A Ridiculous Job

     

I didn't have any 'training to work in a deli and I informed Kris of that when she interviewed me for the job at Russell Farms. I told her that to compensate for any lack of experience, I was a fast learner. Kris was an enormous lump of flesh and when I told her a funny story from one of my travel ventures, she added me to the payroll.

'Oh, you're hired,' she said, her belly wobbling with laughter. 'You'll catch on quickly enough. It's not brain surgery.'

The deli was busy as we walked in and Kris introduced me to the others. Cheryl, a tall, gray-haired woman of around 60ish, handed me an apron. She flung open three large refrigerators and pointed out all the condiments and various ingredients they used for sandwiches. She showed me where all the bread was stored and demonstrated how to use the meat cutter. She showed me the various cuts of meat in the meat case, then took me to the cash and showed me how to ring things in. Then she showed me how to turn on and off and cook and clean the grill for hamburgers and hot dogs. Finally, she pointed out all the ice cream flavours, where the ice cream was stored and the price list. I mentioned to her that I would be making sandwiches eventually. 

After three or four weeks, it seemed I was stuck in front of the dishwasher, loading and unloading. I never did anything else, so my back was getting sore with all the bending. There were a few other younger women working there, one of them a nurse-in-training named Laura.

One day I was fifteen minutes late because I got a ride with another worker. My car was in the garage. She started half an hour later. It was unusual for me to ever be late, in fact, I was usually early, but it couldn't be avoided and there were no cellphones then.

'We didn't think you were coming,' Laura said as she brushed by me, 'because you were supposed to start at 10:45.'

I looked up at the clock and back at this young woman who had never said hello to me in the four weeks I had been there. And now this is her first how do you do? Well, let me tell you why I'm late as I kick your ass all over this kitchen, I thought.

'Oh, Rene and I carpooled,' I said, 'and she starts at eleven so...I appreciate your concern though,' I said.

I hadn't hit it off with her from our first shift together as I had found it unsettling that on our first shift together she had said nothing to me the whole day other than 'Slicer' 'Salad bar' 'Cash' I couldn't engage her in any small talk in order to connect and it didn't help when I couldn't find the pickles in the cold storage and I had to go back and ask her where they were.

'Pickles,' she said, tearing open the lid and walking away. By the end of our first day together, I was a little annoyed. There was no justifiable reason for her to act that way.

Later, I approached her as she was making a sandwich. 'Listen, maybe we should back it all up, we've started on the wrong foot. If I said anything to offend you, I apologize for that.' Why the fuck am I apologizing? I thought. But that's what I do better than making sandwiches - apologize to everyone for being alive.

'I think you're untrainable,' she said.

'Excuse me?' I said. Untrainable? You mean someone who couldn't slap two pieces of bread together with butter, stuff them with ham and lettuce and mustard and make them stick? I was hoping that my face didn't register the surprise that I felt. Now it was clear why no one was letting me make the sandwiches. I WAS UNTRAINABLE!

I didn't want to work a shift with her again, but lo, here I was stuck with her attitude and dislike of me for the rest of the week. I decided to ignore her, too. I headed over to the dishwasher, to my usual station as the day started to crank into gear. I was getting really good at Operation Dishwasher, especially on days when it was better to interact as little as possible.

My back started to ache as I lifted the dishes out of the dishwasher and walked around putting them in various cupboards. It was lunchtime, busy. People wanting sandwiches. A new woman had started a few days previously and she and Laura were standing there quietly at the sandwich table putting sandwiches and sides together. I was supposed to have been on the sandwich brigade weeks ago. I guess I won't be making sandwiches today, I thought.

I watched Heather making sandwiches while Laura helped her by putting together the side dishes when I thought 'hasn't Heather only been here for a minute? And already she's making sandwiches?' Cheryl was on her break so I went over to her and asked if I could ask her a question, if you don't mind.

'Sure, she said.

'When am I going to start making sandwiches? I was told I would be doing this and I've been doing little but dish-washing since I got here.'

'Well, Heather's had experience in a deli,' she replied.

'Really? It doesn't looks like it to me.'

In fact, Heather's hands were shaking like a leaf as Laura helped her make the sandwiches for the customers waiting in line. After, I asked Heather if she'd done this work before.

'No, I worked in a logging camp and as a waitress, but I didn't do this.' Well, she's full-time so it's important she gets with the program, I suppose.

Cheryl came back from her break and decided that I would help Heather with the sides and Laura could do the slicer. I went to Heather to assist, but soon we ran into trouble because now she didn't know what to do and I couldn't help her because I didn't either, having had no 'training' on sandwiches, plus the menu had been changed and by the way which of the new plates on the shelf does this damned side go on? Of course, I could make a decision as to which silly dish for the side, but if I don't get it right? Laura was standing at the slicer watching us with the expression of a battleaxe overseeing an unruly grade three class, Heather was flustered and I looked around for Cheryl, who was at the cash. I'm not going to ask Laura. Especially while we're getting backed up on the orders, which kind of made me chuckle inside. Then Cheryl came over and reached up for a plate inside some cupboard and looked at me.

'You've been here for weeks now and you don't know this?' in a tone of voice that made me want to bend her over and boot her up her fat ass.

'I haven't done the sandwiches nor the sides before. Remember?' So Cheryl took over, Heather went outside for a smoke and I walked away to do what I did best - the dishes.

Then Cheryl came up with another idea. I was to make sandwiches 'when it's not busy.' I totally regretted opening this can of worms with the request to make sandwiches. In fact, I couldn't believe I was going through all this pettiness over sandwich-making. But here's where it got fun. As I stood over the sandwich table, Cheryl called out what I was supposed to do while she roamed the room, then came and barked over my shoulder with 'NO, NOT LIKE THIS, LIKE THIS!' and 'IT DOESN'T GO LIKE THAT, IT GOES LIKE THIS!' One time, she pushed aside the sandwich I'd been making and redid it until I was so fed up with everything I couldn't see the sandwich table for the blood in my eyes. She then ordered me to get the egg salad in the fridge and it was disgustingly runny, but I put it in a side dish anyway. Fuck it.

'You can't serve that!' She got an out two eggs and started whipping them around a plastic container as Laura swooped in to see the mess, glared at me and swooped off again. I swiped the dish and the rotten egg salad sideways right into the garbage bin and walked off.

'You do it.'

I was going leave that minute, but God spoke to me in a soothing voice and said 'Nancy, you're only making 10.45 an hour.' So, being the responsible gal I am, I stayed until the end of the day and, as untrainable as a black bear at a culinary school, I never returned.

The US Is Leading the World into the Abyss

 

I've been blathering on about the States as the invading Evil Empire for years, but people have, for the most part, been brain-washed into believing otherwise, that the American military is there to protect human rights and democracy around the world and save us from dictators who would deem to take over the world. That evil dictator today is Vladimir Putin. What a bunch of lethal baloney we've swallowed. Our willful ignorance across the board will destroy us all in the end. 

The essay attached below by Edward Curtin entitled The US Is Leading the World Into the Abyss, sums up my views and what I've learned and educated myself about the States and its real motives. But further, I'd like to reiterate it is my belief that the CIA is one of the most nefarious organizations ever created. 

'A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “  I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November. Unprecedented.You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.

We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia.Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.

A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.

There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:

“Polly wants a war!” “Polly wants a war.”

I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing. Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change. Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe.  Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:

The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people. They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.

If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.

And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably. The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.

In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabama reported. Putin said:

They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.

I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.

The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.

When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more. They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith.  The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia," cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:

• Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
• Mobilizing European NATO members
• Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
• Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
• Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies

I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation." In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.

Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?

We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates. Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance.  Now war is waged less obviously, and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.

There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.

Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.

To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores? Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked? Have you completely lost your ability to think?  Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?

If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?

If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so - did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger? My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?

No. I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway. I have lost patience with it.  For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail. Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.

I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:

A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.

Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’

The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’

Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’

The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’

The desire for peace and security is a universal dream. Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.

It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.

But I will not stop trying. Galeano did not. He left us these words of universal resistance:

We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.

We must save the world before it is too late.