Go to Final Check-Out

I am now the former grocery store critic for the Knoxville, Tennessee, alternative paper, Metro Pulse. For roughly 10 months I have pursued the truth about Knoxville in its supermarket aisles. Though I believe the truth is still to be found in these stores—in produce perhaps, or inadvertently buried in a bin on the bargain aisle—the press of more urgent and lucrative business pulls me away. I admit that at times it has seemed to me that this column, like Seinfeld, was about nothing at all. Few places feel more empty of meaning than a grocery store at mid-afternoon with nothing going on.

One of the things I learned in grocery stores, though, is that if nothing is happening in front of your eyes, stuff starts happening in the grey matter behind them. A trick that Alfred Hitchcock used in his movies was to hold an establishing shot of a building just a little bit longer than usual. As the viewer stares at this house he begins to wonder why he's looking at it, and then he wonders what's going on inside it, and before long he begins to wonder where the bodies are buried in it.

Grocery stores were like that for me. (I would watch the butchers emerge from the back room with the meat and wondered where it came from and why they wouldn't let me watch it being prepared. People in the deli department have nothing to hide, so what was it with these meat cutters?) In the way they seemed to operate off screen, below the radar, on autopilot, the stores seemed to me like mini-Knoxvilles. Nothing was happening, but that was just on the surface, because underneath everything is going on.

This town, like all towns, has a secret history, a secret past, and a hidden present full of subconscious fears, desires, resentments, ecstasies. Stare down that empty aisle long enough and the linoleum begins to shimmer strangely and you hear suppressed whispers and invisible footsteps.

In some stores those glimmers of truth manifested themselves clearly enough for me to believe I knew what was going on from the minute I walked in the door. Other places I knew about from experience as a longtime customer.

I was keenly aware from talking to owners and operators of these stores and from my experience with family members in the business that it takes a lot of hard work to make money in groceries, particularly in a small, family-owned store. Those small stores often had the most vivid atmosphere and personality about them, and I did my best to do them justice.

Even the supposedly faceless chain stores spoke to me with distinctive voices, and I know I wasn't the only one who heard them. In a couple of instances people reacted strongly to what I had written, in some cases angrily. It was clear that these stores meant something to these readers—they were not "just grocery stores" at all, but places they felt strongly about, almost as strongly as they felt about their own homes, their own neighborhoods.

I have enjoyed writing about these places that people care about, because it has given me a greater appreciation for my own feelings about Knoxville. I arrived here 25 years ago with no personal connection or history in this place. Now I periodically see someone on the street or visit a location in town that I haven't seen in years, and I remember how my life was going and how I felt at that time and I feel happy or sad or angry at the thought of it.

The place has developed meaning for me, and I think that's what makes a town a community. The sum of all its peoples' memories and experiences of the place, its ghosts and its schools and its grocery stores, creates a spiritual feel that, for better or worse, defines our hometowns in our hearts.

Big Lie, Little Facts, Bigger Truths

I feel isolated by my problem with lies. No one seems to care about lies, particularly lies by politicians. People expect lies from politicans, and fall back on reliance on what John Feehery, a Republican strategist, recently referred to as "the bigger truths."

Quoted in the Washington Post, Feeherty said, "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

The bigger truths outweigh the little facts, particularly when they will put your candidate in office. 

Of course, bigger truths in most people's moral universe are arrived at by examining all "those little facts" closely and arriving at conclusions based on those facts.

For example, since most people had never heard of Sarah Palin three weeks ago, most people conclude, as Feeherty does, that she is new. Similarly, when we look at Alaskan opinion polls with high ratings of Palin's performance as governor, most of us also agree that she is popular in Alaska.

When, however, we look at the fact that she did not, as the Republicans claimed, stop the Bridge to Nowhere, and that rather than battling such projects she was an avid promoter of $200 million in earmarked pork for Alaska, most of us would not agree with Feeherty that she could by any contortion of the truth be called an "insurgent."

In the matter of Palin's "insurgency," the Republicans respected the traditional connection between little facts and big truth only so far as they realized that they would have to make all the little facts lead to the bigger truth they desired to put in the heads of the voters.

So they made them up.

But obviously, for  Feeherty and for McCain and for the vast majority of most Republicans in the country this election season,  a "big truth" is not actually certified on the basis of the little facts, but by how far and wide you can disseminate it before the fact checkers get to it.

Spread the big truth wide enough fast enough, and the little facts become irrelevant. Once you get the desired big truth "out there," as Feeherty explains, the case is closed. To hell with the little facts.

Obviously, the big truth is simply the flip side of Goebbels' big lie. 

Most people in print are even more squeamish about comparing Republicans to Nazis than they are about calling them liars.

Maybe they're right to be squeamish. These people are only doing what politicians commonly do to get elected.

When you consider how many people have died for fairy tales like the weapons of mass destruction, though, you start to miss the application of morals to politics.

Food Club on the Parkway

The Parkway in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, wears me out. This is the road to Dolly Parton's amusement mecca Dollywood, the road to Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As you drive south towards it out of Knoxville there are hints of what is to come--billboards for the Elvis Museum and the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which features a disconcerting face with what appears to be three irises per eyeball.

Driving down the Parkway in Pigeon Forge is not like curling up with a good book. It's not like mindfulness meditation. It's not like Vivaldi or cool jazz. Parts of it are like "Surfer Bird" by the Trashmen, but "Surfer Bird" makes a more compelling, unified statement.

The Parkway takes bad taste and then filters out the intelligence. It's more like Soupy Sales than Jerry Lewis, Freddie and the Dreamers than Herman's Hermits, a chicken with its head cut off than a penguin. Gatlinburg is just as tacky, but is nestled charmingly in the mountains. The Parkway in Pigeon Forge is a relentless, garish strip, an eternal traffic jam, with no redeeming geography.

It aspires more to the grand gesture than it used to. As you enter the Endless Drag from the north you now catch glimpses of enormous commercial developments on your left, big concrete entertainment venues the size of Lenin's Tomb with exotic names ("Cirque de Chine"), and blocks and blocks of brand-new pastel-colored shops.

Before you know it, though, you are in the midst of the flying pigs, looming plastic dinosaurs, and hideously grinning sharks that line the Parkway proper. A lot of new stuff has popped up here as well since my last visit (1987). Adventure Quest's castle looks as if it was built with Legos, and I like the upside-down WonderWorks building. You can do it all in Pigeon Forge—drive 40-mile-an-hour go-carts, do indoor skydiving, get married at more than one site, play miniature golf at what seems like dozens.

You can even buy groceries.

Penetrate far enough into garishness and you start running into artifacts of vacations past—old-time souvenir shops, fudge and funnel cake shops, and stores after store selling products "As Seen on TV."

That's the section of the Parkway where the Pigeon Forge Food Club sits, right before Dollywood, between the Sevier County Bank and Pigeon Forge Traders Gift Shop (offering knives, swimwear, leather, plastic bears, and huge Support Our Troops lawn sculpture).

Like the surrounding stores, the Food City is a period piece. Its logo is displayed on a broad band of 1962-vintage corrugated plastic that runs the length of the store. Inside the door is a full rack of tourist brochures and three grab-the-prize-with-the-pinchers arcade games. The bargain products on the wall as you enter feature charcoal, fire starters, cook-out implements, and camping supplies.

There are similar displays at least two other places in the store, as well as bins of bargain rods and reels, swim gear, ice coolers, and a display of board games for killing time by the campfire. Along with the outdoors products there is also a definite party theme at work here, with a well-stocked specialty beer section and hard coolers like Smirnoff Ice Green Apple Bite and Mike's Hard Pomegranate Lemonade.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Pigeon Forge Food City, though, is how unremarkable it is. Outside the store it's Female Elvis Mud Wrestling, inside it's a quiet store in the country. You get the impression that aside from the tourists from Michigan there are plenty of regular people living in the surrounding hills who come into the Food City to stock their cabinets and refrigerators.

Prices are moderate. The store is large with rather low ceilings, but clean and pleasant with the usual amenities, reasonable produce and meat departments, attractive deli and bakery, and an operating pharmacy.

Where's a guy supposed to get a tattoo? Down the Parkway at American Rebel Tattoos Studio. Can I experience a 65-mile-an-hour hurricane here? No, visit WonderWork's Hurricane Hole simulator. Have you got anything on the dawn of Creation? No, but you can check it out onstage at the Biblical epic The Miracle. How about world-famous racing pigs? Go to Dixie Stampede.

But where are the people with the extra eyeballs that I saw on the billboard driving down here?

I'm sorry, sir, our shoppers all have just one per socket. Would you care for some grapes?

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.

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.

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.

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.