A Cautionary Tale
As anyone who’s been paying attention to creepy doings for the last 40 years
or so knows[i],
the subject, “the Utter Creepiness of the Unhinged Right”, is too vast
to fit into one post. How creepy that ride has been for how long and how
long ago we should have jumped off of that spooky train has been, tragically, right
in our face all that time. But we’ve--collectively, at least--turned away from
it too often, missed too many opportunities to get away and now, alas. The zombies have eaten the last living human. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
For those of you who need a quick counter-narrative
to what your television set has been selling you these last 40 years or so, I
offer up this folksy tale from my own checkered past. My intent, as far as
intent goes, is to illustrate what I know of the utter, dismal, creepy danger
of one—and only one--of the dozens of utterly creepy Far-Right ideologues Trump
and his fawning Congress are now (as you read this) handing out Oligarchy-Appointment-Candy
to this month.
Betsy DeVos is apparently going to
be our next of Secretary of Education. As heiress to the (apparently) depthless
Amway fortune she and her family have been funding the worst actors of the
Creepy Right for decades, including many far-far (far-fa…r) Right schemes to
destroy public education in favor of gifting our (that’s OUR) public-education
funds to unaccountable, private corporations running religious-indoctrination
camps (and maybe a few charter schools if they tow the approved
Fundamentalist-Christian line). She’s never attended a public school, nor has
any of her kids, and there’s a question as to whether she’s ever actually set
foot in one. But let’s not get high-centered on small-mindedness, eh? Let’s
think big, like the fact that she’s worth about five billion bucks.
Now think bigger. Have you ever
wondered…these last 40 years or so...how a person like Betsy DeVos (or a person
like her brother, Erik Prince, founder and C.E.O. of Blackwater and now
consulting Trump on “security” matters) got to be worth so much money, or how our
public discourses have been so in the religio-toilet for so long? Well, wonder
no more, and look no further than the likes of Amway.
So what is Amway anyways, and
why are its royal lords and ladies so rich and powerful and… crazy? Isn’t it just a flaky
shoeshine company?!? How is it then, that unbeknownst to almost all of you Amway has
become the epitome of success at sending whacky-Right extremists to Congress to carry
its water all these years and now, a Secretary of Education who doesn’t believe
in public education at all? Is it some
religious cult? A pyramid scheme for crooks? A cancer and a pox upon the Land
that has never been properly diagnosed?
Yes, all of that and a little bit more. So once again, welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Sit back, and enjoy my little cautionary tale.
In the Spring of 1971, I joined the Navy and was sent to
Boot Camp in San Diego. I was 18 and as far as I knew (which wasn’t very far) I
didn’t have to join the Navy at all. My parents sure didn’t think so, and they tried
their hardest to talk me out of it. A war was raging in Vietnam, I was enrolled
in college and I hadn’t even done them the courtesy of finding out what my
draft number was. But like so many innocents raised on patriotism and war
movies, I signed up anyway, waved goodbye to my weeping mother from the dirty
window of the Greyhound bus we were loaded into, and three hours later we were
unceremoniously transferred onto the battleship-grey Navy bus that carted us off
to camp, where the process began of teaching clueless kids like me that we were
nothing which, clueless as I was, I have to admit I hadn’t considered before.
As anyone who has been through a boot camp knows, this is a
formal, abrasive, thoroughly-thought-out and effective educational experience,
tried and true, meant to save us from getting shot in a jungle…or something…like
that...I think…
And that’s how I remember my Navy Boot Camp: vaguely and
disturbingly, which brings me to how I met my first Amway salesman.
I didn’t know he was an Amway salesman at first, didn’t
know anything about Amway for that matter, other than that it was a flaky
shoeshine company. I also didn’t know about creepy corporate-religious cults,
pyramid schemes or any of that. I had just joined the Navy during wartime,
for chrissakes. I, obviously, didn’t know anything about anything. But that
changed quick, thanks, in no small part, to an Amway salesman.
He was the "commanding officer" of one of our sister recruit
companies. This meant that he was a fleet chief petty officer who had pulled
shore duty as a boot camp “drill sergeant”: which meant he fit the definition
of a Frustrated Man. San Diego was graduating out about 1000 recruits a week
into the fleet in those days, with about 100 recruits to a company
[ii]. Any
given company had about 9 sister companies, then, working their way through the
three-month program, all to graduate on the same day and each with a frustrated, usually angry, fleet chief petty officer at its helm bulldogging them through.
One of the most common methods used on naïve kids
who could end up being shot at by strangers in mere months was to teach them
impossibly obtuse minutia about how to fold their clothing and shine their
shoes and then to punish them severely when they screwed up which, because it was bootcamp, was inevitable.
We were taught how to properly fold our Navy-issue underwear
(“skivvies”), and where to properly place them in our locker. Then
we were inspected on how well we had learned these new life skills. If we missed
a fold or creased them crooked, or we placed them on top of the properly-folded
dungarees instead of the properly-folded t-shirt we were punished. Dehumanization was a seamless vapor that enveloped us like a winter fog we forgot how to live without --and
since our commanding officer/chief often slept in the same barracks with the recruits and therefore had to maintain enough good will with us in
order to not get murdered him in his sleep, he worked in tandem with this chief from a sister company in the classic
“good-cop/bad-cop” scheme.
We saw this bad-cop chief often because, in spite of the “good-cop” persona our own chief tried
to project to us, he was really kind of a sadist. This other
chief would come over about three or four times a week,
whenever us “worms” (the endearing term used in Boot Camp for recruits) needed to be shaken down a notch or two, when a hundred push-ups
needed to be meted out for the insubordination of neglecting to dust the top of
a WWII-era light fixture 15 feet off the barracks floor, when a non-functioning, WWII-era M-1 (read: heavy) rifle needed to be held at arms length for an hour for the outrage of
forgetting where your skivvies went and where your socks didn’t, or when a
double-time jog around the camp was called for to impress upon us the
importance of having immaculately-spitshined shoes which, as you might have
guessed by now, was this chief’s particular fetish. In fact, during personal
“inspections” he would step on the toe of a newly-shined boot and
grind it down into the pavement until the wearer winced, or until he knew he was not
only ruining the kid’s spitshine but hurting his toe, and then he’d yell at the
top of his lungs to drop down and give him fifty push-ups.
There are a few things about shining your shoes in a Navy boot
camp that need to be mentioned here. First, Navy-issue boondockers were made of coarse leather and were not at all
shiny when they were issued to us along with our other clothing items shortly
after arrival. They were work boots. They weren’t designed to be shiny. That’s
important to remember.
Second, special attention was paid to the
toe of the boondocker, at least in Navy Boot Camp, which was required to be shiny enough to reflect your
commanding officer’s evil grin whenever he so chose, which meant always,
which meant that young kids who were just beginning to get an inkling that they
were expected to think of themselves as shit developed an entirely-unhealthy
fetish for shining their coarse, unshineabe boondocker toes. This is also
important to remember.
Third, we were only allowed to use Kiwi bootblack and spit to
accomplish this unnatural feat, which led to most of us developing a religious
aversion to Kiwi shoeshine tins, which in turn explains a lot about religious indoctrinations in general.
But I digress.
Imagine then, a hundred relatively-innocent
kids who hadn’t even figured out what they’d gotten themselves into yet let
alone what they were going to do about it sitting in the California sun
laboring over the shining of the toe of their work boots for hours. And hours.
And weeks. And months. That was Boot Camp.
Okay, so along comes Graduation Day, and ten (or so)
companies march perfectly about each other out on the parade grounds in
machine-like precision, a thousand whitehats get thrown in the air with a
whooping cheer (We’re free!...?) we go back to our barracks to pack our duffel
bags with our perfectly-folded skivvies and other perfectly-folded clothes for
our first leave and our next duty station, and there we find the bad-cop. He's all smiles
now, shaking hands, patting backs and he’s telling us that, now that we’re “out in the fleet”, we can use anything we
want to shine our shoes so long as they’re shiny, and that only a worm would continue to do it by the spitshining method he had been forcing us to perfect these last three months, and that he just happened to have a few boxes of Amway shoeshine spray with him to help us along our way to…Singapore, the Philippines,
Spain, and, yes, even Vietnam. The world, he wanted us to now know, was our oyster now, and his product was going to help us slip that oyster down our gullets. It dawned on a few of us like a thud then, that, after all the torture and abuse this sadist had subjected his victims to during the last three months, this guy was, in the real world, an Amway salesman.
And what an Amway salesman he was! To repeat: each and every week there were
(about) ten companies of 100 recruits each graduating on the same day, and this chief drove around and visited them all with (probably) a carload of Amway Shoeshine Spray. He
probably sold hundreds of them a week, making a small fortune off of our boon dockers for Betsy DeVos and her mercenary brother, as it turned out. Rich people getting richer off of our boon dockers, in other words. The Ultimate Ones to become the self-proclaimed
“deciders” of which rat hole their client-politicos should aim us suckers down. Our boondockers were of a piece with the massive tax-cuts for the rich that have been dished out
since Reagan and common-scheme pyramid swindles and cult-like promotion
of grade-B products that should never have contributed to the overloading of our
landfills not to mention our Congress, with unnecessary crap. Support our troops, indeed. Like I said, this subject is too huge. Look it up.
In the meantime, let me share a bit more of my personal
history. My daughter is deaf, and we have had to fight every step of the way
(under Obama!) to get her the services she needs and deserves and is legally entitled to receive from our public schools, and have found the only safety net
we have been able to fall back on consistently when it came time to threatening
school officials who have found it so hard to find time and money for our child
has been the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the bedrock
law that mandates that public schools throughout the country provide our
children with those services (WHICH WE PAY FOR!!). Betsy DeVos, on the other
hand, who may or may not have ever actually set a toe in a public school
facility, had to admit during her congressional hearing that she didn’t even
know of IDEA’s existence and that at any rate “those kinds of things” should be
left to the states. "Nothing", she condescendingly admonished Senator Al Franken on the congressional committee when he questioned her about her astonishing lapse of knowledge, "is really 'free'". For me, a simple dictionary-definition for “creepy” suffices to describe
Betsy DeVos as our next Secretary of Education: “A feeling as if something were
crawling over your skin, shivering, chilled with fright, causing an unpleasant
feeling of fear and unease.”
Maybe the Amway Chief was selling product with mere “religious fervor”. This would jibe with the long history of a company built on a pyramid scheme built on the backs of dupes, half of
whom make no money at all. Another way to describe the Chief’s—and his bosses’—behavior
is this: they’re a bunch of crooks, who use moral relativism as a smokescreen
for their crusade in the pursuit of wealth.
With pyramid-scheme cults like Amway and priests like Betsy DeVos and her brother, Eric, calling the shots these days about whose dogma our kids should be fed at our expense, and what whacky-right "protests" they should be toting their assault weapons to when they grow up (also at our expense) what more is there to say? That we have become nation of dupes hawking wares for rich
overlords who promise us a “seat next to Christ” instead of actual wages?
Maybe so.
Shit.
[i] Starting
with Ronald Reagan and his alliance with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon during the
Nicaraguan “Contra” War.
[ii] This
is my best recollection. I’m almost sure the companies were 100 recruits each,
but not so sure about the numbers of companies per week. It was a lot.
