See Me Squeegee

So one of my favorite monotony-of-life themes involves those situations in which you have a pretty legitimate reason to go to a grocery store, but then circumstances intervene and you end up with a ridiculous shopping cart of a handful of completely disconnected items, and the person checking you out and/or the people in line near you must think you’re a lunatic.  But there’s a perfectly good explanation…that you can’t tell them or you really are a lunatic.

For example, back right after college, I was taking off from my parents’ house to stay a weekend with some friends in Ann Arbor (CW Chronicles fans, you’ll remember Brent and Sperling’s apartment above China Gate), and obviously I was going to stop at Meijer’s to pick up beer on the way.  On my way (and on my first ever cell phone) they called and asked if I could pick up a plunger while I was at the store.  Naturally I didn’t ask questions and just figured that it needed to be done.  And it wasn’t until I saw the look of disgust on the clerk’s face did I realize that I was a man purchasing exactly two items: a 30-pack of Busch LIght and a toilet plunger.

Anyway, that came back up tonight with the following circumstances:

Tomorrow is Halloween, and as is her custom our HR-ish coworker Michele announced a costume contest with 36 hours’ notice, so we all had to spring into action.  Many of us decided to all dress as our fun-to-mock coworker Tyler (who a couple weeks ago had to let one of us draw a tattoo of our boss on his neck because he lost to me in fantasy football; next week he has to perform a dance routine to Kelis’s Milkshake to complete the bet.  Yep, they pay me to work at this place and this is how I spend my time.)

Now, Tyler is a young buck with Frat Fashion Chic style – he’ll pop a collar now and then and once he matched his pastel polo to his canvas sneakers, and I remind him of this almost daily.  So the costume is easy:

-White shoes from Payless that I can marker up with a pastel marker to match my polo

-Popped collar on said polo

-Axe Body Spray sticking out of my pocket and Axe Hair Gel popping up my hair

-Red Bull and/or Four Loko in hand at all times

Alas, tonight I had to teach until about 10pm, so I didn’t have many options to pick up my Axe and pastel markers.  As I reached CVS, it was closing and they were pushing people out the door, so I had to go to Vons, the grocery store, as a last-ditch effort.  Fortunately they had some pastel Sharpies and some Axe, so I was good to go…but they didn’t have an available express check-out lane, and the two open lanes they had were jammed.  Now, I didn’t want to wait ten minutes for just markers and Axe body spray, so I had to make use of the time.  And like most grocery stores these days, Vons had the club card special where if you buy six bottles of wine you get an insane deal.  I didn’t need wine, but it’s not bad to have around the house in case people stop by or you get invited to dinner and need to bring something, so since I was waiting anyway I figured I could spring 50 bucks or whatever to load up the pantry with wine.  Again, not because I really wanted or needed any, but because I was bored and didn’t want to wait ten minutes in line without something more to show for it.  So I loaded up an armful of wine to go with my body spray and markers.  But here’s the catch – my club card is all mangled and the scenario didn’t take my phone number as a substitute, so a manager had to get involved while the line backed up and so at least 10 people got to spend some time considering my shopping cart which consisted of exactly:

(1) One bottle of Axe Body Spray

(1) One five-pack of pastel highlighter Sharpie markers

(6) Six bottles of wine

What must they have thought?  What kind of a grown-ass man has a shopping order like that?  And how was I note the weirdest order in my own line?  (The girl in front of me was 90% certainly a prostitute eating a Whole Foods salad and buying a carton of soup and a pack of gum)

Comment thread folk – can anyone top either order?

Author’s note: this article was a chapter in a book that my friend Adam and I never finished writing, but that we loved.  The premise – “What if…” in the world of sports, taking events or decisions and applying them to the Back to the Future / Space-Time Continuum test.  How would history be different?  Here’s one of our favorite chapters, predicting that if Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time, had been rightfully drafted first by Houston (and not third by Chicago), Barack Obama would not be president.  Sidenote – we love the idea of footnotes, so please be warned that there are footnotes at the bottom of the post.  Here goes:

What if…the Houston Rockets had drafted Michael Jordan with the first pick in the 1984 NBA Draft? 

The 1984 NBA Draft may well be the most-discussed “what if” draft in sports history.  Famously, the Portland Trailblazers took injury-prone, seven-foot center Sam Bowie with the second pick, enabling the Chicago Bulls to take Michael Jordan third.  That selection would pay off in a big way for the Bulls, leading to six NBA championships, nine trips to the conference finals, and an unparalleled legacy as one of the greatest dynasties in sports.  Bowie, on the other hand, would suffer through an injury-plagued career and become most famous as a punchline, the guy who was drafted ahead of Jordan.

The Houston Rockets selected first in that draft, taking center Hakeem Olajuwon, and have never received much criticism for that choice.  Olajuwon was a can’t-miss prospect, and certainly didn’t.  In his second season, the Rockets made the NBA Finals (losing to the Boston Celtics), and by the end of his career he had led Houston to two championships[1].  In hindsight, Houston made a perfectly defensible choice with Olajuwon, but given Jordan’s career it’s hard to say that the Rockets shouldn’t have drafted MJ.  What would have happened if Houston had paired Ralph Sampson with Jordan?  If Portland had paired Clyde Drexler with Hakeem Olajuwon?   On the court, Portland would have been an absolute juggernaut, and with the Showtime Lakers, the David Robinson-led Spurs, and other Western contenders along the way, the deck would have been stacked a bit more against Jordan.  Off the court, one could argue, more importantly, that if Houston had picked Jordan, Barack Obama would not be United States President.

How are the two events linked?  Consider Jordan’s legacy as an African-American icon and pillar of American business, in the state of Illinois, spanning the childhood of the generation that would elect Obama to the U.S. Senate from Illinois.  That Jordan and Obama rose to prominence in the same state was helpful; that Jordan walked in to such a tailor-made situation to launch him to unparalleled success and influence in American pop culture was pivotal. 

First, let’s look at Michael Jordan’s influence in setting the stage for a black president…in a nation less than 150 years removed from slavery; less than a generation removed from school segregation and the assassinations of nearly every prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  In a nation where Obama was only the third black (post-Reconstruction[2]) Senator in an organization that maintains 100 members.  Jordan is credited, along with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, with rescuing the NBA from its image problems in the early 1980s.  This was a tall order, as the image problems were mainly that the NBA was “too urban” for white America, which was fearful of drugs and gang culture. To be truthful, the NBA did have a fairly prominent cocaine problem at the time, but it’s also fair to note that America wasn’t quite ready for a thoroughly-black league only a generation after Jackie Robinson.  Jordan’s winning smile, relatable demeanor, and gentle touch transitioned the NBA from a perception of overpaid, overmedicated “thugs[3]” to a family-friendly, aspirational activity, with parents singing along with their children that they wanted to “Be Like Mike[4]”. 

Jordan’s elevation of the NBA was no small feat, but it’s even more noteworthy that he had songs like “Be Like Mike” to sing from his myriad endorsement contracts.   What he accomplished on the court was remarkable; the impact he had on the world off the court set the stage for a president like Barack Obama.  Jordan became the man every child wanted to be, and the man every parent would be proud to have as a son.  He had all the makings of a true American hero – he so idolized his father that he adopted (and made famous) his father’s nervous habit of sticking his tongue out as he worked.  He loved his mother, and so shared her passion for education that he wore his collegiate North Carolina shorts under his Bulls uniform (an homage to the school and his coach, Dean Smith – proof that Jordan respected and admired authority and those who could teach him).  He exemplified hard work and perseverance, having been cut from his high school varsity team before becoming a prep star.

And he was black, but in an America in which adjectives tend to precede the people they describe, Jordan wasn’t a “black superstar” but rather a superstar who happened to be black.  Parents had little choice but to (and little incentive not to) embrace him as their children’s hero, and kids saw him as Superman with little regard for the color of his skin.  By the late 1980s, less than a full generation removed from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – and in the same timeframe as states fought to decline King’s holiday and keep their Confederate flags – a black man was America’s most prominent icon, export, and matinee idol. 

By 2008, the generation that grew up idolizing Jordan would be Barack Obama’s support base, forming a volunteer army that transformed the world of politics and voting in record numbers for their age demographic.  Their parents, the Baby Boomers, would represent the nation’s largest demographic group, and between the two groups would form a large majority of the voting-age public.  Having all come of age with a black hero on their walls, t-shirts, and televisions, they would represent the first voting public in American history with even a remote inkling that a black man could lead them.

To become president, however, one needs much more than the qualifications and demeanor to ensure the people that he can lead.  Well before that point, one needs the financial support of corporate and upper-class America to be able to afford the media necessary to reach out to the people.  The major political parties would certainly like to have a candidate who is capable, but they are much more concerned in having a candidate who is electable.  Politics is at least as much about winning as it is about governing, if only because you can’t do the latter if you haven’t done the former.  With – again, it bears repeating – only four black senators in modern history, how could corporate America in good faith put its backing behind a black candidate with a true chance to win the presidency?

Enter Michael Jordan, who between the years of 1984 and 2008 had proven, time and time again, to big business that investments in a black spokesperson-slash-icon can pay huge dividends.  Few blacks had risen to much national notoriety in anything other than “black” capacities, and the vast majority of corporate pitchmen were white.  But there was Jordan, cool, calm, and collected, the antithesis of “blacksploitation”, playing the leading man in ads for Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s Hanes, Gatorade, General Motors, and other top companies; there was Jordan starring alongside Bugs Bunny in a family-themed feature film, Space Jam; there was Jordan, speaking at events for management consultants, investment bankers, salesmen, and advertisers alike, relishing his role as businessman off the court nearly as much as he thrived on winning on the court.

Fortune Magazine estimated upon Jordan’s (second) retirement from the NBA in 1998 that his impact on the global economy to that point had been $10 billion.  The Journal of Advertising Research found that Jordan’s return to basketball in 1995, after his first retirement, increased the market capitalization of his then-endorsement firms by $1 billion.  Jay-Z may get credit for the lyric, but it can easily be said that Jordan wasn’t a businessman, he was a business, man.  Or, more appropriately, an economy unto himself, and a business force that hadn’t been seen before.  Corporate America thrived upon the likability of a tall, handsome, well-spoken[5] black man, and the stage was set for similar figures – like Barack Obama – to achieve similar corporately-funded heights.

So, as argued above, Jordan’s popularity among the masses and profitability for Corporate America set the stage for Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency.  Why couldn’t this have happened had Jordan played in Houston?  Even aside from the coincidence that Jordan and Obama both called Illinois home – a contributing factor to this argument – Jordan’s presence in Chicago was crucial both on and off the court.

On the court?  Had Jordan been drafted initially by Houston, the Portland Trailblazers drafting next would certainly have chosen Hakeem Olajuwon, giving Portland a nucleus of Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Jerome Kersey, Mychal Thompson, and then the addition of Terry Porter the next year (Portland drafted him with the final pick of the first round in 1985, so for the sake of argument one can assume they’d have had a chance to draft him regardless of the draft order that year).  Considering that, in reality, Portland became a legitimate force in the West with essentially nothing to show for that year’s pick, the hypothetical addition of all-time great Olajuwon makes Portland a dominant team in the Western Conference, along with the Magic Johnson-led Los Angeles Lakers, over the next 5-6 years at least.

Had Jordan been drafted first, he’d have been paired with Ralph Sampson, who at the time was a top-tier player, but by the late 1980s would be a non-factor given his knee injuries.  With Sampson, Jordan may have achieved some early playoff success in 1985-88, but it’s unlikely that those Rockets could have endured the Lakers, the hypothetical Blazers, and the rest of the Western Conference, and even if they had the Boston Celtics of that era were a juggernaut of their own.  It’s safe to say that Jordan’s career wouldn’t have had the Hollywood-scripted arc that he achieved in Chicago – rise to stardom as a one-man show from 1984-1987, three epic duels with the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons from 1988-1990 as Jordan learned to win and built a foundation around him, a thorough drubbing of those villainous Pistons in 1991 and a championship over Magic Johnson in 1991, dominance of another prominent villain, the New York Knicks, and more titles in 1992-93, and then a return to basketball and three more championships from 1996-98.  Likely, if drafted by Houston, Jordan has a little more success – but not championships – in his first few years, then is forced to rebuild with the injuries to Sampson in the late 1980s, just when his real-life Bulls were achieving prominence, and while the hypothetical Blazers (and Lakers) were hitting their peaks.  Without the ready-made villain Pistons, the ascendant character arc of the late 1980s culminating in the 1991 championship finals with the country’s second- and third-largest media markets (LA and Chicago) and the sport’s other biggest star, Magic Johnson, would Jordan have reached the same lofty heights? 

While possible, it’s doubtful, and even were Jordan able to do so on the court, off the court he’d have had the challenge – remember, we’re talking about his impact culturally and economically more so than athletically – of playing in Houston and not in Chicago.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Houston[6], but Chicago is a quintessential American city along both dimensions that Jordan (and later Obama) rose to prominence – culturally, it’s one of the most-relatable cities to the rest of the nation, and economically it’s arguably the second-most important city in the U.S. (behind New York).  If Corporate America were to choose a perfect pitchman to make an icon, Chicago would be a natural place to look, and Jordan almost immediately became the advertising industry’s greatest find.

In terms of business, Chicago has few peers on the global scale.  It’s one of the world’s most prominent financial centers and home to much of the advertising industry and several of the world’s biggest advertisers, including McDonald’s.  While only a handful of Illinois-based businesses could afford Jordan’s sponsorship fees, everyone who was anyone in Chicago had Bulls tickets during Jordan’s career, and that group included some of the wealthiest and most influential people in business.  Jordan had a built-in audience of the who’s who of American business, and accordingly could convince the mass of Corporate America to invest in certain pillars of black America.

Equally, if not more, important to this argument is that Chicago is, for purposes of media, advertising, and politics, about as American as it gets.  Home to many an American family sitcom or movie – Home Alone, Family Matters, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,  the National Lampoon’s Vacation series and John Hughes’ catalogue, etc. – Chicago is uniquely relatable to most of Americans.  A notable city with a famous skyline, Chicago is known for family values not attributed to New York or Los Angeles.  As a center of travel – it was the mainstay of the railroad industry and its O’Hare Airport was, for most of Jordan’s career, the busiest in the world – and business, it’s a location with which many have ties, having either been there or knowing someone who has[7].

As symbolic as Chicago is to American culture, it’s even more uniquely relatable to political swing state culture.  Heading into the 2008 election, the key battleground states – those in which the election was seen to be in doubt – included Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri (Obama’s only loss in this list), Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia.  Of those states, Obama lost – only by a small margin – Missouri, and those may be the states in which the Jordan Rules, so to speak, were in most in effect.  Chicago is the de facto “Capital of the Midwest”, a cultural and economic hub for the cities between the Appalachians and Rockies and north of the Mason-Dixon line, and Jordan played in the NBA’s Central Division.  People from Big Ten Conference states – Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Western Pennsylvania – simply identify with Chicago. Jordan played his division games against teams from Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio, and up until 1989 Minnesotans didn’t have a team of their own.  Furthermore, Jordan had a hand in Obama’s other big swing state wins, having grown up and played college basketball in North Carolina, and having played his final professional stint in Washington, DC, the most populous portion of Virginia.  In nearly every major swing state for the 2008 election, Michael Jordan had made a personal presence over the 20 previous years, and Obama won all of them but Missouri, the state not represented by an NBA franchise.  Coincidence?

Chicago afforded Jordan two other major-but-unsung advantages.  As mentioned previously, Chicago was enough a capital of the Midwest to engender Bulls fans from across the region.  The same has traditionally been true of the Cubs in baseball, and the reason has much less to do with Ernie Banks than it does to do with Harry Caray.  As a media capital, Chicago’s radio stations have traditionally had larger reach than have those of other Midwestern cities, giving people across the region access to Chicago sports.  By the late 1980s, that dynamic had given the nation access to Bulls home games via cable television “superstation” WGN – one of essentially two such local-turned-national superstations.[8] Simply by virtue of draft circumstance, Jordan ended up in one of a precious few markets that could allow the majority of his home games to be broadcast nationally, allowing for an even more-meteoric rise to iconic superstardom.  What’s more, Jordan’s Chicago location set him in an ideal situation to reach the nation as far as timing; though Houston, his other hypothetical discussion in this chapter, is also in the Central time zone, Chicago had the advantage for Jordan (and Obama) of being in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, meaning that over 2/3 of  Jordan’s games – mostly televised nationally – took place before the bedtimes of the entire country, right in the comfort of America’s homes.

Trite as it may sound, Jordan also fell into the perfect color scheme in Chicago with the Bulls’ red and black uniforms.  As much as Jordan did for Nike – over $6 billion worth of impact to date – Nike also helped to create Jordan as an icon, and Nike’s greatest contribution in that regard was to make His Airness the ultimate 1980s/90s fashion statement.  The Jumpman line started initially with a pair of stylish red, black, and white sneakers – in a color scheme that, incidentally, matched that of the decade’s slightly more famous MJ, Michael Jackson, whose red jacket, black pants, and white socks were prominent in the most famous music video of all time, for Thriller.  Again, the color scheme could simply be coincidence, but in this search for a tipping point of monumental proportions – an African American garnering enough popular support to become President – a series of coincidences could have provided exactly the necessary momentum.  Could Jordan have been as popular in red and yellow as he was in red and black?  Perhaps, but as another Nike icon of that era, Andre Agassi, was famous for saying, “image is everything”, and Jordan’s image certainly wasn’t hurt by his choice in colors.

A major point of contention in this presidential election cycle involves tax policy on “the one percent”.  For several reasons, I have to say that raising taxes on the highest earners is a pretty damn good idea.  These reasons include:

1) I’m not rich and neither are you.

So who cares?  99% of us aren’t 1%-ers, and probably 98% of us will never be.  So who cares if we’re taxing someone other than us?  And while i can do better than this intellectually (and I will), this point remains pretty important in my mind.  Why are so many of us non-rich folks so protective of tax breaks for the rich?  If your United flight attendant told you that you could pay for your $8 snack box or you could just decide that the people in first class would pay for it, you’d let them pay for it.  Why doesn’t this always hold?  Why won’t we let Lloyd Blankfein and LeBron James pay for a few more teachers?  Why can’t Alex Rodriguez be bothered to pay for your healthcare with the millions he’s being paid to sit on the Yankees’ bench?  Why can’t Vikram Pandit pay for new construction jobs and new bridge construction out of his $120 million severance for doing a terrible job as Citigroup CEO?  Why do we protect these guys?!

But like I said, I’ll do better.  Not only do I favor taxing the rich because “they ain’t me”, I also see other major reasons to do so.  Namely:

2) It really doesn’t matter.

And here’s why – at the upper end, prices are entirely set by willingness-to-pay, not by cost.  Other than maybe vacations to outer space, every luxury good is priced based on what rich people will pay for it.  Lamborghinis, the watches that Jay-Z talks about, homes in Malibu…they all cost much, much more than the sum of the cost of their parts.  And so if the richest of the rich have 10% less disposable income, yacht prices will fall by somewhere around 10%.  The guy who made $22 million will have less to spend, but still substantially more than the guy who made $18 million, so ol’ deuce-deuce gets the Audemars watch and 18-mill gets the Rolex.  And both still have plenty more where that came from.  It really, really does not matter.

And for generations we knew this.  The marginal tax rates pre-Reagan were near 90 percent at that top end, and that fueled tons of job creation and growth.  And Robin Leach still had a ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ show to host.  The rich are rich enough – we don’t need to artificially make them richer.

3) Above a certain level, you dicked enough people over to get that money that you owe us.

Here’s where I’ll get a little more controversial, but I’d say it’s 100% true.  My plan – scrap the arbitrary $250k number and instead peg the “dickishness tax” rate to just above what the average cardiologist makes.  Why?  Because we get to use tax policy to do a few things.  One, to raise revenue. Two, to encourage certain behaviors.  And three, to discourage other behaviors.  Obviously we need the revenue, but here’s what else we need – doctors and innovators, those who drive the economy.  Aerospace engineers make less than financiers; cardiologists make less than top salespeople.  And everyone makes less than Fortune 500 CEOs.  But who really drives the economy?  Who do we want more of?  Almost anyone can become an engineer or a doctor, with hard work and ingenuity.  We should encourage those behaviors by keeping their income at a “high-impact” level – the dollars they earn are those that pack the most punch.  But for the most part those salaries have caps.  Doctors are limited by what insurance will reimburse and by how many patients they can serve in a day.  Engineers are on pay scales that accelerate for VPs and CEOs.  But who’s really driving innovation?  The CEOs are at the top of the pyramid but they don’t add the same value as the true innovators.  And so for those who chase capitalism, business and finance represent lower-barrier-to-entry, higher-ceiling pay scales.  Let’s create incentives for people to seek true achievement.

And on the other side, once you’re much higher than a doctor’s salary (and in many cases even below that) you’re screwing someone over to get there.  Salespeople with high commissions are often acting dishonestly; even if not, they’re often using high-pressure, low-ethic tactics to skim money out of clients.  Capitalism is a beautiful system for rewarding innovation, but the evolution of capitalism is this – it rewards “getting that money” more so than innovation.  At a certain level in highly-developed economies like ours, the ability to talk a client out of his money is more valued than the ability to earn that business through true value.  And that’s the genesis of the “dicknishness tax”.

Look at Bill Gates – you could argue that he stole many of the great ideas for Windows straight from Apple.  It’s likely that a huge portion of his fortune came from elements of antitrust.  As much as we’d consider him a technological innovator, much of what he earned came at the expense of true innovators as he strongarmed his operating system into a dominant business position.  Bill Gates deserved plenty of money for what he contributed to the world – but in a winner-take-all economy he “won” the fair shares of many other innovators, many of whom he just dicked over to get there.

Look at Steve Jobs – for all the good he created, he was a colossal dick.  His iOS deliberately attacks Flash and Java platforms, creating a system in which users are unable to view a third of the internet just so that Jobs can dick over Adobe from the grave.  Yes, he deserves a ton of money for what value he contributed to the global economy.  But he dicked a lot of people over to get a giant portion of his fortune.

Look at the financial industry.  It’s dicked over the world, gambling with our money, lobbying for lax regulations but gobbling up bailouts and subsidies.  Look at BP, which rakes in record oil profits and takes energy subsidies, all the while risking the health of the Gulf of Mexico and its wildlife and neighbors.  Look at fitness-based companies like the World Triathlon Corporation and the Rock n’ Roll Marathon series, which are buying up the rights to local fitness events and jacking up the prices under the veil of “capitalism”.  Our economy rewards innovation to a point, but after that point it values marketing, sales, and shrewdness above all.

With shrewdness comes this – pink slime in our food; increased gluten in our food.  Why? Because they’re cheap and the consumer will never know.  With shrewdness comes the “we’ll just pay the fine…if they catch us” approach to pollution and the environment. With shrewdness comes the political lobby, creating “science” that says that global warming is a hoax and pushing for the deregulation of financial and environmental circles.  With shrewdness comes Enron, Tyco, Arthur Anderson, and Too Big To Fail.  What the business climate rewards as shrewdness is often nothing more than profit-driven dickishness.

And this is where the dickishness tax has a corollary – the Scoreboard Corollary.  At a high enough level, the finance guys aren’t shrewdly screwing investors or manipulating stock prices because they want or need the money.  It’s a game to them.  The bosses aren’t negotiating down employee salaries because they want the bonuses for themselves to buy bread; it’s a way to outsmart the other department heads and look better.  The salesman chases the commission to win; the marketing team plans its strategy to increase share; the financial analysts want to pick winners who increase market share and P/E ratio.  To win.  They’re playing a scoreboard game – it’s only that the numbers on that scoreboard could buy healthcare for seniors and education for kids.  Those points on the scoreboard could retrain employees whose jobs were shipped overseas to accumulate those points.  Those points don’t matter – who wins matters.  So let’s adjust the scale downward.  Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 becomes 75…but those extra 25 points feeds the poor.  Who loses?  No one.

Listen, it’s foolish to argue against capitalism, but it’s just as foolish to say that it’s absolute. Pure capitalism can’t exist without creating anticompetitive situations – we need to protect against monopolies just as we need to protect against dangerous products.  We need to protect against insider trading and collusion and we need to protect against the “snake oil” products that falsely advertise.  And along that slippery slope, we’ve also decided to use the tax code to reward activities – home ownership, charitable donations, having kids – and discourage others, like smoking.  With our tax code, we have a chance to reward true innovations and take some of the bloom off the sales/finance and dicknishness roses.

At a certain point, the money doesn’t matter – it’s points on a scoreboard. And at that point, dickishness reigns supreme.  Will taxes end dickishness?  No.  But higher taxes on the rich have a justification.  The advanced accumulation of wealth is often – usually – accompanied by dickishness.  Whether it’s intentionally manipulating a product. badgering through sales techniques, or screwing over a colleague or it’s more inadvertent turning a blind eye to these things as they happen with securities in your portfolio, the more money you make the more you owe to ” the pot”.  And since at that point you’re only paying in scoreboard points, who cares?
Tax the rich, if for no better reason than for Chris Rock’s take on gays in the military.  “Let ’em fight,” he says.  “Cause I ain’t fighting.”  Let the rich pay – you and I can’t afford to, and there’s a pretty good set of justifications for why they should do it for us.

As I travel around this great big world of ours, the same two questions follow me:

1) “What the hell were you guys thinking re-electing George W Bush?” (serious question that I’ve been asked several times now this week in Dubai, and that I was asked at least once in London this summer)

2) “What the hell does your blog name mean?”  (Note – I talk to a lot of people who begin questions with “what the hell…”)

As the first question is inexplicable, let’s tackle the second.  Why is this blog entitled “See Me Squeegee”?  It all dates back to my rap career… (which probably begs another “what the hell” line of questioning).

The year was 2005 and George W had just begun that aforementioned 2nd term.  I was attending graduate school and getting to know my classmates. The result?  My buddy Rory and I dropped a rap album.

It mainly started out of boredom from those group events during which everyone asks and answers the same questions the first few weeks of school.  “Where are you from / what did you major in / etc.”  Rory had grown up in Flint and therefore liked to rap battle and since there were mostly white people there someone had to step up.  I’d battle and lose, but then I realized something about the man they called “MC Nonsense” – he had a pattern…whenever he was out of ideas he’d go back to the same handful of bars while he thought of something new: “I shake it, I bake it, I make it, I take it, I rake it like a leaf, where you at chief?” or “They call me Nonsense, I don’t make sense, I don’t have to make sense, that ain’t my conscience”.  And since he had that stock couple seconds to think of something new, he’s always win.  With that as my knowledge, I could battle back with a similar game.  And so we rapped at every gathering of classmates over beers and people loved it.

We even rapped a group project while everyone else was doing dumb skits.  Our black professor for that “Teaching With Diversity” class – man, that was risky to rap that now that I think about it – loved it and so did our classmates.  A couple popular girls – yep…grad school and there were “popular girls” – developed crushes on us because we entertained.  It was a weird alternate universe but it worked somehow.  And so we decided…we should drop an album.

The theme of that album was this – most rappers rap about either how good they have it (“ball so hard…that shit cray”) or how bad they had it growing up.  No rappers rap about being middle class grad students getting by on student loans.  We’d be the first.  Some of the highlights from our first track, “Manifesto” in which we laid out our mantra, included:

Ever hear an MC brag about a one-room pad?

Ever heard a rapper speak highly of his dad?

Pay attention you might just learn from this lad

and

I tell you ladies and gents

My next paycheck is spent

Trying to keep myself in school with the basic essentials

So don’t think I’m rich just because I’m white

I didn’t vote for Bush, man, I drink Busch Light

So, yep, middle class student loan rap.  It’s a wonder we’re not on the cover of Vibe right now posing in front of our Ford Fusion Hybrids with rims…

But I digress.  Arguably the best lyric of that track was Nonsense’s first, after I had passed him the mic.  It went:

MC

BG

See me

Squeegee

the brains of other MCs off the windows of my Intrigue

And so from that point on I was MCBG and those who have heard the track pretty much always refer to me as such (including my boss, Chad, and any of my students who meet him and hear the story).  And they love that lyric, but few remember it in its entirety.  My buddy Adam would often come bounding into the office, look directly at me and say “MC BG – Hit ’em with the squeegee” or “MC BG why you holding that squeegee?”.  He loved the lyric but for the life of him couldn’t remember it.  That lyric holds particular sentiment in my heart.  So when I needed to title this blog, which some 6 years later would be another medium from spilling my thoughts on the world, the old rap album and particularly that lyric came to mind, and the blog was born.  I’m MCBG and as you read this blog you’ll see me squeegee, spreading clarity on the windshield of society.  Or something.

Postscript:  We never did film the video for our single “Cubicle Ho” (about that girl at work that dresses provocatively, flits incessantly with no real intent of actually dating you, and ruins your productivity while squeezing you for free drinks or picked-up lunch tabs) but Rory did play “Manifesto” at his wedding reception to rave reviews.  And every Christmas Nonsense and I get together with two other friends (my brother and my business partner) and record a track after a few dozen beers at Buffalo Wild Wings.

So that’s it.  See me squeegee. 2005 and forever.

Quick post for today but I have confirmation that my mom is reading these, so this is now my way of showing her that I’m safe even though the closest countries to me are Iran and Saudi Arabia…

Today’s fun update – the realization that when you’re 11 times zones away from where you live – just about halfway around the world – your body clock hates you.  It’s Sunday in Dubai, and I’ve spent the day:

3:45am – woke up, realized that Michigan had played football at midnight and the Tigers were playing a playoff game that started at 2am.  Checked my phone for the results (Denard!  Verlander!  Oh My!) and spent the next hour-plus trying to sleep but tempted to pick the phone back up for ESPN Gamecast of the Tigers.

5:15am = Tigers win!  Brian realizes that the 5:30am wake up  call to hit the gym…is ambitious given that I’ve only slept for 4 or so disconnected hours.

6:40am – the new alarm clock time.  Wake up from the deepest sleep I’ve had since 1978 in Dallas, Pennsylvania. Disoriented as anything.  Snooze button, shower, breakfast over the Arabian Gulf, teach for 7+ hours.

5pm – like an idiot, check out this Club Access scenario I have here at the hotel, let the friendly hostess talk me into a beer.

5:45pm – sit down on the balcony of hotel room, admire view of the Gulf and Palm Island.

5:50pm – it’s hot…90+ degrees and I’m still wearing dress clothes.

5:52pm – change into workout clothes, sit on couch for pep talk

5:53pm – 9:30pm – accidental nap

9:31pm – present – venture back to Club Access room, drink wine and watch Tigers on ESPN Gamecast and my fantasy football teams on the Yahoo Stattracker.

Summary:  In one day in Dubai, I’ve now watched over 10 innings of Tiger baseball from Detroit, but at the oddest possible times. It’s now the Seventh-Inning Stretch, Detroit is down 2-1 and The Death Panel is behind in fantasy, I’m about to order another drink, and my chances of a good night’s sleep are dwindling now that it’s 10:15 and I’m wide awake.

On Deck For Tomorrow:  Dubai Mall, which isn’t as teenybopper as it sounds.  Tallest building in the world, fountains to match the Bellagio in Vegas, and some of my students psyched to show it all off.  Also on deck – I’ll teach Reading Comprehension and Geometry.

One Last Update For Today:  Algebra was this afternoon’s lesson, and Algebra was invented in the Middle East (well, discovered here…but it’s an Arabic word).  Tall order to teach this stuff to the people who invented it.  But I pulled it off – the one dude from Abu Dhabi who had already taken the test, at least a few times mentioned “I saw multiple questions like this and now I know what to do”.  Score one for the Midwest playing a road game in the Middle East.  Now for the Tigers to win a home game…

Seeing as how the only place to get a beer in this town is the terrace at my hotel with this complimentary WiFi, it seems like it’s about time to drop a few details of Day Two in Dubai.  The highlights:

• This class I’m teaching is a blast.  We have students from around the United Arab Emirates; from Saudi Arabia; from Kuwait; from Australia (actually an island a couple hundred miles off the coast, but she still has a sweet Aussie accent); from “everywhere” (Spanish last name, lives here, and has been all over; and from Sudan.  Too much fun – everyone is really friendly and the Kuwaiti guy already bought me lunch, with a guy from Abu Dhabi checking out his homeboys’ schedule so he can have me roll with his crew for a night.  Australia and Spain-slash-everywhere are each missing a couple lessons so we’ll catch up over dinner or coffee one of these days.
• Kind of part of all that – when I’m back to LA or even on the plane, my next non-random-travel-thoughts post is going to be about being a “global citizen”.  These trips…you really start to feel connected with the world and you start to realize that we’re all pretty much the same.  It’s funny – the more I travel, the more I get both “global” and “local”.  I identify much more strongly with Detroit and with the world…Detroit because it’s my tribe and my home, and the world because I realize how similar we all are.  It’s strange how much we identify with essentially a continent in the US (sorry, Canada – but I still feel you given that I grew up 30 miles away.  Also there’s a Tim Horton’s across the street), when as individuals we probably have a lot more in common with our international ancestry and with people who have common interests and values across the globe than we do with people from eight states away.
• Speaking of similarities…in my quest to eat at a shwarma joint last night and an authentic Turkish place tonight, I had to walk past:  Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, Chili’s, Subway, and two KFCs.  Plus a ton of Asian fusion restaurants, two Mexican places, a few Italian spots.  Sort of redundant, but what a global world.
• Today’s non-teaching highlight:  swimming “laps” in the swimming area of the Persian Gulf.  Way too many jetskis and boats around to just make a break for it up and down the coast, so I had to lap swim it in the couple-hundred-yard area roped off for straight up swimming.  Call it extra-long-course meters.  My take – the water is clearer than anything I’ve ever seen, but saltier too.  I still taste it a few hours later.  Really cool sunset happening while I swam – it pays to be able to bilaterally breathe so you can check stuff like that out.
• Also…jet lag is crazy.  Still haven’t slept more than a couple hours straight since I let LA Thursday morning, but every time I do zone out I drool like a fire hose.  The upside – I can regularly check in on the MLB playoffs and this weekend’s football games, which are all happening in the middle of the night here.
• Verlander on the hill in a few hours.  Don’t think I’m not psyched even 8 time zones away.
• Got corrected today for calling this body of water the “Persian Gulf”  Here on the Arabian peninsula it’s the Arabian Gulf and nothing else.  My save – “oh, we’ve always called it the Persian Gulf, at least both times we’ve fought wars here”.  Class also liked hearing me say that I enjoyed flying over Iraq yesterday just to see where my tax dollars have gone.
• Places in the US that students in my class have visited:  Big Rapids, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska.  Places in the US that no one in my class has visited: New York City.  Weird world, man.
• Front page of the newspaper here and a full page of the 6-page editorial section: the US Presidential election.  All eyez on me, as Pac would say.  “Me” meaning “we”.  Choose wisely, fellow Americans.

That may do it for tonight.  If anyone is reading, thank you. Tomorrow your alge-bro teaches algebra in the land of Al-Jazeera.  Might have to pump the Al Jarreau just to stay consistent.  Don’t worry…I’ll be ready to get my boogie down.

Typing as I gaze out on the Persian Gulf, thoughts from my first partial day in Dubai:

*First off, I’m here to teach a GMAT class for Veritas Prep.  If you had told me in 1991, while I was learning Algebra at East Middle School during the midst of the first Iraq war, that in 20 years I’d be flying over Baghdad to talk about Algebra on the shores of the gulf…well, I’d probably have called it Stranger Danger.  What a world.

*While eating shwarma and tabbouleh outside here an hour ago, I listened to a good amount of Jay-Z and Nelly from the speakers of the Escalades driving by.  So, um, it’s not really that much different from Dearborn.

*Phenomenal cabbie from the airport – dude from Egypt who talked about every landmark on the way to the hotel, only his English isn’t all that much better than my Arabic so all we really agreed on was “much, much beautiful” for everything we saw.  I also gathered that he’s a huge fan of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, is still gathering his opinions about Barack Obama, and can’t stand anyone named George Bush.  “Too much touch” is the reason.

*Line of the day by a jet-lagged me: the political discussions started when he showed off a poster of their president (or king, prime minister…I’ll research this) saying “Barack Obama”.  Now, it clearly wasn’t Obama but then I realized he was showing me that that’s their leader.  That was his other thing – he’d point to a tall building and say “Empire State Building”, then I’d look confused, and he’d say “it is like…”.  Interesting dude.  Anyway, after identifying their Obama he says his name, which is something Khalifa. And I say – wait for it – oh, we have a Wiz Khalifa.  Dead silence for 20 seconds.  Emirate cabbies are like American women when it comes to getting my humor.

*More universal than just Dubai, but what is it about expensive hotels and the way they nickel and dime you for things like internet, coffee, and newspapers.  Not a Travelodge in the world comes without a complimentary USA Today, WiFi password, and in-room coffee maker.  But you stay at a really nice joint and they’re telling you about how to charge that stuff to your room, and tempting you with multiple minibars.  I really don’t get it.  For $59 a night I live like a king, albeit surrounded by abject poverty and probably a few meth labs.  For whatever this place costs I can go into massive debt really quickly just trying to wake up in the morning.

*The phrase “Sir, may I interest you in some hookah” is misleading.

That may do it for tonight…I don’t really know what time or day it is here but I know that “tomorrow” I need to be on stage teaching at 9am so I’d better figure this out.  More adventures to come…