Rantings on Boycotts, Reading Lists, Japan and Tourism

So Mika Brzezinski, co-anchor of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, is boycotting Equinox, SoulCycle and Hudson Yards because Stephen Ross, one of the investors in the projects, is a big-time Trump supporter and is hosting a fundraiser for his re-election in the Hamptons Friday night. 

Really!?! Have we sunk so low in our ability to think for ourselves that we need media celebrities to promote their actions to generate outrage among the masses? It is regrettable we have made newscasters, if indeed Mika fits that identification, into role models upon whose actions we cling (probably because the media is in cahoots with each other to promote their members’ importance). 

I doubt all the newscasts on all broadcast and cable stations have an aggregate audience anywhere near what Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley had 50 years ago. My point is we are imbuing in today’s news personalities status beyond their reach, influence they don’t deserve. 

If we choose to boycott companies whose leaders or silent partners are not to our liking because of their politics, employment practices or social/religious beliefs, many of us wouldn’t shop Walmart or any other store, let alone Amazon, we wouldn’t buy cars or gasoline, log onto Facebook or Twitter, or eat in Chick-fil-A (rated the favorite fast food restaurant by the American Customer Satisfaction Index for the fourth consecutive year). 

Grow up, America. Make up your own mind.

Reading Lists: Brooklyn College is my alma mater. I’m used to getting mail from it, usually fundraising solicitations. So I was bemused to open an email from the school’s Office of the Provost that began, “Dear Faculty,”.  Apparently I have not submitted my “textbook information to the Brooklyn College Online Bookstore” and Fall classes begin in less than three weeks.

Okay, the bottom of the email notes in really small type, “You are receiving this email because you are a member of the Brooklyn College alumni community.” So, I’m on a mailing list. 

Maybe that’s also the reason theteachersnetwork is now following me on Instagram. I’d like to think musings on my blog, Facebook and Twitter provide some educational insight, and my past does include after school Jewish instruction in a Far Rockaway children’s home when I was in college; in-car driver’s ed instruction after I retired from Chain Store Age; volunteer help at the English as Second Language study hall at White Plains High School; and one-to-one sessions with foreign students as part of the Conversation Partners program at Westchester Community College. 

But, no, I never had a formal teaching position, so why Brooklyn College wants my reading list for a course I am not giving is beyond me. 

Update from March 14, 2011: More than a quarter century ago I provided reflections on my family’s visit to Japan, including the following: 

“Japanese women craved more fulfillment and independence. They deferred marriage for careers and, frankly, because the men were immature. The men had four passions: sumo wrestling, playing pachinko (a vertical pinball game), reading comic books and drinking. Delaying marriage contributed to the country’s negative birth rate.

“Women’s status was so stunted that even if the highest executive at a meeting was female she was still expected to serve tea to all the men. Men did not defer to women, or children, when entering an elevator. They would push Gilda, Dan and Ellie aside to scramble in first.”

A recent article in The New York Times affirmed the choices women were making in deferring marriage, sometimes forever, and the impact their decisions are having on the economy (https://nyti.ms/2yCwMz3). 

Stay Away: In the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso, Dayton and Gilroy, several foreign countries and Amnesty International are warning tourists about the dangers of visiting the United States. They’re advising travelers to stay away from crowded areas. 

Which leads me to ask, why bother coming to America is you’re going to limit your visit to desolate parts of North Dakota or Utah?

Some Acts of Protest and Praise

I try to shop Costco during the midday, the better to snag and snarf down one, er, many, of the sample foods offered throughout the store. During my most recent visit, Costco was giving out bite-sized samples of Nathan’s all beef hot dogs.

Hard to resist. But I did. At least for the short term I will defer any pleasure from swallowing a Nathan’s dog. It’s a form of resistance to the news earlier this month that Howard Lorber, executive chairman of Nathan’s, a real estate developer and one of Donald Trump’s closest friends, held a $3 million fundraiser in the Hamptons for the Republican National Committee attended by the Trumpster (https://dailym.ai/2vRjRrN).

I’m under no illusions or delusions that my gastronomic protest will have any impact. Nor am I suggesting starting a consumer boycott of Nathan’s. To do so would be counter to many of my edible experiences.

For example, I obsess over Chick-fil-a chicken strips. Our daughter Ellie has admonished me for patronizing a  chain that in many policies is the antithesis of my progressive beliefs. As I generally only eat at Chick-fil-a when visiting Ellie in Omaha, I mostly adhere to her restriction, when I’m not in Omaha because there are few Chick-fil-a outlets where I live (okay, so I’m not perfect). 

It would be easy to document my other hypocrisies on food and nonfood purchases. For instance, I have never bought a German car. But I use a Braun coffeemaker and electric toothbrush. Go figure.

Which translates to a short recess from my Nathan’s denial.  What can I say? I’m an imperfect extremist. 

Neil Simon died last Sunday. He was the most successful American playwright. 

One of Gilda’s and my early dates was to a Broadway production of Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady starring Maureen Stapleton. I don’t recall any of the plot—the show opened in mid December 1970 and ran for just six months, the shortest of any Simon play, though it did secure Tony and Drama Desk awards for Stapleton. 

What I do recall is that Gilda and I wore jeans to the show. My parents were aghast that we would see a Broadway show so attired. I like to think we were in the vanguard of the movement to democratize theater attendance. 

Some 25 years later, while walking down Park Avenue to Grand Central Terminal after work I spotted Simon walking towards me. He had just come out of the Waldorf Astoria hotel. I often recognize celebrities and sports figures on Manhattan streets, luminaries including Dustin Hoffman, Richard Lewis, Johnny Damon, Al Pacino. My customary reaction is to shake their hands as I express appreciation for their work, all the while careful not to draw attention to their presence among us ordinary folks. 

In retirement I miss those serendipitous moments. 

The Last Word: Since his death last Saturday, John McCain’s farewell plans have pointedly excluded Donald Trump (https://nyti.ms/2ws0w0Z). Considering how Trump treated him, one cannot really blame the Arizona senator and Vietnam war hero. 

But in publicly shunning, some would say humiliating, Trump by not only failing to invite him to any of his bereavement services but also asking former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to deliver eulogies, McCain might have missed a more visible rebuke. 

Would it not have been more of a reprobation to have Trump seated in the first pew as his two predecessors—men he has verbally criticized—praised McCain’s patriotism, heroism and commitment to bi-partisan American values? The cutting irony would not have been lost on all attendees and the millions viewing on television as cameras switched back and forth from speaker to Trump back to speaker to Trump for his reaction.

It would be reminiscent of Trump’s stern visage as he endured Obama and Seth Meyers skewer him during the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. Some pundits claim Trump immediately started planning revenge, ultimately enabled by his election in 2016. 

So maybe it wouldn’t have been a good thing to give the vengeful-hater-in-chief another reason to diss John McCain. How any veteran and prisoner of war could support Trump after the insulting manner he has displayed toward McCain is beyond my comprehension.   

Do We Really Need to Know This?

How would you like to have been the PR person assigned to write the press release accompanying the following headline?

“More than 38 Million Online Americans Shopped While on the Toilet”

Do we really need to know this? I know shopping has become more than just part of the fabric of the American way of life. To many it has become the total blanket. Still, do we really need to know that even on the potty people are dialing up their smartphones so they won’t miss that bargain of a lifetime. It used to be sitting on the john was reserved as “quality” reading time. If you remember the movie The Big Chill, the Jeff Goldblum character, a writer for People, said he and his colleagues were instructed to keep stories short enough so they could be read in total during the time it takes to complete one average dump. 

Anyway, back to the, ahem, news ... A Harris Interactive survey paid for by CashStar, suggests “that more than 38 million online adult Americans admit to having shopped online while on the toilet.” Compare that to “almost 17 million shopping via a mobile device while standing in the retailer's physical store.”

Among the other enlightening though not projectable findings of this online survey of 2,104 adults aged 18 and older conducted Nov. 6-8:

*Potty shopping was more of a male than female activity;

*Shopping online trumps safety as more than four million said they shopped while driving;

*The business of business is business, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that more than nine million said they have secretly shopped while in a business meeting;

*Seven million-plus Americans shopped from their mobile device while at the grocery store.

Get to Work Thursday: I never liked Sunday Blue Laws, the civic ordinances that required retailers to be closed Sundays, or another day of the week if one’s religion celebrated the sabbath on a different schedule that Christian America. Blue Laws mostly vanished in the last 25 years except in some hamlets like Paramus, NJ; some companies, such as Chick-fil-A, remain closed on Sundays because of the religious belief of their founders, Truett Cathy in the case of Chick-fil-A. 

I like having access to stores every day. But I also believe store personnel are entitled to some family life. They should not be deprived of holidays with their families. Or friends. With the exception of drug stores and partial hours for supermarkets, stores should be closed on Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. I’m also okay with no retailing on Christmas and Easter. No one should go into cardiac arrest because they can’t get their Target or Victoria’s Secret fix. Yet these stores, and a whole lot more, have scheduled openings for Thanksgiving. It’s not enough they make workers get to the store before the sun rises for Black Friday sales, now they are thrusting a consumer frenzy mindset onto a day that had always been reserved for family. There’s enough tension already in these family gatherings without the extra hype shopping demands. 

My daughter’s brother-in-law Rob posted a neat idea—“Any stores that start Black Friday shopping on Thanksgiving this year will be getting zero business from us.” He included a list of stores opening on Thanksgiving: 

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/2012ThanksgivingDay11222012/a/2012-Thanksgiving-Day-Store-Hours-Opening-Times-November-22-Complete-Roundup-List_2.htm. It’s going to be pretty hard to stay away from many of these stores, but the sentiment is one worth considering.

Lots of people, nearly half the country, will struggle to shop in stores this weekend, but there’s growing evidence the activity does not rate high on people’s preferred activities. According to Western Union Holiday Gifting Index, 68% of those who shopped on Black Friday last year said they did not think the experience was worth the money they saved. 

I Love You, Craig: As long as we are on the subject of waste matter (see above), Gilda has embarked on a composting binge. All manner of uncooked vegetables, fruits, tea leaves, cooked egg shells and cardboard egg cartons are making their way into our compost pile. Normally, I fill up the pile with free compost from our city municipal dump. But I got there too late this year. Without compost, Gilda’s flower and vegetable garden would not be extraordinary, so we’re now a composting family. 

Composting, however, requires leaves. Lots of leaves. Shredded leaves. The electric blower/shredder I borrowed from my brother last year doesn’t really work (no wonder he let me have it). New electric leaf shredders cost about $200. I opted to try to find a used on on Craig’s List. Score! I found one today 60 miles away in New Jersey for just $25. 

While I’m at a meeting tonight, Gilda will be surprised when she comes home from work and sees the Craftsman Leafwacker Plus where my car usually rests in the garage (don't worry about her finding out before she gets home; she rarely reads my posts the day they go up). I even bagged six large loads of leaves from around the neighborhood. I know what you’re thinking—I’m such a thoughtful husband. There’s lots of truth to that. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m retired and able to spend time, thanks to Craig’s List, fulfilling her dreams. 

Chicagoland Express

Spent the last two days in Chicagoland at a retail industry conference in a hotel near O’Hare Airport. During my heyday travel years, I’d fly in and out of O’Hare six times or more a year. I enjoyed Chicago’s controlled bustle. It always seemed more manageable than New York, though the ride between the airport and downtown was never predictable. No matter what time of day you were just as likely to swiftly and bumpily speed down the John F. Kennedy Expressway as you were to crawl along because of congestion or road work. A cabbie once told me Chicago had two seasons—winter and construction.

I didn’t have to contend with the latter this trip. But I did get caught on my way home by the bane of most summer travelers—delays from late afternoon thunderstorms. Chicago was crystal clear, but somewhere down the line storms had disrupted service so that our outgoing plane to La Guardia had not even landed at O’Hare by our scheduled departure time. Instead of returning to New York around 9:30 pm, my best prediction was closer to midnight, if I was lucky. This part of business travel I surely have not missed since my retirement from magazine publishing.

I also haven’t missed the temptation of conference dessert platters. The petits fours seem so delectable. They’re hard to resist, even for someone who has to watch his sugar intake. But they’re soooo appealing. From past experience I know looks are deceiving, yet I wonder if this is the hotel pastry chef who finally understands cardboard is not an essential ingredient of a Napoleon. So I sample a few morsels, secure in the thought none of my fellow conference attendees will squeal to Gilda about my indiscretion. By the time she reads this blog, I’ll have gone back on the dessert wagon and assumed full deniability mode.

Postscript: I was wrong. I did wind up getting screwed by congestion. Seems when I wrote this blog sitting in the Chicago airport around 7 pm, my fellow passengers and I were under the impression the thunderstorms we saw on the weather maps and reports on our smartphones caused the delay. Not so, it turns out. I was enlightened to the real reason as I deplaned around 11:30 pm at La Guardia. When I asked one of the pilots where the thunderstorms were that delayed us, she blithely related the airline always intended us to arrive two hours late, even if our plane had been waiting at O’Hare on time. Air traffic flow, or more precisely, too much air traffic into and out of La Guardia, made a late arrival in New York standard operating procedure. So much for truth in scheduling! Congestion! Argh!!!!

Postscript 2: Slight correction to my Wednesday post on Target, Chick-fil-A and same-sex marriage. The Matt Bai article from the Sunday NY Times magazine appeared July 22. I had written July 17 because when I looked it up on The Times Web site, the article carried a dateline of July 17, when it was first posted to the Internet. I never bothered to check what day of the week July 17 fell on. Another example of how it’s hard to trust anything you read these days and fact-checking is a lost art. 

Chick-fil-A and Other Food for Thought

Lots of news and views to review from the last week or so ...

So liberal-minded cities and universities have rallied against Chick-fil-A because its president voiced religious opposition to same-sex marriage. Not a position I would endorse but probably not one solely held by Dan T. Cathy, son of the founder, S. Truett Cathy, a deeply religious man whose beliefs are underscored by keeping all 1,600 of his restaurants closed on Sundays.

The liberal elite wants to make an example of Chick-fil-A, denying it permission to open new units or by revoking existing permits. I wonder, though, would these same liberals denounce one of their store favorites if they knew it harbored similar anti-gay biases? As Matt Bai reported in the July 22 NY Times Sunday magazine, Target in 2010 contributed $150,000 to a Minnesota group backing a conservative candidate opposing gay marriage. 

During Sunday night’s telecast of the NY Yankees-Boston Red Sox game, the camera lingered on Paul Simon in the box seats at Yankee Stadium. Yes, he’s worth pointing out to the audience. But what about the mustachioed gentleman sitting to his left? He probably wields as much influence, if not more, than Simon, though not as an entertainer. He does it with the weight of his ideas, the scope of his vision, the power of his reasoning. That man was Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The NY Times. Sadly, neither the broadcasters on ESPN nor the people in the control booth had any idea who he was.

Sticking with foreign affairs, Mitt Romney continued his gaffe-prone world tour, this time praising Poland’s vibrant economy while ignoring its 12% unemployment rate (50% higher than U.S. jobless rate), and lauding Solidarity for its part in overturning Communist rule. Solidarity, however, reacted coolly to Romney’s visit because of his anti-union positions in America. Former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, on the other hand, who invited Romney to Poland, praised him.

On a topic that can be classified as “nothing new here,” an article suggesting Barack Obama’s mother might have had African ancestry has caused quite a stir, with conservative commentators suggesting it’s merely a ploy to make the president’s life story appear more appealing while liberals are fascinated by the possibility. 

Regardless of its veracity, the research by Ancestry.com demonstrated that just as happens today, in the distant past blacks received unequal, more severe punishment for identical crimes committed by whites. According to Ancestry.com, a geneology company based in Provo, Utah, an African indentured servant named John Punch escaped from Virginia in 1640. After his capture in Maryland along with two white escapees, Punch received a life sentence of servitude, a punishment “harsher than what the white servants received,” The Times reported. The two white men received just four additional years of servitude.