THE FLUB-A-DUB AWARD


October. The month of change. Change is good. Inevitable. Or so they say.

The downtown is changing. Even against the nature of things. Downtown is becoming greener, even in October. That don't seem right!

I do kind of like the light poles, although there does seem to be an awful lot of them. The wrought iron fence around the flower boxes is clever. They'll look good lying in Main Street. Damn kids! Change can be dealt with either positively or negatively.

Henderson Street looks a little better than I figured, but I thought we weren't going to have any medians? Change, it's never predictable!

Man, you talk about a job getting started quick. I never seen anything move so fast in Galesburg. Monday night the city council makes its 815th mistake this year, and before the ink dries, Seminary Street is being tore up to make room for bricks, one of Galesburg's most damning topics. By Friday, there was quite a crowd gathering, although I didn't notice any of them buying anything. They were all wondering what the hell was going on. I told them the city was bricking the street to appease the owner of the buildings. No one seemed overly impressed. Than I mentioned that the city manager was living in the new public subsidized apartments on the street, and he seems to be very fond of the owner. A riot seemed almost inevitable, so I blamed the whole thing on Maytag. Most people don't know where change comes from or who to blame anyway.

October's Flub wouldn't be complete without mentioning Maytag. Everyone seems surprised that they're leaving town? What's surprising is that they didn't do it immediately after their special quarter-cent charity tax was sunset. Every other Fortune 500 company in America is moving overseas to tap into cheap labor. Why shouldn't they? Corporate boards and CEO's make their living out of cheating us, the workers and consumers, out of our labor and money. It all comes back to cheap labor and profit. In order to make more money, management must spend less on labor. Capitalism is based on this assumption. Welcome to the world of NAFTA. They could have named the whole scheme Union Busting, Inc., but that would have been too honest. Change is not always truthful, or better, just inevitable.

Anyway, Galesburg is out, Mexico is in. Brush up on your Spanish. It seems to be a sign of the times. Change. Nothing remains constant. Short of that things will change. So to downtown Galesburg and its false storefronts, to Henderson Streets U.S.A., and to all the Maytags of the world, Happy Flub-A-Dub. Someday, hopefully the citizens of Galesburg, and citizens everywhere, will catch up with your tricks. What better day for that to happen than on Halloween, the day of the trickster?



Uploaded to The Zephyr website October 29, 2002

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