Letter From Milo: Dropping Like Flies

I've run my own small business - make that a very small business - for about 15 years. I'm not saying I run it well, I'm just saying I run it. I've made good money, decent money and chump change. I've seen good times and bad times, but I've never seen times as bad as these.

The way the economy is going you have to wonder if Karl Marx wasn't right after all. Like hunter-gatherer societies, barter economies and the colonial system, maybe true capitalism's time has passed. Maybe it's time for a new economic system to emerge, something that still rewards individual initiative but takes into consideration the immense disparity in the distribution of our planet's natural resources.

Why should a few nations, blessed with an abundance of natural resources, prosper while other nations, blessed with an abundance of sand, rocks, snakes and AK-47s, teeter on the brink of collapse. It doesn't seem fair. It's a small world, dangerous and very crowded. Such obvious disparities in wealth serve only to inflame the have-nots. New chickens are hatching every day and they'll all be needing a place to roost.

Whoa! I'm getting in over my head here. My world view is basically limited to what I can see out of my window. If I try to go beyond that I generally get a headache and have to retire to my couch with a cold Blatz and the remote control.

I was just reading an editorial about about the bankruptcy of General Motors. The writer opined that GM was too big to fail. What kind of bullshit is that! Too big to fail! The dinosaurs failed. The Roman Empire failed. The Soviet Union failed. Everything eventually fails. Do people think GM is going to last as long as the pyramids? Let GM succeed or fail on its own merits. I've got no sympathy for a company that foisted a monstrosity like the Hummer on an unsuspecting public. I mean, who the hell needs to drive a military assault vehicle on the streets of Chicago? Might as well outfit a Sherman tank with baby seats and a roof rack and call it a family sedan.

My concern is not with the GMs, AIGs and big banks of the world. I'm concerned about the little guy. My sympathies lie with the auto worker not the auto company. My heart goes out to the bank teller not the greedy bank honchos who helped cause this economic meltdown. While the fat MBA-festooned bastards are grudgingly accepting the blame, they are not suffering any of the consequences. At the end of the day, they will retire to their gated communities, while the unemployed autoworker and bank teller will be lucky to hang on to their split-levels and bungalows.

Swear to God, if it wasn't for those unreasonable statutes that deprive a man of his liberty for committing even the most righteous of murders, I'd go and...

Ah, never mind. Where was I? Oh, yeah. As I was saying, as a small business owner, I rely on a lot of other small business owners to help me provide my advertising services. Several of my clients are small businesses, too, and it breaks my heart, not to mention my wallet, to see them struggling to stay afloat and, and many cases, drowning.

Small businesses are dropping like flies. I've seen mom and pop print shops go out of business. I seen advertising specialty suppliers, the people that provide coffee mugs, ball caps and ink pens with logos on them, go under. I've listened to the sad stories of print makers, rubber stamp manufacturers and silk screeners. I've commiserated with photographers who had to close their studios and designers who wonder where they'll get the money to update their computer equipment. I've listened to people who have worked hard and honorably all their lives wonder if they'll ever be able to retire.

I listen and listen and listen, and all I can do is quote the great Marvin Gaye: "What's Going On?"

In my very first posting on this blog site, I promised that I would never lie to the American people. Although I've fudged on that promise a few times, I'll be completely honest now. I'm suffering, too. My business is going through the same problems that other small business are dealing with - budgets slashed or eliminated, lack of credit, longer payment terms and clients defaulting on invoices.

I don't now how much longer I can or want to keep it going. If things don't pick up in the next six months I'll have to make some tough decisions. As it is, I'm probably going to have to get a night job, something to help make ends meet. The only problem is that half the people in the country are looking for night jobs to help make ends meet. As W.C. Fields said, "It's a tough old world, you're lucky to get out of it alive."

Anybody wanna start a riot?

Big Mike: Wise, Wise Man?

Here's what a geek I am. Because I've been hearing so many loudmouths bitch and moan about how the economic stimulus package is "full of pork" and "loaded with earmarks" and so on, I decided to read the actual bill.

Dubbed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009," it's 407 pages of the most brain-numbingly boring legal- and political-speak you've ever laid your eyes upon. No, let me amend that - it's the most boring thing I've ever laid my eyes upon. You are too smart to waste precious hours of your life studying the document.

That's right, I read the god-damned thing! Where did it get me? Well, now I know that none of those loudmouths know what in the hell they're talking about. Of course, I already knew that so I guess I'm back where I started. I suppose I can now argue with confidence against them. I have the facts. They don't. Then again, the facts never seem to make a bit of difference to them.

Why do I do things like this? Here's another example. When the steroid scandal hit baseball, I boned up on everything I could about performance enhancing drugs. I learned how prevalent their use is, what the health benefits and risks are, and how they might or might not actually improve a hitter's or pitcher's game. I then wrote a 5000-word treatise on the subject. All the while I was saying to myself, Just wait till I dazzle them all with my brilliance!

Naturally, when it came time to pit my research against the uninformed ramblings of the loudmouthed set, I may as well have been speaking Amharic.

We like to view ourselves as a rational, intelligent species. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens - wise, wise man. It's as if we're insecure about our wisdom: Hey, we're smart! You hear me? We're smart!

We must be smart. We've created an Internet which provides us access to the most diverse, minutely-studied array of pornography imaginable. We've invented television and CDs and DVDs, which bring us the artistry of Howie Mandell, Madonna, and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" directly into our homes. Perhaps our most spectacular and life-changing invention has been the automobile, whose evolution has resulted in that most sublime and aesthetically pleasing artifact known as The Hummer.

So yeah, we're smart. And I'm a smart ass but I like to think of myself as plain old smart as well. Sadly, though, we seem to have a need to be willfully not-smart too. I remember watching the first debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election. No matter what you think about the respective candidates' positions, you have to agree that the incumbent Bush appeared embarrassingly uninformed and unable to articulate complex ideas. I felt a sense of shame and humiliation that the rest of the world saw the leader of the United States as, well, a dope. I wondered who could possibly vote for a man so lacking in intellectual assets. Oops - who's the real dope here? It turned out that a majority of Americans actually liked Bush's folksy befuddlement and were turned off by Kerry's intellectualism.

How about this? Years ago, I watched the mondo film "The Faces of Death" with my old pal Submarine Tony. Part of a series that was wildly popular in the 80s, it was purportedly a compilation of gruesome, real-life scenes of people being given one-way tickets out of this mortal coil. From the very start, I could tell that the producers' plan was to show a single, blurry, rough-cut clip of a real death and surround it with dozens of staged incidents.

So I launched into a scathing critique of the movie. I pointed out all the camera tricks and verbal suggestions, the breathless dramatic buildups and the shallow payoffs. I figured Submarine Tony would be thankful I'd opened his eyes. Instead, after listening to me for 20 minutes he said, "Would you shut the hell up? You're ruining the whole thing."

Another example. When Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World," came out in the mid-90s, I ran around excitedly telling everyone I knew what a great and valuable message it contained. Sagan wrote the book as a response to the exploding trends of pseudoscience. He deftly carved up fortune-tellers, UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists, New Agers, homeopaths, channelers, faith healers, and the like.

I was working at Barnes and Noble in Evanston at the time. One of my co-workers was Don the Egyptian, a tall fellow whom I'd figured to be fairly savvy. After I gushed about the book to him, he shrugged and said he wasn't interested in it. "I want my world to be demon-haunted," he said. "It's more interesting."

I wrote a note to myself: People want to be fooled.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only guy in the world who thinks the way I do. I also wonder where it gets me. Now and again I think, Wouldn't I be better off watching "Deal Or No Deal"? Instead, I read H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Then I think, Who would I rather hang out with? Howie Mandell or Carl Sagan? Sagan's been dead a dozen years now. I'd still prefer his company.

Big Mike: The Greatest Day

The East End of Metro Louisville, where I live, is an awfully white section of town. That's why the presence of the man sitting in the armchair at my Starbuck's this morning caused me to do a double-take. He was black.

He was waiting for someone, for a business meeting most likely since he was wearing a suit and he had that expectant look in his eye like the bazillions of others of a more ivory skin hue who do the same thing here everyday. I nodded at him and he nodded back. It was all I could do not to approach him, shake his hand, pat him on the back, and ask, Isn't this the greatest day this country has seen since, oh, who the hell knows when?

Good sense got the better of me, though. I thought, What if he's a Republican? What if he'd be insulted that I'd think he'd share my glee over Barack Obama's inauguration today simply because he's black?

Then, when ordering my coffee, I wanted to ask the barista, who was white, Isn't this the greatest day this country has seen since...? But again, I resisted the temptation, not because she was white but, aw I don't know, maybe because I didn't want to embarrass either of us.

Actually, this is the greatest day this country has seen since, well, I don't know when. We're not celebrating a war victory which entails by necessity the preamble of hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed human beings. We're celebrating the first election of a black man by a predominantly white nation in the history of the world. Man!

All my adult life I've thought the single greatest thing would be to witness the Cubs winning the World Series. No lie. I haven't had kids so I don't have the emergence of a Baby Pal to crow over. (In truth, I really wouldn't have minded having a kid or two - as long as they could live elsewhere and would go away whenever I was feeling cranky.) I haven't won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, or the National Book Award. I haven't made love to (in chronological order of my obsession) November 1968 Playmate Paige Young, Shirley (Partridge Family) Jones, Suzanne Vega, Dana Delaney, or Zooey Deschanel. Whatever dreams I had as a kid, save for earning my living in a creative field, have been so far unfulfilled.

So dreaming of the Cubs bursting out of the Wrigley Field dugout on a late October night to celebrate winning the championship of the whole wide world has kept me going despite living through the experiences of George W. Bush, 9/11, debilitating clinical depression, three specific lost loves, the administration of Jim Frey, and other unspeakable horrors.

Yet, today, as I drove to the Starbuck's and listened to NPR reporters breathlessly describe the early morning scene in Washington, DC I realized that a Cubs World Series clincher would rank a distant second. How crazy, how odd, how wild it is - we've fallen headlong into a world financial collapse and people are giddy with optimism!

I don't know what the next year or two will bring but I do know that I've had it up to here with people bragging about their Hummers, their flat screen TVs, their iPhones that allow them to communicate with the people of the Andromeda Galaxy, their sixth new/bigger/better home in the last dozen years, and all the rest of the trappings they've had to sacrifice their mean little souls for. I read the other day that sociologists and the like are astounded because many people are actually looking forward to living more modest lifestyles in the coming years, that this financial apocalypse will force us to become less materialistic and more interdependent. Hooray - the era ushered in by Saint Ronald Reagan is dead!

It's a great day and I'm lucky to be living through it. I can't ask for anything more - oh, alright - just the sight of Sweet Lou, Big Z, D-Lee and the rest spilling out of the Cubs dugout next October to celebrate the championship of the whole wide world.