Faux Hnting

1740faux/450 words

January 16, 2017

Faux Hunting

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

When our family was in the fur business my father sold coats made from many animals. Mom had an ocelot jacket and a mink stole. I had once had a cut down raccoon coat. But we also sold Labrador seal, sheered beaver, Coney, an occasional squirrel coat, mouton lamb, almost any animal whose hide leant it to making into a coat for humans. Lions were too shaggy, but leopards were fine for coats. Mink was raised on farms just for the hides. Sable was trapped in Siberia. I suspect zebra would be too difficult to match up, what with all those stripes. Arctic fox was often sold as a scarf with a fake animal head clasp complete with glass eyes. You could even get moleskin, though it would take an awful lot of dead moles to make a ladies jacket.

Animal rights fanatics are full of beans, total hypocrites.. A cowboy wouldn’t want a plastic saddle. Saddles need to be leather.  As for the cruelty of killing an animal for its skin, in the Argentine cattle were initially raised only for their hides until they figured out that the meat could be turned into corned beef. Leather or pigskin shoes are just an animal skin with the hair removed. Shaving and pastry brushes are made of pig bristles..

Coming from that fur business background, I was stymied by the label on my new, lined boots. The label says “faux fur.” So what animal is a faux? Not a fox, too shaggy for a boot liner, and not mink, too expensive. We used to sell seal dyed Coney, a Coney being a sort of rabbit and dyed to look like seal. It was still basically rabbit.

But a faux? What animal was that?

It couldn‘t be very large, and being a mammal had to be something with four legs.

I’d heard about fox hunting, but not faux hunting.

I’d never seen a faux in the zoo, either.

Maybe the faux is something like the nauga whose hide is made into furniture. I haven’t seen naugas at the zoo, either but plenty of recliners using naugahide..

Maybe, like the Coney, those animal  skins are processed to suit the technological world we live in.  Seal dyed Coney was just a fake. Maybe the faux is, too. Maybe faux fur is really guinea pig, those cute cuddly creatures that are not actually pigs. A Coney is not a seal even if dyed that color, and a guinea pig isn’t a pig. Nobody would want to kill a guinea pig for boot liner, so they give it another name, faux. So maybe a faux is something else. Go figure.

Crony Capitalism

1739crony /220  words
Dec. 4. 2016

Crony Capitalism
A letter by
Harley L. Sachs

Donald Trump’s “saving” about 800  jobs at the Indianapolis Carrier plant from being exported to Mexico was a publicity stunt. He campaigned on a plan to stop exporting American jobs abroad, but in fact there were 2000 jobs in play at Carrier, not the 800. What about the rest? Bye-bye. Then, to sweeten the deal he got Carrier a seven million dollar tax break. The money “saved” for Carrier in fact will not go into the Indiana general fund.
Vice president elect Spense should be ashamed. As governor of Indiana, his deal with Carrier will deprive the state of needed tax income. What will it come out of? Schools? Infrastructure?
This is a typical Trump tactic: pay a bill with other people’s money and then take the credit. He did the same with casinos: borrowing money, then going bankrupt, selling at the loss of his creditors and making himself richer in the process. You can’t run a government that way. In one Southern state a Republican governor cut taxes and left office with the state bankrupt.
In the Carrier case the creditors who get stiffed will be Indiana taxpayers. Try floating a seven million bond issue for schools or roads to replace the Carrier giveaway. Lots of luck.

Here we Go Again

1737history/        

Here we go Again

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

Merkel’s government is going under to a right wing nationalist party. Why?

The new German political Party is anti-immigrant, why?

The immigrants are flooding Germany from Iraq and Syria. Why?

The Iraqis are fleeing a religious civil war; the Syrians are fleeing Assad’s regime. Why?

Iraq fell into a religious civil war because Bush and Cheney caused an invasion. Why?

The Iraq war was started because Shell and Cheney’s Haliburton lost their oil leases and contracts to Saddam.

The Syrian war started because Assad would not give his people a voice in government and declared them to be terrorists. So he destroyed his own country out of spite.

Merkel’s German government is about to go under. Italy will follow and maybe France. Britain is pulling out of the EU and Russia is threatening the Baltic States.

All because of oil rights.

Last time it was the assassination of a minor royal in Sarajevo which precipitated World War I, many millions of dead, and the redrawing of the map of Europe.

WW I ended with the treaty of Versailles which crippled the German economy, making way for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (NAZI) party. Then it was the Jews who were the scapegoats.

The new right wing German party will go after the Moslem immigrants.

Why don’t we ever learn?

Submission to New York Times magazine

LIVES

From Tent to Castle

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

     She was a shop assistant with a German passport, working for a cooperative grocery in Stockholm and spoke no English. I was an American spy at the tail end of the GI Bill teaching English as a foreign language, two three months terms a year. In three years I had learned Swedish. When my number came up to be served I recognized the clerk’s accent. In the then formal Swedish way of addressing strangers in the third person, I asked, “Is the young lady Danish?”

She blushed. I was surprised. This was Sweden, after all, the land of unabashed free love. That this pretty shop assistant could blush was intriguing. I had to know more about her.

It was my job to size people up, judge their character, know them, if possible, inside and out. I immediately saw this girl, who turned out to be from North Germany but an ethnic Dane from South Schleswig, as someone special. She was, to my mind, like a bud of a rose. I saw potential. It would be exciting to see how she would blossom. I was determined to find out.

I set about to doggedly pursue her in my broke grad student fashion. The GI bill had run out. I was paid for my language classes only twice a year. I was not someone who wooed with a bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine and a dinner invitation. Instead, every day I stopped at the Konsum store, took a number, waited until she would be the next clerk to serve. I then bought a nickel chocolate bar. Every day.

 I learned her name was Ulla. 

The store crew figured it out, of course, and teased her. Ulla refused all invitations to a movie. It looked pretty hopeless, but I was determined.

While a company clerk in the US Army in Heidelberg I had learned from our cooks the secret of making pie crust. Swedish pastry selections did not include American apple pie.  I decided to bake a couple of pies and, since Ulla refused my invitations to a movie, to invite the whole Konsum crew upstairs for some real American apple pie, a pie party.

I baked the pies and waited. The agreed time came and went. I cut a pie and had my piece, alone.  Half an hour late Ulla showed up with one of the co-workers.

After that delayed success she decided I wasn’t such a dangerous person after all. We did go to the movies with her always insisting on paying her own way, a plus for a guy who lived on two pay checks a year. That was the beginning.

We did a shakedown trip, hitchhiking to Norway and sleeping rough in a small tent, cooking over a Loma gasoline stove and getting to know each other. This was no American girl who could not live without a hot shower every day, stay in hotels and eat in nice restaurants. This was a girl who had lived through World War II in North Germany on a diet of boiled milk and potatoes in a house with no running water or plumbing. Ulla had pumped water and boiled laundry in a cauldron over a brown coal fire. She could rough it without complaint.

We were married the next year. My American and Swedish friends thought us an odd couple: a Jewish American with a graduate degree whose Polish family had been murdered and a German girl with a Lutheran background who spoke no English and whose brother had died at Stalingrad. We had a lot of points against us and we knew it.

On our honeymoon we left Stockholm on rebuilt one speed bicycles, calendar and itinerary open. Ulla had no money and I had my stash of the three thousand dollars I had put away during my three years as a contract agent. It wasn’t as crazy as it looked, for if we did go broke and get stranded I knew (but Ulla didn’t) the government would pay our fares to the United States. That failing, I had hopes of an assignment in Denmark.

We still had the language problem. We had fallen in love in Swedish and for Ulla’s father’s sake, married in German at the Stockholm synagogue after her conversion. Snubbed my my English relatives who saw Ulla as a despicable German even though she saw herself as Danish, she swore not to leave England until she learned the language.

After fifty-two days of rain in the tent in England and Scotland, we advertised for a winter layover and, because I’m an author, were offered the gatehouse of Borthwick Castle for the winter. While I wrote a bad novel in the dungeon Ulla was upstairs teaching herself English, her fifth language.

This is no Pygmalian story, for I am not her Professor Higgins or Svengali. I am her loving, devoted observer, still enchanted by that remarkable girl who once blushed in the Konsum grocery. store. We have been married fifty-six years.   

Our story, “From Tent to Castle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is available through Amazon.com.

Write Your Story

1734tell-your-story/494 words

2545 SW Terwilliger Apt. 328

Portland, OR 97201

Tell Your Story

Harley L. Sachs

www.HardleySachs.com

“Everybody has a story.” That’s the word from Harley L Sachs, long time resident at Terwilliger Plaza in Portland. “If you don’t tell yours, nobody else will be able to.” Sachs has written his own biography in three hefty volumes and is in the process of incorporating old photographs into volume one. He used to teach memoir writing for Oasis at Meier and Frank, now Macy’s, and now is a co-leader of the Author’s Circle at the Terwilliger Plaza retirement center.

“It helps if you keep a diary or a journal,” Sachs says. He began his when he was fourteen years old and writes in it every day. “Memory is unreliable,” he says. “For instance, my bride and I set off on old bicycles from Sweden in 1960. Looking back I thought we had a kitty of $5000. When I went back to the old diary, I found that we’d had only $3000, yet we had a year long honeymoon in a Scottish castle outside Edinburgh.

“From Tent to Castle, Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is just one of the adventures Sachs has written about. In the thirty years since his retirement from Michigan Technological University he has published more than one book a year.

“My rhythm is to write a novel in 90 days, writing every morning. I realize that, like Charles Dickens, some of my books are based on current social issues. Dickens wrote “Bleak House” about lawyers. I wrote “Stoprape,com” about rape in the military, “White Slave” about slaves aboard Pacific fishing boats, “”The Accidental Courier” about rare earths mined by slaves in Africa, “Dead Men Don’t Bleed” about the difficulties of being transgender in Portland, and most recently “The Seventh Paradigm” about the abuse of metadata, your loss of privacy to computer marketing systems.” His next project? Something about sex trafficking in a Portland shopping mall.

Sachs reveals that writing, for him, is therapy and escape, for Ulla, his wife of 56 years, is paralyzed by a stroke and in expensive 24 hour care. “Writing a book takes up your mind and blots out the troubles around you,” he says. “When you retire, you have to have something to do. For me, that’s writing books. At least I have something to show for it besides some old golf scores.”

Sachs was a freelance writer from 1957, writing trade magazine articles while living in Europe. When he and Ulla settled down to raising their three daughters, he shifted to newspaper columns. He did not publish a book until after he took early retirement. He now has 43 titles available at Amazon. He now reads his published short stories at Portland retirement centers.

“When you die, your memory dies with you,” Sachs, now 85 and in poor health,  says. “For the sake of your grandchildren and history, write your story before it’s too  late.” 

What is Capitalism?

What is Capitalism?

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

We do not have pure capitalism in this country. In reality, the United States is a mixed economy, part free enterprise capitalism and part socialism. Those who laud capitalism as the ideal state, like nirvana, consider:

In a pure state of capitalism there would be no taxes and no public services. All government does is spend tax money. If we do away with all taxes for pure capitalism, all entitlements would be done away with. That is: no social security, no medicare, no medicaid, no public k-12 schools, no tax supported universities. Everything would be privatized.

 As in some communities, there would be no tax supported fire departments. Firemen would be volunteers, and the fire equipment would be paid for by dues assessments or contributions. If you didn’t contribute to the fire fund and your house caught fire, they would let it burn down. It has happened.

Some Republicans would shut down he Department of Education, thereby doing away with Pell grants. With all k-12 schools privatized, every parent would have to pay the roughly $5000 a year costs per student. If you had four kids, that would be 20k a year If you couldn’t afford to send all your kids to school, you would have to choose which would get an education and which would not. Since as many as 50% of kids never graduate, that’s not such a problem. We are becoming a nation of high school dropouts.

       With no government to spend non-existent taxes, there would be no regulatory agencies. No minimum wage. No environmental protection. No Army, Navy, or Air Force. With free rein, a capitalist employer need not offer any benefits at all, fire people at will (as they do now), and with no minimum wage, pay a dollar a day. No health insurance, no workmen’s compensation, no unemployment insurance, no pension benefits, no paid holidays, no maternity leave. (Read WalMart) With no child labor laws you could put eight year olds back in the mines for twelve hour six day a week jobs at a dollar a day. Ah, those were the good old days. They still do it in Turkey, hiring children in sweat shops.

What about infrastructure? Sell the roads and bridges and privatize everything. Why not? Indiana sold the toll road to a foreign company. Want to make some money? Buy a bridge and charge a toll. Buy the road in front of your house and charge a toll. Only a socialist would want free use of a road. Parasites.

As for the army, well, not having any tax  income, the country could not afford to invade a foreign country like Iraq. Drones and jet fighters are expensive. Who would join the military as a volunteer for no pay?

As for police, if you need security, hire a body guard.

Without the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid we could revert to the old method: let the poor, sick and old die. That’s what they do: they die. Ayn Rand lives.

So you don’t like taxes, like Mr. Trump who pays as little as possible? Go for unbridled capitalism. But be careful what you wish for. 

Start, Adam!--a short story

1731startAdam/1140 words

March 24, 2016

Start, Adam!

A short story by

Harley L. Sachs

My niece Steffi used to drive a Coronado convertible that talked. It used to say things like “A door is ajar” or “A tire is low,” and even reminded you to get gas. When I bought my Honda accord, instead of voice commands like on the Coronado, the voice remarks were replaced by little lights on the dash and a peeping sound if I forgot to take out the ignition key or turn off the headlights.

Then my car insurance company insisted on having a monitor installed to track my driving habits. I discovered that they raised the rates because I had driven thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty mile zone and ran an intersection on the yellow. That was the last straw.

My doctor diagnosed a Parkinson’s tremble in my wrists and my eyes have cataracts, so what I needed, and what is now available, is a self-driving car so I can get around. If the self driving car goes thirty-three in a thirty mile zone it’s the car’s fault, not mine.

A self drive car is the latest of the latest. I can call the car on my cell phone and it drives itself up to the door to pick me up and take me wherever I need to go. No more fear of running a red light or missing a stop sign or even speeding twenty-five in a twenty mile zone. Perfect, I thought.

We often name our tools and machines. My grandfather’s Ford was called Lizzy and my father’s computer was called Earnest because he was a Hemingway fan. My self-drive car is Adam. I don’t even need an ignition key, because Adam is programmed to respond to the sound of only my own voice. No one else can use Adam.When I approach it I say “Open, Adam and the passenger door pops open. I get in, sit down, and say “Adam, start.” The electric motor make a little sound and Adam says “Where to you want to go, Harley?”

 That’s my name, Harley. Me and my car are on a first name basis.

This is the ultimate integration of man and machine, or machine and man, whichever way you want to look at it. We are more closely attuned to one another than a cowboy who spends all day in the saddle of his horse. We understand each other, or rather, Adam understands me.

They call it AI, or artificial intelligence. Adam is learning all the time. The first day we were out for a test drive, a dog ran out into the street right in front of Adam. I thought I’d have a heart attack. Driving is complicated and dangerous. Millions of situations can come up that are not in the book. Ah, but according to the user’s manual, all the self-drive cars are learning from each other.

 When a new situation is encountered by one of them, they all learn it.  I knew the sensors looked out for stop signs and the GPS kept track of the speed zones  and intersections, but I didn’t think they were programmed for encounters with, say, a dog in the street or a little kid’s ball—generally followed by a child who runs into the traffic. By golly, they were! Before I could yell, “Adam stop!” Adam stopped and didn’t hit the dog. It was amazing. My own reflexes are too slow. I would have hit the dog. Not Adam.

Adam is one smart car.

This morning I was so eager to get out I hadn’t had breakfast, so I told Adam, “Adam take me to the nearest MacDonald’s.” Off we went.

Adam pulled up at the drive by window and stopped so I could place my order. If you aren’t chipped with and under skin debit ID tag, you have to put your card in the slot and tell them your order. . I was hungry. I ordered a milk shake. and a super size Big Mac with fries

A little bell rang and the voice at the window said “I recommend coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

“But I want a super size meal with extra fries.”

The voice out of the window took on a patronizing tone. “Harley, a super size meal is too many calories, fat, and salt for your diet. Your doctor recommends no more than coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

I didn’t expect an argument. I know my name is programmed into my credit card, so it’s no surprise that the McDonald’s window knows who I am, but I didn’t expect it would also know my medical history. It’s all there, of course, for my protection.

 If I do have a medical emergency, the EMTs will find out right away what to look for and have my whole past medical history right there. I just didn’t think the McDonald’s drive up window would notice or even care. My diet is none of their business. Their business is to sell fast foods, isn’t it? Not to be watch dog over my diet.

I get it. There’s was such a cry about obesity that the restaurants were afraid of litigation. Too much fat and salt in customer’s diets and the industry could be sued. Can’t be too careful.

I sat there a minute trying not to lose my temper. Finally I said, “Forget it. Adam, take me to Taco Bell.”

As we pulled away I thought I heard the McDonald’s window exclaim,” Taco Bell! Ugh.”

At Taco Bell, it was more of the same. The only order they would accept was decaf coffee and a breakfast burrito. No fries. I may have to go back to home made toast, with jam, no butter, and a small glass of fat free milk.

I settled for the decaf and the burrito but the coffee was too hot. It’s not a good thing to gulp hot coffee.  Started to choke and cough and my voice was, well, not my own. Adam didn’t recognize me.

“Are you OK, Harley?”

I was still rasping and coughing.

There was a pause and I heard the electric motor start up. Adam said, “Hospital.”

I protested. “No hospital. I just need to catch my breath.”

“Hospital.”

“Godammit, Adam, I don’t need a hospital. Just take me home.” I think I added an expletive.

Adam is not programmed for expletives.

“Watch your language.”

“Don’t give me an argument Adam. I’m OK. Just take me home.”

Didn’t help. Adam drove up to the emergency room and would not open the door until the EMTs came to get me out. Of course, they couldn’t get Adam to open the door. It's programmed for my voice.

I called the self-drive dealer and asked for a technician. It’s a busy day. It may take a couple of hours. In the meantime, “HELP!”