Sunday, August 24, 2008

The Fresh Market

It must take at least three geese to make up a gaggle, but what constitutes an embarrassment of riches? Everybody in America is created equal, but that still doesn't keep us from gushing over the lifestyles of the rich and famous. We're fascinated by the rich and fantasize about being one of them. No one seems too embarrassed about making big bucks or aspiring to do so.
 
Economic inequalities are serious business. Some people believe the pursuit of wealth is rigged against the people on the bottom, and it makes them angry. I feel that way myself at times, but more often I've got a more complicated reaction.
 
The Philadelphia Story, a Katherine Hepburn-Cary Grant comedy made in the middle of the Depression, is about the ambiguities of American class conflict. It contrasts the lifestyle of a super-rich family marrying off its elder daughter with the struggling, lower-middle-class style of a reporter—played by Jimmy Stewart—who is hired to cover the affair.
 
I think this movie gets closer to what economic inequality feels like because every time I go to the Fresh Market--the grocery store serving old-money Sequoyah Hills, in Knoxville, Tennessee--I feel just like Jimmy Stewart. It's not anger at all, really, more a weird combination of dazzled fascination and reverse snobbery.
 
Take the musak. I honestly doubt that Baroque quartets are the appropriate soundtrack for squeezing tomatoes, but that's the way things are at the Fresh Market. And while my sense of taste should have me gagging at the store's studiedly casual ostentation, I find it instead so inviting and cozy that I want to move in.
 
I probably couldn't afford it. Comparable staples totaling $45.81 at the Kroger across the street cost $53.72 at Fresh Market. But you don't come to Fresh Market for staples. Meat and potatoes they've got, but they've also got Organic Flax Plus Multigrain Cereal, prepared chicken cordon bleu at the butcher's counter, frozen Cuisine Solutions Braised Veal Osso Buco, cans of Haddon House Hearts of Palms.
 
This is a specialty store. They have specialty beers, specialty salsas, specialty potato chips. There are whole aisles of bins of bulk nuts, mixed snacks, candies, and coffee beans including flavors like molten chocolate and caramel macchiato. The store offers Christmastime abundance year round.
 
The store smells like Christmas cookie dough. The ceiling is dark and the aisles colorful. The store has the elegance and bustle of Grand Central Station. Price specials on meats and produce are posted on blackboards hung on the walls.
 
The flowers at the front of the store are beautiful, and the potted plants near the produce section include six-inch-tall bonsai trees and a full selection of potted herbs.
 
It pays, just for your own sense of personal integrity, to keep reminding yourself that this is a planned environment; that there are chain of 80 of these stores, centered mainly in the Southeast, from Florida to Wisconsin; that what you're experiencing is a well-executed formula. This is particularly important at this store, where the old money ambience of Sequoyah Hills washes over the entire scene and makes subjective judgment nearly impossible.
 
Europe has art, architecture, and culture that have been around so long that the moss grows on them; in America the main lasting heritage we've got is our money. Where other countries have prospered and faded, we have been rich for a long time.
 
Downtown Rome looks like it did in the Renaissance, in some parts like it did in the Empire. Downtown Knoxville has individual old buildings, but the overall look is knocked down and rebuilt continually.
 
An old residential area like Sequoyah Hills, though, offers continuity, substance, permanence, and its Fresh Market is part of that. Maybe the best use for our money is to simply sustain identity; Fresh Market is an artificial village market that's been around so long it's become a real one.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Not Ready to Lead

The clearest signal that Barack Obama's campaign message is achieving traction with voters is the fact that he is losing the election.

For months Obama and his people have been pounding home the message that a vote for McCain is a vote for a third term for George Bush. Little do the Obama people realize that despite Bush's abysmal approval ratings--or perhaps, in some horribly twisted, quintessentially American gesture of self destruction, because of them--a third term of Bush is exactly what the voters want.

"W, The Warlord," read the parodies of the Bush bumpersticker, but to many people, I am convinced, they aren't parodies at all, they are a more direct expression than the originals of Americans' yearning for The End, one final, spastic, grotesque orgy of violence that takes us, and all the foreigners who hate us, down together.

Ever since 1955, when Fess Parker stood at the Alamo in the closing shot of the Davy Crockett series, swinging his rifle like a club, fending off the enclosing Mexicans, that's been our subconscious national dream, to do down swinging in glory taking as many of the encroaching aliens with us as possible, and John McCain is the candidate most likely to make the dream a reality.

The two issues, I read, that have made the difference for the McCain campaign in the past few weeks are offshore drilling (the heroin addict's answer to addiction is finding more heroin) and getting tough with the Russians (for "Remember the Alamo" substitute "We are all Georgians"). I've watched America waste years, lives, and treasure trying to remake Iraq in our image. After that experience it seems perfectly apt that we should all burn in nuclear fire to save South Ossetia for democracy.

Obama's problem, we are told, is that he lacks experience. Maybe this means his brain has not been sufficient pickled by the ways of Washington to achieve the level of madness attained by McCain. I really don't believe that's the problem the voters are having with Obama, though. It's not that he's too sane for their tastes, it's that his skin is the wrong damned color.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Sam's

I told my daughter I was going to check out Sam's Club for this blog and she showed me a YouTube video, Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart, in which the evil Lord Waldemart shuts down every shop in Diagon Alley by selling cheap wands and potions at his own store.
 
This is not what you would call good press, but if bad press didn't hurt the Rockefellers at the cash register, why should it hurt the Waltons?
 
Well, for one thing, Sam Walton was selling his goods directly to the public in their hometowns and making a big deal of his small town roots. He was not sitting off in New York City relying on a massive international monopoly to make people take his products, like it or not. He was one of us.
 
So when the hometown boy's WalMart and Sam's Club megastores undersold every shop on the square in the county seat and drove down wages across rural areas already depopulated by the death of the family farm, why were the only people upset some egg-head liberals in the city?
 
Because you can't beat the prices.
 
My Sam's Club, located in the prosperous suburbs of West Knoxville, Tennessee, undersells the local Kroger $31.08 to $42.23 on  standard grocery shopping trip. Because this is happening in the suburbs, not the country, the effects on the community are minimal. Surrounding businesses are not sucked dry; Sam's is not about to depopulate West Knoxville.
 
Maybe the West Knoxville customers feel remorse about exploiting the Sam's "associates" running the cash registers and stocking the shelves for $10 an hour (the average wage for Sam's nationwide). If they do, they're dealing with it pretty well. The SUVs pour into the parking lot at midday in the middle of the week and parking spots are hard to find on the weekends.
 
It kind of reminds you of the day the Yippies dumped money into the trading pit at the New York Stock Exchange to see if the stockbrokers would fight for it. In West Knoxville, the power of a bargain is apparently irresistible, even if there's plenty of money in the bank.
 
There are a couple of catches. Only "members" are allowed into Sam's and the basic membership costs $40 a year. You have to figure you're going to buy enough to save $40 in the next 12 months to make it worth your while.
 
You also have to decide whether you're willing to be photographed while you shop and submit to inspection of the goods in your cart as you leave the store. Unlike other exclusive clubs, this one counts the silver when the party breaks up.
 
And the store smells like fermented plastic, a naugahyde processing plant maybe, my eyes were burning from the fumes.
 
But no one has real problems with any of that stuff. The place is a clean, pleasant, enormous controlled warehouse. There are plenty of non-grocery discounted goods. Lines are long at the check-out, but associates routinely tote up the contents of people's carts at the back of the line to speed up the process.
 
Really, the biggest catch I could see was the sheer volume of goods people end up buying. The day I visited signs in the lobby offered customers a list of products—Tyson boneless chicken breasts, Quaker State motor oil, Gatorade, among others—available by the truckload.
 
I'm assuming buyers of these shipments are other businesses ("We Are in Business for Small Business," signs proclaim), but many of what looked like ordinary household shoppers were walking out of the store with pick-up-sized truckloads of groceries piled on flat carts. They were spending $600 to save some money.
 
You can buy three-quart Margarita mix buckets at Sam's. Four-and-a-half-pound jars of cole slaw. Ninety-six-count packages of Tootsie Rolls.
 
Some extract of vanilla, enough to feed Godzilla, as Allan Sherman sang it decades ago. He was singing about green stamps, yesterday's racket to get people to buy more food than they need. Today's racket is called Sam's Club.

Friday, August 8, 2008

The Revenge of the Nerds

It never surprised me to learn that Karl Rove was a high school debater. As a former debater myself, I am very familiar with the syndrome. These were the guys who, like Rove, walked into debate rounds with briefcases full of blank evidence cards, just to intimidate the opposition.

These were the guys who, in the first round of their first tournaments, peed in their pants from self-conscious stage fright and who, by about their fourth tournament, had developed into full-blown humiliation monsters ("I don't pee in my pants, I make the other guy pee in his!") They became masters at making their opponents look like brainless, mumbling, incompetent fools, and won a lot of debate tournaments doing so.

These were the acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, sophomoric nerds who became acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, senior presidential advisory nerds (doing the bidding of the nasty little bullies who, like George Bush, spent their childhoods blowing up frogs with cherry bombs).

I have come to believe that the entire Republican Party has transformed itself into the refuge of socially and psychologically crippled geeks and bullies who are too maladjusted to function anywhere but in a club of equally dysfunctional geeks and bullies.

Consider David Addington, for example. Chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Addington is often referred to as "Cheney's Cheney." New Yorker writer Jane Mayer has reported in the magazine that Addington was centrally involved in formulating the Bush adminstration's policies on treatment of detainees that resulted in U.S. forces engaging in torture on a systematic basis.

Mayer reported that Leonard Napolitano, a close friend of Addington in high school, described himself and Addington as "nerds."

"Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them 'too distracting to our interest in cards,' Napolitano recalled."

Irwin Hoffman, Addington's history teacher, told Mayer that Addington "had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable."

Sound a bit like Karl Rove? Consider Rove's recent attempt to label Barack Obama: "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

The projection is obvious ("makes snide comments about everyone") but the resentment and envy of a nerd who never had a "beautiful date" is even more striking.

Year after year, election after election, Republican administration after administration, the whole country has had to pay because social cripples like Rove and Addington were never able to get over high school. They take out their revenge on all of us.

The democratic process is repeatedly subjected to versions of the overstuffed debate briefcase trick. It's one sophomoric dirty trick after another. Democrats get Willie Hortoned, and Frenchified, and Swift Boated year after year by psychologically twisted gnomes who consider elections nothing more than primitive machines easily manipulated to win power.

The democratic process is jiggered to protect rich people's money and, more importantly it seems, fulfill the nerds' own need to show the suave, sophisticated, sexually satisfied high school Caesars who didn't even know the debate team existed how powerful a nerd can really be.

This is why I am sitting through these guys sniggering at Barack Obama for being successful (meaning "uppity") and lying about his energy policy to make him look incompetent (the nifty tire gauge gambit—as if Obama wouldn't easily be able to prove they are lying and make a pretty effective joke of it) and sticking him in an ad with beautiful white blondes Paris Hilton and Britney Spears (the miscegenation visual—a harder bullet for even some one as smooth as Obama to duck).

This is why I have to sit through these guys trying to use this bullshit to hold back the flood of reality that is driving this election—the real gas prices, and the real food inflation, and the real housing collapse, and the real global warming, and the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real strategic collapse of U.S. foreign policy—and that John McCain is having a hard time trying to put out of people's minds.

McCain has got a couple of percentage points out of this baloney, and it certainly is his best hope for winning, and he and the geeks could actually pull the whole thing out of the hat one more time.

But if the geeks get their man in again they will have to govern in a reality growing so much more insistently real that no amount of sophomoric bullshit will ever cover it up.

Monday, August 4, 2008

The Wile E. Coyote Kroger

Approaching from the south you see the Kroger suspended above the intersection of Pellissippi Parkway and Northshore Drive, hanging in the air supported by—well, by not much of anything these days, beyond the convictions of suburbanites west of Knoxville, Tennessee, that gas prices are bound to fall soon.
 
The store's namesake coyote (scientific name Overconfidentii vulgaris) is, of course, always bound to fall, but only after his Acme Rocket Shoes have failed to make that last hairpin turn and blasted him instead 1500 yards from the edge of the cliff into empty space.
 
He doesn't drop immediately even then—he hangs there maybe a good 10 seconds, when it finally dawns on the hapless animal that there's nothing below him but a gaping chasm. He gives us one crestfallen glance before his long descent, ending in a muted crash and puff of dust at the bottom of the canyon.
 
You know what's going to happen every time. The repeated failure of beautiful illusions, that's the American story, from roadrunner cartoons to suburban grocery stores. What do you do with people who spend election after election looking for a General Patton type who drinks Budweiser and bowls 300—especially when you know that given a choice between the real Patton and the guy who played him in the movie we'd probably go for George C. Scott? Americans live in permanent suspension of disbelief.
 
The Kroger at Northshore Drive and Pellissippi also hangs like Wile E. Coyote, happily suspended in that instant before the long fall. The store looks great. Hell, it is great. It's huge. There's a veritable garden center outside the store, plus a pharmacy, a bank branch, and a Starbucks inside.
 
The Kroger sells and rents videos, greeting cards, lawn furniture, TVs. The produce department offers beautiful fruits and vegetables, there is a large selection of organic and natural products, the deli and bakery are large and well stocked, the meat department is everything you could want it to be. The prices are reasonable and the store offers double off manufacturer's coupons.
 
So what's the problem? Nothing, if gas prices fall back to $2.50 a gallon by winter. Maybe they will, but Kroger itself seems to be betting that's not going to happen. The store has opened its own gas pumps, with a minor price break for shoppers with a Kroger card. The price has fallen somewhat in the last week but still hovers above $3.70 a gallon, up 30 cents since the spring.
 
The shoppers buying gas and groceries at the Northshore Kroger, and there were a lot of them, pulled up in Escapes, Blazers, Odysseys, Explorers, Quests, and Caravans. Presumably they came out of the green hills dotted with subdivisions visible from Pellissippi Parkway, and from the homes springing up along the Tennessee River for miles to the west. They probably filled up for the trip home.
 
Does it help to know that the price of gas is twice as high in Europe? Does it help to know that, with food prices driven by the cost of oil, hungry people have rioted in the Third World? The price of Kroger's chuck roast is up 70 cents over what it was in February, but the shoppers there haven't taken to the streets.
 
We haven't got streets to riot in, just interstates and exits and parking lots. As far as the Europeans are concerned, they've got trains, and subways, and coffeehouses within walking distance on every corner. We have to do Starbucks drive-through, or at best go to the Kroger, park in the lot, and then stroll in for our coffee.
 
All things considered, I can't say that West Knox County really has the infrastructure it needs for the coming fall; illusions out the wazoo, but no infrastructure.