The Real Risk Of Terrorism In America

Fell In Love With A Stable Mind

Dear Sister by Team Me.

Profit & Working Conditions In The American Dream

The Article: The Fraying of a Nation’s Decency by Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times.

The Text: Amazon.com, the books-to-diapers-to-machetes Internet superstore, is a perfect snapshot of the American Dream, circa 2011.

It grows by the hour, fueled by a relentless optimism that has made America America. First it sold books. Then it realized that buying printed words in bulk, sorting and shipping them was a transferable skill. It has since applied it to anything you could want.

In 2011, for example, I have bought the following from Amazon: a hard drive, an electric shaver, a Bluetooth headset, a coffee machine and some filters, a multivoltage adapter, four light bulbs, a rubber raft (don’t ask), a chalkboard eraser, an ice cream maker, a flash drive, roller-ball pen replacements, a wireless router, a music speaker, a pair of jeans and a shoe rack — and, oh yeah, some books. (Disclosure: A book and a long-form article I have written are sold on Amazon.)

Buying these things the traditional way would have meant driving around to many different stores and paying as much as twice the price for certain items. What’s more, Amazon knows me. It’s like family. It knows where I live, what I like, my credit card number. (Which, come to think of it, makes it closer than family.)

In a moment rife with talk of American decline, my Amazon experiences provide fleeting mood boosts. They remind me that, for now at least, this remains the most innovative society on earth.

And then my bubble burst.

Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

The image of one man stuck with me. He was a temp in his 50s, one of the older “pickers” in his group, charged with fishing items out of storage bins and delivering them to the packers who box shipments. He walked at least 13 miles, or 20 kilometers, a day across the warehouse floor, by his estimate.

His assigned rate was 120 items an hour, or one item every 30 seconds. But it was hard to move fast enough between one row and the next, and hard for him to read the titles on certain items in the lowest bins. The man would get on his hands and knees to rummage through the lowest bins, and sometimes found it easier to crawl across the warehouse to the next bin rather than stand and dip again. He estimated plunging onto his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day. After seven months, he, too, was terminated.

In a statement this week, Amazon acknowledged the complaints and said that it was working to address them, including by installing air-conditioners.

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How The British Recaptured America

The Queen of England gave the President of the United States the evil eye.

President Obama deserved it. He raised his glass over the band’s rendition of “God Save the Queen”. Her Majesty glared. The Commander In Chief bit down on his lower lip. The band played on. And just like that, the most powerful man on Earth was chastened—the one-time clarion call for Change hushed—by a starchy, octogenarian grandmother.

Alas, the Queen’s wordless reproach of President Obama was only the latest and all-too-public of reminders: Mother England has grounded the rebellious son.

America has suffered her indignities at the hands of England before. Beatlemania. The unfortunate Spice Girls-Weakest Link-Teletubby triumvirate of the late 1990s. But from Piers Morgan to the Royal Wedding to the premiere of X-Factor, the British at last conquered American culture in Fall 2011.

In the pantheon of Empires, the Romans turned the Mediterranean into their own lake. The sun never set on the British Empire. And America made the world its TV room. Until the British Empire struck back.

Perhaps American is chastened. Humbled after a rough-and-tumble decade of wars and truculent unemployment. Or maybe we need Mel Gibson back. Because ever since the Aussie actor stopped lobbing spears and musket-balls at the British (1990s) and started spewing diatribes at minorities (2006-Present), the British recaptured America one TV room at a time. They invaded not by sea but reality TV shows.

The British already came to a theater near you. Colin Firth and the “King’s Speech” plundered the Oscars. English shape-shifter Christian Bale scored Best Supporting Actor as the drug-addled n’er-do-well brother in “Fighter”. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 hexed box offices all summer, grossing $1.3 billion and soaring.

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Why Doesn’t God Talk To Smart People?

“Michele Bachmann says God told her to run for President. How come God never talks to smart people anymore?”

Spotted in New York City.