Plastic Farm Animals
I’ve long felt that the United States’ economic model is leading us to ruin. The grab-all approach to business and wealth strengthens the strong while shutting doors to the rest of us. Capitalism encourages greed and monopoly. This graph clearly illustrates the rise of corporate profits (the blue line) and the decline of employee wages […]
You can fly for peanuts, but don’t let one cross your lips. Towards the end of November, Bob got assigned of a couple of farm audits in the-middle-of-nowhere Kansas and, in a stroke of brilliance, decided to route himself through Denver, book an extra four days, and bring me along. It had been two years […]
As he does every year, Bob rents a car and drives us to DC, our first stop on an annual trek to see my parents and four of my five brothers. We spend the night at our friend Ned’s and pick up my brother Joe at Dulles in the morning. He’d nearly missed his flight. […]
“Kill chicken, show monkey,” the Chinese doorman at the Tianjin Hyatt shrugged in reference to a geopolitical news story. This was in 1998 when Bob and I were working in northern China, living in a hotel, absorbing all the nuances of the Far East. I pictured emboldened macaques terrorizing a barnyard flock, the farmer stomping […]
An American flag strains against its moorings outside our second floor window facing the Atlantic. We made our way here down Ocean Boulevard past beach clubs landscaped in cypress and roses, silent miniature golf creatures, gaudy life-sized plastic Arabian horses, and cartoonish restaurant signs with names like Awful Arthur’s, Tortuga’s Lie, and Hurricane Mo’s, all […]