A Lone Marxist Fisherman and Our Culture of Inconvenience

by JOHN MANTZ  Guest Blogger

I spent a rather chilly week in Key West in February thanks to a thoughtful Christmas gift from my beautiful wife Brenda.  I had two fishing trips planned, one on the flats, the shallow body of water within the coral reefs that surround Key West; and the other was a deep sea fishing trip.  I prefer flats fishing because of the variety generally available (Bonefish, Tarpon, Barracuda, Shark, and Permit) and also because that style of fishing allows you to do the fishing while the Captain drives the boat and finds the fish.  I have had many great experiences flats fishing, my favorite has to be my trip with the legendary Captain Ansil Saunders out of Bimini.  Saunders took Brenda and me into his home after we were robbed on our first night in Bimini. Ansil took us Bonefishing every day.  He knew and guided Dr. Martin Luther King through the mangrove covered creeks surrounding Bimini just days before King was felled by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis. 

Unfortunately on our recent trip the shallow flats water, quickly chilled by historic cold temperatures in the Keys, was mostly devoid of the prized game species, so the flats fishing mostly sucked. 

Deep sea fishing is my least favorite type of fishing because it involves trolling the boat under power at about 5-8 knots per hour trailing about 7 rods, and a couple of teaser rigs, fake plastic fish arranged in an array that resembles a school of bait fish. You don’t even hold the pole, and when there is a strike, the Mate will often hand you the pole.  Deep sea fishing is expensive, so it helps if you can get a “split” charter, meaning you go fishing with two or three people you don’t know.  I always find the people interesting and they have provided me with many good stories beyond the size of the fish I have caught – which I assure you have been quite prodigious.  (Fishermen should never lie, but exaggeration is not only okay, it is positively encouraged.)  I have a story to tell about this trip (and I will get to it later in this rant) but first I need to skip ahead to my arrival back in the D.C. area from Key West.

Coming Back from Key West we arrived at BWI airport.  I had dreaded this return for my last two days in Key West because 20 inches of snow had fallen in the Baltimore area, right after we left for Key West.  Remarkably, my car was almost completely devoid of snow, and my drive-time into Virginia from BWI, 45 minutes, was a personal best.  The next day, while I was sitting in a vehicle that can generate the power of over 200 horses, the drudgery began in earnest.  Think of it, a buckboard with hundreds of horses stretching out to the horizon.  And yet it took me 2 hours to go 12 miles!!   Progress hah!!  To be fair D.C. had just had a record snow, but this was a week afterward.  Anyway traffic in D.C. always sucks and on a good day it takes me over an hour to travel that same 12 miles.  What a waste?  How many horses do you need to go 12 miles per hour?? Not 200, that’s for sure.   I know there are those of you who are saying use the Metro (D.C.’s regional transit system), but that also illustrates our culture of inconvenience: they are in deep financial trouble; the cars are 30 years old; they are increasing the fair price and reducing the amount of trains they will provide.

This all got me thinking about all the petty indignities we all suffer each and every day and how we have grown numb to the inconveniences caused by an ever increasing emphasis on the bottom line.  It has not always been thus.  Service Stations used to pump your gas, check your oil, clean your windshield and give you green stamps.  Now, for God sakes, they charge for air.  If you have to call a company, institution or the government how long does it take to get a human being on the other end of the line?  How many jobs have been lost by automated phone lines, and self check outs at CVS and Giant.  Customer Service is dying or dead, along with the jobs of the people who use to provide it.

The legions of corporate lobbyists in Washington are pushing the government in the same direction.  The United States of America, a limited partnership with Lehman Brothers, and McDonald Douglas.  No Bank Left Behind.  Billions to Bomb the shit out of everything, no questions asked.  But with over 10% unemployment and in some states, like Michigan, closer to 15%, we can’t afford a viable jobs bill.  Same thing with health care.  Who cares?  The Canadians may have National Health Care and a lower infant mortality rate, but who won that hockey game the other night.  (That was sarcasm.) There was some state congress person in Utah, who actually proposed the abolishment of the 12^th grade, because it would save one hundred million from the state budget, and, after all, those kids don’t really learn anything in the 12^th grade.

Why do we put up with this?  This gets me back to my fishing trip on the Linda D out of Key West.  Now fisherman, and for that matter all outdoors type people,  like to think of themselves as being self-sufficient rather than the truly interdependent species that we really are.  Thus, you get your disproportionate number of government haters on fishing boats, and at first, being a bureaucrat, I initially take these attacks personally.  In this case, to be fair, I may have tipped my hand.  I was wearing a Bob Marley baseball cap over my unkempt and longish grey hair.  They all knew I was from D.C.  Joe, a retired heavy equipment operator from Staten Island working a school bus driving gig in his retirement, made the opening gambit. “What do you think of those characters down there?”  I presumed he was talking about the Obama administration and immediately responded, “I’m disappointed with Obama.” (Picture “Arlo’s Restaurant” and the Group “W” bench, and me surrounded by mother stabbers and father stabbers.)  And then I said, “Because he can’t get us a National Health Care Public Option”    Staten Island, Joe (Even though I lived on the other side of the Goethals Bridge from Staten Island, I had never met anyone who actually lived there.  To me it was just a place for under-aged drinking and dumping garbage.  Staten Island was the only place a boy from Newark could look down on!!  I think they even tried to become part of New Jersey once, and we wouldn’t let them…but I digress )  Staten Island Joe says, he doesn’t want another huge government bureaucracy, government’s too big and Yada Yada.  I respond in a similar “knee jerk” fashion, progressive style: Medicare works! Every industrialized western society has socialized medicine, Yada Yada.  But my heart’s not really in it. Finally, Jim the small business man from northern New Jersey (he wasn’t born in Newark, so I don’t really consider him a proper New Jersey native) chimes in “ My business is barely surviving, I am spending a small fortune just to pay for health insurance for my own family.  I’m one serious illness away from going into total bankruptcy.”  Somehow these things too are the fault of “big government.” 

All of a sudden, things are too serious, or too silly, for me to enjoy the fishing.  So, I exclaim, “Listen Fellas, you guys and me will never agree on these things, you see I’m a Marxist!!” (Who knows if I’m really a Marxist?  I have a copy of Mao’s book.  I saw it this morning in my bookshelf.  Looks too big for me to have actually read it all.  I always take big books like that on my fishing vacations, and invariably don’t read them because I fish 24/7.)   I don’t think anyone was too surprised by this, and the debate, such as it was, whimpered into the ether.  We continued to politely take our turns in the “fighting chair” catching fish—mostly King Mackerel—that were seriously undersized for the tackle and the chair.  I, however, wanted to get off the boat as soon as I could.  Even though I really liked these guys, my Marxist proclamation really made me the “other”, at least in my eyes.  When the Captain pulled up for gas at a private marina, just the other side of the historic pier walk from by hotel, I quickly excused myself giving the Mate a hefty tip, after all he, among us all, was a worthy lumpenproletariat.  As I was getting my petite bourgeoisie ass off the boat. “not so fast buddy boy” says the Dockmaster, who blocks my path and returns me to the vessel, offering a scold at the Captain, as well, who, he said should have known better than to let off such rabble as myself on his private dock.  What would the yacht owners think?  Had the time for the revolution arrived?  In my head, swirling with phrases like “labour before capital” the revolution was on, but from my lips I rendered only my faint displeasure with the Dockmaster’s fastidiousness with regard to rules and for treating me like rabble.  The Captain, not in the mood for a revolution, but unfazed by the Dockmaster’s remonstrations, dropped me off across the channel from the private dock, saving me about a hundred yards on my walk.

We could have had a revolution there, or perhaps a mutiny, if Joe and Jim were with me.  Why weren’t they with me? Joe’s a heavy equipment operator having to drive a school bus in his retirement.  Jim’s family picked cotton in Texas before they moved north to get manufacturing jobs, and I, of course, have an excellent working-class pedigree. Neither my father nor my brother finished high school and the whole family made roller bearings for GM.

The answer, I think, is that every adult has a viewpoint, characterized colloquially by the expression “opinions are like A-holes everyone got one.”  Viewpoints are developed through our experience in the social milieu or milieu’s that we travel in.  Viewpoints are not developed through careful intellectual or spiritual reflection, and cannot be persuaded thereby.  We just wind up with them.

Funny, Joe, Jim and I all agreed on one thing: “we’re all getting screwed.” They think it’s the government.  I think its corporate greed and irresponsibility.  But, of course, I work for the government and am biased in that regard, and alas, I will always think I’m a Marxist.