Getting a Boom Box Fixed? Now, That's A Challenge

I have an old (I guess it's old now; going on 30 years) boom box that has traveled with me on at least a dozen moves now. It's one of two. One works fine. They're both made by Sony and look much the same. Both have handles so they can be toted without too much awkwardness. They can be operated by both electric and battery means. The radios play well. They even can, if they exist, play cassettes--remember those?

The other day, though, one of them broke down. Which is to say, the CD player stopped working. I have a collection of a couple hundred CDs, so this constituted a colossal waste. I tolerated it for a while. But that was the boom box in which I'd usually put a jazz CD while making my award-winning (by myself to myself, if I may be so braggart) chili (which, however, has earned kudos from all who have tried it). It takes 40 minutes to an hour to make a huge pot, which is about the time for most CDs to run. I had that boom box set up in my dining room, blaring into the adjacent kitchen--a perfect arrangement. Sonny Rollins, Tony Bennett, and Diana Krall would help me lurch through my process.

In other words, I missed the music and the ambiance. So, at long last, I decided to do something about it. Getting something that far obsolete repaired, at least in terms of communicative technology, takes a specialist. I am typical of my generation: scared to death of anything beyond plugging something in. Thousands of people myst be laughing at us, raking in bucks while doing what they figure any dolt could do. We're not just any dolts, though. We're helpless dolts. We left Apple iPhone behind at 3 or 4. What is it now, 26 or something?

But I found a store that I thought would do the trick: A place called UBreakIt, IFixIt. There are a couple in the Milwaukee area; one I solicited for my phone in Whitefish Bay, not far of a drive from my place on the East Side, did well. I found another one even closer. 

I tried them again late last month. The young lady (this place has young proprietors) took a look and wasn't sure she could help me. But she promised to try. The order slip suggested that they'd be ready on the 10th of February, two weeks hence.

Well, it got to be the 16th, nearly three weeks, and I wanted a decision. I called, and they admitted failure. I was a bit piqued: Get this thing back to me so I can make, maybe, the kind of decision one must make with a pet, painful but necessary: Is it time to end the relationship? Is it just not worth it anymore? Shall I commence burial, or at least relinquish it next to the nearby dumpster?

But UBreakIt didn't want to leave me without alternatives, so they called someone on the South Side: Would he take a look at it? Sure, he said. They gave me the name of the place and the address. Off I went. I thought that was nice. They didn't have to do that. They pitied the customer. Doesn't always happen nowadays. Maybe they thought they owed me that.

The address was on a main drag of that part of the town, Oklahoma Avenue. But that didn't mean fanciness or slick storefronts. It was a corner store with its entrance on that angle embracing both directions. (I later learned it was an old ice cream parlor.) No parking lot, either. You had to park as close as you could, which for me was a good half a block away.

I lugged the boom box to the door--Did people actually put these things on their shoulders?--but it was locked with this little sign on the glass: Back in 10 Minutes. It meant that there was but one person staffing the place--otherwise, someone else would have been there--and whatever the issue, it was too urgent to invite business to come in. At any rate, when you see something saying Back in 10 Minutes, you can pretty much bet it'll be longer. What it nearly always means is, Don't give up on us. We'll be back. Hope you are, too.

I lugged the boom box back. It wasn't an especially busy street I was parked on--South 10th--so I figured that if I caught a little lunch at a nearby McDonald's, that would take up the prerequisite time and it would be open when I re-parked in nearly the same place, alongside houses many of which needed new front steps. So it was. He wasn't lying. The place hadn't closed for the day.

UBreakIt, IFixIt is spick and span with plenty of room between the front door and the counter, nicely lit and clean. This place, called Economy TV, has no counter. It had overhead lights frustratingly dim. One didn't work. 

The shelving was stacked with old component audio sets, the kind that, in the '60s and '70s, were essential for someone into recorded music and LPs. But people don't buy those anymore. I had no idea whether they were operable or not, but considering the thick dust that covered them, no one had seen to that in some time.

The shop held a throwback fascination, though. Placed nicely here and there were old radios. They all played AM and FM with names on them like ads in newsmagazines, in the days when they ruled the stands: Philco and Zenith, for instance. The attendant, about six inches shorter than me, clad in a navy peacoat that indicated that the place didn't shell out much for heat, noticed me glancing at them. "They all work, too," he made sure to inform me. The display even had one of those 1920s-era wooden radios, reminding one of the front of a cathedral. "Works fine," said the sign taped to it, in case one was looking for a real live antique.

But that wasn't the only amazement. The moment I walked in, the fellow, probably not much younger than me than ten years, reached out and grabbed the boom box immediately. What constituted work orders were written out on business cards; no excess paper required. Remember, they had been informed that they might--might--have someone coming who needed help. The card with the order had already been prepared. When's the last time you had that happen?

Someone needed, you would think, to take a rag and Endust to all this. I looked for spider webs from the girded ceiling. But the component sets were blocked by other component sets, which seemed to take up every square inch of the place. Enough room had been cleared to walk in with one's problem. That was about it. But that's about all that was necessary. The work area, with used and scraped wood, was a few steps to the rear. It was jammed with things to repair. A stack of channel changers lurked nearby. Some of them, too, had thick dust on them.

It seemed like a place that might collapse at any minute. Yet, it had an energy to it, an exigency that felt genuinely helpful. It was a neighborhood store, the kind of place I would never have known about without the earlier recommendation. The surrounding vicinity, once thoroughly Polish but now leaning decisively Hispanic, had blocks of houses with groaning old porches and stairs that, too, could use some repair. Walking through in February, I wondered whether chairs were still being set up and people called out across the streets to each other during the other three seasons. I hoped so. I would hate to see it go to waste.

Economy TV, however jumbled and chaotic as it at first appeared, was scrapping and hustling and scraping for whatever it could get. I was happy, in a way, to help them. They charged twenty bucks for a look-see. I took out my debit card. Foolish. Should have known. "We take only cash," he warned me. With service this efficient, I wasn't going to deny him. He read my mind. Never phased him; I'm sure he'd had this problem before. "There's a liquor store across the way with an ATM," he said. I went and got a couple of twenties.

I had waited in futility three weeks for the slick, clean, prestigious East Side outfit to get back to me. I had had to reconnect with them for them to tell me that they couldn't fix my problem. Heaven knows how long it would be there had I not taken the initiative.

Mr. Navy Peacoat, though, took one look at me and said, "We'll get back to you in a couple of days." I believed him. This was the kind of arrangement Don Nelson, former coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, had in mind when he chose to eschew formal contractural discussions with then-owner Herb Kohl and settled on a once-a-year handshake to continue his job. The informality led to complete trust. Someone's word mattered here.

They did call me back quickly. Two hours. "We're all done," he said. "You can come get it. It'll be forty, so you owe us another twenty."

Three weeks as opposed to two hours? Was this age-ism working, however subtlety? Or was it just that an older repairman was used to the equipment? Mattered not.

I came for it the next day. There were other men in the shop on this late Saturday morning, too. They didn't seem as interested in getting things fixed as they were in just visiting. Sloppily clad, one had had several teeth removed in front. There were grins all around. Bonding need not be done perpetually in bars.

Navy Peacoat took me back to the repair bench for a test drive. "I was listening to my favorite song all day yesterday," he said, and cranked on some Ronnie Milsap. Not jazz, but it blared nicely. All set. I paid him off.

I mentioned my chili prep. "See, now you've got a friend to make your chili," another attendant said. "You took me right away, so thanks," I told them. "I'll recommend you."

They thanked me as I left. There was a bounce in my step as I worked back to the car. I got home, plugged in the boom box, now good as new, and celebrated by turning it up. No sense holding back. The chili would taste good tonight. The jazz would sound better.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

What Would X and MLK Think Now?

Yes, I do wonder what they'd think. I also wonder if it would be mostly good that came from it.

I went to a one-act play in Madison last weekend. The premise was to display a conversation that never happened, unfortunately: Between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

It was called "The Meeting," and the premise was that it would have taken place in early 1965, just before Malcolm X because the first of them to be gunned down. In fact, a minor role of a bodyguard was written in, largely because X had been threatened many times and that followers of Elijah Mohammad were laying for him.

But seemed incidental to the main event. Martin arrived and they predictably started in on each other. Being the one with the most strident philosophy on how to deal with white racism, Malcolm X asserted himself. He was never one for non-violent resistance. His response to being attacked for attending a university or sitting in a segregated lunch counter was to hit back.

Of course, X's rhetoric, re-created by playwright Jeff Stetson, came at King's character, played by Willian Toney, with an undeniable rush. But by this time, King had heard all of that. He fended off the stridency of X, played by Talen Marshall, with deftness and calm.

In real life, though, both men made strides toward the other's approach. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, ghostwritten by Alex Haley, later the author of Roots, he appears astonished that people of all colors and philosophies could worship together at the Hajj, or the pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca, one of the Five Pillars of the religion that all devotees of Allah should at least try to perform once in their lives. X's edge toward distrust and suspicion toward whites begins to fall off. All the more a shame that he didn't have the chance to explore the implications of that new attitude.

King continued his philosophy of non-violent resistance to segregation until his own violent end. But instead of being completely passive, which Freedom Riders and marchers (often led by him) tended to reflect, he leaned toward a more aggressive tone, support of unions, in the months before his own assassination. In fact, he was in Memphis, in support of garbage workers' unions, when he was shot. The viciousness of responses to protests reached their peak, he said, not in the South, where they were bad enough, but in Chicago. Perhaps that triggered more strong-willed responses elsewhere.

The one-act nature of the play left little time to explore those late-in-life inclinations more deeply. The purpose of the play, it appeared, was at least to expose the fundamentals of the two activists' approaches so that the younger Black students (this took place at Madison Area Technical College, now known as Madison College), living far later than their lives' expanse, could at least compare the two and discuss it among themselves. In that, I thought, it succeeded. I'm glad it did, because as time slips farther away, clarification and exposition of what the two had to deal with are all the more necessary.

A symbolic gesture ran its path through the play. The two squared off in arm-wrestling matches which became indicative as to which man's philosophy would hold sway. Malcolm X won the first without much of a challenge, but King won the second, surprising Malcolm. The tie-breaking and decisive third? In the play, at least, neither could win. The playwright didn't want to go there.

I can. So far, at least in practicable display, King has won. Think about the reaction to George Floyd--strong, but most peaceful. Aggressive, violent reactions were put down almost immediately. So far, at least, Black resisters haven't resorted to organized weaponry. Heaven help us if they do.

Economically, though, Blacks need to go an even greater distance--here, Malcolm X would win. He foresaw a greater, more sweeping respect potentially emerging. "You want to desegregate the lunch counters," said his character to King. "We want to own the lunch counters." Ironically, it would be another method of non-violence.

At the end, they hugged. I doubt that that would have happened in, say, 1962. But if both had lived into the '70s, their respect might have grown appreciably. The violent bent of our society made sure we'll never know. They were not unaware of this. Both knew someone was coming for them.

A panel discussion, including the director of the play as well as the actors, followed. About half the attending crowd stayed, and questions from it were featured. Naturally, one question posed asked how the entourage felt Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would feel today. It was asked generally, without specifics, and so were the answers.

I thought that to be too bad. I would want to know how they thought the two activists would consider the murder of George Floyd, for instance; the presidency of ex-, dripping with ugly white supremacy; the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse; critical race theory; or the continued Republican efforts to limit Black voting. But perhaps that was too much to ask for. The discussion took about half an hour. It would take a whole course to explain the relative paucity of advancement of the Black race and why the resistance to it is still obvious and unabating. There were about ten people on the panel and most of them weighed in on most of the questions. A drilling down would have taken hours.

I wonder after all that effort and energy expended, though, the two legends would look at today's situation and say to themselves; We did all that for this? We're standing still. We're still standing still. We've tried everything--being nice about it, being tough about it, being intellectual about it. Resistance, still. Racism, still. Prospects, still dim.

No longer any reason for any of it, either. The struggle goes on. Repeat a hope and maybe it becomes true: We shall overcome. Someday.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Why Will Colorado Lose? Look to Mayorkas.

Colorado doesn't have a chance with the Supreme Court. It's been co-opted, too.

How do I know this? Look at the stupid, awful, ridiculous attempt to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejando Mayorkas. It reveals the shameful attitudes of far too many Republicans and how today's politics have been reduced to mutual face-slapping.

Mayorkas came within a hair's breadth of being impeached for absolutely nothing. The Republicans have tried to smear him for incompetence and neglect, when all he's trying to do is execute policy as best he can--as best as the Republicans have helped, or mostly not helped at all, to shape it. In the sad majority, the House Republicans have conjured accusations that Mayorkas, gasp, has lied to them.

Oh? Nobody defending ex- in the vast investigations of his horrible acts five years ago lied? They lied like rugs, in front of everyone, and we all knew it. They put a gossamer thin coating over what couldn't be hidden. Or they refused to testify, defying subpoenas, and dared anyone to make them.

All Mayorkas has done is to put his head down and deal with an impossible situation, specifically designed to make the Biden Administration look inadequate--when in fact it has been, if anything, more efficient about trying to keep migrants on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border, reducing an absurd number of them from seeking asylum, and removing the ones they can.

In other words, it has responded to Republicans who desperately need to create 2024 campaign issues out of thin air. The latest attempt to provide them with exactly what they wanted--increased enforcement and the money to pay for it, in exchange for funding for the wars in Israel (which Republicans lather over) and Ukraine and military support for Taiwan, all badly needed--has been thrown back at it by jackbooted followers of ex- at his order. It is a frightening prospect, but one that must be called out by Biden and his supporters, now, at every turn.

Mayorkas is caught up in this only because he is the convenient scapegoat, because Biden cannot be touched with impeachment nonsense, or perhaps he now will be with smears galore about his feebleness burnishing. Even so, a handful of Republicans with consciences left--looking at you, Mike Gallagher, of the 8th District of Wisconsin, in the Green Bay area (who, if you recall, was one of the first Congresspeople to go public with a plea to stop the attempted insurrection: his announcement that he won't run for another term coming immediately after the Mayorkas vote--coincidence? I think not)--prevented an impeachment vote from passing the other day. It embarrassed Speaker Mike Johnson, who deserves to be embarrassed many times over.

Nevertheless, the hubbub and energy expended about useless details, and the utter vindictiveness of it all, has created a mindset in the Supreme Court that, while probably supportable, indicates that rationality has pretty much left the basis of our politics.

The justices can hardly be blamed. They understand full well that, if Colorado should be allowed to successfully accuse ex- of an insurrection, without enforceable definition, other state legislatures will seize upon any reasonably noticeable public disorder and blame it on Biden, accusing him of motivating the forces behind it (as if he would), and take him out off the ballot for president in their states, charging him with "insurrection."

The Supreme Court could, if it wanted to, define the term "insurrection" to sufficiently narrow ex-'s participation on 1/6/21 to encompass it. But then the justices who voted in favor of it would be accused of establishing an ex post facto definition, strictly prohibited by the Constitution. Colorado, and Maine (which has also tried to stop ex- from being on ballots in 2024) wouldn't mind that at all; I think Colorado was half-expecting that.

With three justices appointed by ex-, and two more clearly in his camp, though, I highly doubt that they will take a detached view and do what's most appropriate. Such definition would stop a tit-for-tat, vengeance-filled succession of state legislatures from slicing ex- and Biden from their ballots due to conjured accusations of attempt at "insurrection," keep all of our eyes on the ball, and utilize Article 3 of the 14th Amendment to project enforcement of it the way it's supposed to be done, the way the simple wording of it suggests.

Of course, if it did so, it might also encourage splinter groups to "fake" attempts to take over state governments by trying to disguise assaults on state capitols and spread false press releases saying that, for instance, a rowdy group of Democrats tried to overthrow the state government of, say, Idaho, when they did no such thing, kind of like the way the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as "Indians" in Boston Harbor in 1773. So there's that, too. Dirty trick? Wasn't 1/6/21 a dirty trick, too?

So the Supreme Court is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The rule of law is clearly endangered to the point at which the "right" thing can't be supported anymore because it won't be followed. Whatever its ruling, it isn't likely to be respected because the Court ruled it to be so; it's likely to be respected only because justice has given way to power, as blind and coercive as it may be. The Supreme Court has admitted, in other words, that it is helpless.

The failed impeachment of Alejando Mayorkas proved that, with a whisper of rationality saving the Congress from being tied up uselessly for months. Note, though, that that rationality is quite narrow, very edgy, and subject to reversal instantaneously. The Republicans in Congress are acting the way the late Marquette men's basketball coach Al McGuire said: Like a bouncer starting a fight in the bar to justify his existence. They can't justify passing the best possible version of a border bill designed to give them nearly everything they want because of self-imposed psychological dependence on a complete fool, so they busy themselves creating a quasi-legal excuse to harass a Biden Cabinet member, inventing their own dog whistle because they know they don't have a remotely justifiable excuse to impeach Biden.

The Supreme Court doesn't have a remotely justifiable excuse to stick ex- with the obvious label of "insurrectionist," or at least it doesn't think it can, because it's scared to death about state-invoked legislative anarchy. In other words, it can't justify its existence anymore because the guardrails about decent behavior have disappeared, and it relies on that when it makes its rulings.

When law lacks respect, force intervenes. We're not at that moment yet, but we're close.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark