The Rake Magazine

Author: Tom Bartel

  • The Wisdom of the Car Buying Masses

    Just when I thought it was safe to cancel my Strib subscription, they surprise me and put something on the front page that actually 1) contains information that I care about; 2) contains information that elucidates a larger story; and 3) nudges at least one piece of television-like spot news dreck out of the paper. (Actually, I’m only guessing about point number 3.)

    Today, there was a good piece by Dee DePass about the slump in car buying in the Twin Cities. It seems new car and truck buying was down 14.5 percent last year. Used car sales were also down—by 12 percent.

    Of course, these were sales by dealers, and if there’s one thing we should have learned over the past few years is that we don’t need dealers anymore of almost any type. We have the internet, and sites like Carsoup and Craig’s List, make it a lot easier to sell your car yourself and cut out the dealer’s commission.

    So, perhaps the numbers are a little skewed, but a table accompanying the story gives some detail that is relevant. (Sorry if you read the story online. The table wasn’t attached to the online version of the story. Is there a worse web site in the world than the Strib’s?)

    The table showed basically that the sales of American brands are down, for the most part, 15 to 20 percent. On the other hand, Toyotas, Hondas, Volkswagens, and other efficient foreign models were up. Not down less than Americans. Their sales were actually higher.

    Is there anything to be inferred from this? I’m going to go out on a limb and say Americans have wised up way faster than their automobile company executives and noticed that gas prices are rising and are making adjustments such as buying smaller more efficient cars.

    This is a roundabout way of getting to presidential politics. Recently, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have called for a temporary reduction of the gas tax. Because of course, we want to do everything we can to encourage Americans to drive more, take no responsibility either on the personal or political front for the idiocy of our national energy policy, and just keep paying out to our pals in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

    This at the same time as they laughingly call for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. It just gets funnier.

  • Stupid Is as Stupid Does

    A story appeared in The New York Times on Valentine’s Day with the headline “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” It cited several recent books that bemoan America’s seeming self-satisfaction in the knowledge, that, well, we don’t need no knowledge, ’cause we’re Amurricans.

    I don’t think that’s the case. I think we don’t need no knowledge because, by golly, there’s money to be made on two fronts: We can sell stuff to stupid people; and we can sell stupid itself.

    Let’s look at the evidence of my first premise: George W. Bush, whom I like to refer to as President Forrest Gump. I’m not necessarily implying that President Bush is stupid, because I don’t think he is stupid. I actually think he’d make a great contestant on that TV show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? I bet, for example, he knows more about the content of your phone conversations than you do.

    I like to call him Forrest Gump because Forrest Gump beat out Pulp Fiction for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1994, just like Bush beat Gore for president in 2000, and for the same reason. He won because Americans prefer the world of Forrest Gump. It’s violent, complex and unfair, but can be successfully navigated the same way Forrest did. After all, life is just like a box of chocolates. Sometimes you get nougat, sometimes you get caramel, and sometimes you get Vietnam, AIDS, or global warming.

    Americans can swallow anything.

    I certainly don’t buy the rest of the world’s assessment of Americans as exemplified in the London Daily Mirror headline the day after Bush beat Kerry in 2004. It read: “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?” First, I ask, If we’re so dumb, how can we count that high (Ohio notwithstanding)? And second, does re-electing Bush make us seem any dumber as a nation than collectively spending over $250 million to see the last Ben Stiller movie?

    Which brings me to my second point. We need to do a better job selling stupid to the rest of the world. Stiller’s Night at the Museum did over $320 million in foreign sales, granted. (It was hurt by the bad weather in Slovenia on opening weekend or it would have made a few thousand tolers more.) Since we can’t sell Escalades in countries where urban streets are about as wide as two donkeys (and, I might add, gas has to be paid for in hard currency like the euro) the only commercial advantage left to us is to sell stupid in Europe and Asia. (I’m sure we’ll make more economic inroads in Africa when more Africans stop obsessing over the whole subsistence farming economic model and get digital cable like the rest of us.)

    I don’t even have to go back to Jerry Lewis’s inexplicable popularity in France to make my point. I’m not even counting President Gump’s backrub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel or his duel with the locked door in Beijing. I’m talking “commercialized” dumb. You know: YouTube’s dogs on skateboards or any movie starring Will Ferrell. Face it, we’re leaving a lot of Will Ferrell money on the international table.

    Americans spent $150 million watching Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, but it only did about $10 million in revenue overseas. Now, this is a movie that could have a lot of appeal for foreigners. First there’s the whole stock car thing, which foreigners think is pretty funny. (“Zut alors! Look at those guys driving around in a big circle when they could be actually displaying the ability to do something other than turn left and bump each other.”) When you throw in Ferrell running off the track in his tighty whities pretending to be on fire, well, it just doesn’t get any funnier than that.

    But, like I said, it seems the only reason that movie showed overseas at all is so the Chinese could bootleg the DVDs and sell them back to us on New York sidewalks for two bucks.

    For some reason foreigners haven’t yet developed a taste for stupid movies any more than they have for our foreign policy, unless of course the movie is Titanic. Titanic did over a billion dollars overseas, which I’m going to guess happened because they do have a taste for movies about rich Americans who die while stoically drinking expensive French brandy.

    So, I have a possible solution to at least part of our balance-of-payments problem. As I write this, President Gump is touring Africa, and since it would only be the Japanese and Chinese who would profit if he were touting HDTVs while doing so, I propose that he do his diplomatic mission, and also throw in a little plug for America’s No. 1 export. Instead of acting like Forrest Gump at the closing press conference, he could do some sample Will Ferrell imitations for the assembled cameras.

    From all reports, he’s really good at it.

  • No Surprise Here, UnitedHealth Rides Again

    It’s not any surprise to those who’ve followed the sordid history of UnitedHealth Group to see that the company is being sued by the Attorney General of New York for manipulating the reimbursement rates for their insured who go outside of the network for their care.

    It seems United reimburses its customers based on a formula which calculates the "customary" charges for services in the New York area. Of course, the "customary" charges are calculated by a third party. In this case a company called Ingenix, which happens to be owned by UnitedHealth.

    An investigation by the state showed that a "customary" charge for a doctor visit in New York City was $200. Ingenix said it was $77. I don’t know if any of you have been to the doctor lately, but the charge in Minneapolis passed $77 quite some time ago. I’m fairly certain that I read somewhere that New York is more expensive to live in than Minneapolis.

    As NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said, “We believe there was an industrywide scheme perpetuated by some of the
    nation’s largest health insurers to deceive and defraud consumers.”

    Ya think?

     

  • …leaving community hurt, too

    Here’s the headline from yesterday’s Strib: "Girl, 6, is grazed by bullet, leaving community hurt, too."

    It’s tempting just to let that stand as one more blob in the insipid lump of goo that is the Star Tribune. OK, I will, but with just one comment: Doesn’t every bullet that hits a six-year-old hurt our community?

    I wish I had such an overstaffed news room that I could send a reporter out to the scene of a shooting to ask everyone who lives near the incident what they think of a little girl getting shot. What do they expect people to say? "Hey, no big deal. People get shot here all the time. What really makes me mad is the Twins letting Johan Santana get away."

    Actually, there was one detail of the Strib story that’s kind of funny. The assailant’s gun went off because his pants were so loose that the gun slipped down his pants leg and discharged when it hit the floor. How much funnier would the headline have been if the gun had hit with the muzzle pointed straight up?

    "Man, 20 or so, grazed by bullet, leaving future generations hurt, too."

  • If I were king of the fore-e-e-est

    I hope you all noticed the bold initiative of the Star Tribune, as expressed on their editorial page on Sunday. Yup, they put their heads together, snorted and wheezed with the Herculean effort, pressed hard on their temples to concentrate the intellect, and made their endorsement regarding tomorrow’s "Super Tuesday" nationwide primaries and caucuses.

    And you thought they were too timid to actually make an endorsement without doing a focus group first of what they could get away with without offending their ever shrinking base of readers and advertisers.

    Well, the joke’s on you. The Strib editorial board ain’t afraid of nobody or no thing. Not nobody. Not nohow.

    And just to prove that, they threw caution to the wind, damned the torpedoes, hurled themselves once more into the breach and endorsed…voting.

    As they put it, "Super Tuesday, Too important to miss." If that weren’t endorsement enough, they even said,"It could be a transformative moment in American politics."

    That’s some bold talkin’ there.

    So whatever you do, don’t miss Super Tuesday. It’s too important AND it could be transformative.

    And speaking of "Super", how ’bout them Giants? They made the top of the Strib’s front page today, right above the coverage of the candidates.

  • Discounting the Value of Work

    Every month or two a Costco coupon book arrives in the mail. Unlike the usual crap in most direct mail envelopes, the Costco book contains at least twenty coupons for stuff we actually use at our house: shampoo, Kleenex, garbage bags, dishwashing liquid. I usually look forward to my semi-monthly Costco runs, and do so even more when I’ve spent the night before tearing out a fist full of coupons.

    I like to go on Sunday, especially when the Vikings are playing on TV. The lines are shorter and the navigation through the aisles is easier. I often combine the Costco trip with one to Home Depot next door. But it seems the lines are never long at Home Depot these days. The trickle-down effect of the real estate bust is my guess why.

    As I was checking out at Costco, stocking up on over $100 worth of stuff, the checker mentioned that I sure was using a lot of coupons. The young woman who was reloading my cart as the items came off the scanner said that I was buying a lot of stuff that she needed, too, but she couldn’t afford to use the coupons this week because she was “short.”

    The checker offered: “They’re good through next weekend, too.”

    “Next week, I’ve got to pay rent,” she replied.

    The guy in line behind me was buying a new vacuum cleaner. The cheerful checker kept up the banter: “This must be cleaning supply day,” she said to him as I was signing my credit card slip. “Yeah,” the guy said, “my cleaning lady told me I needed a new vacuum.”

    “That’s good,” said the checker. “I’m a cleaning lady too, and I hate it when the vacuum’s no good. My husband and I do it one day a week. He does the downstairs and I do the upstairs.”

    Pushing my cart toward the parking lot, I thought of the first George Bush and his amazement at the electronic bar-code scanners when he went through a grocery line during a campaign stop. Of course, at the time this Bush had been either vice president or president for nearly twelve years and probably neither he nor Barbara had been doing their own shopping for at least that long. (And honestly, do you really want the President of the United States standing in line at the grocery store?) Nevertheless, the story was used to great effect by his rivals to show how “out of touch” Bush was with quotidian America.

    Similar charges could more honestly be leveled at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently said she was proud to be from Minnesota, “where we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.” Of course, she’s probably not as proud as George Bush fils, who two years ago told a single mother of three, “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

    Never the wordsmith, Bush of course has no idea that “fantastic” doesn’t really mean “great.” It means “beyond rational belief.” What is fantastic is that Bachmann is proud that someone needs a second job in order to have the money to buy discounted shampoo by the gallon. Not as fantastic perhaps as that Bachmann expressed her pride as she was endorsing the Republican-proposed “Middle Class Job Protection Act,” which has a corporate tax cut as its central strategy to protect Americans’ rights to work two or more jobs.

    It should be pretty clear by now that Americans’ ability to keep working in order to keep shopping in order to keep the terrorists at bay is stretched as thin as our military. As the New York Times noted last week, foreign companies and governments have been behind more than half of all the announced deals to purchase American companies so far this year. Our enemies don’t need to fly planes into buildings any more. They can just buy the buildings with their strong currencies. And we can start getting used to the idea that we may all be working two jobs soon, and that the new boss will likely be Asian, European, or Middle Eastern.

    I’m working on a coupon book of my own now, which I’m planning on direct-mailing to politicians who think the issues worth worrying about include who is more religious and whether gays can marry. I’m hoping just one of them will use it to walk through a checkout line and buy a clue.

  • States' Rights When It Comes to Flagpoles

    I’ve been thinking a bit about Mike Huckabee. Of course, I’ve mostly been thinking about what a disaster for the country it would be to follow the idiot currently in the White House with another. But you’ve got to admit Huckabee would be funny.

    For example, let’s consider his performance on the Confederate flag in South Carolina issue. First, he obviously considers whether South Carolina wants to erect a racist lightning rod over its capitol a states rights issue. I couldn’t agree with him more. But, if South Carolina can have its states rights issues, what’s Huckabee’s problem with, say, Massachusetts permitting gay marriage or California having stricter air quality standards for cars?

    And then there’s that whole remark he made about the flag poles. In case you missed it, here it is: "If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole. That’s what we’d do."

    I’m going to take a wild guess as to what Baptist preacher Mike was talking about and say "shove the pole up their ass." Do you think? (Do Baptist preachers really talk like that?)

    Ok, but somebody’s going to have to explain to me why Mike’s so all fired anxious for some people who might be visiting Arkansas to shove a pole up their ass and he’s so dead set against people who happen to live in Massachusetts doing the same thing.

  • Making Hay in the Winter

    There’s going to be another inquiry into why the bridge
    fell. On top of the NTSB, the Legislative Auditor, and the Governor Pawlenty-hired
    consultants, we’re going to have the Minneapolis
    law firm of Gray Plant Mooty looking into things on behalf of a bi-partisan
    State House-Senate committee.

    One wonders why we need another such investigation. But it’s not
    too hard to figure out if you read the comments of the politicians who oppose
    its formation. One needs to look only as far as our head politician for the
    answer. Governor Pawlenty said that the
    purpose of the investigation was "to make political hay out of a tragic
    situation."

    I agree whole heartedly with the governor, but not because
    it’s wrong to make political hay here, but because it would be wrong not to.
    Here’s why: the bridge didn’t fall because we didn’t know that it needed
    repair. The bridge fell because we knew it needed repair and someone made a
    political, or, to be generous, a budgetary, decision not to make the repairs.
    That’s what I’d like to find out: who made that decision to play dice with the
    chances with the lives of the thousands of people who drove over that bridge
    every day?

    Applying Occam’s Razor (which is a principle of
    investigation which states, in essence, that the simplest possible solution to
    a problem is most often the correct one) I’m going with Pawlenty’s appointment
    of Carol Molnau, an anti-transportation, anti-tax ideologue, as transportation
    commissioner as the proximate cause.

    That political decision trumped all the engineering and
    maintenance recommendations that might have saved the bridge. And that’s hay
    that should be cut, baled and stacked for all of us to see every time we drive
    over a Minnesota
    bridge.

  • My Friend Larry

    Larry Berle is perhaps the friendliest guy on the planet. He seems to know everyone I know, plus most everyone else, too. He accomplishes this in a couple of ways. He gets you to introduce all your friends to him, and then he actually remembers their names, what they do, where their kids go to school, and genuinely is interested in learning more about them.

    And he plays golf.

    The first characteristic he seems to have been born with. The golf I blame on his wife. Annie is just like Larry, except she’s probably a better golfer. (Her given name is Ann, but she’s so damn exuberant all the time you can’t help but use the diminutive.) When she and Larry started dating eighteen years ago, she introduced him to the game. She still plays a little, but not as much as Larry, mostly because nobody plays as much as Larry.

    Larry’s in his early sixties, but looks like he’s forty. I have an idea how old Annie is, having been to a birthday party or two, but let’s just say she could easily pass for twenty-eight. I attribute their youth to their health, and their maddeningly consistent buoyant outlook on life.

    Larry sold his business three years ago to concentrate on playing golf and making friends. Annie still works, so that cuts into her time to indulge his obsession. They do spend a lot of time together, though. They have gone hiking nearly everywhere in the world. Egypt, Papua New Guinea, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Patagonia have all felt their footprints.

    But eighteen months ago, their life as they knew it came to an abrupt halt. Larry had been out riding his bike, and when he didn’t return home Annie began calling his cell phone. Then she began calling police precincts and hospitals. Only after Larry had been missing for eight hours did she find him at Hennepin County Medical Center. Somehow he’d fallen off his bike and cracked his head, hard, on the concrete. He doesn’t remember how this happened, and while somebody called 911, no witnesses were there when the ambulance arrived. At the emergency room, they were so busy trying to save him that they hadn’t thought to call any family. Annie finally talked with someone treating Larry, who told her to hurry because he wasn’t expected to make it.

    He did make it, with extensive surgery that included temporarily removing a large piece of his skull, which allowed his brain to swell. He also made it, I’m convinced, due to the prayers and good wishes of his thousands of friends who set up a phone and email network that provided daily news of his condition. We friends also took care of Annie, which mostly involved not talking constantly about Larry and concentrating instead on dinner and wine.

    A few years before his accident, Larry had embarked on a quest to play Golf Digest magazine’s top hundred courses in the United States. A few of these are public and relatively easy to access; however, most are exceedingly exclusive. If you aren’t the guest of a member, you’ve got no chance to play unless you make the PGA Tour. And since the tour doesn’t take high handicappers like Larry, his only means of playing many of these courses was to make about a hundred new friends—friends who happened to be members of clubs like Augusta National.

    Of course, Larry did it. He worked his extensive list of friends to make contact with members who’d be willing to play golf with a stranger. Sometimes, he simply cold-called people, introduced himself, and wrangled an invitation.

    Over the course of nine years, he finished the list. Then he figured he had to write a book about it. He plunged into a task he knew nothing about, and was about two-thirds of the way through his first draft when he fell off his bike.

    Six months after the accident he was back at the book. He was suffering from some of the common side effects of a brain injury. His concentration and patience were both shot. He’d lost the ability to perform simple tasks such as balancing his check book. But the same determination that got him onto the courses got him to finish A Golfer’s Dream. In fact, he says finishing the book helped “bring him back.”

    For avid golfers, the book might be a slight disappointment. It’s not about the golf per se so much as it’s about all the friends he made on his quest. But that makes it even a better read, because when it comes to making friends, Larry is Tiger Woods.

  • Another Death Sentence for Journalism

    NY Times media columnist David Carr told a sad tale today. It started out with him telling how the city of Chicago had just paid out $20 million to settle lawsuits by four former condemned men who had been tortured by police.

    He mentioned that, in essence, because of these men being tortured into confessing capital crimes, the death penalty for Illinois had been put on hold in Illinois by former Governor George Ryan.

    And he told the story that these men, and others like them, had been freed based on the reporting of John Conroy of the Chicago Reader.

    And then, Carr reported that Conroy and three others had just been laid off by the new owners of the Reader. The Reader’s companion paper, The Washington City Paper, where Carr was once editor, had also laid off five newsroom reporters. Declining revenue and the need to cut costs were cited, as usual.

    Good thing it happened last week, instead of a few years ago, or those men would be dead, and several Chicago police would have gotten away with murder.

    Now it’s journalism that’s on death row. It’s been put there by readers who don’t demand investigative work, and advertisers who don’t want anything to do with any story that involves more in depth reporting that asking people where they get their favorite hamburger.

    It’s only a matter of time. Soon we’ll have nothing but insipid city mags and so called newspapers whose business model doesn’t include any editorial that doesn’t pander to the lowest expectations of readers and the highest ones of advertisers. Add that to all the advertisers being sucked away from the actual content providers by the likes of Google, and it won’t be long until even more publishers push the plungers on their staffs.