Somebody Needs to Learn the Meaning of the Word 'Exploitation'

David Foster Wallace is dead--but he has at least two books coming out soon.

One is the project he fretted over for years and expected to be published after his death.

Another is the commencement address he delivered to Kenyon College graduates in 2005. The transcribed address has been available online since...2005. For free. Now it is about to be published by Little, Brown and sold for $14.99.

This is exceedingly irritating to me and I read this review with clenched teeth. At one point, my teeth unclenched in an attempt to bite the head clean-off a man named named Tom Bissell.

It was at this point:

"While some may question the decision to publish Wallace’s address as a book — and its interior design of one sentence per page is not much of a rebuttal to that question — it would take a small, charred heart to find any impure motives here."

A 'small, charred heart?' Is you serious, Tom? You're trying to convince me that this is a pure endeavor? How exactly is this not exploitative and unnecessary? As you said in your own review, more people have read Wallace's Kenyon College commencement address than his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. For free.

Why start charging them now, if not out of greed?

--Small Charred Heart in Los Angeles

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Poor Tony Krause Lives Another Day

How do you know you've led a sheltered life?

You say something like this:

"I guess I'm really just not used to people with tears in their eyes."

I would hardly call Arlington Heights "a well-to-do suburb of Chicago," but aside from that, this article is pretty spot-on, highlighting a problem that has always been there and grown exponentially of late--libraries being overtaken by homeless people who enjoy unfettered bathroom use, relief from cold and rain, and free internet-porn viewing booths.

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The Profit Crunch

As one of the nation's newest--and foremost--economic experts, I would like to inform you all of the main problem with the corporate structure as it exists:

Profits from boom years are not retained to cover losses during bust years. They are instead distributed to investors and spent on ridiculous executive salaries, increased advertising budgets, corporate retreats, useless conferences, and dubious R & D, which mostly just concerns a redesign of packaging and a cheaper, more-dangerous ingredient list.


Therefore, unless the boom continues without end, there will always be a decline in profits, which decreases the stock price--since the stock price was already based on certain unmet sales expectations--and leaves the company scrambling for cash.

What are the first things that a company does in such a situation?

1. Raises the price of their product slightly, yet again, so that only penny-pinchers and super-observant people notice.

2. Cuts the salaries of all non-management employees.

3. Cuts benefits of all non-management employees--especially pricey things like health care and retirement payments--despite previous promises of lifelong care.

4. Replace all real-world ingredients with cheaper, similarly-flavored chemicals.

5. If this doesn't work, appeal to the government for help, since your industry is 'crucial' to the existence of the world as we know it.


Now, let's think of a few real-world examples:

1. Hostess. How long have the good people at Hostess been making, as David Foster Wallace once called them, "shadow snacks*?" Forever. Have the ingredients stayed the same over the years? No way! You know how expensive real sugar is? Real butter? Shit--if they can save $0.001 per cupcake by using some sort of experimental cancer-causing 'butter-like agent,' they will. They have. Had a cupcake recently? They taste like SHIT. So, as the price of their ingredients plummets, as the real wages of their employees likewise plummet, as benefits for said employees disappear...the price has gone steadily UP--outpacing inflation, outpacing increasing fuel costs. Why has it gone up? Because they need to feed the monkey, man! God forbid they were content with selling 50 billion cupcakes a year and making a mint. They had to get greedy--"what if we can find a way to sell 100 billion cupcakes a year! Yes! Let's do it! Let's sell ourself off to Interstate Baking Corporation (share price $0.04, btw) and turn our bakery into a money machine! Oink! Oink!"

2. General Motors. Formerly the World's Largest Automaker (title now belongs to Toyota, as of 2007, fyi), they have famously been hit by 'hard times' every single year of my life. Or so it seems. Laying off employees, eliminating health benefits, spending the pension fund...all to strip down, become leaner and meaner, to more-agilely continue the pursuit of their long-term goal--total self-destruction by an INCREASED reliance on gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. So let's see...a dinosaur has no idea what it takes to compete in the marketplace, can't even see into the past, much less one year into the future...we can't let this company go under! We must bail it out with taxpayer money! What would we do without its lack of foresight and gross inefficiency? It is America! If we all have to start driving around in Toyotas and Hondas and BMWs it would just be so...nice...


3. AIG. The biggest insurance company in the world--by far. Imagine if AIG had in its bank accounts the $5000 trillion dollars it has probably collected in insurance payments over the last...15 years. Now, being an insurance company that, like them all, thrives on the small print, they probably only paid out...$5 trillion dollars over the same period. Where, then, is the other $4995 trillion? Is it in the bank? Can they use it to bail themselves out of this 'disastrous predicament' that they brought on themselves by being greedy, short-sighted, and stupid? No. It has already been paid out to wealthy stockholders and executives. It has been spent on lavish executive washrooms with marble toilets and single-use silk toilet paper. It has been spent on pointless annual conferences in Las Vegas, Thailand, the Cayman Islands, Dubai--anywhere there's gambling, booze, and a bottomless supply of hookers. It has been spent to hire friends of friends to redundant positions, just to keep management fun, to spread around the bottomless money, to have enough guys onboard to play polo against Morgan Stanley over the weekend. It has been spent on mailing every house and apartment in America an unwanted pile of steaming junk mail every week. It has been spent on hiring expensive consultants to do the jobs of people on-staff who would rather not actually do their jobs. It has been spent buying up enormous amounts of questionable, risky, derivative securities that they didn't even fully understand. The list could go on indefinitely...

Don't even get me started on the banks--if they have proven to be incapable of managing money...why are we giving them more of it?

Which brings me to my main point:

Whatever happened to the beautiful, self-refining, social-Darwinistic side of market capitalism? Why are we not just letting the firms that did not make mistakes fill the void left by those that did? Isn't deregulation what they all wanted in the first place? Careful what you wish for, assholes!



*A 'shadow snack' is a food product that is desirable not because it is healthy, but because it is delightfully bad for you, an indulgence, which runs counter to the recent, general trend toward healthy foods.

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Back in Action

Goodtime Charlie is once again stateside, so please set aside any worries you might have about our nation's future--it is once again in good hands.

What has happened while I've been away from the controls? Mucho.

The financial system has gone to pot, thanks to all the people not smoking it.

Do I sound like my mom when I say that people who risked their savings in the stock market should not have been gambling what they could not afford to lose? Yes.

According to Forbes, there are 946 billionaires in the world, due to the unrelentingly-bullish (til recently) global markets. What goes up must come down, right? Right.
Why can't each billionaire the shady financial system created just give $1 billion back to it? Oh, wait, I know--they're greedy. That's why we're in this problem in the first place...

Is it all as easy as I make it sound here? Nope.


My favorite living writer, David Foster Wallace, forever tortured by his own overbearing genius and armor-piercing powers of observation, gave up his struggles and hanged himself in Claremont, California.


Admittedly, the news wasn't exactly shocking--anybody who has read his writings realized how profoundly he struggled with the dark side of life--but it was certainly saddening. For those of us who actually read books (sadly, we are few), the next several decades just got much bleaker for the novels, stories, and essays that he will not create for our enjoyment.

On the other hand, as his sister Amy said (I'm paraphrasing here), rather than think about how much time we did not get from him, it is better to think about how much time he did give us, how long he held on to life in the face of a catastrophically acute depression. Imagining a life without his work, since I have now been spoiled by it, simply makes me grateful for every bit of writing he did provide.

It is hard, especially now, not to imagine Wallace as somewhat of a real-life Hal Incandenza, the main character of his masterwork, Infinite Jest-- so unbelievably intelligent that he is eventually unable to communicate with others, who hear his eloquent oratory only as unintelligible screaming. How long can a man tolerate that? Life at the top of the intellectual heap is no doubt lonely, and knowing all that is wrong with the world, but being powerless to fix it, must be paralyzingly frustrating.

Wallace hadn't written anything in over a year, which is mind-boggling to imagine, considering his output in the past. I always used to hope he was spending most of his time locked in a basement somewhere, methodically perfecting another Infinite Jest-like, 1000-page epic, and I know I wasn't the only one.

He was a literary giant and he will be missed.


Paul Newman also died recently. Not as relevant to my life as Wallace--mostly just a face on one of my favorite salad dressings--but I did enjoy his performances in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Cool Hand Luke. I'm glad he got to live a long, relatively-healthy, satisfying life, and I feel sorry for his wife of 50 years, Joanne Woodward; that has to be tough. That is all.



In other news, pirates have taken over a ship full of weapons off the coast of Somalia, and are holding it for ransom, currently surrounded by US gunboats.

How could this have happened? I mean, this was not a freighter full of Pampers--it is crammed to the gills with 33 Russian-built tanks, grenade launchers, anti-aircraft guns, ammunition, etc. Could the men onboard not have perhaps used some of their ship's cargo against the surely-outmatched Somali pirates? That might have been a good idea.

According to this article, Kenya--the purchaser of the weapons--refuses to negotiate with pirates or terrorists, and is therefore on the sidelines, waiting for other countries to solve the problem for them. Whether or not Kenya intended to give the tanks to forces in South Sudan--which would violate an agreement they have with the Sudanese government--is up for debate. The curious thing is that nobody in the Kenyan military is even trained to operate a Russian tank, since they buy theirs from us...

[Question: Should the Kenyan government be allowed to keep the cargo if it is salvaged? Or should the tanks be given to coalition forces and used to shell the pirate town of Eyl until all the pirates' SUVs and lawn ornaments are reduced to rubble? Discuss.]

That debate aside, the incident certainly begs the question that if a boatload of armaments is not safe in the water these days, what chance does anybody else have? Answer: Slim.

"Today there are thought to be ten gangs operating around Somalia with as many as 1,000 members. Two years ago there were only about a hundred pirates. Most are based in Puntland, a semi-autonomous region that angles around the Horn. Recent visitors say that the tiny fishing village of Eyl has enjoyed a huge economic boom as the pirates buy luxury 4x4s and build smart new homes. Men with laptops describing themselves as “pirate accountants” come and go and restaurants have opened to cater for more than 200 hostages. In all, 13 ships are under the control of pirates. Two more vessels – a Greek cargo ship and a Hong Kong-flagged vessel – were snatched this week and attacks are reported almost daily."
(from The Times online)

Why has the US Government not carpet-bombed this pirate village yet? They don't seem to have any problem with killing innocent people while 'valiantly' fighting to rid the world of terrorism in every other corner of the world. Maybe the pirates are more valuable as defense-contractor customers? Otherwise, you'd think they could at least stop the flow of luxury SUVs and granite counter tops, just to piss them off...


Enjoy your Tuesday, and stay tuned for tales from Tanzania...

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