Tin Can Turkey

Tin Can Turkey
In which our hero battles cold weather, germ phobia and personal humiliation to prove a $12.15 point

by James Mullaney

In the two decades before it was given renewed life as Sean Hannity's radio theme, Bruce Hornsby's song "The Way It Is" was one of those banal, long-ago hits ubiquitous in elevators, dentist waiting rooms and retail outlets all over North America. If in the past twenty years you've bought Froot Loops or Right Guard, there's a strong chance you've heard it. When the song first became popular in the late Eighties I was working at a supermarket deli where our workday soundtrack was pumped in over store loudspeakers in endless rotation. The upshot was that what customers heard once when stopping in for a box of Twinkies and a dozen lottery tickets we employees were subjected to several times each day. I must have suffered through "The Way It Is" hundreds of times.

The song is supposed to be about racism, and for this essay I Googled the lyrics and confirmed that the second and third verses are precisely the simplistic, sanctimonious reproof on the subject you'd expect. The first verse, however, can be read quite differently:

Standing in line marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old lady's eyes
Just for fun he says "Get a job"

For this essay let's set aside Hornsby's -- let's just say it, folks -- racist implication that everyone on welfare is black. It's revealing, but not germane.

Recall, this song was a hit during Ronald Reagan's tenure in the White House, after Carter's recession, when the US economy had added somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-million jobs. I've never met a single soul on the political Right who would abuse a "poor old lady" "just for fun," but back then we and our polo ponies couldn't have clomped around outside the welfare office humiliating grannies even if we wanted to. Full employment kept us too busy.

I know as I sliced bologna I was always irked when Bleeding Heart Hornsby rotated back out the store's speakers, and not just because "The Way It Is" is the kind of song that'd flush a sobbing Noriega from the Vatican embassy crying "tio!" Hardhearted young conservative me always thought, "Well, yeah, why can't she get a job? I mean, there's a stack of blank applications at the courtesy booth up front and supermarket shelves don't stock themselves."

But that was Reagan's America. Now that we're living in Barack Obama's America and everyone is unemployed, we've all tossed our tatty silk suits in the recycling bin and joined that poor old lady -- who is now over a hundred and still waiting on that hope and change -- on the welfare line.

Actually, not quite. Believe it or not, there are those of us who are still taxpaying Americans. You can tell which ones we are. These days we all look a little frayed around the edges and have "sucker" tattooed on our foreheads. In fact, we're a minority now, since today more Americans than not draw some sort of government check. Hornsby's lyrics really need to be updated to reflect our modern downtrodden:

Mailing my check to the IRS
To pay for Pelosi's health care mess
But postage went up again
The man with the food stamps saunters near
With his free WIC cheese and a case of beer
And just for fun he says "Get a second job"

Sure, you'd never hear it while on hold with the pharmacy, but this version is a heck of a lot better a reflection of the current rusting age than the original was of the bright and shining 1980s. But even now all of those poor old welfare grandmas out there would be living better lives, perhaps even entirely free from the insults of silk suit wearing plutocrats, if instead of reaching out for a welfare check they'd just reach down for their own bootstraps. But, sadly, until the Big Meltdown comes and we're all forced to chew bark off the trees for brunch, it ain't gonna happen.

America is now a nation that doesn't know the difference between want and need, a people to whom the once ingrained, rock-ribbed American attribute of delayed gratification has been snuffed out by a national id that stomps across the Rockies, punches Mount Rushmore square in Roosevelt's kisser and kicks the St. Louis Arch clear into Boston Harbor while screeching, "But Iraq is haaaard, I want it over now!"

I wish we could just throw up our hands, sing what's the matter with kids today? and hope that the next generation wises up. Unfortunately this is a problem that spans generations. We have met the spoiled, entitled brats and they are everyone, young and old, and every one of them has a hand in my back pocket.

Most home owners aren't kids (a fact that'd surprise a passing Martian anthropologist stumbling across a typical 21st Century American mommy trying to put her screeching wittle pwecious down for him afternoon nap-ums). By now every adult ought to be aware that our economy is circling the drain. Adults used to understand instinctively that hard times are a good time to cut corners; maybe start a backyard garden and line their loafers with cardboard in order to squeeze another season out of them. Translated for modern audiences, a recession is a smart time to put away the Vail time-share pamphlets and stick a for sale sign on the jet ski on the front lawn. But take Red Hornsby's suggestion and "just for fun" drive around your neighborhood and take a gander at all the satellite dishes on roofs and cable TV wires running from telephone poles. I bet there's nary an antenna in sight (NB: Yes, there's one on my roof. There are plenty of dimwits to insult my intelligence on free TV, thanks very much, and I refuse to pay twelve hundred bucks a year for the frisson of watching first-run cable dimwits like Spongebob Squarepants and Chris Matthews).

We're facing hard times now, but does anyone really know what that means any longer? We hear stories of people tightening their belts, sure, but isn't cable TV the first unnecessary that someone serious about saving and worried about the future would cut? You mean I can keep over a grand in my own pocket? Root-a-toot-toot, I'm giving Comcast the boot! But do you know of anyone in the past year who has cancelled his satellite or cable service? TV is fun (at least it was until they cancelled Adam-12) but it's not a necessity.

And what about movies? Do people really have to go to the theater and make a blockbuster out of Transformers 2: Big CG Things Go Kaboom? How did my generation survive the turntable dark ages without iPods, iTunes, iDept, iDefault and iBankruptcy? How did our moms raise us without being permanently linked to our hip pockets via cell phones, that creepy invisible umbilical cord that can't be cut? These aren't luxuries of the evil rich or even the rewards working shmoes give to themselves. They're the everyday toys of the unemployed hoi polloi, paid for without shame and too often with someone else's welfare dime.

That dime used to mean something. Which is why I decided to pay for last Thanksgiving's turkey with discarded aluminum cans.

The idea came while I was our running. I jog each day and the week before Thanksgiving I found myself absently counting discarded deposit cans on the side of the road. I often run two and a half miles out and back on the same road, and on a stretch of about 1.4 miles I counted 142 cans and bottles. Sure, I've always picked up pennies from the sidewalk, but that's real cash money. And a Sprite bottle seemed the least fun way after a public toilet seat to catch herpes. But $7.10 worth of cans on a short stretch of road that I run along anyway was too good an opportunity to prove a point about frugality.

I'm not a soda or beer drinker so I had zero experience redeeming deposit cans, but I guessed that 142 cans was way too much to pick up and carry home here and there, even over a week or two. This would have to be an organized, one-day walking expedition. I figured two trash bags and a pair of new, clean work gloves should do for supplies. Before leaving home early Sunday morning I left a note of explanation for the authorities which read in part, "If missing, have probably been murdered by hobos. Check culverts for body." My affairs in order, I set out. The following are excerpts from that morning's diary.

7:00 a.m.: Embarked on perilous expedition to prove crazy point.

7:01: Realize I forget watch. Pencil and paper too. All times and diary entries hereafter will be approximations.

7:02: Encountered first beer can. Who's throwing crap in my front yard? Lousy teenagers.

7:03 -- 7:30: First mile in, not too many cans. Found -- and left untouched -- bottle filled with what appears to be urine. Wish I had my own empty bottle, which I would right now fill with vomit.

7:30: Arrived at 1-plus mile area of greatest can density. Can density far greater than anticipated. Density of author too.

7:31 - 8:00: Realization dawns that entire town has secret drinking problem.

8:15: Do they even make Tab and Fresca anymore, and does sludge pouring out of these faded cans taste better than original contents?

8:25 - 9:20: This is a real workout. Empty cans and bottles are heavy. Why not more bums and bag ladies in Olympics?

9:21 - 10:00: Struggle to haul bags back home. If repeating experiment next Thanksgiving, remember to swipe shopping cart from mall.

My cans brought in a total of $12.15 at the downtown liquor store. A local supermarket was selling frozen turkeys at the special can't-beat-it recession price of forty cents a pound. I picked up a twenty-plus pound turkey for $8.12, which left me $4.03 in free cash to go out and score me some primo crack (hey, it goes with my new lifestyle).

I like to think I proved my point. As bad as this recession is, as bad as it may get, as disparaging as Bruce Hornsby is of the silk suit-wearing fat cats who pay the lion's share of taxes, it is -- or should be -- the responsibility of the individual to cater his lifestyle to his changed circumstances, to tighten his own belt, and to feel a mixture of guilt, gratitude and, yes, shame, when accepting any kind of government handout.

One final and, unfortunately, typical example of where we stand now here in entitlement nation.

I know of a guy who hasn't worked in nearly two years and who, a year into unemployment, went out and bought three purebred poodles. His taxpaying neighbors are being awakened at all hours by these yipping rodents, yet their owner never bothers to shush them. You'd think he'd want to keep his neighbors fresh for the jobs that pay for his dog food and vet bills, but such is the entitlement mentality: My check comes from Uncle Sam, not from my working neighbor next door. This fellow lives on my running route and he's about my age. He has no disability. There is nothing preventing him from walking the exact same street where I conducted my little experiment and doing the same thing I did. Yet in the warmer weather I see him almost daily sitting in his front yard with his shirt off, belly bulging to his knees, playing with the expensive dogs you and I bought for him. Judging from the cars parked in front of "his" house on Thanksgiving Day, it's a safe bet he enjoyed turkey. It's a safer bet that, to pay for it, he didn't pick up the Tab.