I Buy What I Like

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted.  The fast and furious storm of bullshit that is the news forced me into decision paralysis around topics.  But I figure that I can write about current events without discussing the War with Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, Hezbollah, Hamas, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, chronic inflation, Medicaid and SNAP cuts, ICE, cosplaying cabinet members, UFC cage matches on the White House lawn, triumphal arches, painting the bottoms of reflecting pools, that goddam ballroom, and You Know Who.

So, here goes…

I’ll start with the whiskey.  Bourbon.  Woodford Reserve, to be exact.  Even more specifically, the batch purchased by alleged FBI director Kash Patel.  Not content with heading up the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, Mr. Patel wants to be the googly-eyed face of a lifestyle brand.  He’s hawking bottles of Woodford Reserve engraved with his imprimatur.  Kash—sorry, Ka$h—one must carefully safeguard one’s personal branding--has reportedly been giving away these personalized bottles as gifts.  He probably won’t try to sell these due to trademark infringement, but there are other Ka$h tchotchkes to be had.  Seriously.  Just go to https://kashpatel.store. 

Now, it isn’t any surprise if you believe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Just look at the long line of products shilled by Patel’s master over the years.  Most of it garbage, but each of these had their eager buyers.  The grift never ends.

But the trend of taking advantage of true believers points up a larger, more prevalent phenomenon.  I think most of us have consumer brands, famous or mundane, that we favor.  For me, there are items ranging from durable goods to breakfast cereals where I will only buy a particular brand. 

In my case, I make these purchases because each of them fulfills a specific need.  What I’m not doing is making some kind of statement.  None of them is tied to group affinity or loyalty to a cause.  I buy what I like.

But for some of us, especially to people who are chronically online, consumer brands have become still another front of the culture wars.  I first commented on this trend a few years ago in this space.  When it came to light that Dan Cathy, the patriarch of the Chick-fil-A family, had spent considerable funds opposing legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, there was a short-lived tempest on both sides of the political spectrum.  Protestors began demonstrating in front of Chick-fil-As across the land.  SUVs carrying real Americans jammed the drive-thrus with those on foot jamming the indoor lobbies.

Chick-fil-A was one of the first times I connected the dots between consumer brands and culture war virtue signaling.  While there are more than a few brands culturally coded as liberal or even left, it’s those attracting a conservative following so strong that any kind of deviation in terms of marketing or brand identity drives some people into conniptions. I can point to several recent examples.

About three years ago, trans actress and influencer Dylan Mulvaney released a video on Instagram featuring a personalized commemorative Bud Light can inscribed “Cheers to 365 days of being a woman.”  True to form, the right wing trolls lost their shit.  In no time flat, Fox and other conservative outlets were fuming that this single social media post was proof of the unstoppable force of insane liberals and large corporations bending the knee to woke ideology.  Calls went out to boycott Anheuser-Busch.

The boycott did have an effect on sales.  Sales of Bud Light dropped by a third over the ensuing weeks.  By many reports, they haven’t fully recovered.  But the news moved on eventually to focus on some other manufactured outrage.  (For the record, I have been boycotting Bud Light my entire life.  Life’s too short for crappy beer.)

Cracker Barrel has had a couple of public relations scrapes of late.  If you’re not familiar with the chain, think of a cornpone Applebee’s.  Attempting to accommodate patrons following healthier diets, the restaurant added a meatless sausage to the breakfast menu.  It did not remove any of the existing meat items.  No matter.  The red blooded meat eaters were horrified that Cracker Barrel, their Cracker Barrel had caved to the soy boys.  The pushback was apparently short-lived.  As of this writing, Impossible Sausage remains on the menu at my local Cracker Barrel.

The other, more recent dustup concerned Cracker Barrel’s logo refresh.  For years, the logo featured a man in overalls sitting next to a barrel.  The old logo catered to both kinds of customer—those who could read, and those who couldn’t.  A few months back, they unveiled a stylized logo featuring just the name in an updated logotype.  Nothing controversial.

I was wrong.  The social media on the right had a fucking meltdown.  Many posters, having discovered Cracker Barrel’s CEO was a woman, accused her of being a woke DEI hire despite her having been in the position for about a decade.  Another lamented that the logo update ruined what he called a family tradition.  (The chain dates back to 1977.  You know, the era of such traditions as disco, platform shoes, bad haircuts, and wide lapels.)  Still another said his elderly parents swore never to eat there again.

Unlike the great Impossible Sausage controversy, corporate quickly reversed course.  As a number of would-be internet wags put it, the faithful got back the cracker and the barrel.  Right-wing outrage has the potential to shape some brands.  It seems that these people internalize brand preferences as identity.  It is much in the way that many of these same folks internalize their affinity with a certain politician as identity. 

Imagine having so little, so few substantial things to hold on to that you have to grasp at the ephemeral to believe you stand for something.  That is the world we live in.

 

 

© 2026 The Unassuming Scholar

Cultural Desert

My dwindling “Saved” queue is finally at zero.  My music streaming service updated its site and now offers fewer of my favorite musicians and tracks.  My preferred podcast platform is going dark at the end of August.

It seems that some of the best cultural experiences the internet offers are drying up.  The hardest hit for me is Netflix’s discontinuing its DVD service.  The funny thing about that development was its streaming service offered better content 10-12 years ago.  Particularly during the time when Netflix partnered with Starz, I could access all kinds of obscure titles in streaming format such as films produced by the East German studio DEFA.  As Netflix transitioned into content creation, its streamed titles interested me less and the reason I continued to subscribe was mainly for the DVDs.

I’m not sure what I will do now.  I read recently that TCM had cut its staff.  Programming quality there seems to be slipping, and I watch that channel less frequently than I did before and during the pandemic. 

A casual reading of recent news coverage surrounding our culture industries points to COVID as a culprit.  Movies and music helped me through the lockdown, and I know I wasn’t alone.  When it came to music, I listened to familiar favorites, discovered new artists, and fell in love all over again those I hadn’t listened to in ages.

The spike in demand for streamed music increased the value of copyrights owned by songwriters and recording artists while yielding comparatively little return in the form of royalties, which in turn led to what I will call The Great Catalog Sell Off of 2021.  (Bruce Springsteen was reportedly the biggest winner, receiving more than a half-billion dollars for his body of work.  The buyer was Sony; I think they can afford it.) 

The passing of copyrights from what must have been scores of songwriters and recording artists into the hands of a narrow range of new owners is ominous.  It’s true that owning the rights to numerous catalogs afford economies of scale which make streaming profitable in a way it would not be for individual artists.  But it also means that un- or less-profitable artists or their works are more likely to be withdrawn.  I hope this prediction is wrong, but my tapered listening diet of late is anecdotal evidence in that direction.

Time was, there was money to be made from “long tails” marketing to a clientele who wanted niche goods and services.  Online commerce would lower the transaction cost incurred selling to small groups of customers.  I used to believe that.  But like a lot of conventional wisdom, this may not have been true in the long run if ever.  With the growing trend toward concentrated ownership in media, less mainstream consumers will be shut out.

Concentration of ownership in any industry is not a good outcome.  It compels media platforms and outlets to dumb down and reduce the diversity of content available to the viewer or listener.  In the business world, you have to positively spin changes even when they don’t benefit or work against the consumer.  I’m not convinced and you shouldn't be either.  New is not necessarily improved. 

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Requiem for a Spectre

If you’re under forty, you were raised to fear Middle Easterners and Muslims.  For my generation, the bogeyman was communism.

This week marks the centenary of the October Revolution.  Strangely, the anniversary has attracted little comment in the media which is funny when you consider how large the U.S.-Soviet rivalry loomed over 20^th century history.

The Cold War was, in retrospect, more about national rivalry and global power politics than ideology.  While it’s true that the collectivist ethos of the former socialist states was inherently antagonistic to Americans’ individualistic worldview, the East-West standoff was really about global hegemony on both sides. 

Still, throughout my childhood and youth my teachers and the media played up the threat evil communism posed to our freedoms.  Atrocities such as the Cambodian genocide were offered up as proof of the ruthlessness of communist rule and what might befall us should they succeed in their goal of defeating the United States.

This statement, which seems overly dramatic from today’s perspective, would have been credible to a number of people when I was a kid.  Once, in a high school history class, the teacher asked us what was the goal of the communists.  A student in the back of the room promptly answered in a loud, emphatic voice, “The goal of communism is world conquest!”  No one disputed him.  The teacher appeared pleased.

This was in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was doing his level best to antagonize the Soviet leadership.  Anticommunism had become conflated with “patriotism,” and the popular rhetoric ignored realities on the ground.  The Sino-Soviet split had occurred twenty years earlier.  The recently concluded Vietnam War was more about national sovereignty than communism, a truth recognized by many scholars from its start though clearly not by most Americans and their poliicians.

We have a tenuous relationship with truth that goes back much further than the current debate as to whether we’re living in a “post-truth” era.  Our thinking tends toward either/or, black and white reasoning.  We categorically reject any evidence which contradicts our narrative, however manifest it may be to a less partial observer.  This tendency becomes pernicious when it results in defining ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not.

This is a recurring theme.  In our first century or so, we were not those corrupt, rotten Old World aristocrats.  During the Cold War our alliance with the Soviets against the Axis was forgotten as we proclaimed to the world that we were most certainly nothing like those godless commies.  Today, we are not those Muslims who hate our freedom, but this is a topic for another time.

Back to the dialectic between a free, virtuous America and a totalitarian, evil Soviet Union.  If you were with us, your country was a “democracy” and part of the “Free World.”  If you were not, your country was either enslaved or untrustworthy.  This fiction ignored two things.  First, many of the regimes in the so-called Free World countries were in fact corrupt and repressive.  Secondly, whenever the people of one of these countries dared assert their right to self-determination the U.S. and its allies would step in to stymie the attempt—witness the examples of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, East Timor, and Nicaragua.

All this sidesteps the question of the merits of the Soviet experiment, however.  Putting aside the chaos of the Civil War and the totalitarian excesses of the Stalin years, there were aspects of it which compare favorably with the capitalist West.  Many of the ills of capitalist economies were less manifest, such as fluctuating business cycles and unemployment.  The regime at least made the effort to attend to its people’s essential economic and social needs.  The state ideology encouraged the collective welfare over narrow self-interest. 

That last item probably doomed the system in the end.  The citizens of the Eastern Bloc were less interested in political freedom than in Levi’s and rock music.  During the so-called Era of Stagnation between the mid-1960s and the advent of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s economic planners struggled to meet popular demand for consumer goods.  Appeals to the collective good fell on deaf ears when people stood on line for soap and razor blades.  Some Soviet clients, most notably Hungary, managed to satiate consumer demand.  Others, like Romania, were economically inept and politically crooked.

Watching from afar, the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath did seem breathtaking at the time.  The West was vindicated.  It wasn’t long before the downside became apparent, however.  Ethnic conflict in Russia and other former Soviet republics.  Terrorism.  Economic turmoil.  Organized crime.  Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union did not fall for the reasons we use to congratulate ourselves.  It wasn’t the absence of freedom or because of the Reagan administration’s military build-up.   It was that our comparatively free market was more efficient than their planned economy.  What was portrayed as a clash of ideologies ended on a disappointingly prosaic note.  Then again, it doesn’t matter as we’ve long since moved along to newer, suitably evil enemies.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Spectacle

Poking around YouTube, I stumbled upon a doc which had aired on Britain’s Channel 4 a few years ago.  An episode of a series titled How the Other Half Live, the program profiles two families, one affluent and the other poor.

In this installment, the first family is that of millionaire marketing consultant David Abington and his wife Angie.  The Abingtons live in a spacious manse in the countryside with their two young children.  The second is that of debt ridden single mom Caroline Buffery and her daughter, who live in a cramped council house.  The program’s conceit is to compare their lives whilst the Abingtons looked for ways to help the Bufferys.

How the Other Half Live points up the vicissitudes of late stage capitalism.  Mr. Abington, a truck driver’s son with a modest education, succeeded through perseverance and ability.  Ms. Buffery, who gave up an itinerant life as a “New Age traveler” after her daughter was born, earned a criminal justice degree and a master’s in law.  Unable to land a “pupillage” or apprenticeship which would qualify her as a barrister, she works in a betting parlor.  Her schooling has left her with £20,000 in debt she’s been unable to pay down, adding to her woes.

Whatever its producers intended it to be, How the Other Half Live comes out as a bizarre cross between a news documentary and a reality show. Mr. Abington said he was inspired to reach out to a financially struggling family after returning from a vacation.  Traveling in first class, Abington walked with his son George to the rear of their plane.  He said George became visibly apprehensive when they left business class and entered the economy section.

Talk about sheltered.  People living in actual poverty can’t afford air travel, and in my experience the passengers up front don’t look much different from us riffraff riding in the back.  But, never mind.  David and Angie Abington reached out to Caroline Buffery.   

David, who couldn’t place Caroline in a pupillage right away due to the enormous size of the applicant pool, hires Caroline to do legal work for him in the meantime.  Son George and daughter Rebecca become fast friends with Caroline’s daughter Iris, despite their different backgrounds.  And they all lived happily ever after. 

They all lived happily ever after, because that’s what the narrative conventions of these kind of TV shows demand.   It’s certain that this program was partly scripted as reality shows are, that any spontaneity of the subjects was calculated, and that the outcome decided before the cameras started rolling.  The question of whether the Abingtons made any lasting difference in the lives of the Bufferys is unresolved at the end of the hour.   

What is clear is that How the Other Half Live, aside from its obvious reality show tackiness, is that it is part of a long tradition of poverty porn on television.  Poor people make us feel superior, make us feel virtuous by comparison.  Being poor is shameful; in the past when I’ve let my guard down with people I’ve known a while and mentioned I grew up in poverty they would often give me a funny look as if I’d told them I had a social disease.  I’ve since learned not to mention this part of my biography.

Public discourse high and low reflects a trenchant hostility on the topic.  News and political commentary discuss the policy implications of poverty but back away from taxpayer supported anti-poverty programs notwithstanding their ideological stance.  Reading the postings of internet trolls, one can feel a nearly palpable hatred of the poor.  Very little effort is made to analyze the structural, cultural, environmental, and behavioral aspects of the problem.  It’s simpler and much more satisfying to blame the victim.

                                                                                                      

TV programming reflects our cultural attitudes, and depictions of the less well-off or just economically unfortunate cut across decades and genres.  The bathetic How the Other Half Live reminded me in its tone of still another YouTube artifact, this one hailing from television’s so-called Golden Age.  It was a game show, of all things, an installment of Queen for a Day.

Queen for a Day was a daytime show targeted at housewives which had made the leap from radio in the late 1940s and ran into the early 1960s.  It’s an appalling piece of work, perhaps even more exploitive than anything seen on contemporary American TV.   Hosted with cringeworthy smarminess by Jack Bailey, Queen for a Day would call on stage several women chosen at random.  Each would recount their financial problems and tell the host what sort of help they would like to receive from the show. 

The winner was chosen by receiving the loudest applause from the studio audience.  Seated on a throne in a crown and robe and clutching a scepter as the house orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance,” the new Queen was presented with her prizes.  As with Caroline Buffery, we are implicitly assured that the Queen faced nothing but smooth sailing ahead of her.

This particular episode, a kinescope from 1958, is one of the very few which have survived.  True to the show's theme, the contestants each had their own awful bad luck.  One was a single mom whose husband had been killed in a hunting accident.  She wanted to return with her daughter to her family’s home in Ohio and train as a hairdresser.  Another was a military spouse who wanted to build bunk beds in her trailer for her four kids.   Still another was a mother to a bedridden polio victim in a body cast who wanted a hospital gurney so he could leave the house occasionally and a transistor radio to keep him company in his sickroom.  (And if that wasn’t enough misfortune, this lady’s husband was an invalid with a heart condition.)   

The next contestant in the misery parade was a timorous and very pregnant young woman who needed funds to buy inventory for her family's failing grocery store, which she said had a grand total of 64¢ in the till that morning.  (Upon hearing this Bailey took up an impromptu collection onstage, netting a few dollars which he presented to her with flip ostentatiousness.)  Lastly, we were introduced to a mother whose husband was unemployed and also had a bad heart and whose teenage son was crippled by rheumatic fever.  She hoped for a set of encyclopedias and a remodeled bedroom for the boy.

The recent widow was the episode’s Queen, who won a scholarship to beauty school.  The audience acclamation which chose the winner was hard to watch, particularly because I knew that these were regular people and their reactions were real.  The show used an “applause meter” to measure audience sentiment.  Each woman wore an apprehensive expression as Jack Bailey reminded the audience of their wish and awaited their share of applause.  The shopkeeper’s shoulders were visibly heaving from the deep breaths she was taking.

Queen for a Day was pure spectacle, misfortune and redemption as sadistically vicarious pleasure.  We love to see others have their dignity taken from them, as long as we don't give the objects of our contempt too much thought.  In the case of Queen, the contestants’ authenticity is plain to see and this fact adds to the discomfort of watching them share their pain with the viewing public.  The contestants came on stage in their dowdy street clothes and without stage makeup.   A couple of them were visibly wringing their hands as Bailey interviewed them, and they all either stammered nervously or spoke in such low voices that the host had to ask them to repeat themselves.

The fact that each of the women was desperate enough to pin their hopes on winning a game show, especially one with all or nothing stakes, may have overridden any humiliation they might have experienced but it doesn’t make it any more palatable to watch.  I’m actually a bit surprised contemporary TV hasn’t ventured into similar concepts, though attempts to revive Queen for a Day have been unsuccessful.  I doubt it had anything to do with the concept’s lack of subtlety; maybe it just seemed dated or needed a new gimmick to freshen it up.

Still, in a time where the social safety net is wafer thin it’s not hard to imagine equally desperate people today being willing to subject themselves to degradation in front of millions of viewers in exchange for a chance at a prize.  How the Other Half Live strikes me as a marginally more sophisticated form of this tendency.  Social media and our preoccupation with recording every trivial moment on our phones has lowered our inhibitions, though, and Millennials in particular are more willing to trade their self-respect for a little exposure, so the future evolution of these kind of programs will be interesting to follow. 

Television may have reached maturity as a medium.  But it has not lost an iota of its ability to reduce us to rubbernecking at other people’s suffering.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

End of an Era

The passing of Fidel Castro has evoked mixed feelings for me.  Initially I felt a sense of disbelief, as if he might last forever as a living, breathing museum piece legacy of the Cold War.  Fidel was a presence on the world stage for my whole life, and so his death struck me in the manner that, say, the demise of Queen Elizabeth undoubtedly will when that time comes. 

Before Americans were taught by their leaders to fear and hate Muslims, they feared and hated Communists.  Cuba, so close to the United States, was a particular source of unease.  Our mainstream news media played up the Castro regime’s repressiveness, enthusiastically echoed by politicians and the exile community.  That Fidel did not go the way of the leaders of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, that it was not until after he stepped aside in favor of brother Raul that Cuba began the first tentative steps on the road toward capitalism already trod by China and Vietnam, caused consternation among American leaders.

On the other hand, Fidel’s death has elicited laudatory retrospectives of his life, thought, and work among progressives.  I tend to view him in terms of his whole record.  By his own admission he was a dictator, albeit a “sui generis dictator.” His regime had an abysmal record on civil liberties.  It repressed and persecuted the LGBT community.  Castro was perfectly willing to foment nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union.  His emptying the jails of Cuba’s worst criminals during the Mariel boatlift was hardly a laudable gesture, either.

Notwithstanding all this, the Cuban Revolution was a net gain for Cuba.  For the first time, Cuba was a fully sovereign nation.  The revolution broke the grip of American corporations and American organized crime on the economy.  It brought about a fair distribution of wealth.  It placed agriculture in the hands of the people who worked the land.  It led to Cuba having the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean as well as having its best educated populace.  Most importantly, it made quality healthcare universally available, an endeavor at which the United States has failed miserably.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “Special Period” did result in some dents in the revolution’s edifice.  Raul Castro’s willingness to make concessions to the neoliberal order is worrisome though inevitable.  As the country reopens to American investment and tourism one sees the specter of pre-1959 Cuba slowly rising like a miasma.  (Ironically, during the era when the CIA toyed with a number of novel ways to assassinate Fidel, he shrugged off the threat by saying that if he were to die the United States would then have to contend with Raul and “he’s even more radical than I am!”)  I wonder what Fidel may have thought of the first signs of his work being undone.  Did he acquiesce to this process?  This seems unthinkable to the point of cognitive dissonance.

And so, Fidel’s death represents a further loss of hope of preserving the gains of the Cuban Revolution.   I suppose all there’s left is the prospect of playing roulette and blackjack at the Havana Hilton for the first time in generations.  Bring on the Yanqui tourists!

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Deshielo Cubano

After 54 years, the end of an exercise in futility:  The U.S. and Cuba have restored full diplomatic ties.

And what was accomplished by the half-century rift?  Families split apart, the isolation of a people trying only to build a better society, and a near brush with nuclear holocaust.  Yet soon an American ambassador will present his credentials to Raúl Castro.  Quite ironic when you think about it; Fidel used to half-jokingly warn his enemies that if anything ever happened to him they would only wind up having to deal with his even more radical brother. 

But Castro the Younger has proven not to be immune from the global neoliberal tide, permitting a limited growth of private enterprise in recent years.  It’s not as if Cuba’s leadership has much choice.  Having survived on its own for nearly 25 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s economy is in straitened circumstances to say the least.  Once Cuba becomes more fully integrated into the global economy, it will likely become still another haven for offshoring with its finances firmly under the whip hand of the World Bank and the IMF.

All the same, the current thaw is a win-win for both sides.  The U.S. will have entrée to Cuban markets.  Cuba still has the Castros.  I only wonder if the Cuban people will be better off in the end for it.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella

Take-out chain Pret à Manger’s workplace social engineering program is back in the news.

An article in the London Review of Books describes in detail how Pret enforces customer-friendly behavior on the part of its employees through in-store micromanagement and occasional visits by mystery shoppers.  The overarching idea is to inculcate an attitude in service workers at odds with their subjective state. 

Of course, all jobs require us to present a calculated, inauthentic persona to the people we meet; sociologist Erving Goffman pointed this up in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Even the most technically skilled positions entail a certain degree of playacting when dealing with others. 

However, service sector work conditions in recent years reflect the worst aspects of neoliberal capitalism.  The widening wealth gap seems to be heralding the advent of a new Gilded Age in which society consists of a small plutocratic class and a somewhat larger set of the merely rich on the one hand, and a large, financially insecure mass of servile contingent workers on the other.  Between these two poles is an ever-shrinking demographic customarily referred to in American cant as the “middle class.”[1]  Under such conditions obsequiousness has become a survival strategy for the masses lest they be made to suffer further.

What does all this mean for me, then, as a customer who swings by Pret on a business-day afternoon to grab a quick to-go lunch?  Do I want prompt, efficient service?  Of course.  Do I wish to be treated rudely or indifferently?  Certainly not.    But neither do I want insincere, overweening friendliness, particularly when I know that failure to display such behavior might lead to a loss of livelihood. 

That there is a happy medium to be achieved is beside the point.  The capitalist class must keep workers firmly in place.  And the surest means of doing so is to systematically deny each of them their very humanity.  Corporations like Pret à Manger are refining this process to near-science.  Whether we choose to believe so or not, we are all the poorer for the practice.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] That most of this population segment is made up of salaried and wage workers who themselves teeter on the brink of economic disaster is a truth most of us avoid thinking about.

California über Alles

Behold, a curious item from The Baffler by Corey Pein: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/

If you need still another reason to distrust Silicon Valley technogurus and the world they seek to impose, here it is…

In Memory of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot - August 3, 1913

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot. 

The uprising stemmed from the brutal working conditions imposed upon itinerant farm workers harvesting hops at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland, California.  An influx of job seekers, whose numbers far exceeded the number of positions available, drove down the already slender going wage.  The workers who were taken on, many of them women and young children, performed heavy physical labor for 12 hour days in triple digit heat.  Despite the temperature, Durst did not provide water to the workers but instead sold them an acidic beverage to slake their thirst.  Shade and adequate toilet facilities were also lacking.

Facing a strike over low pay and poor treatment, Ralph Durst called in the Yuba County district attorney and sheriff’s deputies to quell the unrest.  The inevitable confrontation led to the sheriff’s contingent firing into the crowd after it resisted their attempt to arrest Industrial Workers of the World organizer Richard “Blackie” Ford, who was addressing the strikers.  At least one worker in the crowd fired back.  When the smoke cleared, four people lay dead: the DA, a sheriff’s deputy, and two workers.  Scores of other people were injured.

As so often happened during the labor struggles of the era, California Governor Hiram Johnson called in the National Guard to restore order for the bosses.  Ultimately, Ford, fellow organizer Herman Suhr, and a number of the other laborers present were apprehended and questioned.  Many of them were beaten or otherwise abused during the interrogations.  One suspect killed himself in his jail cell.

In the end, Ford, Suhr, and two others were bound over for trial on second-degree murder charges in the death of the district attorney.  Ford and Suhr were ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.   When Ford was paroled in 1924, he was promptly indicted for the death of the sheriff’s deputy only to be acquitted at trial.  Soon thereafter, Suhr was pardoned and set free.  

Let us not forget the workers killed and wounded that day, nor should we forget the IWW organizers Herman Suhr and Blackie Ford who were unjustly imprisoned for their efforts on behalf of labor rights.  An injury to one is an injury to all, then and now.

Solidarity forever.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Branded

It appears we are getting ever closer to the day when workers are truly little more than two-footed livestock.  A real estate firm in New York City has offered pay raises for employees who get tattooed with the company logo…

Burying Thatcher, Exhuming Neruda

Margaret Thatcher is dead.

She is dead and I'm once again reminded of the saying that while the good that people do dies with them the evil they've done lives on. (Or something like that.) Together with her ideological soul mate, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher was largely responsible for leading the global shift toward neoliberalism during the 1980s. True to her legacy, Thatcher is to receive a state funeral at public expense even as austerity measures in Britain have scaled back student aid and public assistance for the poor.

While official Britain prepares to bury Thatcher and right-wingers mourn the world over, in Chile a judge has ordered the exhumation and autopsy of diplomat, statesman, and poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda died in 1973 of what was believed to be complications from prostate cancer several weeks after the Chilean military overthrew the elected administration of socialist President Salvador Allende.

Opponents of the military regime in Chile, which was presided over by Augusto Pinochet, a man much admired by Margaret Thatcher, have charged that Neruda's death was caused or hastened by the military due to Neruda's left-wing politics and support for Allende. If this was the case, Neruda's demise would be simply one more murder among the thousands committed by the Chilean military in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 coup.

It's hard to say what will be accomplished by reexamining Neruda's death, save to quiet the historical record. That Neruda's life and career ended as Thatcher's career was on the rise is a bitter juxtaposition. Neruda was a man of humane letters, with all the connotations that that adjective carries, as well as a leader who sought peace and justice for those whom it was in short supply. Thatcher, on the other hand, represented the backlash from a lower middle class opposed to social change, petty, grasping, resentful people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The Iron Lady was in fact no lady, but rather a crass bounder who believed that the public good demanded enriching oneself at the expense of others.

The world will be a better place when it produces more Nerudas and fewer Thatchers. But while Neruda’s memory lives on in the hearts of progressives, it is Thatcher’s which will cast an ominous shadow over the world for a long time to come. For that we are all the poorer.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

 

Austerity

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund have agreed to assist the cash-strapped government of Cyprus with an emergency infusion of € 13 billion.

Naturally, there are strings attached.  In this case, the austerity measures demanded by the EU and the IMF include a 10% forfeiture of savings bank deposits.

The bankers and politicians fail.  Innocent people pay the price, as they have throughout the global economic crisis.  First, they lose their equity in stocks and in their own homes.  Now they are being penalized again for their own hard work and thrift.

And so the greatest wealth transfer in modern history continues apace.  How soon before austerity comes home to roost in the United States?  How will we respond? 

I truly want to believe that there would finally be a backlash against the plutocrats, a true occupation of Wall Street, but I cannot.  Sadly, the public will do what it’s done since 2008.  It will blame the Democrats, shiftless welfare cheats, and spendthrifts who owe more than they can ever pay.  In the end our false consciousness, our willingness to be capitalism’s useless idiots, will be our undoing.  We’ll lick our masters' boots even as they kick us into our graves...

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Don't Call Your Soul Your Own

The customer service policy of UK-based quick-service dining chain Pret à Manger has made the news this week.  Hardly Page 1 stuff, but interesting in its way.

Apparently, Pret à Manger enforces cheerfulness among its employees by sending a mystery shopper to each outlet once a week.  If the anonymous visitor is greeted with sufficient obsequiousness, every worker at the store gets a cash bonus. 

How nice.  Because, after all, I know I want to be treated slavishly whenever I stop in someplace for a cup of coffee.  A fleeting encounter in the bustle of the day with someone I’ll likely never meet again, an exchange forgotten by me almost as soon as it ended, becomes an elaborate three-minute playlet of manners in which the other person’s livelihood depends upon how well he or she projects friendliness.

“Pret” arrived in the States a while back, I’m told, but it has yet to open any stores on the West Coast where I live.  But the chain’s effort to extract the last drop of cheerfulness from its low-wage workforce, described in The New Republic by Timothy Noah, demonstrates late capitalism’s quest to not simply claim their employees’ physical and mental labor but to take hold of their inner lives as well.  (It comes as little surprise that McDonald’s--home of the original McJob--owns an equity share in Pret.)

I like courteous service as much as anyone.  I enjoy dealing with friendly people, provided the friendliness comes from the heart.  But even as civility erodes to nothing, it appears that its last remnants survive within the plastic confines of the food service industry.  Still, I'm not sure if the Pret model is universally appealing.  It certainly isn't for me.  I’m more partial to the efficient, even detached, service at the old school joints I haunt when I’m in the city.  Places where the waitstaff are clad in white jackets, the lighting is low, and the paneling dark.  Aside from the occasional night out, however, I prefer to dine at home. 

But Pret’s customer service policy is a manifestation of a broader trend in the service industries in which so many of us now toil and a dark harbinger of things to come.  No telling how this affects the worker internally.  Kids sick?  Not feeling well yourself?  Bills past due?  Car trouble?  Fight with your spouse?  Your dog died?  Tough luck; you’ll just have to smile and accept your lot as a member of the servant class. 

The work I do has its own emotional labor demands.  But I can’t imagine having continually to contort my affect so as to best please each individual I come in contact with.  

Timothy Noah is undoubtedly correct when he observes that this push toward agreeableness favors women over men given the lifelong cultural pressure on the former to be pleasing to others.  My ex-wife, the product of a culture where emotional reserve is considered a virtue, loves to mock American women’s exaggerated emotiveness.  (“H-i-i-i-i-i!  How are y-o-u-u-u-u!  It’s so good to s-e-e-e you!”  Always makes me laugh.)  Such displays can hardly be sincere, even among friends.

However, sincereity isn’t really the point, then, is it?  Good management practice nowadays dictates exerting as much control over the workers’ lives as can be legally managed.  There’s an element of dominance and submission creeping into the workplace that was unimaginable a generation ago.  And why not?  After all, self-actualization in our society is fully achieved only when one is in a position to exploit others.

And so the Pret à Manger story is simply another installment of a long-running drama in our economic race to the bottom.  Its main plot thread is trivialization of the individual.  The truest expression of depersonalization is when we are asked to alienate not only our time and skill, but our inner selves in the bargain.  The day will soon be upon us, I’m afraid, when we can no longer dare call our souls our own.  

  

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Above the Surface, Below the Surface

Two disturbing news items this morning from India.  The first is a commentary among the many stories on this week’s gang rape-murder of a student on a bus in Delhi.  The other concerns labor violence in the state of Assam.

The Delhi piece attempts to explain the assault on the young woman as the result of “two worlds colliding.”  The shopworn cliché aside, such an assertion is bound to raise hackles.  Explaining crime as a function of structural poverty went out of fashion in the United States decades ago.  Similarly, although the Delhi incident clearly raises questions of entrenched gender inequality in the developing world, these questions also obscure the very real problem of poverty and privilege which are exacerbated by uneven development and a growing divide between rich and poor. 

Although no one deserves the fate of the Delhi victim and those responsible for the crime must be held accountable, one should ask whether this incident received wide attention because of the victim’s social status.  If she had been a slum dweller and not the daughter of an affluent family, would this story have made local, let alone global, headlines?  If she had been the illiterate child of a common laborer instead of a promising student, would we have been as concerned?

The story from Assam concerns the murder of a tea plantation owner and his wife, who were burned alive in their house by a mob of women tea pickers fed up with abusive working conditions.  The plantation owner was notorious for withholding pay from his employees and was known to sexually abuse the women in his employ.  More ominously, he was accused of murdering a child worker last year during a protest and yet he remained at liberty.  The article accuses the Assam police of working in collusion with the plantation owner to suppress unrest.

The Assam article appeared in Dissident Voice.  I found virtually no mention of the incident in mainstream news sources.  This should come as no surprise.  Americans find it easy to muster outrage over assaults on individual rights and dignity, but feel scant sympathy for mistreatment of groups.  It may be just as well that the U.S. news media neglected to report the Assam story, because I suspect it would have been framed to vilify the laborers while downplaying the crimes of the plantation owner.  One can just imagine the lead—“Job Creator Slain by Ungrateful Employees.” 

The events leading up to the tea plantation incident should serve as a warning to Western workers.  While I cannot imagine American employees collectively resorting to something as dire as killing the boss—individual workplace rampages are more our style—the conditions that brought about the tea pluckers' revenge, such as the absence of a union to safeguard workers’ rights, the employer’s wage theft, and the open flouting of labor laws as the authorities turn a blind eye are harbingers of what may come in the U.S.  Our laws already have a strong bias in favor of property rights and property owners, and in those states which have adopted “right to work” legislation individual employees are at a growing disadvantage versus employers.  It might not be long before American workers experience a kinder, gentler version of what their sisters in India have endured for years. 

These events may have occurred abroad, but the dominant themes are familiar enough in our culture: male privilege, abuse of power, the immiseration of society’s most vulnerable people, and the mystification of mainstream society on those occasions when the poor and desperate lash out.  We would do well to heed the lesson of these examples set so far away.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Payday!

An interesting morsel from today’s newsfeed…

The federal bankruptcy judge overseeing the liquidation of junk food purveyor Hostess has approved bonus payments for the company’s top execs.  This is after they ran the company into the ground for the second time in ten years.

It isn’t hard to see what’s next.  Over a hundred companies have made bids for the rights to Hostess’ brands and for the company’s production facilities.  It probably won’t be long before new owners are turning out Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Ho-Hos to sate the American sweet tooth.  And they’ll do it with many of the same executives and without a unionized workforce.

The decision to pay the bonuses defies reason.  In the wake of the 2004 bankruptcy, Hostess’ union workers made wage and benefit concessions to save their jobs.  In 2012, management demanded further give-backs.  When the employees refused, management exercised the nuclear option and effectively killed the company.  Now they have been given leave to pick over the choice remains while the workforce is left out in the cold.

The Hostess case is the latest in a very long string of corporate failures where the executives are handsomely rewarded for poor performance.  The outrage, unfortunately, will inevitably be misdirected at the real victims—the workers.  No matter how egregious the evidence of corporate wrongdoing, Americans stubbornly cling to the just world hypothesis despite its faulty logic.  The workers are unemployed; clearly they suffer from deficient character.  The senior managers receive bonuses; this is proof of their superior virtue.      

The chains of ideology are stronger than any made of steel.  Perhaps the day will come when we can say capitalism died of a theory.  But looking at the political landscape in the aftermath of capitalism’s latest crisis and the American public’s everlasting willingness to believe the lie that the system benefits them, that day is too far off to inspire any glimmer of hope.