An Ex-Bartender’s Apology to the Addicts I Enabled

You probably think I’m talking about alcoholics. And sure, I spent twenty years pouring drinks for them. Most bars wouldn’t survive without their coterie of regulars, the folks who show up every day for happy hour, or every night with their friends. And sure, they’re coming to hang out and be in public and not have to be alone with their thoughts and their damage, or just unwind from whatever it is that stresses them out. But a solid percentage of them are addicted to alcohol by any reasonable measure, and I, like every bartender ever, share some culpability for enabling them.

But they’re not who I’m talking about. Plenty of those folks are plenty functional and I say let them have their joy, or relief, or escape, or whatever. And the ones that aren’t, or who turn mean or sad or depressed? Yeah, drinking exacerbates things. But their troubles go beyond the bottle.

No, I’m not talking about the folks putting the ‘fun’ in ‘functional’. I’m talking about customer service addicts.

I wrote about them before, when the first wave of Coronavirus shutdown protests hit, and entitled white people across the nation demonstrated for their inalienable right to get their hair and nails done, and be waited on in a restaurant. They’d gone cold turkey for a few weeks — the first time in their lives many of them had ever been deprived of a fix — and they lost their goddamned minds, same as any addict forced to quit when they aren’t ready. Worse, there are so many of them they have the clout to keep the service economy open even though it’s not safe. Not for them, or for the people who have to work those frontline, high-exposure jobs, most of whom don’t make that much money, especially the ones who rely on tips for their income.

So, who are these customer service addicts? If you’ve ever worked in food service or retail you already know who I’m talking about, even if you never thought of them as addicts or the service you gave them as their fix. They’re the ones who believe the hype, who really think the customer is king, and always right, no matter how unreasonable or abusive they’re being. They’re the ones who don’t tip, or tip grudgingly when they do, the ones for whom your earning so little money is a feature, not a bug. They get off on treating you like you’re less than them, knowing you have to play along or risk your income.

They’re like weather, and they’ll thicken your skin and tighten your game, or they’ll run you out of that line of work and into something else. Not everyone’s got the grit or the psychological agility it takes to thrive in that environment. Because let’s face it, there’s a solid chunk of people who just really get off on treating other people like shit. Weirdly, they’re thickest on Sunday during brunch, right after church gets out.

And while that sounds like a dig, it actually goes to the heart of the matter. Because the woman who wants to speak to your manager about your attitude is trapped in her own kind of hell. She may have chosen it, may think she likes it, may even be right. But the tensions and contradictions inherent in that kind of stratified worldview — never mind the psychological contortions required to participate in white christian patriarchy — tear a person apart inside, even if they don’t know it’s happening. To be inducted to the hierarchy requires a person be injured, either directly, or, in the case of those doing the injuring, indirectly, because to harm others is to harm oneself. And to live with that kind of contradiction, and keep shoving it out of the light, will, in the end, do a person great harm.

Say it this way. Early in my career, here’s how I taught myself to deal with people who believed buying whatever the establishment was selling entitled them to treat me not as the person expediting their good time but as a lesser being they were free to be as rude and abusive to as they liked: I might have to deal with this person for five minutes, or an hour, or whatever; they have to live inside their head all the time.

Cruelty begets misery. This much is obvious. But the particular fuckery of a hierarchy-based worldview is that misery also begets cruelty. I call it Shit Mountain because we all know which way shit rolls. Why do you think it’s called a pecking order?

Not everyone believes Shit Mountain, of course. For every customer service addict who gets off on being treated like they are actually, meaningfully better than me and the rest of the staff — like the game we were playing was real, which was weird, since they’re also the ones who like to break the rules at the end and tip poorly, no matter how good their service was — there were two or even three people who understood it was a kind of game we were playing, that I and the staff were people like them doing a job well or poorly but in good faith whether that good faith was returned or not. Even places where the ratio’s different still have people it’s an actual joy to serve. But, like the weather, there’s always gonna be customers who think they’re the king and always right and are gleefully watching you for the slightest misstep or slip-up, looking for an excuse to deduct from your tip or call your manager and get their ego fluffed.

So why, you might ask, am I the one doing the apologizing?

They say addiction is a disease, and it’s possible they’re right, at least metaphorically. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the metaphor given my experience as a bartender and (currently quit but nostalgic) smoker. To me, addiction is a way of dealing with pain, more particularly with the damage, psychological and physical, that causes it. There’s that dopamine rush when you fix, yeah. But there’s also that feeling of relief when you re-up your stash, or buy a new pack of cigarettes, or your favorite bar or coffee shop opens. It’s reassuring the same way having enough food in the pantry is for some people. Because like when your food runs out and you get hungry, when you run out of whatever your fix is, the damage starts hurting again. For some people it’s bad enough to drown out everything else.

For most of my career, and the first few years after, I would have cast myself as the aggrieved party when it came to customer service addicts. I mean, at least for the drunks and alcoholics I was the dealer — a fraught position to be in but at least one they had to respect. For the customer service addicts I was the fix. And while my kung fu was strong, that shit leaves bruises no matter how thick your skin gets. But now I’ve got more distance I can see how I enabled them just as surely as any alcoholic, and that just like with the alcoholics I enabled, I have some culpability to acknowledge.

The customer service addict is as damaged as anyone who lives on Shit Mountain. That they live there, where cruelty begets misery begets cruelty all the way from the top down to the bottom, is by itself damaging to them, and to everyone around them, and to the world in general. By playing along, by enabling them, I contributed to the furtherance of not only their pain and damage, but the damage and pain they cause others, and the world.

For that, I sincerely apologize.

The Sanders Ceiling and the Dirtbag Left: Why Democratic Socialism Fails Without Social Justice

Friends, humans, socialists! Lend me your eyes. For I come to bury Bernie, and to praise him.

When the histories are written – if histories are written, and more on that later – I think Bernie Sanders, though he will almost surely not be President, will rank as a transformative figure in American politics. How can he not? Things that are mainstream now, things like Medicare For All, a $15 minimum wage, a Green New Deal, were politically unthinkable four and five years ago, and it is, for the most part, entirely thanks to Bernie Sanders.

Turns out that progressive policies are actually pretty popular. As many of us suspected they would be, if the media could be convinced to take them seriously (more on that, too). Bernie’s run in 2016, and the energy that manifested behind it, put those issues into both the Democratic Party platform and, more important, the marketplace of ideas, where they sell like hotcakes at a lumberjack convention. Because why wouldn’t they? They’re great fucking ideas that would make almost everyone’s life better.

So why can’t Bernie, and Democratic Socialism, seem to break through electorally? Or at least get past the dedicated core of supporters who have already joined his Political Revolution?

***

The answer is complicated. But it can be broken down into elements, some of which can be controlled, some of which can’t. For instance, one element that can’t be controlled is the cultural and historical weight of the word socialism, whether you modify it with the word democratic or not. Especially among Americans over the age of, say, forty. You know, the people who actually vote in meaningful numbers. I’m pushing fifty, myself, and remember the Cold War pall that hung over my childhood, where at any moment the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics might erupt into nuclear holocaust. That’s some heavy shit to lay on a kid. But more important, that early training (friend/enemy, good/bad) is hard to transcend even if you’re consciously trying.

And yeah, socialism is much more agreeable to Millennials and Gen-Z and whatever we end up calling the ones who’ll come after them. We could have had it already, too, if they’d fucking turn out to vote in bigger numbers. Not that any generation ever has any moral high ground on that. So file that under ‘we’ll work on it, but don’t hold your breath.’

Also in that file is what I’ll call the Resistance of the Punditariat, who perform our national political discourse on TV and podcasts and radio, and from the pages of newspapers and magazines and political websites, and who are, for the most part, handsomely compensated for doing so. Their salary depends on their not understanding certain things, especially those that might upset the status quo. Not only are they invested in that status quo – as the successful will be in any situation or system – they have also been worked like sports refs for decades now by the folks on the right, who never miss an opportunity to accuse them of liberal bias. It’s to the point where a fair observer has to say they’ve overcompensated. Why else was every third question Elizabeth Warren was asked – back when she was the front-runner in national polling – whether or not she would raise taxes on the middle class? The question’s as loaded as an AR-15. Like in middle school when that kid thought the funniest thing in the world was to ask ‘Does your mom know you’re gay?’

So figure the punditariat – who are mostly fairly liberal in their personal attitudes; I do believe that – will continue to skew anti-liberal/progressive/socialist for the foreseeable future. You can’t control it, but you can take it into account and start working them yourself, calling out bias in framing and the focus on horse-race ephemera when lives and livelihoods are on the line. Like anything, if enough people do it for long enough, that tide can be turned, too. Evolution has a thousand mothers.

***

So what factors can we control? And what does this have to do with Bernie Sanders and his Political Revolution? I’m glad I asked, cuz I got a theory.

My theory is we have two problems, which are inter-related. The first is simply this: socialists, especially the core of Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution, are really shitty at being allies, and, as such, are even shittier at building coalitions. If you think I’m wrong, I’ll point you to all the people demanding Elizabeth Warren endorse Bernie Sanders because of their friendship and ideological similarities. People who, some of them, got in a flame war with Warren’s supporters back in January when her so-called friend and ally called her a liar on national TV, and who called the person who built the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (and was forced out of running it) a corporate stooge. Shit, Warren’s people reached out to Sanders weeks before Super Tuesday and her dropping out of the race, and were rebuffed.

Some of this is the Dirtbag Left, who not unlike the above-mentioned punditariat, have found a profitable sort of noise to make, and whose new salaries depend on their not understanding things like how being an exclusivist jerkwad pretty much guarantees nobody wants to join or even work with you. It’s somewhere between a faith tradition and a cool kidz club from what I can tell: you’re in or you’re out, and fuck you if you’re out, even a little. It works as entertainment, but it’s no way to build a governing coalition. Which is what you need if you want to enact policy to, like, change people’s lives and shit.

But there’s a whopping dollop of blame to put on Bernie Sanders’ fudge sundae, too. For some of his hires, definitely. But the man made some seriously flawed choices. For one thing, his insistence on running as much against the Democratic Party as the Republicans and the billionaire corporate oligarchy is just a really not good way to get Democrats to support you. It riles up the kids, but til they show up to vote that’s a human interest story at best.

But it was Bernie’s choice to dismiss social justice issues as ‘Identity Politics’ for so long that really doomed him.

Put it this way: the backbone of the Democratic party is not, as many white college-educated progressives believe, white college-educated progressives. The ‘Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party’ as folks used to put it. We think we are, and there’s a certain logic to it. But we aren’t the party’s backbone, nor its heart and soul, either.

Women of color are the backbone of the Democratic Party, its heart and soul and animating force. People of color generally, but women of color particularly, and African-American women particularly-particularly. They’re the ones who show up, no matter what. The ones who do the actual work that makes the party go.

Women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants. You can win without them. But only if you’re a Republican.

So, if you want to, say, get the Democratic Party nomination for President, you’d best have a plan to win those voters over. Give them a reason to take a chance on you, Because as previously detailed, anything that can be labeled ‘socialism’ has a hard row to hoe in the US, and since those folks are the ones who catch the worst when Republicans and their coalition of White Christian Nationalists and the Actual Oligarchy are in charge, yeah, they tend not to want to take chances. I mean, put yourself in their shoes for a minute. If the house is on fire, you want to hear from the guy talking about how to put the fire out, not the guy talking about what kind of house you might build later.

And that brings me to the second prong of my theory, which has to do with the limits of a purely materialist critique of the status quo’s utility, not only as rhetorical but an analytical tool.

Like any reductive analysis, a purely materialist (the corporations and the 1% have captured the state and unofficially enslaved us all to an unsustainable economic system with disastrous and unjust real-world consequences) critique flattens the object of its critique, examines it through a lens that shrinks the spectrum in order to highlight certain wavelengths over others. All too often, issues of social justice are among those excluded wavelengths.

Those for whom social justice issues are of more than academic or conscientious interest aren’t thrilled to have their concerns so cavalierly excluded, it turns out. Nor are they thrilled when, as I’ve seen so often, they are blithely told how their issues will be magically solved through solely economic justice, and called names when they fail to achieve the expected moment of epiphany and join the faith tradition.

Remember, these are the natural, obvious allies any effective democratic socialist movement needs to achieve even a fraction of its goals. It’s time to stop asking why they aren’t joining us, and start asking how we can grow not only our tent but our worldview to include them.

***

I have a deep and abiding respect for Bernie Sanders and the movement he’s built. I think we all owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing the issues – and policy solutions – of economic justice and class war and democratic socialism into the American mainstream, where even a resistant punditariat has to take them seriously. But I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached the limits of not only a Sanders-style Political Revolution that demands adherence instead of building alliances and coalitions, but of a purely materialist socialist critique of late capitalism that filters out issues of social justice and asks those for whom social justice is lived reality to take it on faith that they’ll be included.

For what it’s worth, on a personal level, I still think that more actively fighting the class war and striving to establish economic justice will go a long way to righting social and historical injustice. Like the cereal commercials from when I was a kid used to say: it’s an important part of this nutritious breakfast.

We just have to remember there are other things on the table, which are just as important, some even more so.

***

If you want to change hearts and minds, you have to meet people where they are. You have to find out where they’re coming from, what they need, what they want. And you have to, you know, help them get it. Do the work for them. Don’t tell them how being your ally will benefit them. Show them how it does. It means reaching out, but it means stretching out, too. Becoming bigger yourself.

The most basic tenet of democratic socialism is that we’re all in it together. So let’s start acting like it. Let’s start acting like we understand the only socialism worth having is one that begins with social justice. Maybe then we can get some shit done.

Make America What Again?

What with the shit-show we’ve got going on right now as a nation — concentration camps on the border, a wag-the-dog escalation to a war of choice with Iran, a serious bump in hate crimes and people identifying as Nazis and white supremacists, a climate crisis that will destroy life as we know it starting to kick in for real, a nationwide election coming up that will undoubtedly be fucked with by hostile foreign actors while the beneficiaries insist nothing’s wrong, and a legislature unable, thanks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to do anything but confirm hardcore conservative federal judges to lifetime sinecures, just to skim the surface — it’s easy to understand the widespread longing to go back to the way things were under the Obama Administration. To get things back to normal so we can all go back to living our lives without having to worry that the demented narcissist with the nuclear football will bring about Armageddon in a fit of pique or even just to avoid jail time.

I get it. I really do. I also would like not to live my life in a fog of existential dread, in which every action is pointless because, Rapture or not, the end is probably nigh for the American experiment and possibly human civilization and what can possibly matter anymore?

But even were it possible to return to whatever passed for normal before — and it isn’t — such a return is not even desirable, both on its own merits and especially in light of the challenges we face as Americans and human beings who live on the rapidly-warming, ecologically-imbalanced, and soon-to-be-downwardly-spiraling Earth.

I’ll explain.

Continue reading “Make America What Again?” →

A Preliminary Case for a Universal Basic Income

From comments I made on someone’s facebook thread (lightly edited for clarity):

It’s a legit question how to pay for a UBI. Now, I’m no economist, but I do have some notions. First is, yes, upping the rates on the highest tax brackets. You know, like we did during the golden age from the ’40s til the ’70s. Not only does it raise revenue from top earners, it disincentivizes taking earnings that high, because why do it if the government’s just going to take most of it? So the incentive is to reinvest that money in the company that earns it, by building and buying stuff, and to pay employees more. Which pushes money down the socioeconomic chain to people who will spend it on goods and services rather than betting/investing in derivatives markets, which is where way too much money is these days. The multiplier effect suggests that money pushed down into circulation creates more value/money than money put into derivative investments, which increases GDP and, as a result, the tax base.

There is also the question of what the alternative to UBI is. Sure, you can say the answer is to keep doing what we’re doing. But technology has put us in a position where that’s not going to work anymore. We don’t need so many factory workers, because robots can do the job more efficiently, just like we don’t need so many grocery checkers, because self-check machines do the job more efficiently. The old way of doing things is undergoing a sea change, which we can fight, or adapt to. Put briefly, there won’t be enough jobs in the traditional sense for everyone who wants one. Now, this can mean good things. For instance, an explosion of new IP, since artists and creatives of all kinds will be freed to pursue their work without worrying about keeping a roof over their heads. But also a revolution in entrepreneurial undertakings. Right now, to start a business you need to have enough of a cushion/nest egg to pay your bills til the business gets off the ground and starts earning enough to sustain you. With UBI, more people are freed up to take more chances entrepreneurially, which means tapping the potential of the American people more deeply than ever before. I personally happen to believe in the American people a great deal, so I see this as a good thing.

There are also the long-term benefits to consider. Study after study shows that lifetime achievement and contentment are higher in people who grow up in economically stable/prosperous households. They commit less crime, are healthier and happier, and are, as a rule, more productive.

Continue reading “A Preliminary Case for a Universal Basic Income” →

Why I’m Voting for Kshama Sawant

I’ve been meaning to write this for a few weeks now. And while mail-in ballots have been out long enough that some folks have undoubtedly already cast their votes, I still think it’s worth chiming in to say that I whole-heartedly support Kshama Sawant’s bid for re-election to the Seattle City Council.

This is not to say that I whole-heartedly agree with her every position and precept. And to be clear, I am in no way affiliated with her campaign (though I am personally acquainted with some folks who are). I haven’t volunteered or worked for them, and though I still intend to donate money, I have not yet done so.

But whatever our (minor) differences of opinion on policy, I find a lot to like about Councilmember Sawant, both in terms of her accomplishments and in terms of the policies she’s currently pursuing. Continue reading “Why I’m Voting for Kshama Sawant” →