wanted me to do more straight-ahead reporting, and—stomp stomp pout pout—I didn’t wanna. It was ‘96, the beginning of the ‘Net boom. Would I have done the same thing five years earlier, when there was a recession and college grads were begging for jobs? Hell, no. Timing counts.)

  Be that as it may, the initial theory still applies—college degree, no whining. And, to be entirely honest, I think this goes double with “creative” types, who nobly starve for their art. Two words: Day Job. A Day Job is a (not-yet-digustingly-successful) creative person’s best friend. Very few people are insanely creative 24 hours a day (and those that are often have more emphasis on the insane than the creative), so why not fill those hours in which you’d otherwise be agonizing over your personal sense of self-worth with cash-generating busywork?

  I think college is the best thing that can happen to someone economically, but I also believe that with that diploma you agree to throw certain things out the window, among them the right to garner sympathy for your financial position. If you’re educated enough to get a degree, you’re educated enough to make money (I say “educated” rather than “smart,” since lots of smart people are unfortunately not educated). If you’re educated enough to make money, then go out and make it. Really, it’s not that hard. At least, not right now. And thank God for that.

  THE TERROR OF

  BAD CHOCOLATE

  Some people believe bad chocolate is like bad sex: Even when it’s bad, it’s still good. This formulation is nonsense at its root. Bad sex is definitely not still good. It’s actually tremendously depressing, sort of like getting all worked up go to Disneyland just to find that the only ride open in the whole park is the monorail to and from the parking lot—and that the monorail seats smell kind of funky.

  Secondly, bad chocolate is worse than bad sex. We accept that sex may occasionally be bad—it’s the inevitable side effect of being human and letting hormonal surges replace rational thought—but chocolate is supposed be above that. Chocolate is supposed to be an absolute good. Occasional bad sex is regrettable, but bad chocolate is a betrayal.

  What’s even worse is when you see a Bad Chocolate Moment coming, and yet there’s not much you can do about it. One of those happened last night, when Krissy tossed me a small plastic tub of something pink and asked me to open it for her. I looked down at the tub, and saw that they were, in fact, Frankford MarshMiddles Chocolate Crème-Filled (artificially flavored) Marshmallow Eggs, inexplicably left unopened during the orgy of Easter candy.

  Immediately, several issues presented themselves:

  1. For people over the age of 10, marshmallow candies are not meant to be eaten so much as they are to be used for various scientific experiments, generally involving microwave ovens, liquid nitrogen and/or Bunsen burners. That’s because people over the age of 10 generally understand that marshmallow comes from gelatin, which comes from something that was scraped off a rural route with a shovel or that once participated in the Kentucky Der
by and finished somewhere between 8th and 12th. Also the freshness of marshmallow candies has a half-life shorter than even the most unstable of transuranic elements. The tub proclaimed it was a “Resealable Stay-Fresh Tub!” which was nothing more than a contemptible lie. A stainless steel holding chamber filled with inert helium can’t keep marshmallows from going stale. All told, there are better ways of getting a sugar high than tolerating stale sugar suspensions whose origins inevitably lead back to something with a mane, big soulful eyes, and a small Guatemalan in checkered pants sitting on its back.

  2. “Chocolate Crème”—”crème” in the context of candy almost always means “unnatural chain of sucrose polymers.” It’s edible only to the extent that your white cells won’t actively attack it as it courses through your small intestine.

  3. “Artificially Flavored”—Artificially flavored chocolate is to chocolate as grape soda is to grapes, which is to say a concoction whose only relation to its natural analog is that it is within ten Pantone strips of being the same color.

  4. On top of this the marshmallow eggs looked like decapitated Peeps, and that’s just wrong.

  The artificial flavor theme was reinforced when I cracked open the tub, exposing myself to the sort of chemical smell one typically associates with killing weeds.

  I looked over to my wife. “Sweetheart,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “This might not be an optimal chocolate experience,” I warned.

  She looked at me blankly, as if this might not be an optimal chocolate experience were words from a Tristan Tzarza poem, pulled out of a hat and set down in random order and thereby devoid of all semantic value. Then, “Why did you say that? Did you eat one?”

  No,” I admitted, with my voice providing a subtext there signifying that while I might smear one across a new picture to stop the photographic development process, I wouldn’t actually put one in my mouth. “It’s just a feeling I have. I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  My wife gave me a look as if to say, you dear, silly man, give me the chocolate before I am compelled to gnaw on your aorta. So I did, and went back to the magazine I was reading.

  For this reason, I missed the part where Krissy gagged and actually spit the chocolate crème-filled marshmallow egg back into her hand rather than have it inhabit her mouth any longer. However, I didn’t miss the part where she picked up the small tub they came in and stuffed it as far down into the trash as it would go. Then she looked over with a face that suggested that she’d just been fed the rancid gut of a raccoon (which, considering what gets used to make gelatin, there’s a small possibility she had). But more than that, it was a tragic look of betrayal. Chocolate isn’t supposed to do that to your mouth. Thus the quick trash stuff. It was too late for Krissy’s innocence about chocolate to remain unshattered—but not too late to spare our daughter. By plunging the Pink Menace into the garbage, Athena might be spared the same horrible fate. Krissy did it for the children.

  As for my Krissy, I just happened to have a bag of Cadbury solid chocolate candy eggs, so quickly enough the crisis had passed. But I guarantee you from now until the end of time, I could say to her, “hey, remember those chocolate crème-filled marshmallow eggs,” and it will generate a hearty shudder. It was Bad Chocolate. And you just don’t forget a thing like that.

  THE EXISTENTIAL

  PLIGHT OF

  CHESTER CHIPMATE

  The cereal box on my breakfast table features someone named Chester, the mascot for the “ChipMates” line of cookie cereal. On it, you can see him doing his thing, opening his arms wide in celebration of the cereal brand which he is exhorting you to enjoy in all its flavorful, vitamin-enriched kidtastic goodness. He is cute and non-threatening, particularly for one who is clearly meant—by attire and accoutrements—to be a pirate. As required by the National Code of Cereal Mascots, his eyes are wide and unlidded, his eyebrows arched with pleasure and his mouth ever so slack, showing just a hint of tongue, as if to imply the joy of consuming the cereal is so great that one’s brain simply cannot ask one’s jaws to clamp down and risk not tasting the powdery, particulate fragments that hover in the air above the bowl, jostled up after the cereal has tumbled the distance from the box to the bowl’s concave surface. He is everything a cereal mascot is meant to be.

  And yet.

  What do we really know of Chester? What is his story? What are his motivations for presenting this bowl of cereal to us? To which of the two great cereal mascot archetypes does he belong? Is he a Taster, one of the lucky mascots, like Tony the Tiger or Toucan Sam, who gets to enjoy the product he is so assiduously pitching? Or is he a Chaser, one of those poor bastards like the Trix Rabbit, doomed to the Sisyphean task of promoting a cereal he himself is never once allowed to enjoy? The pirate garb suggests he is a Chaser; after all, pirates spend their time chasing booty, which they may or may not ever get. But on the other hand, perhaps this pirate already has his treasure—these dun, chocolate-spotted discs of corn and oats—in which case, like Lucky the Leprechaun, he would be tasked with keeping said treasure from cute but frighteningly rapacious children who chase him about trying to get it for their own. Which would put him solidly in the Taster camp. Fact is, Chester could swing either way. We don’t know.

  And we can’t know. And that is because Chester is the mascot not for a national brand of cereal, but for a store brand (or, as those in the industry call it, a “private label” brand), made for the Krogers supermarket chain here in America’s heartland. As a mascot for a private label brand, Chester finds himself in an uncomfortable position. His job performance is hampered, not because of his lack of skill in his job, but by the simple mechanics of private label distribution. None of his efforts, for example, will ever get ChipMates into a Food Lion or a Safeway. They have their own private label cookie cereals, possibly with their own mascots—an excitable giraffe, perhaps, or maybe a baker out of his mind with cookie-based rapture.

  But more than that, as a store brand mascot, Chester is denied the vehicle that would allow his character its narrative: The commercial. Everything we know of all the major cereal mascots comes in 30-second animated snippets; it’s how we know Tony the Tiger is an excellent lifestyle coach, or that Snap, Crackle and Pop have virtuoso comic timing, or that the poor Trix Rabbit is in desperate and immediate need of therapy. We will never have these brief windows into Chester’s soul; store brands aren’t given commercials of their own. At best, they get a picture in an advertising circular or a second or two on a local TV ad, as the camera pans across a collection of private label items and some droning announcer declares the remarkable savings they afford. Two seconds of being panned across is not enough time to develop a coherent backstory. All Chester gets is the cereal box, and a single, ambiguous pose.

  And, of course, he’s lucky to get even that. Some mascots don’t even get a box; think back on the humiliation visited upon Schnoz the Shark or Mane Man as they tried to entice consumers to their cereal in flimsy plastic bags, shelved, as they always were, on the bottom shelf of the cereal aisle. Think also on the extremely high rate of unemployment among cereal mascots. When was the last time Baron Von RedBerry got work? Or Twinkles the Elephant? Or Dandy, Handy ‘N Candy? The dirty secret about being a cereal mascot is that if it doesn’t work out—if your cereal flops or management decides to make a mascot change—you’re through. You can’t get work again. No other cereal will hire you. The best you can hope for is that somewhere along the way some advertising whiz kid decides to run a nostalgia campaign, and then you get trotted out again, gamely smiling for the camera and pathetically grateful that the income will help you get your meds (cereal mascots are ironically susceptible to several diseases related to vitamin deficiencies). Say what you will about the ignominy of being a store brand cereal mascot, but at least it’s steady work. Creating new mascots for a private label brand is money the grocery store companies simply aren’t going to pay.

  Be that as it may, spare a moment for the
existential plight of Chester Chipmate, a mascot without voice or history or personal motivation, an enigma wrapped in a mystery, coated in sugar and fortified with minerals. Who knows what wisdom he might impart to us if he had just one 30-second animated commercial? An exclamation that his wares are chiptastic? A promise that his cereal is good to the last crumb? An admonition that in this life we all have to make choices, and some choices come with their own pains, which we must accept with eyes wide, eyebrows arched, jaw slacked and tongue slightly visible? Perhaps all these things. Let us enjoy a bowl of ChipMates and think on it.

  BEST CALENDAR

  OF THE

  MILLENNIUM

  The Mayan Calendar. I’m writing this on December 16, 1999—on the Mayan calendar, it’s 12.19.6.14.6. That’s right, only 5,485 days until the next baktun! Better hit the mall now!

  Typically speaking, calendars do two things (beyond, of course, giving “Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson a way to recycle decade-old cartoons for ready cash). First of all, they provide us with the ability to meaningfully note the passage of time. For example, today is the 226th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the 55th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and the 78th-month “anniversary” of my first date with my wife (we were obviously not married at the time). One week from today will be my daughter’s first birthday. Send gifts.

  All these events are contingent on our calendar for their notability relative to the time in which I exist; If we noted weeks and months differently, it might be the anniversary of something else entirely different. Months and weeks have no basis outside us: We made them up, or, if you prefer, God made them up, and we went with his basic plan (don’t we always).

  The second thing calendars do is notify us of the cyclical nature of our planet. Thanks to a more or less fixed tilt of the earth’s axis and a regular period of revolution around our sun, our world gets hot and cold on a predictable schedule, and the patterns of life take note. Flowers bloom in the spring. Animals hibernate in the winter. Leaves fall in autumn. We get re-runs in the summer. It’s the circle of life. For various reasons primarily relating to food, the planting and harvesting of, we’ve needed to know when to expect the seasons to come around again.