Descent from My iPhone

How in the hell can Apple sink so low?

No, I'm not talking about the kind of shit product releases that can be summed up in three words and one numeric symbol:

iPad=my bad

I am talking about the kind of shit morals that requires two freaking hours of masterful condemnation by a man who comports himself much like a Revivalist preacher with a cult following.

Except sweatier.

Of course the cult in question is ... well, let's just say I bit the fruit and now I've been cast out of Eden.

Not that sweat is inherently antithetical to Apple. I happened to require some customer dis-service at our local crApple store this week, and the pimply-faced staff were so sweaty the place smelled like a college dorm during Finals Week.

And people, I used to teach at Reed College, so I know from smelly students.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so judgmental of the mouth-breather behind the counter who was taking so damn long to help me. He was probably only mouth-breathing to avoid smelling his shiny, happy coworkers.

Although, given their perspiratory tendencies, maybe that should be sheeny, happy coworkers.

But still the sweaty man rang out his righteous indignation.

Except, actually, he's not a cult leader. He's a cult follower. And he knows you are too. And even though he spent those two hours telling you how freakin' evil the freakin' cult is, he doesn't actually ask you to leave it.

Just to email it.

Which, if you are like me, you will be doing from a burnished-silver keyboard annotated in VAG Rounded font.

Welcome to that very special case of self-hating ethnics, the morally outraged Apple user.

iWouldn't actually buy an iPad, because it is a stupid, purposeless product.

Not like my iPhone, which I bought because I needed to make and receive calls.

Which I can do on my iPhone.

On rare occasions.

If I'm not trying to call someone who also has an iPhone.

Case in point: my best friend's mother died, and I called to offer my condolences. But we both have iPhones. To make a long cancer-ridden death short, after we were cut off fifteen freakin' times, my friend finally Skyped to Chuck's cell phone--which, unlike my SmartPhone only has middling intelligence but which with the regularity of any idiot savant is able to make or receive calls any time the owner wants. All that, just so I could say the usual You may not be able to realize it now, but I promise, life goes on tripe of condolence, by which point it was moot since your iPhone not working is actually life going on. And on and on.

Oh, wait, I'm the one who's going on and on here. But not about what I meant to go on about.

Let's get back to the sweaty man.

He comes to Portland to tell us what's wrong with the world. Which was one thing when he was telling us how evil the President is when the President was George W.

But quite another one he is telling us how evil the President is when the President is Steve Jobs. As in president, or rather CEO, of Apple.

Which, as well all know, makes personal electronics that are to die for. We just didn't know how literally.

At least not until the sweaty man told us.

Now, I'm the sort of shmethically-driven consumer who won't eat a Hershey's Kiss for fear it's been produced using child labor.

But the thing about a Hershey's Kiss is, at least it works. What should I think knowing my iPhone, and all my other damn electronics, functional or not, have been produced with child labor?

Luckily, the sweaty man was there to tell me. In no Arid-Extra-Dry terms.

One thing you can say about Mike Daisey is that he is nobody's bitch.

Which makes him different than me.

Because once upon a time, I wrote a piece for Bitch magazine about the evils of worker abuse in Chinese factories.

And since Bitch has feminist response to pop culture right in the title, I figured it was a pretty safe bet to talk about how multinational corporation Viacom exploits factory workers in China, exposing them to lead and other chemicals, to produce cheap Dora the Explorer toys to sell to Americans.

Which promptly led to a helluva lot of hate mail to Bitch about me, from people saying I was racist for criticizing a Latina cartoon character.

Racist? Nope. Naive? Maybe. Because see, I expected people to give up their cheap slave-labor made toys.

Not like Mike Daisey. He says you can keep your iPhone. Hell, you can even watch Dora the Explorer on it. Just so long as you email Steve Jobs first, typing with however many thumbs you happen to have (hint: if you've been working at the Shenzhen factory that makes Apple products, it may be fewer thumbs than you started with), to tell him that you think anyone who's as big a genius as he is can probably figure out a way to get products manufactured that doesn't involve child labor.

Or even adult labor, if those adults happen to be laboring 80+ hours per week, and/or sleeping 14 to a ten foot by ten foot room in the company dorm.

Because really, Apple should leave the evil to those who do it best: Microsoft.

Emfatic on National Security

Security is a weighty matter.

Take, for example, the waddling bandit.

In case you haven't heard of him, here is what you need to know: He is a bandit. And he waddles.

Over a period of three years, he waddled into thirty different banks and waddled out with great sums of cash. But then he got caught. According to yesterday's AP report:

Shirley Ann Van Houten says she saw a man park on a side street and go to the Liberty Bank office in Springfield, but there were plenty of spots available on the main street nearer the bank. When she saw the man return from the bank with a bag, she jotted down the license plate number and called 911.

Just to be clear, we live in a country where it is suspicious to take any but the nearest parking space.

A country plagued by an obesity epidemic, yet where it is inconceivable that a fat guy might intentionally park a little farther from his destination just to waddle off a few extra calories while doing a normal, non-criminal errand.

And indeed, a country in which someone who turns in a fat man on suspicion of park-and-waddle has those suspicions confirmed, to the tune of a $10,000 reward.

Fat men have me thinking about surveillance this week.

Mike Daisey is a fat geek. He even played a fat geek in a Microsoft training film. The character was named Fat Geek.

He was in a scene with Bill Gates. Who is a rich geek.

Imagine the onscreen chemistry they must have had.
Nowadays Mike Daisey is an autobiographical extemporaneous monologist.

That is a big fat way to say he sits around and rants about what's wrong with the world. Just like me! The difference being he does it onstage and is rather famous. I do it on this blog, and . . .

Daisey's latest show is called If You See Something, Say Something. Which used to just be the unspoken M.O. of people such as Mike Daisey and me, who rant around town. But now it is the official security policy of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Which is really quite amazing. Mostly because if you have ever ridden on a NY subway, you know the smart thing to do is No Matter What the Hell You See, Keep Your Mouth Shut. (unless maybe you see some soft and cuddly as kittens dudes with dreadlocks, in which case write the New York Times at once).

Daisey's show is about the difference between postwar America, in which the Department of War morphed into the Department of Defense, and our nation experienced its largest ever peacetime military build up, and post 9/11 America, in which the Department of Homeland Security morphed into existence, and our nation experienced its largest ever privatization of the military and surveillance of just about everyone, including of course we its citizens.

These things do not make Mike Daisey a happy man. Especially since none of us seems to be any safer.

Daisey was more or less preaching to the choir by doing an anti-Bush administration monologue in Portland on September 11th. But who am I to hold back on the hallelujahs?

I for one am worried that Al-Qaeda is going to develop some kind of fatal foot fungus, then wipe us all out by releasing it in the airport security line.

It's not just the fear of a massive death toll in airports across American that terrifies me.

It's the possibility that my last meal might be Cinnabon.