Only In Wisconsin

I haven't lived in Wisconsin for 34 years so you can take all I'm about to write with a grain of salt. But reading about the protests over Governor Walker's attempt to break the public employees union (and, denials aside, that's exactly what he's trying to do), there is one thought that enters my mind again and again: only in Wisconsin could this happen. It's only there that in the middle of winter you'd find tens of thousands of people protesting for weeks on end over a political change that adversely affects the little guy.

It certainly isn't a Midwestern thing. Six years ago Indiana's governor did exactly what Walker is trying to do now. I'm sure there was a political battle, but nothing happened of the magnitude of what's happening now in Wisconsin. I can't imagine huge protests taking place in California, my current home, should a Republican governor try to break the public unions.

There's just something about my native state that engenders this kind of grass roots populism. It's a populism that can swing both right and left. When I was working for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign the word that kept coming up to describe Wisconsin was "quirky." I kept telling people in the campaign that Wisconsin would swing for Clinton. Their poll results kept showing something else.

I told them to screw the polls, that Clinton was viewed as someone more moderate (I didn't believe there was actually much difference between the two candidates, but the press kept saying otherwise), that the state (sadly) still had a strong racist component, and there was no way all those little old ladies and men on Milwaukee's South Side would vote for Obama. I was wrong. Even the South Side swung big for Obama in the primaries and Obama won the state in the presidential election with ease. Wisconsin is...quirky.

Yet this same state had Joseph McCarthy as its senator for many years. George Wallace, whose presidential campaigns were 100 percent about racism, garnered 34 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 1964. Wisconsin kicked out a quirky Democratic Senator, Feingold, this past year and replaced him with a far right Republican who couldn't articulate any real views except a hatred of all things Washington. Right, left, right, left. Wisconsin, more than any other state I know, likes to swing toward extremes.

It's a state that also can organize large public rallies easier than most. When the public turned against the Vietnam War, Madison was a major national center of protest. I marveled at those protests when I was a kid. I knew protests weren't happening with anywhere near the fervor and frequency elsewhere in the Midwest. What was so special about Wisconsin then? The same thing that makes it special now. It's an inherently quirky state.

Part of it I think is the cold weather. It promotes a certain internal strength. It forces you to plan ahead and always be prepared. Part of it I think has to do with the amount of alcohol people consume. In the winter, a significant segment of the population stays almost perpetually tipsy. They aren't afraid to tell you what they think.

The ingredients necessary for the current battle in Wisconsin were fairly simple. First you needed a new politician on the scene, one that had yet to build any goodwill with the state. Walker is a newly elected governor. Second, that new politician had to be filled with hubris. That's certainly true of Walker. Third that politician had to be an ideologue with a tin ear for what the people want. Walker has said explicitly that he's a conservative and holds at least mild disdain for what he calls "pragmatists".

Essentially to set up this battle, first and foremost you needed someone who could play the role of an uncharismatic dogmatist, and enemy to the little guy. Walker has fit that role perfectly.

Then you needed little guys who had a history of not taking crap from anyone and organizing against powers that be. Wisconsin has historically had strong unions and has a long history of people working on assembly lines for big corporations. Although most of those jobs have been gone for a decade or longer, ordinary folk are used to battling against the big guy over wages and benefits.

Put a dullard ideologue in office, have him get power hungry and overreach, and in most if not all states aside from Wisconsin, the people would grumble and scream, but quickly give in. That's probably what happened in Indiana several years ago. But in Wisconsin, it really is different. People are feisty. They don't like being pushed, even if the person doing the pushing was someone they elected by a wide margin.

After Clinton lost the primary in Wisconsin, I told myself I'd never try to predict what would happen in my home state again. Wisconsin is just too much of a wild card. I'm not going to try to predict what will happen with Walker over the next few years. I can easily imagine his term of office, as a result of his ham-handedness concerning the employees union, will be rough. But I could well be wrong. Two years from now, the people in the state could love this guy. You never know. With Wisconsin and politics anything is possible.

My Time As a Member of the Wisconsin State Employees Union

There have been I don’t know how many commentaries about Wisconsin Governor Walker’s plan to take away state employees’ right to collectively bargain. Few of these commentators have spent any real time in Wisconsin and fewer still have actually been a part of the employees union. I have, although it was long, long ago. I’ve been thinking of those days as I’ve read about the protests and the AWOL Democrats in the State Senate.

My title as an employee was Clerk Typist II. I earned $4.63 an hour, which was, if I remember correctly, about double that of minimum wage at the time. For my salary, I sat at a desk near the entrance to the UW-Extension building, directed visitors to the offices they were seeking, typed remittances on carbon paper, and handed out paychecks every other week (people in the building loved me for this and I felt like Santa Claus).

I was basically the receptionist for the building. I’m sure that job doesn’t exist anymore. What buildings, aside for hospitals and Walmarts, still have greeters who tell you where you need to go? Nowadays, you’re supposed to just figure that piece of information out yourself.

It was my second job out of college. I was waiting for my sweetie to graduate in six months. Employment opportunities in college towns for recent graduates are usually very slim. Madison, Wisconsin was no exception. My first job was working for about twenty cents over minimum wage as a temp in the Wisconsin state unemployment office. I started out in the mailroom, but they quickly “promoted” me to client correspondent. My job was to write letters to people who had been given, through error, too much unemployment compensation and to try to claw back the money with threats.

Some people did pay back the money. Most didn’t. I’ll never forget the response one of my clients sent back to me, written in cursive on greasy lined paper:

Dear Mr. Rochecker,

You’ve got about as much chance getting money from me as you do sticking hot axle grease up the ass of a tomcat.

Yours,

X

I hated my job. The pay was crap. Taking back money from the unemployed seemed cruel to me. I was in the basement all day. Fortunately, the part of the unemployment office that got new job announcements was one floor above and I convinced a girl who worked up there to pull the good ones for me the second they hit the job board.

That’s where the Clerk Typist II position showed up. The requirements were good communication skills, a good wardrobe, and an ability to type 35 words per minute. I called the number immediately. I showed up at the UW Extension building one hour later ready for my interview. I lied about being able to type at the minimum required speed, told my future boss I’d do anything to get the job, and bowled him over with my enthusiasm. He hired me on the spot.

I spent the next weekend in our apartment with a “how to type” book from the library and practiced for probably about 15 hours until I had the rudiments of touch-typing down.

How well could I live at $4.63 an hour back then? Not very well, but I didn’t starve. I could pay my share of the rent in a shared apartment, buy food, go out once a week with my sweetie for some cheap Chinese, and go to the movies. I was more than OK with this mind-numbing job, though. My goal at the time was to be a full time novelist. I thought this is what novelists did, took stupid jobs that didn’t tax them too much so they’d have the mental energy to write when they were at home.

I wrote and wrote my first novel on nights and weekends - page after page – a picaresque. I’d go to work dutifully every day, dressed like I thought a male receptionist should dress. The people around me were conscientious and serious, but there was one funny exception.

Every once in a while, I’d walk down to the basement to the copy office to get some paperwork Xeroxed. The door to the copy office was always locked. There was a little slot through which you were supposed to slide your papers. At 3:00 PM your copies would be placed outside the door for pick up.

I was intrigued about this locked door. Why were these people copying in secret? So I’d always try to open the door when I dropped off my paperwork in the hope that I could actually see what was going on inside. One day I succeeded. The door was unlocked and I opened it to find five guys sitting around a table playing a German card game that I knew well, sheep’s head.

What these folks did was play cards all morning and through lunch. Then at 1:00 or so they’d take all the copying jobs for the building and run the papers through the copy machine. They were getting paid eight hours for a two hour work day. So, yes, there was some waste and sloth going on in the building. But it wasn’t widespread.

My wife graduated. That summer, I stopped to critically read my novel (it was about half done). Oh my lord, I thought. This is utter crap. I definitely need to do something else for a living.

We moved to Denver at the end of the summer and I kissed my Clerk Typist II position good-bye, but not before I trained my replacement, a very weepy young woman who had just divorced and talked non-stop about her marriage and how she missed her husband. She was 26. I had just turned 21. I thought she was ancient.

Nowadays a job like I had pays about fifteen dollars an hour. That’s an improvement relative to the cost of living over my salary, but not a dramatic one. You can probably afford to rent your own apartment with that kind of money, and make payments on a decent used car (I didn’t own a car during my stint as a Wisconsin state employee).

The improvement from a barely livable wage to a modest but livable one for clerk typists in the state of Wisconsin over the last 35 years was, no doubt, the result of collective bargaining. Without it, jobs like the one I had would, I’m guessing, be ten dollar an hour things. Can you really live on ten dollars an hour? Sort of, if you’re twenty years old, sharing an apartment with your sweetie, don’t have kids and don’t own a car.

Governor Walker would like to strip collective bargaining from state employees. What would be the long-term outcome? Crappy pay and expensive benefits. Eventually you’d probably have a sea of employees earning Walmart kind of wages. Eventually you’d have a state where a large percentage of employees – both public and private – earned wages that caused them to struggle to just make ends meet every month. This isn’t progress for the state. This isn’t progress for the country.

Governor Walker has noted that Mitch Daniels, who has axed the budget of Indiana as governor, is a hero of his. The data say that Daniels’ dramatic budget cuts have, in the end, made it more difficult for your average Indianan to make ends meet. No one should mistake this as a change for the better.

When someone works an honest job, they deserve not the world, but the ability to be able to feed and raise a family (with some help from their spouse’s income), keep that family healthy, put a modest roof over their heads, and keep their cars running. When a job doesn’t allow for these modest benefits of employment something is wrong in America. This Walmart model for employees essentially is the future the Governor Walker is planning for Wisconsin state workers. Who benefits from such a plan? Only a sliver of the populace, the wealthy. It’s a plan that is undeniably wrong.

Uncle Stuey Watches The Grammys

I'm a voting member of the Grammys. It doesn't take much to be a voting member. You have to have worked on some CDs (if I remember correctly two is the minimum number) that have been sold through a national distributor. There are about 10,000 voting members out there, musicians, engineers and producers who care enough to pay their annual dues. The criteria for membership means that the age of the voters is a lot older than that of the pop listening public. So the vote skews old in terms of taste.

I watched the Grammys at the annual Bay Area party for Grammy members with a friend, a classical composer. The party used to be a nice affair, but the music industry is in a tailspin, which means people have stopped paying their dues, which means The Grammys don't have the money to do much in the way of entertainment. They dropped their annual Christmas party this year, and the Grammy watching party was kind of a sad thing. There was a tiny amount of food, the venue was a dump of a bar, and the attendance was low, consisting mostly of people who paid $25 for the right to shmooze with people like me, people who couldn't help them not a bit with their musical aspirations.

But I did watch the show on a big TV. I thought the Grammy organizers did a good job all things considered. There had been some work and practice beforehand on the part of the performers, people weren't just winging it, and the effort paid off. The numbers were big on dance and spectacle, with flames, rocket blasts and lots of hunky and sultry chorus dancers slithering around. That's what entertainment is mostly about today, spectacle to delight your eyes, so the effort made sense.

The music, though, was incredibly boring. Basically, it consisted of singers imitating singers of old. Bruno Mars imitated Jackie Wilson and not very well (Jackie Wilson was just too talented to be the kind of singer that can be mimicked with any sort of accuracy). Justin Bieber did a good job of imitating Shaun Cassidy (actually, he's much better than Shaun Cassidy as a singer). Lady Gaga imitated Madonna (who imitated Marlene Dietrich) minus the sex appeal (the point of that approach escapes me, but others obviously feel otherwise). Muse imitated Blondie (and Blondie imitated Jefferson Airplane). Mick Jagger, who has made a great career out of being a white version of James Brown, imitated Solomon Burke (and surprisingly showed that like Brown once did he can still bust a move in his 60s). Cee Lo Green imitated The Four Tops with the addition of the F word and the S word (kudos to Mr. Green for his wonderful drag get up, though). In the weirdest moment, Bob Dylan imitated himself and did a good of it (although Maggie's Farm isn't a song that anyone has to hear on national TV).

Pop music changed with Elvis, Motown, and the Beatles, but that change occurred 50 to 60 years ago. Every decade since has been full of a recycling of those old sounds and chord progressions. Rap dropped the chord progressions, but simply sampled those old sounds for background music and nowawdays seems to have retreated to using a very traditional verse-chorus structure, with the rapper talking out the verses and some big voiced person taking over the chorus.

I keep wondering when is "next"? When does pop music leave the Beatles behind and truly make something new. My classical music composer friend says the same thing is happening in contemporary classical, people are simply recycling the "contemporary" music of the 1950s. Sooner or later, though, it will happen. Someone will come on the scene and truly revolutionize pop music, make it new the way the Beatles did. We just aren't there yet.*

I voted in about 20 categories for the Grammys. There are over 100 categories and many of them contain "music" that is just plain unlistenable, at least to me. I think that my vote matched the winner about 20 percent of the time, which is a new high for me in terms of "success." One of the winners that lined up with my vote was Esperanza Spalding. When her win for best new artist was announced, every black person around me at the party (and me) shouted out (martinis will do that to me) in celebration. The rest wondered who is she?

Ms. Spalding isn't a pop musician, but you can get an inkling about what I mean by moving ahead from her version of jazz. She's conservative in what she does. She's not about to break with the past, but she's trying to stretch the boundaries of what makes jazz music. Ms. Spalding is also very talented. She'll be around a long time. Pop musicians would do themselves a favor if they spent some time listening and watching her instead of trying to imitate Blondie and Madonna.

*And maybe one day country singers will learn how to actually dance when they are on stage instead of being statues. We're not there yet either.

Why Something So Tiny Gets So Much Attention

About a week ago, the Tea Party Senate Caucus held its first public meeting. There are a grand total of three members of this caucus, three nuts from three of the reddest states in the country. All three are essentially libertarians. If they would call themselves the Libertarian Senate Caucus maybe no one would pay them much attention. But I guess it's all about the packaging. Three Tea Partiers getting together makes news and gets covered by a room full of reporters.

Why? Three people don't make any sort of caucus. They don't even fill a booth at McDonalds. If anything, whatever press coverage these three looney tunes received should have been derisive. Look! A caucus of three. Hahaha. If they ever get to four, they could form a bowling team!

But no. The press took this pathetic attempt to show impact seriously. They covered it as legitimate news. In the background of press motivated events like this is the idea that the Tea Party has transformed the political landscape. It hasn't except for a few states. But the press would like you to believe otherwise.

Why does something so tiny, the Tea Party, and ultimately ineffectual get so much attention? I think partly it's because these people are acting against racial stereotype. They are a group of white middle age and older Christian people. Think Ward and June Cleaver.

We expect people like this to be polite and considerate, unlike our stereotypes of people of color or non-Christian religions. So when we see white grandmas and grandpas screaming at town hall meetings about government being too big, about the threat to take away Medicare, we think this is unusual and ultimately, newsworthy. It's the equivalent of Ward and June Cleaver going postal.

When liberals and lefties marched against the Iraq War, the press hardly noticed. That was just the angry left behaving as expected. But the angry right? That's a twist, according to the press, something worth covering. Having spent time listening to Ward and June Cleavers go postal over the potential election of a black candidate, I happen to think that the "angry right" isn't unusual at all.

But that doesn't cover all of why the press pays attention to the Tea Party. I think it's also because, anger or not, these people are on the far right. For whatever reason, the far right is covered a lot more by the press than the hard left.

For example, CPAC just held its annual meeting and had a straw poll of Republican presidential candidates. These nut jobs voted for Ron Paul. They voted for Ron Paul in 2007 as well. What chance does Ron Paul have of winning the Republican nomination? He's a fringe candidate and the answer is zero. What is the purpose of giving significant press coverage to a meeting of a group of people who think that a nut job who wants to abolish the Fed is presidential material? Beats me.

In the 60s, the left used to get uber-exposed the same way. Nobodies with big hair and outlandish words like Angela Davis were in the news frequently. Now they are old hat.

I guess that press obsession with the hard right simply represents press fashion. In another decade or so there will still be screaming white Christian grandmas and grandpas of course. But the press will go ho hum, we've seen that before. They'll be on to something new and supposedly fresh, like, I don't know, maybe a group of screaming Park Slope moms with high end strollers. Until then, we're stuck with coverage of the Tea Party that is, as one national reporter admitted to me, mostly overblown.

How To Sing The Star Spangled Banner

I'm about as patriotic a person as you will find out there. I'm extremely sentimental about this country that allowed my parents entry after WWII. Sure, I believe that America comes up well short of an ideal in many ways. But I can't think of a better place for my parents to have immigrated, not even close.

I place my hand over my heart with enthusiasm whenever our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, is played. I sing along usually and feel immense pride when I do so. My expectation of the lead singer when I'm at an event where the anthem is sung is simple. Sing on pitch. Don't make the song all about you. It's the nation's anthem, not your anthem after all. Show some modesty, hit the notes, bow, and walk off.

Yesterday, before I don't know how many tens of millions (hundreds of millions maybe) of television viewers Christina Aguilera did this to the Star Spangled Banner:



She's so busy trying to insert notes that were never written into the anthem in an effort to impress that she blows the words. Then there is that raspy, he-done-me-wrong thing that she does in a few places. No, Ms. Aguilera, The Star Spangled Banner isn't a torch song. What were you thinking?

Here, in contrast, is another version at an earlier football game this year. The guy isn't a professional singer. He's a hockey player, Jim Cornelison:



Mr. Cornelison stands there like a tank and belts out the notes. He's sincere. Yes, the notes are a little pitchy, but he's singing not to wow you. Rather he's simply trying to honor this country the best he can in voice. Now that makes me happy.

You don't have to be a professional singer to do justice to our anthem. I'm hoping that we move away from having pop singers butcher the Star Spangled Banner at nationally televised events like the Super Bowl and get more strong-voiced, straight-ahead singing amateurs like Cornelison. Here's to hoping.

I also note the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl yesterday. As a native cheesehead who adored the Packers as a kid, that makes me even happier than hearing Mr. Cornelison sing.

A History of "Your Best Entertainment Value"

Sometime in the 1980s - when the music CD was king, and record companies raised prices so that what used to cost $5.99 as an LP cost $12.99 as a CD - record companies began to slap a sticker on their CDs that said, "Music, your best entertainment value." There was some truth to this statement. For example, you could buy a book or go to a movie with your date for about the same price as a CD, but that was a one shot deal. In contrast, you listened to a CD over and over. On a per use basis, music was, even at $12.99 for a dozen songs, cheap entertainment.

But the public didn't see it that way. People grumbled about the price of music in the 1980s. I heard that grumbling from friends. The price doubling on the part of record companies that accompanied the format change from LP to CD was looked at as a greedy grab. And it was.

Something else changed during that time period that also led to grumbling about price. People stopped actually "listening" to popular music. By that I mean that from the 1950s through the 1970s, a teen or twentysomething would sit with their friends and for entertainment turn on a new LP and...just...listen. Music was entertainment in and of itself.

That wasn't true anymore in the 1980s. Pop music was either something in the background or something that accompanied a video on MTV. It simply was no longer valued in and of itself. So its price - which reflected its former use as a source of standalone entertainment - was no longer reasonable.

It's cliche to complain about the quality of 80s music. Pop music probably was worse from a musical content standpoint. But it was serving a different purpose than it did in the 50's through 70's. Pop music in the 80's was by design a vehicle for visual entertainment.

It's easy to see why the public glommed on to mp3's and pirated downloads. Pop music had lost its primacy. The existence of downloading sites meant the public didn't have to pay for something they thought of as an entertainment accessory. Then in the 2000s, the iPod came along to firmly establish the subsidiary, but ubiquitous role of pop music. It is now something you have in your ear that doesn't demand too much attention and serves the role of background mood elevator.

I think that the subsidiary role that music plays today is the big difference between music and other media. Books and movies are still sources of entertainment that command the full attention of the reader/viewer. As such they still have the same intrinsic value to the consumer that they always did. It's true that like music, books and DVDs face downward price pressure. But there doesn't seem to be quite the same mad rush to grab free and illegal digital books and movies as there was with music. Part of that difference is due to differences in format, sure. A digital movie is still hard to watch on TV and a digital book isn't for everyone. But I think part of the pause on the public is that authors, publishers and movie makers are still respected and valued.

The end result of the mad rush to free music is that the music industry is essentially dead. Yes there is, of course, still music being made. But the ability of anyone to make money off it aside from a handful of stars is gone.

The public doesn't care about this. They still have plenty of music to chose from, more than they ever had before. They make all kinds of ridiculous statements to justify the fact they aren't paying for their music. There is the "who cares about the greedy record companies" defense on the part of the public. There is the "bands get exposure through my downloading and sharing they wouldn't get otherwise" defense. They don't have to pay and get indignant about the idea that they should pay for music. The public's "best entertainment value" is now beyond ridiculously cheap. It costs nothing. As a result, it's almost a given that music businesses will lose money.

There was hope that legal digital downloads would eventually serve as a reasonable revenue source for record companies and musicians. But that isn't happening. Music licensing - for TV shows, movies and commercials - has always been a good backup source for revenue, but there has been some unexpected collateral damage from illegal downloading. Once the public began to expect that their music would cost nothing, Hollywood and ad agencies began to think the same way. They demanded a dramatic lowering of licensing fees. Music is being licensed out at about 10 percent of the old rates with the exception of things like Beatles and Sinatra tunes.

It's a wonderful time for music consumers. They can choose from a ton of music and pay nothing for it. But for music makers, free music means no revenue. A 100 year long era when a significant number of popular/folk musicians could make a living has come to an end.

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