I was wrong.
I thought I’d heard every West Virginia joke there is.
There is of course the fact that we hillbillies invented the toothbrush, evidenced by the fact that had anyone else invented it the branding would have been teethbrush.
There’s the dead give away of matrimonial bliss, which is shown by the fact that the spit tobacco stains are down both sides of the truck.
Of course, there is the long running debate about whether if you get divorced, are you still cousins, or if your parents divorce are they still brother and sister?
Understand, we only go to movies in the mountain state in groups larger than 18, since 17 and under are not admitted to those grown up moving picture shows.
Oh, and of course there is also the concern if the state library burned down how would they replace both books.
I’ve heard them all. I’ve had them all slung at me at one time or another. I’ve even told most of them myself, in one form or another. From the cringey to the eyerolling to the downright offensive, West Virginia has been the butt of the joke for as long as there has been a West Virginia.
You will never understand the amazing display when, as a recruit at basic training during initial issue, Staff Sergeant Perez called the entire room to attention to mark the occasion of me and one other West Virginian “getting our first ever pair of shoes.” Proud moment for me and my family, you see. A family that has been on the land I left to enlist since before there was a West Virginia. Or a Virginia. Or an America for that matter. I wonder if the Native Americans that kept my distant forebearer Ned captive before he escaped and spent weeks in the wilderness returning to the Gauley River Valley in pre-revolution America told hillbilly jokes…
Bring your jokes, I thought. I’ve heard them all, I assumed. None can bother me, I arrogantly thought.
You know the saying about what assuming makes you. Here I stand one, after this:
At the height of West Virginia’s opioid epidemic, executives at a leading drug distributor exchanged emails making light of the crisis.
The emails were put forth by Cabell County attorney Paul Farrell Jr. during trial at U.S. District Court in Charleston. The trial pits the county and the city of Huntington against the nation’s three largest drug distributors, who they argue fueled the overdose crisis.
In one, shared on Thursday, AmerisourceBergen executive Chris Zimmerman shared a lyrical parody of the theme song for “The Beverly Hillbillies,” making fun of “a poor mountaineer” who purchased pills at a “cash ‘n carry” pain clinic.
Another was titled “OxyContinVille” and included a parody of a Jimmy Buffett song that described driving from Kentucky to buy pills.
In a third email, a member of Zimmerman’s team wrote, “One of the hillbilly’s must have learned how to read :-)” in response to an email detailing Kentucky’s new opioid regulations.
Zimmerman apologized in court for the contents of some of the emails, including the use of the term “pillbillies,” which he said referred to drug dealers, not patients.
“I shouldn’t have sent the email,” he said, but added that he took the attacks upon his credibility “personally.” He said the documents were cherry-picked out of context and defended the corporate culture at AmerisourceBergen, one of the three opioid distributors on trial in Charleston, and said it was of the “highest caliber.”
But Farrell disagreed. “It is a pattern of conduct by those people charged with protecting our community — and they’re circulating emails disparaging hillbillies,” said Farrell.
Who exactly did Jackass McGee here think the drug dealers were selling the pills to? I’m just tickled pink he feels the need to defend the corporate culture of his multi-billion dollar company at the expense of joking about my culture. But that’s fine, we’re used to it. We are the state that when you win $3 million in the lottery, they send you $3 a year for a million years, after all.
It’s all just jokes. Just funnies. Just them dumb hillbillies. Not the type of folks in fancy offices with suits that cost as much as few months of mortgage payments on the double wide. No need for the distressed and dying to be known as anything other than jokes in memos and line items on the P&L spreadsheets.
Legally and in the grand scheme of things, the insults in inboxes are not a big deal. It’s an emotional point of order rather than a legal one. This is a trial, after all, and it’s a small piece of the much bigger picture: of an industry that flooded enough pills into West Virginia that if the residents took a thousand each they couldn’t consume them all in a decade or longer. The three companies on trial, AmerisourceBergen Corp, McKesson Corp, and Cardinal Health Inc, insist that they are not to blame. The doctors are. The Pharmacies are. And especially responsible are those darn rapscallion pillbillies.
“We are a mirror on what happens in healthcare,” Enu Mainigi, a lawyer for Cardinal, said Monday. “We reflect it, we don’t drive it.”
They were just following orders, of course. The doctors give orders and the FDA sets quotas and we just follow the orders, you see. When it comes to accepting blame, there is no joking about. “We reflect it, we don’t drive it” is something I’m sure those companies’ investors and stockholders are thrilled to hear. I doubt they find it funny either.
Just look at the reflection of those pillbillies in the unimpeachable executives:
Following further questioning of Zimmerman, U.S. District Judge David Faber denied the introduction of more emails exchanged between members of his team, despite acknowledging that they revealed insight into attitudes within the company at the time.
In 2011, after Florida passed legislation to crack down on pill mills, Zimmerman sent a team-wide email joking that the “Pillbillies” would head north to Georgia and Alabama instead. Later, a corporate investigator forwarded an email titled “Oxycontin for kids” with a picture of a Kellogg’s cereal box altered to read “SMACK.” “You’re just a barrel of laughs today,” responded a coworker.
But it’s just pillbillies. So who cares, right?
Well, we do. We who have friends, loved ones, sometimes even ourselves who struggle, and strive, and sometimes fail and die. Even in the darkness brought about by the opioid crisis there are small sprouts of light. And those glimmers are not from outside. I hope Cabell County and the City of Huntington — where I’ve lived and worked before and know first hand the hammer blow addiction has landed on the tri-state area — get every dime possible from AmerisourceBergen Corp, McKesson Corp, and Cardinal Health Inc.
But it won’t be millions in judgement funds that fixes this. It won’t be a federal court or a billion dollar company with product to move at the cost of lives they deem worthless except as a joke and profit. Those pillbillies and their loved ones, friends, and neighbors will dig their own way out from under. They’ll survive the opioid crisis like they have the mines closing, the demographic shifts, the Civil War, the slow bleeding demographic death that has made the West Virginia strand of the hillbilly subspecies an endangered one, and a million other things.
We will scrub off the dark and wickedness of the opioid crisis with guts, and grit, and our bare hands, and our toothbrushes if we have to. And folks will probably make jokes about that too, pillbillies trying to better themselves. But we will get it done in the end.
And the drug companies and anyone else that won’t help can go to hell. Laughing or otherwise.
I can’t decide if corporate culture draws in such people, or if such people are just especially suited to succeed in business and thus set the corporate culture.
Either way, I wonder at times if we as a society weren’t too quick to do away with tar & feathers.Report
Sociopathy and lack of empathy are, in fact, well rewarded in corporate culture.
Empathy and conscience hinder profits and are thus damaging to shareholder’s interests.
Someone with, for instance, the slightest hint of a conscience would not have flooded West Virginia with a drug designed to get them addicted, uncaring of their eventual death or problems, as long as as much money as possible was extracted from them first.
A company that isn’t trying to take all your money, damn any law whose fine is less than the profit, and certainly damn any ethics, is one that isn’t maximizing shareholder value.
it’s not so much “corporate culture” as it is “corporate success”. Always be closing and whatnot. There’s no room for feelings.
Charles Stross had some thoughts on it (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html) wherein he points out that we already have AI, it’s very much in charge, and has been for some time. It’s just large and slow and called “corporations”.
And as he ends — it’s a paperclip maximizer sort of AI, and humans are the paper.Report
Always comes back to the idea that shareholder profits (rather than stakeholder interests) rule all.Report
I tend to agree.
What I find most interesting is that it wasn’t always understood that shareholder’s interests trumped all other interests. This is an idea that dates back only to the 1980’s or so. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Unless you happen to think that America before 1980 was a terrible wasteland with poor economic growth, we have stone cold evidence that things could be different and still work very well.Report
I doubt Friedman’s intent was to grant executives carte blanche to be irresponsible towards anything except making profit, but as an economist, he should have seen the unintended consequence of that theory.
Or perhaps he did see it, but expected legal or political action (or perhaps shareholder action) to act as a check on those consequences.Report
Institutional investors and mutual funds existed i Friedman’s day, and were only getting larger. He understood incentives too well to think either of them would give a crap about corporate ethics.Report
As his friend Pinochet might have said, “Incentives are all well and good, but the prospect of a one way helicopter ride has a way of focusing the mind.”Report
“[Friedman’s] friend Pinochet”
Can you elaborate on what you’re trying to insinuate by this?Report
he is not insinuating anything.
miracle of chile and the chicago boys. facts.Report
guys like chris zimmerman pretend to wonder why people like me feel violent towards them. but really its a show a front they know why and they know someday it will come.
why make excuses for old milton. he is on record many times emphatically making exactly that point: corporations and the people behind them should always and only focus on profits.
as you know uncle milty was refuted and shunned because of his extremely wacko pov until nixon closed the gold window.Report
I have been amazed for at least 25 years about management’s — and in particular senior management’s — inability to learn that e-mail is not a casual remark made in passing to a peer that you know shares your particular biases. It’s a memo, dated and effectively signed, put in a filing cabinet somewhere just waiting to be discovered by opposing lawyers. Heck, Bill Gates nearly got his company busted up on the basis of some poorly worded e-mails. It doesn’t seem like they’ve gotten any better.Report
It’s because senior management has an inordinate amount of narcissistic and sociopathic individuals who are unable to grapple with the idea that they can be held personally accountability for anything.Report
But surely a Facebook video of me screaming deranged gibberish through the mailslot of a Congressperson can be safely deleted if it later proves embarrassing, right?
I mean, I even dragged it into the Recycle bin on my desktop!Report
And the IDF is posting video of rockets being fired and posting them to the internet!Report
This is a great response.
Does anyone remember years back when Michael Moore made the “clever” argument that, if corporate heads really believed that markets should be totally unrestricted, they’d all be selling crack? The joke was that *nobody* could picture something that crazy and socially-destructive ever really happening! Haha! That one’s not so funny anymore either.Report
Thank you Rufus, that means a lot coming from youReport
Wasn’t corporate drug pushers the basic plot of A Scanner Darkly?
There were more than a few people that were kind of dubious about legalizing marijuana because they didn’t want Big Tobacco getting involved in the legal weed industry. Like imagine what could happen if Philip Morris could sell marijuana and other drugs. Nothing good really, although marijuana is less dangerous than tobacco.Report
Yeah, I didn’t think Michael Moore had a good point there because I assume, if crack was legal, of course there’d be some corporation selling it!Report
Great piece. Thanks for sharing it.Report
Thank you KristinReport
Following further questioning of Zimmerman, U.S. District Judge David Faber denied the introduction of more emails exchanged between members of his team, despite acknowledging that they revealed insight into attitudes within the company at the time.
This judge ought to be recalled.Report
federal judgeReport
He should have his house egged.
Monthly.Report
Because? See Fed. R. Evid. 403.Report
Because they revealed insight into attitudes within the company at the time.
It feels like The Government colluding with a powerful company against the interests of The People.Report
Well, there’s no arguing about your feelings. But everyone who has ever tried a case has heard a judge say, “You’ve made your point counselor. Move on.” I could tell you how that feels, but I don’t see how sharing my passing feelings would be of any value to anyone else.Report
I can imagine the counselor feeling triumphant in that moment…
If, of course, he had been allowed to have the other evidence included anyway. Like, as an attachment or Appendix C or something.
If the case was one won or lost based upon evidence presented of attitudes within the company at the time, however, I’d like to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth added to the evidence first.Report
Your imagination is as useful as your feelings. The lawyer told to move on when he’s on a roll usually feels terrible, and wants to get everything he wants to offer in, no matter how redundant — it’s the “whole truth ” after all — without having to consider whether the jury is bored or the trial actually gets done and all the other litigants looking for justice get their days in court.Report
Justice may be blind, but she also has ADD.Report
Lawyers are frequently dismayed at the inability of people to keep quiet.Report
“I had the right to remain silent….But not the ability.”Report
I forget where I read it, but in some crime novel, a remember a line from a detective of the novel as basically, “Sherlock Holmes never actually existed. We work hard and sometimes get lucky, but mostly, people are dumb, loud, and happy to hang themselves.”Report
One more joke for you:
People from West Virginia resent incest jokes. People from [fill in state here] resemble them.Report