Journalists: Where are your binders?

Absurd: a tab in Kaleigh McEnany’s famous “binder” of talking points that, I must admit, was very satisfying to see. From the beginning of her ascension to the position of White House Press Secretary, I have followed all her theatrical performances, paying close attention to her scripted body language of which her incessant “binder flipping” is a part. Like some Tantalian folk tale, the binder teases me from behind the podium.  I am dying to see how it is laid out and what is inside. I imagine her lovingly piecing it together on the carpet of her living room, barefoot, in her fuzzy pajamas with a glass of merlot in her hand. Seeing even a bit of it was a total rush.

I started obsessively watching these conferences hoping they would set the world right. I had followed McEnany’s career enough to expect a phony charade and was certain she would not survive in a room full of seasoned journalists armed with the truth. Clearly, the briefings would be a validation of my need to have authenticity annihilate superficiality:  food for my soul.

If you have not had the pleasure of viewing one, McEnany’s press conferences are, quite obviously, formulaic. They are carefully designed to promote the actions of the president.  She shamelessly spins every question and rarely provides a direct answer. She uses her binder to present “facts” supporting her whataboutism, and her journalistic plant, Chanel Rion, to hand feed her questions. She begins and ends with an advertisement sometimes complete with propagandist videos.  Her tactics include scapegoating, lies of omission, serial positioning, cherry picking, and simply ignoring questions she cannot answer. She does all of this and more, but even from the perspective of this inveterate progressive, she wins every time. Though McEnany should be scrambling out of these briefings defeated and exhausted, she instead glides out like a self-satisfied movie star.

I have two potential reasons. First, what McEnany says is the unassailable truth or second, the press corps sucks. Though in my more Twilight Zone moments I have entertained the former explanation, to preserve my grip on reality, I usually side with the latter.

The press is playing bit parts in a show in which McEnany is the star. They arrive with pre-determined questions. Most of the time, the answers are hijacked, often just serving as a springboard to promote the President’s agenda. These sacred questions are posed regardless of what McEnany says, or if the question has already been asked and the answer already given. Rarely interrupted, her spin hangs there fully preserved and unchallenged. Maybe I am ignorant, but questions cannot be adjusted to respond to a real time situation?  Journalists: where are your binders?   

For a recent example, McEnany opened her 7/16 briefing with the following statement: “The president reversed the disastrous overregulation of the Obama-Biden administration…The cost of these burdensome regulations falls disproportionately and benefits disproportionately lower income Americans.”
Even my own half informed brain could identify issues:  omitting the benefits of regulation and the costs of not regulating, associating a long history with Obama exclusively, leaving out the fact that many regulations protect the public from the indiscriminate actions of the moneyed elite, the insinuation that Donald Trump is the champion of the poor… Surely somebody would oppose it. Surely somebody could flip to her tab labeled “regulation” or “the poor” and beat this one down. I understand we are in the middle of a pandemic, but we already know Trump’s position on masks.  

At the very least, I wanted one person to fact check this opening statement in real time, and at best, I wanted them all to toss their prepackaged questions out the window and corner the assertion like a pack of hungry wolves. Instead, it was allowed to stand, and, later, the main takeaway from this briefing? According to the press,  McEnany claimed that, “The science will not get in the way of us opening schools”, which she did, but then clarified it afterwards with comments that clearly exonerated her from the statement’s worst possible interpretation.

My conclusion? I am beginning to believe that the press is, as the Trump administration claims, after the president and not, as I rely on them for, after the truth.

Absurd, indeed.

Time Theft: A Story from the Pandemic

It is six AM in the middle of April and Anissa is watching through a large bay window. She is watching the marshmallow snow plop down from the canopy, melting into the thick white merengue slung between the tree trunks. She is watching a bewildered possum sinking its naked feet into the fluff, apprehensively crossing the brook and then disappearing behind her neighbor’s wood pile.  The jubilant birds are singing and preening around the feeder, unperturbed by the chilly surprise.  Delivering long firm strokes to her ecstatic, vibrating cat; she watches until her coffee turns cold.     

Setting her cat gently aside, she pads barefoot to the kitchen. She swallows what is left, and then runs the empty mug under cold water for a few seconds.  The action triggers a memory.

 “The most mundane tasks,” she remembered an old boyfriend scolding as he eyed his scorched, greasy pan that she had placed in the dish drainer, “should be done with patience and contemplation.”

In a nod to his philosophy, she deigns to give the cup a proper bath.  She squirts a bead of soap into its mouth and, working the edge of the scrubber around the lip, she gazes out the window above the kitchen sink, searching unsuccessfully for the possum. The counterfeit snow is still falling but will disappear within the hour.

Under normal circumstances, this idleness would not be the pace of a typical Thursday morning. Instead, Anissa would be racing to get ready for work: yanking a wrinkled shirt from her overstuffed dresser drawer, plowing it with the iron, and darting off for a quick shower. She would eat breakfast in the truck, leaving behind a deluge of crumbs and small drips of coffee wherever she went.  At work, she would proceed at the same accelerated pace, powered by the persistent stress churning in her chest.

For as long as she could remember, Anissa had approached the necessary tasks of life expeditiously. She did this even though the result was often calamitous: errors, spills, stubbed toes, broken objects; It was worth the risk, she thought, because of a certain calculation: the less time spent doing work, the more time she’d have to create

“Work is for survival, art is for existence, and if you need them both you are usually screwed,” was her challenge to her old boyfriend’s lesson on mundane tasks.

“You must slow down and appreciate being,” he maintained. It was the last significant thing he said before leaving her.

Throughout her life Anissa had worked many different places. No matter the nature of the work, it was always accompanied by a seething resentment and a tenacious yearning for long stretches of uninterrupted time.  Time to compose any number of poems, stories or songs that drifted through her imagination, to make sculptures from pieces of nature or junk, to play music, to draw.

Creativity was so valuable to her, in fact, that she deliberately set up her life to have few obligations. Never-the -less, she remained consumed by the expectations of work. She would save money with the hope of taking time off. Then, some major expense would claim it.  As the decades went by, she gained little in the form of economic advancement, and her art went unassembled, her stories unwritten, her instruments un-played.   

Recently, she decided to act. She trimmed her expenses to the bone. She drastically cut her hours. She had accumulated some savings that would serve as a cushion. She would only work enough to survive.

And, then, came the pandemic.

Anissa now sits at her desk. Today she is writing. Tomorrow she may be drawing. The next, playing music.  From her radio she hears the stories from hibernating voices across the country, across the world: accommodating the change as their circumstances allow. She is moved by the layers of physical, psychological and economic devastation. She watches developments closely. She watches as her own savings dwindles.

 She does not want to go back.

Christmas 2019

The Christmas branch hung from the rafters
In the years after my mother left;
She was the one who did Christmas best:
With the crescents and the bittersweet
and the orange clove scents and the wildflower wreaths.
He could never fill her shoes;
The Christmas branch, not our only clue.

"It's got two bottoms, " I complained.
"Or two tops," my dad's refrain.
My friends were confused by the Christmas branch,
"Is he just too cheap to buy a tree?"
"No," I said, "He's just artsy."
"It's a protest against the slaughter
 of Christmas trees," said his other daughter.
"More room for presents," said my Uncle Ed,
"And easy disposal once it's dead."

We never solved the mystery
Of the Christmas Branch that hung from the rafters
In the years after my mother left;
She was the one who did Christmas best:
With the star fashioned from milkweed pods
And the batter spoon and the potato stamp cards,
The string of lights, monochrome blue
He could never fill her shoes.
The Christmas branch, not our only clue.

It had one bulb, as I recall
And after that broke, none at all.
He took the explanation to his grave
And the credit that I never gave
Just for carrying on,
In the years after my mother'd gone.
And I never had the chance
To tell him I liked
That Christmas branch.

Plastic II

Disposable glove
Tossed in the mud
What have you done?
You aint out here cleaning ovens
Though you're covered in grime
Shaped like your crime

Disposable glove,
You are making a scene
On a day like today when the air is so clean

Disposable glove,
here comes the dark
And it's time to get out of the park.

Plastic I or Christmas 2018

Inflatable doll

Emptiness looms on your polymer tongue 

A circuitous tribute to all you've become

Inflatable doll

Flaccid and dumb

At least the lights and the narcotic food

Wrestle the dark for the traveler's mood

Inflatable doll

Someday escape from your moldy brown box

And float out to sea to choke what you mock

Inflatable doll

Exhausting yourself on the frosted front lawn

A cowering heap, I applaud your defeat

You can only hold air for so long

From the Bottom: An Open Letter to the Kings of Capitalism

Dear Kings of Capitalism, 

I only have two rules when it comes to my existence as a working class stooge. 
The first rule is that  I like to do a quality job. It doesn't matter if I'm scraping dinner plates, pushing morphine or molding the minds of tomorrow, if I'm getting paid to perform a task I'm going to do it well. Nobody has to tell me.  I enjoy the internal reward that comes along with a job well done. If I do something poorly I am miserable. 

The second rule?  I don't want to spend more than forty hours a week (arguably already too much) doing it.  I don't mess around while I'm at work, but ask me to work extra hours and I'll morph into disgruntlement before you can say "pink slip".

Over the last few decades I've worked primarily as a waitress, and educator and a nurse. I don't care how fulfilling or important, I never describe my work as a "career", since to me a job is a job: it's what I do to survive. I only became a nurse and an educator in order to make a living doing something that was personally fulfilling, but I did not become these things to become these things. They are not part of my identity. If I won a million dollars I'd quit working as soon as the check hit my palm. 

Clearly, however, the dominant structure of education and healthcare in this country will not allow me to satisfy both of my rules. The demands of the system require that I choose. I can do a quality job and work extra hours or I can do a crappy job and work the prescribed number. This is why I personally experience a large amount of stress working in these professions: cognitive dissonance. If I try to stick to rule number one I found myself violating rule number two and vice versa. I cannot get out. It is a cognitive dissonance trap. 

The broader implication is that this trap affects a lot of people. People like me routinely disappear from these essential professions since they are unable to cope. This tends to leave three types of people behind: the newbie, the slacker, and the workaholic. The first, of course, hasn't yet realized the struggles that she is about to face. She will work for a while and then leave, unless she falls into one of the remaining categories:  the person who does the bare minimum and is perfectly satisfied or the person that doesn't mind being exploited since this is all she does. 

My advice if you would like to hold on to more quality employees? Stop filtering us out. Stop making unreasonable demands on our time. Stop giving us too many classes and too many patients and impossible tasks that require us to put in unpaid hours in order for us to feel like we've done well. If your turn-over rate is high and you look around and all you see are newbies, slackers and workaholics you may want to reconsider your assignments. 

I beg you, let us do a good job and go home.  It's the least you could do considering the daily sacrifice of flesh and blood we make s for your measly wages. Label  it a "unprofessional" if you will, but you do not own our precious leisure time. 

Love, 
Working Class Stooge 

Moonlight

The moon is merely a place to die
It's no gruyere or pizza pie
Cold and blunt as a maniac's knife
Like the lump in the throat of the executioner's wife

The moon is like love, if your love's gone dry
And the dust is as deep as a dead man's eye
Lend it your rogues from your prison cells
They'll ball like babes in the belly of hell

Gods emerge from its pitch black holes
Drained of power, grey and old
Straining to hear their pretty harps
But there is no home in the endless dark