After Old Folks lost the house on Martin
Lake, he and Brenda were living behind Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne in a trailer
rent-free for six months because they paid $1,000 to put a new floor in it. From
the estate sale of their antique furniture after the foreclosure and before the bankruptcy.
With no debts they could live on Brenda's salary at the prison, maintaining the computers,
with Old Folks at home, doing the cooking and writing up a storm.
The writing
included driving around the Gulf Coast and publishing pamphlets about his trips.
Sending them out to members of the Buzzard Cult.
* * *
Owen was on the road with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. As a member of Doyle's
band Owen drove around the country playing top festivals, played on several CDs,
was on the Grand Ole Opry and Crook and Chase television programs, toured Europe,
and played on a CD nominated for a Grammy.
Balder was in a Marine band in
New Orleans. Good duty for a musician.
* * *
Old Folks was happy with this arrangement, but Brenda wasn't. She wanted
a home of their own, closer to the prison, with some land, to keep chickens on, and
grow a garden.
To buy a house, Old Folks would have to find a job and rebuild
their credit.
He was looking.
He had been looking for a job, or working
at one, and expecting to be fired, since his DIY fellowship at Tulane ran out and
they moved to the mountains to live poor and write.
That is, they had been
living poor and writing for 25 years, the writing causing them to live poor.
Every time Old Folks got a good job the writing interfered with his doing it.
Old Folks marked his 25th anniversary as a writer working a temporary tech-writing
job at Tyndall AFB, that was fixing to run out, and throw him back into the pool
of unemployed, or underemployed professionals.
He was an unpublished, or
underpublished writer, in his real career, or non-career.
* * *
Then Old Folks got a job as a temporary technical writer out of town, in
Atlanta, for eight months, that might turn into a permanent job, if Old Folks worked
out.
The job was with Lucent Technologies, which Old Folks called Suent Scientific,
in his books.
Lucent Technologies used to be AT&T, which used to be Western
Electric.
Western Electric was the plant Old Folks had applied for a job
at back in Winston-Salem, the company that had to get their affirmative action numbers
up because they had a history of discriminating against blacks, the company that
would hire no white people until they met their quota of black people.
Old
Folks wondered if the company had changed.
* * *
Old Folks got hired permanent by Suent Scientific. At age 57. Thanks in large
part to the anti-age discrimination laws.
Old Folks believed in equal
employment opportunity.
He also believed that, without laws to require it,
industry wouldn't do it.
He thought Suent Scientific had made progress in
race relations.
He didn't think they had a problem treating blacks fairly.
But many black employees felt otherwise. They felt that Suent hadn't come far enough,
fast enough, there was still a lot of work to do, and Suent wasn't moving fast enough
to do it.
* * *
Old Folks wrote about race in his books.
Later, he wrote about race
at his web site.
He thought race was an important subject. That should be
written about.
His goal was to write honestly and openly, about subjects
that matter, in plain speech.
Ray McGovern, the ex-CIA analyst whose ministry
believes in the biblical injunction to "speak truth to power," said at
the Conyers hearings on the Downing Street minutes that you can't mention Israel
in polite conversation, and that the last time he did a former head of the CIA called
him an anti-Semite.
When Old Folks wrote about race he was called a racist,
by black people and white liberals who were themselves racists, in Old Folks's opinion.
"Start at the pointing finger and trace it back," he said.
* * *
Every management employee at Suent Scientific was expected to take a week
of training a year, in one- or two-day classes, or at a week-long class.
Old Folks signed up for a class called Diversity in Action: Living Our Values, or
something like that.
The instructor was white, a professional diversity educator,
the class was mixed, some whites, some blacks, some men, some women.
Most
had chosen to take the class, although one man had been sent to the class by his
manager as a disciplinary action.
A homosexual co-worker kept hitting on
the man.
He said he didn't swing that way, to please stop importuning him.
The man persisted in his entreaties.
Finally the recipient told the importuner,
"Look if you don't cool it I'm going to beat the shit out of you."
Instead of disciplining the homosexual for sexual harassment, the manager made the
man who threatened the homosexual attend a diversity class for being homophobic.
And put a black mark in his record.
And the class, except for Old Folks,
agreed with the manager.
It was like attending a political education class
at a Communist factory with the Ideological Rectitude Officer there, listening in.
Taking notes.
These people have brainwashed themselves, Old Folks
thought.
Fear of the sack keeps modern, Western man in line, George Orwell
said.
He said the really well-trained dog jumps through the hoop without
being asked.
* * *
The instructor asked the class to group themselves by the amount of power
they thought they had, by race, and Old Folks put himself in the least powerful group.
As he was white, he was supposed to have put himself in the most powerful group.
When asked to explain himself, he said that, if he was being hired, or considered
for promotion, along with an equally qualified black person, Latino, or Asian, the
black person, the Latino, or the Asian would be given the nod instead of Old Folks
because (1) it would look good in the statistics, and (2) if Old Folks was chosen,
one or all of the others could have cried foul, and accused the manager of racism,
whereas Old Folks wouldn't, or would be a fool to.
Nobody thought this was
true. They thought that Old Folks was paranoid.
Old Folks not only believed
it, he believed it because it had been happening to him for 35 years, in the workforce,
in the military, and in higher education, not to mention in writing contracts, grants,
and literary prizes, where diversity trumps excellence every time, and doublespeak
is used to justify the fix being in. It's all subjective in the arts anyway.
Old Folks was a crank. An Alibi Ike. And a whiner.
* * *
The same thing happened when the group were asked to rank themselves by power
by sex.
Old Folks ranked himself least powerful.
Again, nobody believed
a female would get the nod over Old Folks if they were equally qualified, because
females had been discriminated against in the past, and needed an edge.
* * *
Old Folks said, "Listen, I know a white male has an advantage if he
acts like the white males who run things. But if he won't, if he doesn't play that
shit, a woman or a minority who does will be chosen, and they will gang up on the
hard case who sneers at them. That's me. I despise the way company men act and you
all want to be a company man."
"Where does that put me?"
* * *
It's like when Larry asked a postman if Bukowski got it right, in Post
Office. The postman said, "He got it right what a son of a bitch the bossman
is, but he left out how all your co-workers are bucking for bossman."
Old Folks was telling that, not just to the bossman, but to his co-workers, and they
thought he was daft. They couldn't admit they had been bamboozled. They had hoodwinked
themselves.
Parenthetically, you can say the same thing about writing program
graduates. They think Old Folks is balmy. They have to think he's balmy. If
he isn't, they are.