Duped (licate)...

Graphic: Roadkill Tees

      Other than magic or illusions, nobody likes to be conned.  This can be something small, like when the sale price doesn't ring up at checkout; or it can be huge as in your life savings vanishing in a flash (or after an election).  But those are financial, and there are many other ways of being fooled...think the car salesperson, or the timeshare, or the politician; the "forked-tongue" of yesteryear suddenly becomes an apt description for most of those cases.  But the grocery store?  Picture this headline from The Guardian: Major egg companies may be using avian flu to hike US prices; a related piece had this: US’s biggest egg producer’s profits triple as prices soar...Cal-Maine’s profits nearly eight times as high as at the start of the bird flu outbreak.  In the fascinating book by Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries, the world and history of our markets is explored with extensive research and placed right in your lap; and as I mentioned to my friends, you may not only end up with a new respect for those long-haul truckers (many of whom barely crack the poverty line after paying all of their dues and contractual obligations, much less their fuel and maintenance), but may think twice about those two hallowed chains of Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.  But even with all of the book's seemingly endless footnotes (which proved as interesting as the rest of the book), Lorr caught my eye with this partial explanation of how marketers and branding consultants work to shape our views in grocery stores (and other stores as well): For years, whenever given the choice, I just tossed the organic fair-trade version into the cart.  I had read my Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser.  Kept up on my New York Times exposés.  I knew the cost of industrial food.  Paying extra to make the world a slightly better place seemed like the literal least I could do as a white American male atop the food chain in a financial, social, and calorie sense.  It was an opportunity.  A sign of my larger sentience and connection to the world.  And so without even thinking, I ponied up.  Every time.  Ethics was habit.  But the habit always nagged at me.

     So far, was that sounding a bit like you?  While not quite as automatic as author Lorr's reactions, I did find myself leaning that direction, tossing organic fruit or produce into my cart more often than not; and yet, not always.  Lorr goes on (and bear in mind that he's working with a branding marketer at this point): I had watched organics and fair trade explode into billion-dollar industries.  But it was hard to say the world was becoming a better place for the marginal spending.  In fact, it felt like it was becoming a more insulated one.  I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins.  The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update.  The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.  And thus, Lorr enters the world of "inspections" and "certifications;" and it is all quite sobering.

      Ages ago my friends opened a cookie company, this back in the days of brands such as Mrs. Fields and Famous Amos, well before the "personal" touch became a regular form of marketing (have you ever seen so many "famous" chefs with their own cooking shows?).  And one thing that jumped out and which I so rarely noticed was that of a circled letter K symbol on a package, a symbol which meant the product was "certified" as kosher.  And here's what my friend told me about what it took to get their cookies certified as kosher: a rabbi who could do the certification appeared at the upper door of their factory warehouse, made a few gestures and left...no inspection, no walk-through, just a quick peek and a blessing that now allowed them to print their packaging with that symbol.  By the way, she told me, those few minutes cost her company a cool $50,000.  As Lorr pointed out: ...in 2009, the Government Accountability Office estimated that only 0.001 percent of all imported food products were inspected for fraud or mislabeling.  A stat that sounds pretty damning on its own, but especially when juxtaposed with the fact that 50 percent of all fresh fruits and 80 percent of all seafood are in fact imported... And thus was borne the world of private certifiers, auditors, and licensors as non-government labels --from fair-trade to organic, kosher to cage-free and pasture-raised-- began to sway us consumers, letting us "know" that all was indeed well.  Or were we being (dis)illusioned?

     When it comes to animal cruelty, it becomes a game of numbers.  As Lorr pointed out when he went with both animals rights groups on clandestine raids, as well as talking with factory farm owners, the amount of fruit and produce and meat produce, processed, shipped and stocked is boggling.  An average store will carry: ...32,000 individuated products known as Shop Keeping Units, or SKUs.  The biggest have more than 120,000 SKUs items.  And as shoppers, particularly American shoppers, we want anything BUT that blemished apple or browning banana.  So now jump back to that poultry or hog or cattle farm.  An animal has broken a leg or has been jammed too tightly into a pen or has caught a bug (the latest bird flu caused one such farm --yes, one single  farm-- to euthanize all 4.5 million of its birds).  For the farmer, animals are a commodity and thus are money.  As one stock farmer told Lorr, they are not in the business to lose money.  And so, as Oliver Frankin-Wallis pointed out in his book Wasteland, we overproduce to compensate.  As one example, the garment industry, despite all the clothes and shoes and other items hitting our shelves, likely represents just 15% of what has been made and appears on our shelves, resulting in what even the industry admits is a staggering 85% wastage: that which lands on the scrap floor, is returned, is damaged, or simply remains unsold.  What other business could operate in such a fashion (pardon the pun).

      Jump to another arena entirely and enter the world of plastic surgery where breast augmentation accounted for 40% of all plastic surgeries and held the number one spot until 2021, which is when liposuction took over the lead (this was all before the trendy arrival of weight-loss drugs).  Of course, that was just in the U.S. where such procedures have become nearly a $4 billion industry.  Worldwide, breast augmentation represents only 25% of all plastic surgeries (less than half that in Asian countries).  For men, removing "man boobs" is one of their top three elective cosmetic surgeries, wrote Sarah Thornton in her book, Tits Up (despite the title, the author takes a serious look at our fascination with female breasts, from nursing mothers to bra manufacturers to yes, the patriarchal world of strippers).  Silicon implants have only a 10-year warranty so women often have to have them removed and replaced before they "rupture or deteriorate."  And the largest manufacturer of implants, Allergen, also leads the market in Botox and Juvéderm for wrinkles.  Miami has the highest number of plastic surgeons per capita, Thornton wrote, likely because Florida does not require doctors to carry malpractice insurance (what??).  And she points out that although the people having plastic surgery are 90% female, only 18% of the plastic surgeons themselves are female (again, what??).  But your body views breast implants as foreign bodies so it immediately begins surrounding them with scar tissue, all of which has to be removed before another implant can be reinserted.  "It's a defense mechanism," said one plastic surgeon.  "The body walls off the implant to protect itself."  And as author Thornton points out: For the record, silicon is not a plastic, developed primarily from fossil fuels, but a synthesis of silica stone, water, and natural gas-derived methanol.  So why throw in all this talk of breast implants when the discussion is on being fooled?  Partly because in the world of plastic surgery, particularly reconstructive surgery following a mastectomy, there's been a procedure often left unsaid, one which uses your own tissue and blood vessels, and which is placed over the pectoral muscles instead of under them (going under the pecs is much more invasive and later tends to limit movement or cause pain when exercising).  DIEP flap surgery was described by BreastCancer.org as: The DIEP --or deep inferior epigastric perforator-- flap is named for the blood vessel that runs through the abdominal muscle.  DIEP flap surgery requires surgeons to make a small incision in the layer covering the abdominal muscle so they can take the blood vessels that travel within the muscle...After DIEP flap surgery, your belly looks flatter and feels tighter — as if you’d had a tummy tuck.  As Dr. Elizabeth Potter, a pioneer in DIEP surgeries, told author Thornton: Breasts made from transplanted belly tissue are warm, soft, and enduring.  They don't just look like real breasts, they feel like real breasts...'My patients wake up to their body transformed.  They feel more at home in their body -- with no foreign invaders.  They feel less betrayed, less dependent, more sovereign.  It's the beginning of a process of taking back power."  They've reached the summit (I threw that in because author Thornton noted that in the Hebrew dialect, breast and mountain are the same word)...

     So maybe that was why I dove into a series of books by Jay Ingram called, The Science of Why.  I mean, who hasn't had a bunch of questions about why things are the way they are?  So did you know that the porcupine is the third largest rodent in the world?  Wait, rodent, as in rat?  But here was something even more interesting...their barbed quills not only penetrate skin easily, but cause the least amount of tissue damage, even when compared to 18-gauge hypodermic needles (yes, those needles that are used to give us vaccines); they even worked better than barbless quills, and even "reproduced" barbed quills of plastic.  What's up with that?  And the average porcupine has over 30,000 of those quills!  And when angry or threatened, their quills go "up" and create a white "stripe" of sorts, followed by a pungent odor.  A skunk, you say?  Pretty close, except that skunks are not rodents.  But here's another tidbit from the book: those glowing eyes that cats and American alligators have when you shine a flashlight on them?  It's not the "red eye" we get in photos (that's actually the blood in our eyes' blood vessels) but the tapetum which focuses different wavelengths of light depending on the species.  Deep in the dark ocean, the tapeta brings out yellow-green wavelengths, but on land, dogs, cows, horses, even some moths & butterflies (not to mention dolphins and many fish) utilize different tapeta.  And that vertical slit pupil (for some animals, it's horizontal) ?  It allows way more light in than our camera-like round pupil...about 10 or 15 times more light.  Wait, more light?

      So as long as we've touched on smells, it was interesting to read that 80% of people in North America use some sort of air freshener.  But what was more interesting was to read it in The Forever Dog.  Said the book: Most people assume air-fresheners are safety-tested prior to sale, but shockingly, no testing is required, and chemical companies don't need permission to sell these products to consumers for household use (fewer than 10 percent of ingredients are disclosed on the labels)... Research shows that even once-a-week use (e.g., spraying the air in a bathroom) may increase a person's odds of developing asthma and other lung diseases but as much as 71 percent... studies show that the average level of chemicals is often double in pets than people [and] just when you thought you could go back to old-fashioned, unscented candles, get this.  The vast majority of candles are made with paraffin wax, a petroleum by-product that is created during the process of refining crude oil into gasoline.  When heated, paraffin wax releases toxic acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, toluene, benzene, and acetone into the air, all of which increase cancer risk... and up to 30 percent of wicks contain heavy metals (lead), so several hours of burning foments airborne heavy metals much higher than acceptable.  Gee, after reading all that, no wonder toothpaste and mouthwash manufacturers didn't want to list all their artifical sweeteners (primarily sorbitol and the poisonous-to-dogs xylitol).

Congressional Message: Roadkill Tees

      Let's face it.  It is up to us to be fooled or to dig a bit deeper and to see through falsehoods.  It is up to us to decide whether to watch and listen to only one side, and then decide whether to take what was said as fact.  It is up to us to decide whether we believe that the powers-that-be, the corporations, the banks, and the manufacturers all have our best interests in mind and not theirs.  It is up to us to accept that what a label says --or has perhaps purposely left out-- will not cause us harm.  For me, the contrast in what was being said in the last election campaign, and what was the reality, was quite stark.  And so was the fact that nearly 90 million people didn't even bother to vote...that's 36% of the country's eligible voters, wrote The Guardian, and that number was more "votes"  than either Trump or Harris received.  What's up with that?  Over a third of our country basically didn't care what was going to happen, and then here we are.  Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, presented all of this before the election,* adding: Americans suffer

from a form of collective amnesia.  There’s simply too much going on.  We’re also very vulnerable to the power of suggestion -- things we learn after the fact that become incorporated into our memory, fooling us into thinking they were real.  Our memories are also affected by our biases -- experiences, beliefs, prior knowledge, and what our friends and associates believe.  When we retrieve a memory, these biases influence what information we actually recall.  Anyone who watches a lot of Fox News or hears lots of right-wing radio is vulnerable to both suggestion and bias.  But there’s something else.  The media lives off conflict.   And Trump is nothing but conflict.  He bloviates, lies, exaggerates, takes credit, avoids blame, and belittles and excoriates opponents.  So it's little wonder that I now see tee shirts that say: I quit following politics for good.  Now I'm following it for evil.

     Yet despite the rising prices and the falling markets, despite the angered foreign nations and the followers happily chanting "promises made and kept," (well, maybe not all those "day one" promises, other than pardoning the primarily 92% white crowd who stormed the Capitol) and despite the protests and the red MADA (Make America Dumb Again) hats flying off of shelves, I continue to look outside and see a sun rising instead of setting.  And I continue to believe that somewhere underneath it all, people may be down but not out.  And I continue to agree with the words of author Sarah Kendzior, who traveled the highways of America and wrote about it in her recent book, The Last American Road Trip: I drive the highways of America like I'm reading its palm because I know the only way to put things back together is to see how they fell apart...I search for truth and justice and wind up on the American Way, a path of pain and violence that permeates from past to present.  Yet even in the worst of times, I refuse to believe our nation's fate is preordained.  There is no inevitable autocracy or inevitable democracy.  There are no red states or blue states.  There are only purple states, purple like a bruise, and people trying to survive in a broken-promise land... My nonfiction horror stories prompted many questions.  The one I got most was,  "How are you raising kids in America, knowing all these terrible things?"  I answered, "I love America with all my heart and would never live anywhere else.  I write about problems in the hope that we can fix them, so that my kids won't have to."...This book is not about one continuous journey but multiple trips through a country falling apart.  We traveled where we could when we could.  Then we returned to work and school, much as you likely do, and waited for the day we could roam free once more.  This is a book about time as much as place and the fragile nature of both.  In an era when empathy is demonized, my love for America has come to feel like defiance.  Powerful operatives want to destroy this country, and they want ordinary Americans to think it was their own idea.  They smear states with stereotypes and preach partition.  They push us to shrug off the plight of the marginalized.  They bank on us not having enough compassion for our countrymen to see what all corners of America are like.  They want us to stay in our places, literally and figuratively.  They want to crush curiosity.  But the wonderful thing about children is that they keep you forever curious.  You see your country through their wide eyes, its wonders and flaws, while keeping watch like a parent.  You study how prior generations of Americans survived their own dark times.  You pay tribute to their sacrifice... But the future is behind me in the back seat, asking me where we're going next. Our last American road trip was only the beginning.  We are an American family, and we are staying that way -- no matter what.

     It was Machiavelli who said: The Prince knows that it is far safer to be feared than loved.  In these times when separating truth from fiction, and separating being governed from being ruled, the phrase "it's all up to you" takes on even more importance...

*It's sobering to read what happened in Trump's first term, as compared to the demonized Biden years.  Anyone involved in the stock market with their retirement funds can see the difference now (under Biden, the market topped 40,000 for the first time in history).  But here are just a few bits from Reich's report before Americans voted (at least, those who actually did vote):  Under Trump, the national debt rose from about $19.9 trillion to about $27.8 trillion, an increase of about 39 percent, and more than in any other four-year presidential term (at the end of this year, the Congressional Budget Office expects the debt to increase another $1.9 trillion)...In 2016, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the China was near $350 billion.  In the first three years of the Trump administration (before COVID-19), it worsened, averaging almost $379 billion per year.  Under Biden, America’s trade deficit with China has improved dramatically — falling by $103 billion, or 27 percent, to $279 billion. It’s the lowest bilateral deficit in goods since 2010...Under Trump the economy lost 2.9 million jobs.  Under Biden, it has gained 15 million, so far.  Hmm, but that was then, all during Trump's first term.  As to Trump's 2nd term, well, you be the judge if you think things are now getting better or worse.  Wrote The Atlantic: ...as Trump’s critics cheer the apparent change of heart among some of his supporters, they face an inconvenient reality: Many of his voters are jubilant.  For these happy millions, the first 100 days of Trump’s second presidency have been a procession of fulfilled campaign promises—and have brought the country not to the precipice of economic ruin or democratic collapse, but to a golden age of greatness.  But if you've read this far, then forget all of that and fall back into the world of true sleight-of-hand with a few performances by Shin Lim, who currently headlines at the Venetian and "fooled" Penn & Teller 3 times, as well as winning the finale of America's Got Talent!...