Caution:  Foul Language And A Dead Fish

University of California President Janet Napolitano appeared on Tavis Smiley's PBS program last night touting UC's efforts to recruit and even seek out minority applicants for admission to both student and professional positions since the passage of the Proposition 209 in 1996, a ballot initiative that established racial diversity in state run schools, agencies and among state government contractors. 

Oh please. Not again. See, what Dr. Napolitano and other well intentioned ninnies mean by diversity mainly refers to black applicants, as were the kids shown in Dr. Napolitano's video clips during the Smiley broadcast.  Hispanics were included as a seeming afterthought.  As for white kids?  Pfft. They were shown as exclusionary frat rats.

Dr. Naplitiano sure as hell wasn't referring to Asian kids, who already comprise about 40% of the undergrads at Berkeley and UCLA, and whose numbers are legion in all of California's universities and colleges. 

Prop 209 was not really intended to foster racial inclusion and “level the playing field” as its disingenuous supporters claimed. It was nothing more than sanctioned prejudice in the name of slavery compensation.  

I was goddamned tired of the misnamed Affirmative Action nonsense long before I was passed over for hiring and promotion because, as I was told by the chief of staff to Jerry Brown during the weird bastard's first gubenatorial incarnation: “You're a white male.” On another occasion I was asked by a middle-aged female personnel officer when I called about my interview results, “You're the older Caucasian man we talked to, right? Well, we'll keep your application on file in case we need you.” Gee, thanks.

Another time I was told by a nervous barely 20-something Asian female: “You're overqualified.” I guessed the poor kid had been sent out to talk to me by her boss who was too cowardly to give me the bad news herself once she saw me through the office window, even though that boss and I spoken on the phone the night before. She'd said she looked forward to meeting in person, but instead sent this Asian kid who had not even seen my resume.  The poor girl looked so uncomfortable that I sympathized with her. “Look, I know someone put you up to this. So let's make the best of it.  You go have a nice cup of chai tea and I'll quietly open a vein in the men's room.” She almost cracked a smile.

Finding a job these days can be discriminatory hell. Just fill out a printed job application anywhere. There's always a tear off section for the applicant to check off his/her ethnic background. I suppose this is intended as evidence an employer can use if challenged by the Affirmative Action ISIS when bidding on a government contract.  If you don't fill it out someone will fill it out for you, or mark you down as an unemployable troublemaker and all around smartass who probably does weird shit in secret, like read books or listen to classical music, and who should be medicated up to his antisocial eyeballs and locked in a padded cell  -- but not hired.  Ever.

Thing is, I have just enough Native American in my familial wood pile to count, but it's not my primary genetic heritage and my advanced age tends to cancel it out.  I know, I know, age discrimination is illegal in hiring, but proving it takes more time and legal hassles than I can afford.  Anyway, going where you're not wanted is not a good career move.

Look, I'm a commie socialist pinko knee jerk liberal and life-long Democrat of Medicare age who wants to tax everyone to the tits so politically enlightened local governments can declare eminent domain over every goddamn golf course in America and replace them with subsidized housing for unwed crack whore mothers, especially those gated communities occupied by annoying old farts who tool around in golf carts and complain a lot.

But goddamnit, Dr. Napolitano, your university affirmative action program is nothing more than bigotry dressed in a graduation gown with a mortarboard hat.

Worse yet, thinking like yours is just the kind of well-meant social justice bullshit that's given rise to the right wing basket of deplorables who believe that a blow-dried serial bankrupt with the family values of Caligula is presidential material. 

Seems that we liberals have awakend the hungover sleeping giants among the loudmouthed yahoos who let an OxyContin addicted gasbag with a radio show and a skinny blonde shrew of a right wing author do what little thinking they do for them. And the bastards actually vote while too many of us smug liberals get complacent and do not vote at all.  Or if we do, we vote against someone we deem toxic instead of voting for someone we deem beneficial.  Even many women who tell pollsters they're voting for Clinton are ambivalent about her, citing the trustworthiness issue.  

So basically we're voting from reaction and not reason.

That reaction is so pervasive it even got to my goldfish.  After seeing last night's Trump-Clinton debate from the privacy of his fishbowl, he made a suicidal leap from his watery balcony during the night.  I found his stiff little body on the floor this morning. There was no note.

-oOo-

E-mail comments, critiques, corrections and death threats to tomatomike@aol.com.

Well, there’s just no way of getting around politics and the commensurate emotions. Some things just can’t be allowed to pass. The NAFTA deal cost millions of jobs and Hillary backed it. She has touted the TPP as the “gold standard” of trade deals which she has now flipped on. She will likely amend it in some inconsequential way and back it again if elected. The TPP, which Obama is pushing with all his might, gives some unelected multinational corporate entity the power to decide our laws on labor, trade and manufacturing. Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Hillary and Obama are globalist lackeys.  What comes next, authority over more of our laws? This is our sovereignty folks. You really need to think about this. -- Wht
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Jesus! One email and I've been reading ever since.  All your Times piled one after another.  Great.  -- Thea
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I was once told by a high rise law firm's hiring partner, "Oh, yes-- you're the one who fits the profile that we used  to be looking for."  -- Trog
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I couldn't stomach listening to the debate last night. I'm not fond of Clinton, but Trump makes me want to throw things.  I read all about the debate in several articles in The Washington Post.

Thing I don't get, Trump wanting to keep bringing up Bill's infidelity and actions he took as President. Has no one told him it's Hillary running for President? She's not the one who had the affairs. She's not the one who signed trade agreements. He can try to rattle her, but he should have asked Ivana for her opinion. She could tell him that, after publicly experiencing the pain and humiliation of something so publicly exposed, bringing up the subject again, bringing those women into the debate room wouldn't rattle Hillary.

If Donny Boy wants to bring up infidelity, well... Marla Maples comes to mind. HE is running for President. -- Brat

My dearly departed goldfish and I didn't watch the entire debate either, and look what happened to him after what we did watch.  MB  

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When I apply for a job, I PRAY for paper applications. As it stands now, most places with corporate offices, want you to apply on line. If you can remember your last job, when you started (day/month/hour) how much you were making when you started and how much you were making when you left, you're gold. Well, silver. Then try to back up from there until the blanks run out. If you get through the remembering part, you get to take a half-hour test about how you'd handle this if this happened, of this if that happened, and then they ask it again in a different form to see if you were paying attention. Aaargh! So stupid if you're an elder soul, just looking for a few part time hours to supplement your paltry Social Security. I don't know who to blame for that. Progress, I guess. Thanks for making me angry again! (Seriously, glad to see you venting. Saved me the trouble). – Beaty

Well, maybe getting angry over a blog post is healthier than getting your blood pressure up with a double espresso latte or an 8-ball of speed. MB  
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Sigh.....I read this piece with great understanding.  Here I am, and have been for decades, just wishing everyone was treated equally.  You know, equal pay for equal work, don't care what color you are, or where you're from or what your gender is.   It has seemed odd to me that in order to get more diversity into the work force the solution has become to limit how many of this heritage or that gender or whatever other lines are drawn with crayon and we've all gone mad.  Why (yes, I'm still Pollyanna here) is it so hard to just hire somebody who applies for the job and has a bit more savvy than somebody else, and maybe who isn't wearing a foil hat?   Why doesn't everyone just require himself to be colorblind or culture-blind or...oh never mind.  Young black men are getting shot by white officers in the street, middle-eastern men are shooting people by the dozens in malls, Natives drink too much and Asians are...taking up a lot of space in colleges.   And white people....well, maybe I ought to stop writing things like this because someone will think it's easy for me to say anything since I'm white.  Why do so many insist on reporting things that incite and not mention the people from all over the world in all walks of life who live here peacefully and want no harm played out on anyone?  Humans are missing the important stuff, Mike.  Pardon me for humming Kumbaya, but I would just like a better line drawn - one that happens to curve around us in a circle and nobody is left out.  Maybe it's the hippie in me.  -- Zoey

This man is now a friend of mine, but...

....that was not always the case.  Lieutenant Edward R. Murphy, Jr., was a naval officer and I was an enlisted sailor.  He's since become a figure in Navy history as the former executive officer of the USS Pueblo, the spy ship captured by North Korea in 1968. The other night I happened see a televised interview of him on YouTube:

Citizen Soldier: The Ongoing Story Of USS Pueblo, With Executive Officer Edward R. Murphy, Jr. - YouTube

Six years earlier we had both been stationed at the Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines. I was an 18-year-old high school dropout, he was the base education officer and a tyrant about it.  He did not tolerate diploma-less sailors under his jurisdiction running around loose, so he restricted me to the base until I passed a high school G.E.D. test -- which I did with all deliberate speed.

Fast forward to 1967.  I'm a radio reporter at small station on California's north coast, working two jobs and attending college full time.  Busy boy.  Anyway, I learned that my former education officer was stationed at a nearby naval facility.  Seems that he and another officer were being awarded the Navy - Marine Corps medal for lifesaving.  They'd swum through 100 yards of cold surf with a bad undertow to rescue two stranded fishermen clinging to a rock.  So we had a reunion at an awards ceremony on the county fairgrounds.

We occasionally chatted over the next few months. Then he told me he was being transferred to a small ship in Japan, saying it was about the size of the coastal transports we had in the Philippines. But it was no mere coastal coastal transport.  It was the spy ship Pueblo.

A year had elapsed by the next time I saw him, not long after his release from a North Korean prison.  Although only in his late 30s his formerly black hair had turned completely white, presumably from trauma, and he'd resigned his commission.  When we met he  was being interviewed by a reporter for a series of articles published in the Christian Science Monitor about his Pueblo experience.  He later collaborated on a book in a similar vein:

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Command-Uncensored-Account-Capture/dp/0030850754.

I now live in San Diego, which is also Mr. Murphy's home town, and yes, we've reconnected.  While we are both civilians now, and well into our Medicare years, the former Lieutenant Edward R. Murphy, Jr.,  USN, will always be Mr. Murphy to me, an exemplary officer who had put the lives of others before his own, but also one quick to yank the liberty card of a recalcitrant sailor whose education needed improving.  

Consider yourself saluted, sir.

-oOo-

Send corrections, critiques and lavish praise to tomatomike@aol.com.

Thinking of people who made a mark on our lives is like a dose of thankfulness.  A lot of life is laid out to make us search for the light at the end of the tunnel, but memories of shared experiences, pieces of stories that make us evaluate our own good luck, that's all a gift.  It's nice, too, to touch base with those people we once knew and couldn't have thought we'd see again.  I'm glad you got that chance again with Edward Murphy.  Be well, Mike.  And keep 'em comin'  -- Zoey

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Wonderful! ! As always.  -- Juli

Thank you.  -- MB

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Sorry for the delay. I had to locate my magnifier. I can't read 1 point type anymore. But as always, it was worth the fetching. I love that story and that you've reconnected. You have more stories in you then you are writing. Please, keep me in the loop. -- Beaty
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Really enjoyed this. It's great that you've reconnected with your former XO. – Shannon

Shannon's dad is a retired Navy cap'n.  – MB

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One wonders if the current crop of officers have the same concern for their men to have basic educational necessities. Or want to put that sort of discipline and effort into their jobs. -- Wht

I think so.  Our now all-volunteer military has become so technically complex that a high school dropout would probably not be allowed to enlist.  Even when I joined in 1961, the Navy had the motto "Stay In School" in its recruiting campaign to discourage potential dropouts from running away to sea.  But those were also the days when judges often gave the choice of jail or the military to juvenile offenders of draft age, diploma or not.  -- MB

The Stripper & The Church Lady

Six a.m. I‘m standing by my airport shuttle van in the driveway of a new McMansion near Sacramento waiting for a tardy passenger. The van company is a shared ride service, and this delay will make me late for the next stop. I’m getting antsy. 

"She’ll be out in five minutes,” the passenger’s boyfriend says. He’s standing beside the van in his bathrobe. He looks likes he just awakened from a sleep that began in 1973; Brillo pad red hair, droopy mustache. Disco Van Winkle. I could see him wrapped in a polyester leisure suit with white vinyl boots and a matching belt.

I clear my throat. “I have to pick up one more passenger, and I’m running late now,” I say. “Could you see if she’s ready?” 

He nods but doesn’t make move toward the house. Instead, he fishes a $50 dollar bill from his bathrobe pocket and hands it to me. “Just five more minutes, I swear,” he says. I tell him the tip is included in the prepaid fare, and anyway, $50 is way too much. 

“Take it. It’s for your trouble,” he says. 

I can take a hint. I pocket the fifty, then I hear the front door of the house open closely followed by the rattle of luggage wheels on cement. The passenger is 21 or 22, wearing sprayed on jeans, a nothing halter top, sandals and navel a ring. She’s also slugging down a bottle of Wicked Ale. 

“Hiiiiiiiii, Mr. Van Driver!” she gushes, all boozy cheer. “Here I am!” I take her suitcase, then politely but firmly suggest that she sit in front, where she’s less likely to throw up from motion sickness on the curving hillside roads we'll be taking, and where I can get a Hefty bag to her in a hurry in case she throws up anyway.  

“Guess I better not take this, huh?” she says, finishing the bottle and handing the empty to the boyfriend. “I’ll call you when I get there,” she tells him. “Think he’ll let me smoke in his van?”

They look at me. “I’d like to say yes, but state law and my next passenger say I can’t. And we’re running late. We better go. Now.” 

She throws me a wobbly, mock salute. “Yessir!” she says, and pulls herself into the front passenger seat. She blows a kiss to her squeeze:  “Bye bye. I’ll call when I get there. Will you miss me? Say yes!” 

“Go. You’ll miss your flight,” the boyfriend says. She pouts. I climb in and we’re on our way. 

“You sure I can’t smoke in your van?” she asks.

“I’m sure.” 

“Are we making any stops?” 

“We’re picking up a church lady.” I mentioned the church connection on purpose. I thought it might make my tipsy passenger more circumspect. Silly me. 

“For real? We’re picking up Dana Carvey? That is soooooo cool! Should I ask for his autograph? I love Dana Carvey! 

“We’re not picking up Dana Carvey. We’re picking up a real church lady. A Presbyterian.” 

My dispatcher warned me about her the night before: "Watch your fucking language. The old bitch calls corporate and complains about the drivers swearing and shit." 

The elderly Presbyterian church lady is in tears when we arrive, thinking she's going to be late for her flight.  I assure her that she will be at the airport in plenty of time to have her luggage looted by airline baggage handlers, be humiliated while spread-eagled by an obese TSA minority hire, then jammed into a cement airline seat and nibbling on blanched rodent turds the airlines claims are peanuts. I don't put it that way of course,  but that's how I've come to think about airline travel since federal deregulation too effect in the 80s.

The stripper tries to help. "Hiiiii!," she gushes again, exhaling an invisible cloud of ale breath. The church lady's mouth puckers up like a barnacle.  

"My name is Tawny," the stripper says. "I'm going to Vegas. Are you going to Vegas too?" 

The church lady's barnacle pucker gets even more puckered. "No," she says with a rimless glasses glare. The stripper is too full of ale and God knows what else to take the hint. She presses on in a cheerfully boozy way: "Well, where are you going?" 

"Shhh," the church lady hisses, trying to shut the stripper up. 

Not a chance. Never try to quiet an aggressively happy drunk. It will have the opposite effect.  Tawny proceeded to prove my point.

"Gosh, I'm just trying to get your mind off missing your flight. I mean, wow, you were like crying your butt off a minute ago. But it will be okay. Like, even if you miss your flight, you can come to Vegas with me. Do you have any daughters? Hey, do you mind if I smoke? I'll give you $20 if you let me smoke." 

"Shhh," the church lady hisses. 

The rebuff hurt the stripper's feelings. "Fuck! I'm just trying to be friendly! Just because she's gonna miss her fucking flight, it isn't my fucking fault! Gosh! Shit!" 

Actually, the delay is her fault. But I don't say that. Instead, I say, "No one will miss any flights.” I gesture toward the windshield. We are on US 50 in light traffic, passing through an industrial area.  "Look, there's hardly any traffic and we'll be at the airport in plenty of time." 

"There's my club!" Tawny shouts. She waves an arm in front of my eyes and points to a cinder block building the Presbyterians on the zoning board wanted as far away from a residential area as possible. "Hi Marci! Hi Twila! Hi Amy! I'm going to Vaaaaaaaaaygas! Ha ha!"

"Shhh," the church lady hisses.

I intervene: "Miss, better settle down or Southwest Airlines won't let you on the airplane."

That seems to work. Her posture stiffens in drunken dignity and she clams up. A dense climate of silence settles over the van for the rest of the ride.  We arrive on time and the church lady bolts from the van, snatches her carry-ons with a blue-veined claw and scuttles full throttle to the terminal entrance.

The stripper gets out before I can open her for door for her and takes a deep breath. She appears momentarily sober, her eyes clear despite the alcohol. I unload her luggage from the back. 

"You've been patient with me," she says. She opens her suitcase, extracts a $20, and stuffs the bill in my shirt pocket. I start to say the tip is included in the fare and her friend had already been more than generous. She wouldn't hear it. 

"Hush.  I know what it's like to work for tips," she says, and tamps the twenty down. 

Back on the road, I reflect on which of those two women had the more Christian nature set forth in the Sermon On The Mount; the angry Pharisee or the sweet drunkard who strips for a living? 

My money is on the latter.

-oOo-