HIde! HIde! The Homos Are Coming!

    During  the Depression era a friend of mine lived in the deepest, poverty-ravaged parts of the South.  Options in public policy were grim, problems intractable. Better tomorrows were a melancholy dream. The tenure of public office holders was likely to be marked by a stringent shortage of results for the electorate. Politicians had to sell something other than accomplishment.
    One politician in my friend's home state cruised regularly to election and re-election. In political season, when he went out on the stump, he stationed henchmen in the audiences of his speeches. Early in his delivery, on cue, they would begin shouting, "Tell us about the niggers.  Tell us about the niggers."  With gusto he did, thus evading forthright treatment of his constituents' dismal lot and his own meager record. He was the people's champion against scapegoats of his own expedient choosing.
    I recalled this story of political hate-mongering when I read that presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul will appear in a new anti-gay film. It is being called -- without discernible irony -- a documentary. It portrays the advancement of gay marriage as a threat to the Christian faith. "If homosexual activists get everything they want, it will be nothing less than the criminalization of Christianity," one figure argues in the film.
    The looming presidential season has already offered other excursions into the twilight zone. Senator Paul is a regular tour leader. Just recently, within the space of a week, he took opposite positions on the issue of childhood vaccination. He continues to lie about his education credentials, despite having been caught in it years ago.  He is a human gaffe-fest. As the son of perennial gadfly Ron Paul, he poses a question for science: Could crackpot bumbling be hereditary?
    Meanwhile, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has taken a colorful show on the road. With choreographed outbursts of faux spontaneity, he touts poor self control as a leadership skill. And lurking in the wings of the political stage are more than  a dozen dreamers, has-beens, opportunists and oddballs who are likelier to be canonized than elected to the White House. Their declarations of presidential aspiration suggest that some have noted the Sarah Palin model. Political celebrity can pay well.  No electoral success required.
    Huckabee may be one of the mercenary group. The ordained minister has diligently shaped himself into a brand, in the idiom of today's marketeers. As a candidate, television and radio personality, speaker-for-hire and author, he has established himself in an aw-shucks vein of right-wing commentary on social and political issues.  The title of his latest book conveys well enough the sizzle of product-Huckabee: "God, Guns, Grits and Gravy."
    He cannot think that cornpone formulations will resonate with a varied national audience. Hence my suspicion that he aims to prosper in a niche market. He might be welcome to do this  were his methods not base.  He is, of course,  far from being the first politician to demonize minorities.  But as an observant Christian, I find his Bible-thumping version of it especially noxious. Permitting gay Americans to formalize loving relationships threatens nothing and harms no one.
    Elsewhere in the presidential pose-a-thon: Wisconsin's bully-boy Gov. Scott Walker is shucking and jiving past the simplest questions. Florida's Jeb Bush is severing financial ties that might appear unseemly for a presidential aspirant -- and are, in fact, unseemly for a presidential aspirant. Hillary Clinton is assembling a major campaign machine while purporting to be undecided about campaigning. Ditto Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who salivates over power. Vice President Joe Biden is making a show of plucking petals off his inner decision-daisy. Wannabes of every sort are searching for a schtick.
    Our national air reeks of politics whose aim is less to lead the people than to herd them.The election is not quite two years away. I fear it will seem a lot longer.




 
   

The Customer Is Always Ripe

       I have never seen an airline employee use a cattle prod on passengers.   However,  the image does occur to me, and not only  when I travel.  To my mind it symbolizes the fading  of a venerable term --  customer service --  toward that nether region  where outmoded concepts go to be quaint. There it will join smaller casualties of changing times, such as personal letter.  And it will join much greater ones, such as two from the world of politics, dignity and tolerance.
    Of course airlines are not alone in treating customers as a necessary evil. The style has been favored for years by insurance companies, which are keen to sell their product but loath to see it actually used.
     Yet who would have foreseen  a day when many businesses deal with customers by resourcefully hiding from them?  We've all had the experience. The automated phone tree offers me every option for service except the one I really need. The automated, on-line help page,with its list of Frequently Asked Questions, suggests that I am the only person on the planet who wants to know what I want to know. My question is not frequently asked. It is not even occasionally asked. I am an outlier on the bell curve of customer behavior. I am a nuisance.
   In the uncommon event that these robots clearly offer the option of access to a human being, the human being is  too busy to talk right away, even though my call is Very Important To Us. The human being is helping other customers  -- most of whom, like me, are twiddling their thumbs on hold. Our time, in the aggregate, is less important than the time of the human being whose wages we are paying and who supposedly is employed for our convenience.
    As the country learned the hard way, the ethic of customers-as-chattel has penetrated the banking industry as well.  And it has seeped all the way down, to affect the smallest of the small fry, people like me.
    My requirements of my bank are  simple. I want my money safely kept. I want portions of it promptly returned to me when I ask.  But nowadays, to gain access to my own money, I must run a gauntlet of sales pitches:

    Teller: "Have you considered our new warp-speed account bundle with color-coded deposit and withdrawal slips?"
    Me: "Yes. I've heard about it. But I don't  want it, thank you."
    Teller: "But you're missing so much."
    Me: "I'm aware of what I'm missing. I don't need it."
    Teller: "But you could have funds automatically moved among your accounts at night, and receive a complete update on your cellphone the next morning."
    Me: "I don't need to bank while I sleep, and I don't want to do arithmetic before breakfast."
    Teller, eyebrows arching: "Really!"

    I am old enough to remember when banks offered toasters as sales inducements. Now they offer scolding and guilt.
    In his satirical comic strip Li'l Abner, the late Al Capp presented the character of the shmoo. A shmoo was a chubby little bowling pin of a creature with a cheerful grin and a bottomless desire to enhance the happiness of human beings.
    Shmoos were plentiful. They reproduced exponentially and asexually. They needed only air. They  abundantly  gave eggs, milk and butter (no churning needed).  And shmoos gave themselves. If  a shmoo sensed that a nearby human being was hungry, it would cheerfully cook itself for dinner. Fried shmoo tasted like chicken.  Broiled shmoo tasted like steak.  Shmoos would undergo any circumstance to please.
    At the epicenter of commerce by shakedown -- industries with monopolistic advantage -- there is a certain inescapable shmoo-ness in the customer role. Other industries may be thinking wishfully when they adopt the model. I know of businesses that will not hand me over to an automaton when I need service. I favor them vigorously when I shop, and I am not alone in this.
    We probably should not imagine a focused consumer revolt. But traditional business may not be immune to the kind of creeping customer desertion that mortally wounded the American auto industry and American newspapers.
    Meanwhile, at certain points of my consumer need, I suppose I must grin shmoo-like and learn to live with realities.
    A bank is, whatever else, a better repository than a mattress.
    Usually.