SKIES OPEN, PUD RANTS

I have a new tennis partner, and, after weeks of practicing, today was to be our first official tournament. Marty is a nice guy and a better player than I. I was curious to see how we'd interact in the crucible of competition.

But the downpour roaring on the roof, combined with satellite imagery, tells me it ain’t gonna happen. So I’m stuck indoors with Pud again.

Yesterday he was too much. He was so pissed off about this restaurant calorie law he was saying things, like a drunk Mel Gibson, that he would later regret. Pud actually said it’s a lesbian plot.

“Look at her,” Pud said, turning his laptop so I could see it, “this gal obviously doesn’t care about her appearance. Or if she does, she’s been getting some very bad advice.

“She’s skinny, but it’s totally ok to be fat if you’re a lesbian. Lesbians laugh at straight women and gay men who try to be thin.

“So why is Carole Migden, of all people, hassling the restaurant industry about calorie disclosure?

“She claims it’s a public health issue. But you know that’s bullshit. The diet industry itself is a serious public health menace.

“Weight loss is an eating versus not eating issue. To lose weight, one must give up the pleasure of a full stomach.

“If you want to lose weight, while at the same time enjoying the pleasure of a full stomach, which is what the diet industry promises, you are doomed to failure.

“Successful weight-losers come to associate the dull gnawing in their gut (hunger) with the pleasure they derive from being slimmer—visually in the mirror, tactilly inside one’s clothes, even aerodynamically. So the feeling of hunger turns into a good thing, but it takes a while.

“Is it better for dieters to go to restaurants that disclose the calorie content of their menu items? No. It’s better for dieters simply not to eat. The daily amountof food that a dieter needs to maintain basic health can be consumed in about ninety seconds. There’s no good reason for a dieter to voluntarily hang out in a food milieu.

“And when you have to go to a restaurant, you don’t need a fucking calculator to stay on your diet, green salad with no dressing and a diet coke will always do the trick.

“It’s like alcohol. How about bars being required to disclose the amount of alcohol in each of their drinks. This would help problem drinkers stay within ‘their limit,’ right?”

“But, Pud,” I said, “you can’t go around dissing all lesbians. It’s not fair, plus you’ll get your ass kicked.”

“Ok,” he said, “there are good lesbians and bad lesbians, and Carole Migden is a bad lesbian. Better?

“It’s the kind of do-gooder meddling that gives liberals a bad name. It’s easier to pretend to attack the big bad chain restaurant industry than to address real problems, like what is it about our society that makes Americans want to eat themselves into oblivion.

“Or turning around the thuggish SFPD.

“Or getting rampaging white youth off our streets.

“Or finding out who killed Lester Garnier.”

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IT'S TRUE: What They Say About Liberals

Once I was young and impulsive

I wore every conceivable pin

Even went to the socialist meetings

Learned all the old union hymns

But I've grown older and wiser

And that's why I'm turning you in

So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
Phil Ochs

(full lyrics)

I had a supervisor at UCSF who couldn’t be more liberal. She looked at Common Dreams daily to find fresh arguments to match the urgency she felt inside. Most of what she said about politics I agreed with, but it was a little too party-line to be interesting.

Martina arrived in the United States from western Asia along with her family, when she was twelve, and started learning English then. Hers was a modest immigrant family success story. By the time I arrived on the scene, both of Martine’s parents were dead and she owned, outright, two homes in the burbs south of SF.

Martina lived in one of the houses and rented the other one out.

It came to pass that the rental house became vacant and we’d hear horror stories from Martina about exorbitant repair expenses and unreliable workmen. And, then, we’d overhear her talking with the agent who was looking for tenants and handling the lease.

One day Martina got a call from the agent that upset her. The agent had found a tenant, but Martina was adamant that no lease be consummated without her approval.

Turns out the prospective tenants were Filipino, and Martina would simply not rent to them, and she told the agent why, with her five subordinates, three of whom were themselves Filipino, listening the whole time.

Martina explained to the agent that Filipinos live in large groups, that the nice couple that looked at the house were only the tip of the iceberg. There would be, Martina predicted, eight to ten people living in the house and it couldn’t stand the wear and tear.

End of conversation. No Filipinos.

Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. Not just the prejudice, but the overtness. Ain’t America great! It’s a place where immigrants from any culture can discriminate against other immigrants from a multitude of cultures—sort of a melting pot of ill will.

One of Martina’s Filipino subordinates, a long-term temp, was a nice older guy (my age) who was overqualified for our work but was hindered by halting English, you could tell he was translating back and forth with Tagalog, in his head.

We all liked Joey. It was understood that when a permanent position opened in our group that he would be hired.

One morning Joey came in not feeling so good. When he sat at his desk he couldn’t get going. He had no energy and he felt something weird in his chest.

There was lots of hemming and hawing about ambulances etc, so finally I got my car and drove Joey to Kaiser hospital, where he had limited coverage through this temp status.

Later that day Joey had a triple bypass. He’d been having a heart attack.

So, at least among the Filipinos in the office, I was said to have “saved Joey’s life.”

In the hospital they fixed Joey’s heart but they diagnosed some other serious conditions that needed attention. And his limited coverage would leave Joey owing tens of thousands out-of-pocket.

This presented Martina with a chance to do something good for Joey. There was a permanent-position opening in a section next to ours that did similar work. Joey was qualified and the supervisor of that section would be happy to have him.

So Martina went to bat and got Joey hired for the permanent position, almost overnight—a process that usually takes weeks.

With his new permanent status, Joey’s health coverage was upgraded to “full” and all those looming medical bills went away, at least from Joey’s perspective. Someone (all of us) was still paying the costs.

My guess is that Martine probably thought she had done a good deed, a moral good, buy relieving Joey of his crushing medical bills, of course, WITH OUR MONEY.

So it’s true what they say about liberals: They’re generous, with other people’s money.

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