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

A Holiday Classic Revisited

The winter solstice has passed and we in the northern half the globe can look forward to longer days and the promise of spring.

The prospect helps me overcome my deep seated dislike for the corporate bacchanalia of Christmas.  The one exception to my antipathy is lifelong my love of TV holiday specials and Christmas movies.  I’m particularly fond of A Christmas Carol in just about any of its film or television adaptations.  But my hands-down, all-time favorite of these is the 1951 film Scrooge starring Alastair Sim. 

Scrooge was a popular holiday programming staple when I was a kid in the Seventies.  I don’t think it’s seen as much nowadays, despite the wide variety of broadcast, cable, and online outlets.  But you can find just about any old movie on YouTube, and so the other day I watched Scrooge for the first time in many years.

What stood out for me, what I hadn’t noticed in past viewings, was that the film’s emotional impact stems not so much from its evocation of Christmas cheer and hearth and home typical of nearly all holiday stories but from its emphasis on Charles Dickens’ not-so-implicit critique of early capitalism.  For all its atmospheric shadow and fog and Alastair Sim’s rubber-faced mugging at the camera and for all the heavy-handed simplicity of the familiar redemption tale, where Scrooge differs from other adaptations of A Christmas Carol is the supplementary exposition screenwriter Noel Langley and director Brian Desmond Hurst added to the plot.  

The vignettes Ebenezer Scrooge revisits with the Ghost of Christmas Past are such convincing antecedents to the man that one must remember that half of them were never part of the novel.  Certainly, the dialogue reveals the social Darwinism which characterized the Victorian age.  When young Scrooge and young Jacob Marley agree that society would soon undergo rapid and violent changes and that only the strong would survive, they concisely sum up the worldview of the new merchant elites on both sides of the Atlantic. 

I suspect that one reason for the embellished backstory was the temper of the times in Britain when Scrooge was made.  Although much of the luster of socialism’s promise tarnished in the six years following Labour's 1945 election victory, it appeared that the inherent evils of capitalism had at least been checked.   Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the film’s popularity declined in the era of Thatcher and Reagan.  To imply there’s something wrong with unbridled capitalism is a secular heresy nowadays.  (In the immortal words of Maggie Herself, “There is no alternative” to the free market, and “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.”)  When the most elemental gains of 20^th century social democracy such as social insurance and the right of workers to organize are presently threatened, a reminder of how bad the good old days were might have a salutary effect. 

On the other hand, the message can be too obvious at moments.  Consider the scene in which Mr. Jorkin (Jack Warner), a character invented for the film, is confronted with his embezzlement of company funds by his business partners.  Lines such as Jorkin’s “We’re all cutthroats under this finery” and the partners’ willingness to accept Scrooge and Marley’s bailout offer to avoid scandal can touch a sensitive nerve or two in the context of recent events.  Nevertheless, the exploits of Scrooge and his colleagues, both in novel and in Desmond Hurst’s film, raise questions about the relationship between virtue and wealth.  When Mr. Fezziwig loses his family firm to the rise of the new “vested interests,” one reflexively thinks of the small businesses crushed whenever big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart come to a new town.  At one point Langley’s screenplay has Fezziwig deliver an earnest oration on trade as a way of life rather than as mere pursuit of material gain.  It's unlikely such sentiments rest in the hearts of today's b-school graduates. 

                 
Despite the moralism of his tale I think Dickens pulled a punch or two, perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of his well-heeled readers.  After all, Bob Cratchit did not toil in the dark Satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution.  His compensation of 15 shillings a week (or £39 a year) was a fair wage for the time, and it did enable him to support a large family and send his eldest daughter away to school. Living in a pre-consumer economy where most monetary transactions concerned food, shelter, and raiment meant that Bob’s pay could provide a decent life even if it wasn’t necessarily a life of leisure. 

If Dickens intended to illustrate the hardships of economicl inequality, he would have done far better making Cratchit a mill worker or coal miner living in a hovel with his ill-clad and underfed progeny.  The various film renditions of A Christmas Carol inevitably carry over this flaw in the dramatis personae.  Scrooge succeeds partly due to director of photography C. M. Pennington-Richard’s use of shadowy atmospherics to evoke a seedy London cloaked in a miasma of fog and coal smoke.  (Had he wanted to add verisimilitude he could have moved filming off the Renown Pictures soundstage onto the streets of postwar London and probably achieved the same effect.)  Visuals aside, the film’s characters (save Scrooge) tend to be quaint cut-out caricatures drawn largely to impart the warmth of an archetypal old-time Christmas.

Similarly, the Cockney of supporting characters such as that of Scrooge’s charwoman seems calculated to evoke nostalgia for a time and place none of us have lived in.  Listening to Kathleen Harrison’s aitch-dropping, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard screech, I was strangely reminded of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.  I don't mean as a literal comparison, but in the sense that both make us think of the Victorian years as a time of cloying charm rather than pointing up the rough, often brutish lives experienced by England’s proletariat. 

That said, perhaps I’m analyzing too much.  Watch the movie when you have the chance.  Happy holidays.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Lost Minds

They’ve lost their minds.  Conservatives, I mean.

There can’t be any other explanation.  Reading the headlines over the last few days it’s difficult to think otherwise: The National Rifle Association has called for armed guards in public schools following the Newtown massacre, there’s been still another mass shooting, this time in Pennsylvania, a middle aged truck driver has pled guilty to setting fire to an Ohio mosque claiming he was goaded by Fox News’ relentless vilification of Muslims, and the ragged remnants of the congressional Tea Party caucus are stubbornly blocking a compromise solution to the fiscal cliff crisis.

I’m not sure why this series of events is any more comment worthy than others of late.  The myriad permutations of madness that express themeslves so frequently in this society are like background noise by now.  It won’t be long—a few weeks at most—before the Newtown murders fade from popular memory.  More unsettlingly, it will probably be recalled only when the perpetrator of a fresh new atrocity exceeds Adam Lanza’s body count.  Because, you see, in our fascination with superlatives we are pleased even when the unthinkable occurs to set a new record.  Not overtly pleased, but the enthusiasm (if that’s the right word) is clear as the talking heads linger over the latest numbers as if recounting the score in a particularly exciting football game. 

We’ve become inured.  It’s our way.  Twenty-eight dead, and our biggest concern is that Congress is going to raise taxes and take away our guns.  A couple of days ago, I heard a story on NPR about the recent spike in nationwide gun sales and proposals to renew the federal assault weapons ban.   The memorable soundbite was from a man buying a semiautomatic rifle and several high-capacity magazines (and I wish I was making this up): “Ah was savin’ up to buy a new truck, but I figgered Ah’d better buy a new rifle ‘fore the law changes.”   (I don’t remember if this interview took place in the South.  It probably doesn’t matter.  In the same fashion that the inflectionless California dialect has become the norm among denizens of Blue State America, the manner of speech I like to call “Redneck Creole” has become the patois of Red State America.  This poor ass could have lived anywhere, really.)

Now for the obligatory disclaimer: This is not to imply all, or even most conservatives are on the loony Right.  But when one surveys the political landscape at the close of 2012 it is not difficult to infer that the quotidian conservative is at least partially influenced by the propaganda echo chamber created by Fox News and AM talk radio.  Subjected to a worldview which offers pat, self-contained answers in lieu of critical thinking, public acquiescence to the right-wing agenda can be little wonder to the minimally astute observer. 

Of course this raises the question of why so many people so willingly accept such tripe.  In a more charitable frame of mind I would chalk this up to conservatives' penchant for conflating opinion with fact (a flaw shared by more than a few on the Left), their unwillingness to consider points of view which conflict with or refute their own, and a narrow shortsightedness that leads them to support unstintingly policies that are beggaring our country.  When I’m feeling irritable (my default setting these days), I attribute our problems to the millions of brainwashed imbeciles that the U.S. produces so prodigally.

The balkanization of public opinion is, I’m told, an unfortunate byproduct of the information age.  We cherry-pick information to suit our politics.  So it matters little, in the end, what recommendations come of the Vice President’s search for solutions to the gun violence problem.  They will come to naught as Republican lawmakers and their Blue Dog Democrat colleagues alike depend upon favorable NRA endorsements at election time.  Even if Congress does succeed in enacting more restrictive gun laws those laws will inevitably be challenged in the courts, and the federal judiciary has traditionally taken a cautious approach to interpreting the Second Amendment. 

In short, expect little substantive change and more grieving communities until sanity and reason return to our political discourse.       

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Sometimes They Come Back

Even though the semester has ended, I’ve yet to sleep well.

Last night, I dreamt I walked into my classroom on the first day of spring classes.  Every seat was filled by a student from last term.  Taking my course over again.

So much for “out of sight, out of mind.”  Tonight I’ll go to bed early, after a nightcap of scotch and antihistamines.  Maybe that will cut the nightmares off at the knees…

What's in a Name?

I’m in my office, weeding my files after a long semester.  The phone rings.

It's Patti, the dean’s administrative assistant.  “Hi, Unassuming.  Glad I caught you before you left.  Please hold for Dr. Kimpossible.”

I tense involuntarily as I always do whenever I see, hear, or have to interact with the dean.  I choke down the bile rising in my throat.  A moment passes, and she’s on the line.

“Unassuming, I have a question about a student who received an incomplete in your Thursday evening section.”

“Yes?”

“Why (unintelligible) she get an incomplete when (unintelligible)?” 

“Kimpossible, I can’t understand what you’re saying.  Could you please take me off speakerphone?”

“No, I won’t!  You know (unintelligible) that I (unintelligible).  Now answer my question!”

“I’d love to.  What was your question?”

Kimpossible switches from speakerphone.  Bereft of the speakerphone echo to emphasize her authority she repeats, seemingly through clenched teeth, “Why did your student Michelle Johansen receive an incomplete grade?”

“Because until an hour ago, I had no idea who Michelle Johansen was.”

“She was in your class!  She says she earned an A!  How could you not know who she was?”

“Because Michelle Johansen’s ‘A’ was earned by Kyounghee Kim.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just spent the better part of the morning on phone with Admissions & Records getting to the bottom of this.  Kyounghee was naturalized as a citizen a few months ago.  New citizens can adopt a name different from their birth name.” 

I breathe deeply, and continue, tired of reiterating facts I’d spent the first half of the day grappling with.

“So, Kyounghee became Michelle.  Unfortunately, she never told me.  She turned in all her work with the name Kyounghee Kim.  When I downloaded the grade roster I thought there was a database glitch and a mix-up of student ID numbers.  Kyounghee never responded to my emails or phone messages.  Since grades were due the next day and I didn't want to penalize the rest of the class by being late, I gave Michelle the Mystery Student an incomplete until I could sort things out.”

“You’re blaming A&R for your mistake?” Kimpossible snaps.

“What?  No, I’m saying the student should have told me to avoid confusion.”

“Now, you’re blaming the student!  Don’t you know anything about customer service?”

“Michelle is a student, not a cust—“

“Don’t contradict me! What are you doing to fix this?”

“I’ve already submitted a grade ch—“     

Click.  The line goes dead.  I hold the receiver to my ear for a moment longer, as if expecting it to suddenly crackle back to life in a buzz of misplaced recriminations and high dudgeon. 

I hang up.  Guess I should’ve left the office a minute or two sooner.  And there’s no point in hanging around waiting for the phone to ring again.  Especially since I’m already off contract and not getting paid. 

I snap shut my briefcase and head for the door.  Think I’ll celebrate the end of the semester with a couple of shots of Maker's Mark.  It’s a warm feeling to know I’m a free man…at least for the next thirty-two days. 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

  

Looking On

In the opening scene of Haskell Wexler’s masterful 1969 film Medium Cool, two TV news cameramen are recording footage of a solo car accident.  Only after getting the material they need do they call an ambulance for the car’s badly injured, unconscious occupants.

Medium Cool is partly a commentary on the mass media’s fly-on-the-wall amorality in the face of violence, and it is as valid as criticism now as it was forty-three years ago.  In a broader sense, television news and other mass media give us front-row seats at society’s tragedies du jour.  Wexler’s damning commentary came to mind last week after the New York Post published a front page photo of the man pushed off a subway into the path of an oncoming train with the caption, “Doomed!” 

Yesterday’s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the public reaction to it, evoked another scene from Medium Cool.  In this sequence, the TV cameraman who is the main protagonist (Robert Forster) is riding through Washington, DC, as the city prepares for Robert Kennedy’s funeral.   He observes to his soundman (Peter Bonerz) that after the JFK and Martin Luther King funerals we had public mourning down to a scripted ritual.

So it has been with the Newtown massacre.  There have been candlelight vigils and wreaths and other tributes left at the scene of the tragedy.  The community is lauding the bravery of the teacher who led her students to safety.  Pundits of varying persuasions argue over gun rights and the state of mental health care in this country.  The shooter committed suicide, further intensifying the speculation over his motives as reporters and law enforcement pick apart every aspect of his life in search of clues.

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, we are slogging through another round in our periodic, fruitless discourse over the nature of violence in American society.  Each incident is treated as a fresh shock, something seemingly unprecedented.   (A New York Times article from 2000 attempted to identify common patterns among spree killers but its conclusions differ little from current popular wisdom.)  We express our anxiety over the angry white males who so often, though not always, commit these terrible acts.  The passage of time has diminished popular memory, but the first of the contemporary run of school shooters, Brenda Spencer, was a 16-year-old girl.  That said, it was her father, a white and possibly angry male, who had given Brenda the .22 rifle she used as a gift…along with 500 rounds of ammunition. 

The recurring discussion leads me to a recurring point I’ve made in this space, which is that there are certain common threads in our culture which create a propensity for such incidents, a roiling anger bubbling just beneath the placid surface of daily existence which erupts suddenly and with terrifying ferocity in unexpected places at unexpected times.  The perpetrators may be outliers, but they are nonetheless emanations of our collective unconscious as increasingly isolated individuals contend with a hypercompetitive, celebrity obsessed, all-or-nothing, winner-take-all culture.   Bowling alone, to appropriate Robert Putnam’s metaphor for lack of community in American life, seems to have farther reaching consequences than a mere sense of disconnectedness with our neighbors.  Sometimes it can be fatal.

The 24-hour news cycle amplfies and indulges our morbid fascination with atrocity.   It’s hardly surprising that the attention lavished on spree killings grew in tandem with the rise of the cable news networks followed by the deluge of content afforded by the internet revolution.  Pop culture magnifies the deeds of famous murderers, shining a lurid spotlight on celeb antiheroes.   A favorite tune of mine in middle school was the Boomtown Rats song “I Hate Mondays,” not realizing then that the track was inspired by Brenda Spencer’s smartass explanation for her crime.  Even after more than a dozen years after their rampage, the public retains a fascination with Columbine murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that has been manifested in numerous TV documentaries and several film treatments of varying historical accuracy.   Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers came out as our national fixation on random violence was reaching its stride, a fitting bookend to Medium Cool not only in its reflection of the zeitgeist but also in its implicit critique of the media as omniscient voyeur.

The emotional remove we experience watching real-life events unfold on television and online desensitizes us to the suffering of others.  A few recent news items have asked whether a generation of youth weaned on electronic diversions is less empathetic than its predecessors.  I’m not so sure of this.  The so-called “bystander effect” has been implicated in the aftermath of tragedies ranging from the Kitty Genovese murder a half century ago to last week’s subway death of Ki-Suk Han.  It’s a cousin to the collective action problem in that each individual witnessing a crime or accident tends to assume that someone else will render aid.  Belonging to the global village Marshall McLuhan described provides immediacy without the intimacy one would have had in traditional society where every person was sure of his or her place and whose neighbors comprised an extended family.  In other words, the sense of unreality experienced through visual media is carried over into daily life so that when emergencies arise in public spaces we respond passively as if we were watching the events unfold on screen.     

It’s fitting, I suppose, sitting back and watching things unfold.  We’ve already been reduced to consumers and replaceable labor in our plastic corporate utopia.  Having been rendered spectators in our own lives, all that remains is to become spectators of the lives of others.  Being a bystander is really the only community we have left.   Perhaps whatever shred of sanity it is possible to grasp in these times resides in accommodating oneself to this fact.     

© 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.

47% Redux

The election is three weeks in the past, and Republican strategists remain defiant in the face of loss.

Stuart Stevens, a Romney campaign advisor, said this week that while Barack Obama may have won a majority of the popular vote Mitt Romney received a majority of votes among those earning $50,000 or more a year.  Stevens claimed this was a victory for Romney, as it demonstrated that the Republican Party retains the support of the middle class.

Romney won the majority of voters making over $50,000, but lost the popular vote, so obviously the majority of Americans make less than $50,000.  What does that tell you?  Among other things, it shows that the American middle class of yore is shrinking in the face of a three-decade effort of conservatives to shift a greater share of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a few. 

Another inference one can make is that a good number of the fifty-grand-and-up club probably aren’t making too much more than that.  Ignoring the crass pronouncements of GOP bigwigs, Republican voters just a layoff away from falling into the bottom 47% or worse continue to quaff the Kool-Aid. 

It’s a matter of time before cognitive dissonance sets in.  On the other hand, perhaps not.  Americans rarely accept realities that do not comport with their worldview.  The conservative myth is seductive, entrancing even those who stand little or no chance of benefitting from its promises.

Until the electorate wakes up and votes in its true interests, we can’t expect anything besides more of the same.   

Them Ol' Midsemester Blues

They’re waiting outside the classroom, petulant at having been locked out.  I’m running late, arriving a couple minutes before the start of class.

“It’s cold out here in the hallway,” whines one of my young charges, anxiously rubbing her arms with exaggerated vigor to emphasize her distress.

“You know, you could have asked one of the custodians to let you in,” I offer.  “You don’t have to wait for me to open up.”

“But you’re supposed to be here, and you weren’t!”

I sigh resignedly and unlock the classroom door.  The students shuffle in listlessly and take their seats.  It’s getting toward late fall, and most are clad in snowpants, fleece tops, and Sherpa caps.  There’s a nice covering of snow outside, at least a foot after last weekend’s storm, and a few people stare longingly out the window.

Not bothering with the usual opening pleasantries, I read off the week’s announcements.

“All right, settle down, please.  The New Age Club will be selling dreamcatchers in the student lobby Thursday from 3:00 to 5:00, to raise money for their summer pilgrimage to the Sivanada Ashram.  Contact Karma Smith-Jones-Abramowitz for more information.

“As many of you know, Charisma Smith-Jones-Abramowitz twisted her ankle snowshoeing the day before yesterday.  Dr. Kimpossible has arranged grief counseling services for those of you affected in any way by this unfortunate incident.”

A disturbed murmur erupts.  “Charisma’s hurt? “  “Omigod!”  “You mean, you hadn’t heard?”  A couple of students abruptly grab their bookbags and hustle for the exit.

“Um, bye?” I venture, puzzled.

“We gotta go see Charisma!” explains the last one out over his shoulder, the door closing behind him.  I wait expectantly, figuring at least a couple more students will capitalize on the Charisma tragedy by leaving.  But for some fidgeting, however, the residuum of the class stays put.

My fears of an empty room allayed, I continue with the announcements.  “I guess I should add that the varsity Transcendental Meditation team will hold a candlelight vigil for Charisma tonight at 8:00 on the quad.” 

I tense momentarily, sensing this might trigger a second exodus.  No one moves.  After a pause, I ask for this week’s homework.  There are twenty-some students in the room.  Three hastily scrawled sheets of notebook paper eventually make their way to the front of the room.  I frown. 

“You were aware that your research paper outlines were due today?”  I am met with silence, broken by a couple of muffled coughs and the sound of bodies shifting in seats.

“Mr. Scholar?”  a thin, nasally voice calls tentatively.

“Yes, Mallory?”  Mallory is a slight young woman of about eighteen, maybe nineteen.  Mallory is articulate, perhaps even intelligent, and she speaks more frequently than anyone else in the class.  She represents a particular type of today’s college student, the kind raised by indulgent parents to treat her elders as equals.  The resulting air of adult self-assurance Mallory projects serves puerile ends, however.  Because for Mallory everything is up for negotiation, including her grades.  Especially her grades.  I’ve come to dread Mallory approaching me after class, knowing she’s seizing yet another opportunity to cadge a couple of extra points on an assignment or argue about her test scores.   

“Don’t you remember Dean Kimpossible’s new policy?  You know, the one that says we don’t have to turn in our work if we’re stressed?” 

Mallory hands me a preprinted card she’s filled out.  I groan inwardly…it’s a “stress card,” part of Kimpossible’s initiative to raise Snowflake College’s retention and graduation rates by creating a more nurturing environment.   If a student hands you a stress card you have to excuse him or her from an assignment, no questions asked.  And with no grade penalty, of course.   

“Any others?” I ask, knowing full well what’s coming next.  Thirty seconds later, I’m holding a stack of stress cards.

Undaunted, I move on to the day’s lecture.  True to form, they’re not having it.  My efforts to start a discussion are met with complete, cricket chirping apathy.

“…And so we find in the literature that…that…Oh, hell, I’m even boring myself!”  I pull down the projection screen over the whiteboard.  “Let’s watch a movie.”    

Now, that cheers them up.  For a moment or two, anyway.  The film is a documentary, not exactly something that would pique their interest.  But at least I can relax a while, knowing I won’t have to entertain the precious darlings for the rest of the period. 

The film ends, I turn up the lights.  Everyone rubs their eyes as they adjust.  “Okay, last order of business…I’ve got your midterms graded. 

“As a class, you did well.”  There’s an ironic inflection in my voice, which naturally goes unnoticed.  In the general spirit of safeguarding their fragile self-esteem, I’d allowed them to work on their exams in small groups.  This accounts for the high grades.  For the first time, their countenances lift.  They actually believe they all earned their “A”s.  And who am I to dissuade them?

I hand back the exams, and the class slowly disperses.  One last student hangs back.  It’s Ian, next to Mallory the most shameless grade-grubber in the group.  Ian hands me his test paper, a bubble-in form. 

“Hey, Mr. Scholar.  I got #23 wrong.  I answered “D.”  But, I meant to answer “B.”  I did—see, I erased “B” before I bubbled in “D.”  Can I get credit for answering right?”

Give ‘em an inch and they’ll want a mile, I remind myself.  I try not to show my annoyance as I reply. 

“I don’t think so.  I mean, you got to take your test with a group.  What more do you want?  Next time, make sure you’ve checked your work before handing it in.”

This is not the answer Ian expected to hear.  He turns on his heel, stalking away muttering, “Epic fail!”  I suspect he is referring to me.  Too bad the stress card rule wasn’t in place last week when I gave the exam.  I suppose it will make the final interesting.

Looking up at the clock, I see that I let the class go five minutes early.  Time was, not so long ago, I would go back to my office and catch up on my work.  But not today.  I congratulate myself on having gained a few minutes of free time and lock the classroom door as I leave.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Status Quo

The voters have decided and chosen the lesser evil.

The Obama victory last night, as with that of any major party presidential candidate, means very little in the long run for the American people and the world at large.  It is good news for us who care about preserving the remaining shreds of civil liberties we still possess or who wish to extend civil rights protections for women, same sex couples, and immigrants. 

But in every other social arena, particularly in the workplace, a second Obama administration will have the same impact as a Romney administration would have had.  The demands of the global capitalist economy, untethered to any bedrock of morality, presided over by sociopathic profit seekers, will continue to dictate U.S. policy as it has for the past generation.  Expect more of the same—more industry-funded union-busting efforts, more state right-to-work legislation, and the steady erosion of personal economic security as the American working class is sacrificed in the race to the bottom.    

If you find you’re worse off four years hence, don’t blame it on your vote.  The only option you ever had was the status quo. 

Vox Populi

Here is an interesting tidbit culled from YouTube.  It’s footage from a Romney campaign rally in Ohio this week.

There’s a saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God.  If that is the case, then God help God.

Home Stretch

October is drawing to a close, the debates are over, and we are little more than a week away from the end of the 2012 presidential race.

The closer November 6^th draws, the shriller the rhetoric gets.  Both candidates are hurling jabs at each other’s record and respective economic programs, while their acolytes in the chattering classes argue bitterly over everything from tax policy to healthcare to whether the administration acted appropriately on intelligence related to the Benghazi consulate attack. There has also been the inevitable pop culture spillover: Conservatives are up in arms over enfant auteur Lena Dunham’s suggestive pro-Obama video, and a clutch of concertgoers walked out on Madonna after she urged them to vote for the president during a performance.

The polls show we are just as divided as we’ve been for the past dozen years…Obama and Romney are tied at 48% among registered voters according to Gallup.  Ideologues aside, most of us will vote for the perceived lesser evil.  The other major contest, however, is the one most people aren’t paying attention to: the race for control of both houses of Congress.  But 468 separate races—for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and the 33 Class I seats in the Senate—don’t hold nearly the media sway as the personality-driven choice we make every four years for the top job. 

We ignore the congressional elections because they seem irrelevant to daily concerns.  Perhaps they are in the larger scheme.  One could argue the same of the presidential race; we only believe it significant because of the attendant media saturation.  Our apathy is literally systemic.  The reason we don’t participate in politics, save to vote, is because we are effectively cut out of the policy making process.  At the national level (and at the state level too), the “iron triangle” of interest groups, bureaucrats, and legislators forms policy.  The things that affect us most directly—public school quality, whether there are enough cops on the street, and how soon the potholes on your street get fixed—are governed by largely anonymous local officials whose names we either skip on the ballot or vote for blindly without recognition.   

All the same, if voting is our only role within the existing system we should make the most of it.  As an engaged citizen, I’ll devote my efforts over the next few days to urging my neighbors and coworkers to take charge of their future and cast their ballot.  Starting now.  Let’s see, let me bring up my friends’ numbers on my phone here and…hmmm, it’s Sunday, I shouldn’t really bother them…oh, who am I kidding?  Game 4 of the World Series is on…can’t miss that.  I’ll make my calls tomorrow, sometime, maybe. 

Go Giants!   

George McGovern (1922-2012)

Former Senator George McGovern has died.

His passing should make us consider what might have been.  McGovern is best remembered for having lost the 1972 presidential election to incumbent Richard Nixon in the biggest landslide in U.S. history. 

McGovern’s drubbing at the polls was an object demonstration of the American voter’s egregious lack of judgment.  Nixon’s resignation in disgrace a scant twenty-one months after his electoral triumph must have caused even the president’s most fervent supporters to kick themselves for their stupidity.  (On the other hand, maybe it didn't.  A political cartoon from that time shows two men at a bar, with one saying to the other, “Hey, Nixon’s no dummy.  If the American people wanted moral leadership, he’d give it to them.” The humor in that piece hits a little too close to home for comfort.)

McGovern was not perfect by any means; his quick repudiation of his first running mate Tom Eagleton after it was revealed Eagleton had once been treated for clinical depression being the best remembered example of his fallibility.  Nevertheless his defining characteristic was his fundamental decency, something lacking in virtually every presidential candidate for the last thirty years. 

McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran as well as an academic historian, was an early opponent of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.  After one measure he sponsored to defund the war failed to pass, McGovern proclaimed, “This chamber reeks of blood!”  It is nearly impossible to imagine a member of Congress saying anything like that today about Afghanistan or any other of our recent wars.  Nixon, by contrast, promised to end the war during his 1968 campaign but only concluded the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam a few weeks before the 1972 election.  Unsurprisingly, both public and pundits forgot his foot-dragging and widely praised Nixon's success.  Nixon's saturnine, uncompromising style, which had worked against him throughout his political career, actually helped his cause in 1972.  Despite the Vietnam debacle, Nixon's silent majority had no patience for what they saw as anti-American ideas or the excesses of the '60s youth culture.  For them, a McGovern presidency would mean condoning what they held to be anathema.  

McGovern was a good guy. Unfortunately, good guys with ethics often finish last in this country.  In a culture where we strive to impose our will on each other and seek to impose it on the world, it is clear why he did not achieve this nation’s highest office.  As the man in the cartoon said, Americans aren’t interested in moral leadership. They want to be told they are the best, that they are always right, and that they are always blameless.  George McGovern’s plainspoken style conflicted with our self-image, reminding us that power does not necessarily equate with greatness. I only wish we had public servants like him today.   

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Columbus Day

Today is Columbus Day, the federal holiday which commemorates a white guy who got lost and thought he landed in India.

Please consider signing an online petition to Congress in support of replacing Columbus Day with a holiday honoring Native Americans.  You can find the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/indian/petition.html.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)

British historian and truth teller Eric Hobsbawm died yesterday at age 95.

Requiescat in pace.

 

Indispensable People

Once in a while, common sense is reflected in social scientific research.  According to an item in the Huffington Post this week, a new study finds that bosses tend to be less stressed than their employees.

Surprise, surprise.  Although the article avers that the Harvard study defies the “conventional wisdom” that greater pressures are part and parcel of the greater responsibility shouldered by our betters, those of us in the rank and file know better.

It all comes down to security and life chances.  It’s true enough that CEOs and managers lose their jobs every day.  It’s also unlikely that these people will spend much time unemployed.  Even if it takes longer than expected to land a new position, the superior compensation enjoyed by senior management, often sweetened with golden parachutes upon termination, soften the blow of being out of work.

Not so with most workers.  After thirty-some years of neoliberal economic policies, flat wage growth, offshoring, union-busting, and cuts to pensions and social programs, faced with the struggle to make ends meet and the threat of unemployment with only a badly frayed safety net to catch them when they fall, the American working class is beset with anxiety and feelings of helplessness bordering on Weltschmerz.   

This is to the advantage of employers, of course.  A fearful worker is a docile worker.  A large surplus labor pool, undereducated and fitted only for the deskilled service work of the postindustrial economy, keeps wages low and serves as an object example to anyone tempted to buck the system.  The widespread reliance on consumer credit to maintain the comfortable standard of living we all expect further serves to discipline the workforce by way of postmodern debt servitude.  It’s probably best not to mention the certain economic disaster lurking behind illness or accident even when the unfortunates are insured.  Too many of us go to work every day with the bleak knowledge that we are expendable hostages to misfortune.    

The underlying lesson of the Harvard executive stress study is clear and simple: In our free market system, some people are more indispensable than others.    

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

We Are (Still) the 99%

The Occupy Wall Street movement began a year ago today with its first, namesake demonstration in New York City.

By turns iconic, inspiring, and frustrating, OWS has if nothing struck a deep nerve in American public opinion.  As with liberalism and progressivism since the Age of Reagan, Occupy has been largely defined by its conservative opposition.  In the popular perception fostered by the mass media, the Occupiers are, interchangeably, smelly hippie wannabes who need to grow up and get a job or a bunch of overprivileged, overeducated brats who don’t know how ordinary people live.     

The truth is, as always, more nuanced than the popular stereotypes admit.  A point of comparison may be helpful.  The Tea Party, OWS’s obverse in so many respects, is thought to have suffered from the same public misapprehensions.  A crucial difference between the two movements, however, is that the Tea Party was in no small measure the product of interest group astroturfing.  If not for extensive funding by groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers and the attendant access to the media resources necessary to persuade and organize rank-and-file voters, it’s unlikely the Tea Party as a purely grassroots phenomenon would ever have had enjoyed the successes it did in the 2010 midterm elections. 

Although the mass media were somewhat useful in airing Occupy’s message, OWS never received the same volume of coverage as the Tea Party.  Compounding the problem was a question of vision, a problem with public image, of means and ends.  Apart from asserting the power of the 99% and protesting corporate power, Occupy never articulated a coherent message.  This much was clear both in the Occupy marches I attended last fall as well as academic discussions about what the whole thing meant. 

The messaging problem was an intractable one from the start.  There appeared as many facets of Occupy as there were adherents, as many political tendencies as factions.  Meanwhile, fragmented media images defined Occupy for the rest of the world.  Unkempt squatters in New York’s Zuccotti Park.  College kids pepper sprayed by police on the UC Davis quad.  But it was the prominence of anarchists in Occupy Oakland and their refusal to back down in the face of police intimidation, together with reports of incidental damage to private property during demonstrations that served to solidify mainstream distaste with the overall movement.  Once OWS and anarchism became conflated in the public mind, any residual sympathy evaporated. 

Much like “communist” and “socialist, “anarchist” is a term understood viscerally rather than intellectually.  Anarchists may not be the mad bombers they were seen as (and sometimes were) a century ago, but they’re still pretty scary to folks out in the sterile precincts of suburbia.  Rather than seeing anarchists as people practicing a philosophy of non-exploitive, non-hierarchical social cooperation, the dominant image is that of black-masked thugs smashing in the plate glass window of a Starbuck’s.  In the absence of any substantive coverage, it’s sufficient to alienate the people necessary to make Occupy a broad-based social movement.

One sign of hope from Occupy is that it signals an emergent struggle for the soul of the middle class.  The majority may still be in thrall to the free market myth, but a small and vocal segment of educated, aware citizens who see personal economic difficulties as structural rather than as an outcome of character failure can help shape public opinion in favor of more humane economic and social policies.  From that start point, perhaps the realization that the economic crisis we’re suffering is truly global in scope will take hold and more of us will find common cause with those afflicted worldwide. 

We are—still—the 99%.  All we need to move forward is a common cause, a common consciousness, a single purpose.  Occupy Wall Street may not have gained momentum as a mass movement in its formative stages.  But it can show us the way forward.  Perhaps we will see in Occupy’s second year a fuller realization of the potential that was so evident in its first, heady days.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Blowback

On what was predicted to have been a quiet 9/11 anniversary, rioters in several Libyan and Egyptian cities attacked U.S. diplomatic missions, resulting in several deaths. 

The worst of these was on the Benghazi consulate, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.  The protests have spread to Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and India over the past two days, and these are just the major incidents.  There have also been demonstrations reported in Europe and North America. The cause of all the commotion: An online trailer for a poorly made web film titled The Innocence of Muslims, which purports to depict the life of the Prophet Mohammed in a manner deemed blasphemous by Muslims. 

For several days, the filmmaker’s identity was a mystery.  At first claimed to be one “Sam Bacile,” a man for whom no information could be found, it turns out the auteur was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Egyptian immigrant.  Nakoula is something of a colorful fellow, with convictions for bank fraud and drug dealing.  Apparently bitter over the treatment of his people by Egypt’s Muslim majority, and knowing he could capitalize on America’s kneejerk Islamophobia, Nakoula produced a crude work of religious slander. 

There are two tightly interwoven reasons for the reaction The Innocence of Muslims provoked.   The first is the West’s century-long economic exploitation of the Middle East and its support of corrupt and repressive regimes.  The second is a Western animus toward Muslims, regardless of ethnicity, that ranges from casually dismissive contempt to open hatred. 

In the United States, anti-Muslim prejudice is bound up with the belief that the American people and the American way of life are indisputably superior to all others, anxiety over America’s perceived decline as a world power, and our dependence on imported oil.  As a child in the 1970s, I remember the adults around me railing against the goddamn Arabs who were driving up gas prices.  The Iran hostage crisis—a backlash against Western abuses that should have sent a clear message that a change of attitude was in order—merely fueled the aggrieved anger.  The patriotic fervor surrounding the 1991 Gulf War reflected frustrations over decades of Middle Eastern unrest.  The popular reaction to 9/11 needs no explanation.

It’s a cheap shot to chalk this xenophobia up to the facile observation that Americans are just dumb.  Given the breadth and depth of information available to them, as well as the affluence that would enable travel, this assertion nonetheless contains a sliver of truth.  Less than a third of U.S. citizens hold a passport.  When we do travel, it’s usually to countries with amenities similar to home.  If we vacation in poorer countries, it’s to visit lavish resorts that tell little about how the locals actually live.  Even in those instances where Americans have contact with non-Western cultures that knowledge is clouded by distinct cognitive filters, the travels of evangelical youth groups and Mormon missionaries for example.  It is unlikely that many Americans who have travelled in Muslim countries have come away with a positive impression due to their insular worldview.

The democratization of media ushered in by the digital age has burdened us with ideological blinders.  One result is that in our desire to be told what we want to hear, we often confuse opinion with fact.  The conservative blogosphere is rife with the libel that the Prophet Mohammed was a pedophile because he took a child bride.  It doesn’t matter that child marriage was a common practice in many cultures, including those of medieval Christendom, and were normally contracted to cement alliances and not necessarily as sexual unions; nevertheless, the insinuation of deviance alone is enough to condemn a whole swath of humanity.  (The histories of each of the Abrahamic religions contain numerous episodes at odds with modern mores.  It’s probably just as well not to dwell too much on the idea of God impregnating an adolescent Virgin Mary, for instance.)    

An overlooked dimension to right wing anti-Muslim hostility is the memory of the Nation of Islam’s militancy during the Civil Rights Movement.  This experience surely informed subsequent popular anger over Middle Eastern anti-Americanism.  The thought of dark skinned people professing a strange faith that gives them the courage to stand up is enough to strike fear and loathing into heart of any redneck, whether “those people” (sarcasm intended) are at home or ten thousand miles away.  

This is the heart of the matter.  Americans can be frustratingly small minded and paranoid.  And yet it has much in common with its proclaimed enemy.  How is spending every Sunday morning in a cavernous Wal-Mart-style megachurch listening to the ravings of some bucktoothed ignoramus any different from the devout Muslim who faithfully goes to mosque to receive the dicta of the imam?  Is the person in Jackson, Mississippi who wishes death on Islamist militants all that dissimilar from the Afghan villager who wishes the same on American soldiers?  How much moral space really exists between the Palestinians who publicly celebrated upon learning of the 9/11 attacks and the red-blooded American patriot who takes satisfaction from the bombing of innocent civilians?  There is ugliness to spare on both sides.

Perhaps it’s somewhat simplistic, but the ugliness on this side has an easily identifiable cause: The quotidian American’s lack of worldliness and cultural sensitivity.  The American’s responsibility in this respect is greater than that of other peoples because we came to the Muslim world, not the other way around.  It is incumbent upon us to understand the problems and popular attitudes of the Muslim peoples because our country has meddled in, manipulated, and distorted their sociopolitical lives for over six decades.  Our history with the Muslim world did not begin on September 11^th, 2001.  It began much, much earlier, and the sooner we truthfully confront the United States’ role as an imperial power the sooner we can move toward some semblance of reconciliation.

Ignorance is never bliss, even if you are an American.

                 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar