Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Mickey Z. does his yin/yang thang remembering Nagasaki & Gimbel's
How to set up a nuclear strike:
The Japanese soldiers (and, for that matter, all Japanese) were commonly referred to and depicted as subhuman: insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply barbarians that must be wiped out or exterminated. The American Legion Magazine’s cartoon of monkeys in a zoo who had posted a sign reading, “Any similarity between us and the Japs is purely coincidental” was typical. A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth before peace could be achieved.
To read the complete article, please click here:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/mickeyz090805.html
60 years ago today:
+++
Remembering Gimbel’s
My first after-school job was delivering the long-defunct Long Island Press but I really entered the working world when, at the age of seventeen, I started as a temporary summer worker at Gimbel’s department store (my Dad knew someone there...lucky me). I eased my way into the good graces of the bosses until I got into the union. Ultimately, I maneuvered myself into a Sunday-only work schedule. This arrangement enabled me to work only seven hours a week at a union-enforced double-time wage and thereby garnered me enough cool cash in seven lousy hours to easily finance my youthful existence. Still, being the anti-authority type of fellow I am, I wasn’t satisfied and I soon figured out a way to sign myself in and out at lunch time and spend most of my time across the street in Macy’s, watching football in their crowded television department after a terribly un-nourishing lunch at the Blimpie’s on 32nd Street (I didn’t even know what a vegan was yet).
At Gimbel’s, I got to spend a lot of time with some older guys who did this kind of menial work for a living and I gained some valuable insight into the typical worker-employee relationships I could look forward to in my future enslavements. Also, it was via such co-workers that I garnered my first-ever homosexual propositions.
To read the complete story, please click here:
http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1660
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
