[Newspoetry] smokin'

[Mike Lehman]

Sam,
Don't forget Employee Paul's recent cry for help re: his 'habit' (read
addiction) to the profit-producing weed known as tobaco.  I think that
was a cry for help and I assume he has been kidnapped and bundled away
to a rubber-lined room run by the Newspoetry Employee Assistance
Program.  They will continue to pass him said tobaco, but I suspect that
all future correspondence from him should be examined carefully in the
hopes that he may cue some of his fellow employees to his big Breakout
plan when the Newspoetry ward nurse, AKA Nurse Cratchit, lets her guard
down.  We must be prepared to take him into the Newspoetry Underground
and take him to safer digs on the Lower East Side of Urbana.

Smells like a conspiracy to me...

Mike

Sam Markewich 2 wrote:
> 
> Dear Fellow Employees,
>         It should have become apparent to all of us by now that our rights are
> being infringed on.  Employee Lehman has already outlined some of the
> issues at stake, such as union representation, enough line breaks to
> feed our families, etc., &c.  Additionally, Employee Wendling has
> astutely realized the covertly impending rash of drug testing we likely
> will all be subject to if we don't stand up and take action.  I,
> Employee Markewich, should like now to address three further issues of
> grave importance to our own secure futures.  I believe we are indeed on
> very shakey ground.
>         First, I ask all of you not to gloss over the comment concerning
> smokin' addressed to us by our new editor and CEO, Mssr.  Joe Futrelle.
> As many of us know, Mssr. Futrelle's last name is really not Futrelle at
> all but Fewtral.  He is related to one Wiley Fewtral, a greedy man of
> great and unconstrained avarice, in short, a thief.  Apparently the gene
> pool does not mutate so easily, for our very own CEO seems to be telling
> us we're "smokin'" so as to set us up with a smoke screen!  This, and
> other kinds of regularly scheduled (probably by a computer program,
> which may well even be composing these letters to us) letters from Mssr.
> Futrelle are nothing more than the worst side of what is known in the PR
> business as Total Quality Management.  In short, Futrelle strokes us
> with his own brand of false sentiment so that we will feel like "one big
> happy family" and produce more product.  The increased profits to the
> Newspoetry consortium of companies, and to Futrelle himself, of course
> is seen by none of us in our less-than-minimum-wage pay checks.  Worst
> of all, we all feel so good for being stroked by the management that we
> don't even think about this stuff!  I say it's time we do!
>         Of still more concern is what is beginning to show itself as a kind of
> "false benevolence" with a very smelly underbelly.  As Newspoets we all
> remember the stunning display of Mr. Boris Yeltsin on top of a tank
> taking back Russia for Gorbachev (or however you spell that guy's name).
>  Of course, none of us, nor any of the Russians, suspected for a minute
> that what Russia was actually in for was a despotic crazy man with dirty
> politics and capitalistic inclinations to match those of Robert E. Lee!
> We all thought Russia was moving towards freedom, not drunken
> irrationally planned free market terrorism against the Russian
> citizenry.  Are we, the Newspoetry assemblyline workers, not now seeing
> the very same thing in our own work place?  Did we not think that
> Futrelle was our Gorbachev, a man of reason, peace and foresight?  And,
> are we not now seeing former CEO Mssr. William Gillespie slowly
> infiltrating the ranks in seemingly inoccuous acts of heroism, like
> Yeltzin standing atop that tank?  What else would explain Gillespie's
> recent "friendly reminder" concerning our employee handbook?  Were he
> not now in power why would he send out such a thing?  I believe he may
> well be greesing the wheels of our own sentimentality in order to make
> it that much easier to sneek back into the ranks and impose his own
> brand of despotic rule!  In fact, I believe he never really left his
> seet and has been the man behind the curtain even as Futrelle has played
> the perfect puppet.  Many of us thought back when the Yeltzin-Gorbachev
> thing went down that it had been planned from the beginning of
> Gorbachev's presidential rein.  It appears something similar has
> happened here.
>         Finally, if it's true that we're all smokin', it's true too that we're
> all supporting the tabaco lobby/industry.  I do not believe this
> reference on behalf of CEO Futrelle was an accident.  I think he is
> being paid off by the tabaco lobby and that his seemingly stroking
> message to us was actually an attempt at subliminally censoring us by
> making us feel good about our selves through a linkage of self-image to
> smoking.  This, of course, would make it hard for any of us to critique
> tabacco in a poem, for we would feel that we were really saying
> something bad about our self, that to be "smokin'" was a bad, rather
> than a good, thing.
>         If Futrelle's pockets are being greesed by the tobaco industry it seems
> quite plausible that the Gillespie-Futrelle coup could be a means to get
> us all to subtly support the industry through silence.  It would work
> like this:  Since Gillespie started the whole Newspoetry consortium and
> gave us our jobs we hold him in positive regard.  Yet, we also know that
> he smokes.  When does he ditch the Editorship and hand it over to
> Futrelle, a non-smoker? He does it as the debates on tobaco start to
> fade out of the news.  In other words, he gets out of Newspoetry just at
> the time that we Newspoets might start to become disgruntled at tobaco
> since so much of what we had hoped might happent to the industry fell
> through.  He got out, then, just as we might start to say to ourselves,
> "Hey, Gillespie smokes".  Then Futrelle the non-smoker steps in and
> starts stroking us with his TQM stuff.  The result: we feel great about
> the management, we feel great about smoking because of Futrelle's recent
> compliment to us vis-a-vis smokin', and we will thus feel great when
> Gillespie COMES BACK INTO POWER.  Little would we suspect that both
> Futrelle and Gillespie are sitting in the same chair smoking together
> the finest Cuban cigars supplied to them by none other than Joe Camel himself!
>         In closing, I encourage all of us Newspoets to stand up and fight
> against this mockery of freedom of the press and progressive news
> coverage!  I have planned a meeting so that we can come together and
> rally for our rights as workers.  The meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m.
> this Saturday in Switzerland.  Come one, come all!  Fight the Power!!!
> 
> peace and solidarity,
> Employee Markewich
> 
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