Fear and Pressing in Central Texas

I'm off to a business trip tomorrow and wanted to treat myself to dry cleaning and pre-ironed shirts every morning while away, so I took my load on Tuesday to my local dry cleaner. I dumped the pile of shirts and pants on the counter.

The attendant looked at the pile, then mournfully at me. "Sir," she said, with a Mexican accent, "I can take your clothing, but it won't be ready for at least four days."

The sign outside read "same day cleaning," and the usual turnaround was about 36 hours. I cocked an eyebrow.

"It's the pressers," she said. "They left Monday morning and never came back." She pointed to a "Help Wanted" sign displayed prominently in the window. "No pressers at all. We just got back Saturday's dry cleaning. Don't just take my word for it," she said as I thanked her for my candor and scooped up my clothes, "is everywhere. Everyone running."

Two other dry cleaners also had help wanted signs, and I stopped by the next day, hoping to avoid expensive hotel cleaners, with my load at a local family chain. They too had a 'Help Wanted' sign on the door.

"Any chance of getting this done by Friday?" I asked.

The clean-cut young man behind the counter nodded confidently. "Not a problem," he said. "After five today if you liked."

"So you've got no problems with pressers?"

"Nope," he replied. We're doing just fine."

I left lighter in arms and full of hope. Came back this afternoon to pick up the clothes.

"You still have the sign up," I said to the young Hispanic woman behind the counter. "How's the work in the back?"

She shrugged.

Then another young man, from the same owning family I think, wriggled past her in a vain attempt to catch an incoming phone call. He was sweating, and there were people crawling all around the hanging rails of bagged laundry in the next room.

"I'm glad you were able to keep your workers," I said to the man. "I had problems at other stores."

He gave me a tired look. "It's quiet in the back right now," he said. "There's no one working in the back. And the conveyor belt is broken, so we have to pull everything off by hand." He wiped sweat from his face. "But we're only down two pressers for tomorrow and," he pointed at the sign, "maybe some others will come back."

I assume by "others" he means 'low-paid, hiding from the INS' kind of others, and not the unemployed citizen or eager high schooler others.

"Don' worry," my cashier said as she handed me the bill. "My sister come back tomorrow."

"One down," the man said. "I just have to find one more."

The rumors around town are rife with planned raids at public schools, illegal immigrant detention camps south of Waco, and general fear.

I wonder if my pre-Holocaust parents felt similarly to the missing pressers. At least I'm pretty sure their end will be less certain than that of my parents.

A Joke...

Q: What do you get when you hire a right-wing commentator and a reporter to the White House?
A: A Common Porter. Someone to shoulder the burden of "Message of the Day" for a debased chief executive.

When Bullshit Calls Journalists Listen: Iranian Superweapons

Journalists are wimps.

Iran, the country that doesn't have the spare parts to keep its thirty year old aircraft in the air, has superweapons! Missiles that can't be tracked, can avoid radar, yet are MIRVed. Torpedoes that fly underwater at over 200MPH, also sonar-evading. Read about it in any major media outlet!

While Teheran has 'created' its own fighters, tanks, missiles and other weaponry, the reality is that they have adapted (read repainted for the most part) North Korean technology. Guns for oil... just like Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and now Iraq.

Just a few weeks ago the papers broke the story about how Saddam Hussein had kept the fiction of weapons of mass destruction alive not for the ears of warmongering Bush klansmen, but for his own people, to keep them in fear of what he'd done to the Kurds.

And now the mass media is doing it again, with silence, with acceptance, instead of with jeers. The country that can't support keep its own planes in the air, the country where millions of its citizens in mud brick houses, a country that hasn't had an original thought since the corrupt Shah was ousted, a country that looks to North Korea for even slight technological achievement, is assumed to have leapfrogged all the advanced technology research centers of the world?

Reporting this idiotic pap, in this way, plays right into Bush administration hands that would rather ratchet up the fear, for internal political purposes, than portray Iran as the pathetic hotbed for suicidal radicals that is really is.

So what if this is a real threat? Where' the news media analysis to support that? How do we assess such developments? From Karen Hughes' situation room? From Rumsfeld's office? From unnamed sources in the Bush administration? Me, I'd rather hear an analysis by a report who has spoken to real rocket scientists, or to non-factional experts in the field. Instead we hear translated half-quotes from Iranian television and their military press office releases.

Journalism isn't just about the scoop interview or the 'first to the presses.' It is about analysis of the data, the credibility of the source and the 'big picture.' Even if embedded reporting is sexier. Try harder, folks, try harder!

[A side note: In preparing this blog entry I researched over one hundred separate articles. The vast majority, as you can read through these links, all hark back to the same AP piece written by Ali Akbar Dareini, their Iranian reporter. They were retouched or lightly edited for the end news outlet. Perhaps there aren't anywhere near as many journalists as we think...]