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

Truth and Fiction

A couple of items from the Web today underscore the increasingly surreal blurring of truth and fiction in public affairs.

The Onion, almost always good for a morning chuckle, describes a purported speech by Obama that slightly, but only slightly, reflects the apocalyptic fears of suburban tract-house sheep concerning the President.

Meanwhile, Salon, which is marginally more serious than The Onion, features a short article which reports that 15% of Republicans in Ohio, a crucial swing state in the presidential race, actually believe Mitt Romney had more to do with Osama bin Laden’s death than President Obama.

Finally, to cap off the absurdity of this post-convention week, ABC News posted a piece  with a photo showing Joe Biden apparently snuggling against a woman biker in a diner, a real-life scene truly worthy of The Onion’s long-running parody series depicting Biden’s vice presidency.

The first Tuesday in November can’t get here fast enough.        

Mission Accomplished?

Today was a violent one in the democratic paradise we’ve imposed on Iraq.  Over 100 people died in sectarian violence…a phrase that is a neat turn of journalism-speak, a dry, dispassionate way of saying that a lot of innocent people met a horrific end because they adhered to the wrong religious doctrine.

Mission accomplished?  Hardly.  The Bush administration...at home and abroad, almost four years after it left office it’s the gift from hell that keeps on giving…    

...And They're Off!

The conventions are over.  Finally.  After the quadrennial dog and pony shows from each party, we now face eight weeks of media bombardment running up to Election Day while we indulge the delusion we have something resembling a real choice.

In one corner, we have the vapid animatron and his Stepford wife whose smiles thinly veil the threat of a return to a relentless pursuit of failed supply side policies and the accelerated immiseration of American workers.

In the other corner, we have the slightly tarnished incumbent whose occasional oratorical passion helps belie the impression ice water flows in his veins and whose victory will mean only a slightly less vicious pursuit of the self-same policies.    

And if you’re already tired of it all, you still have another fifty-nine days to endure.  Just don’t forget to vote on November 6^th.

A Working Class Hero is Something to Be

Labor Day weekend is an annual milestone which marks, if not the official seasonal end of summer, then at least its symbolic conclusion.

The holiday’s name has become something of a misnomer.  The United States is one of the few countries that does not observe its worker’s holiday on the first of May.  In fact, the first weekend in September was chosen by its founders specifically to distance labor from May Day and its association with the age-old bogey of socialism.  Over time, the Labor Day holiday has gone from recognizing the sacrifices and contributions of workers to being yet another excuse to consume.  

Perhaps it’s just as well.  The labor movement in the United States is in sorry shape.  One key reason is that American workers have made a unilateral suicide pact with the Right.  For a generation the gains made by organized labor have been steadily eroded by the relentless implementation of the Republican economic agenda and the impotence of Democrats in Congress and the state houses.  And for some perverse reason, workers, caught on the twin horns of false consciousness and false needs, have bought into the baldfaced lie of the crooks who own and run the country that this has all been done for their own good.

The demonization of union workers has gotten strident lately, particularly after Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on public employees’ collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin.  Economic policy has become all about relieving “job creators” of their grievous tax burden while slashing such benefits for the middle and working classes as funded pension plans and subsidized public higher education.  The American labor movement itself is partly to blame, resting on the laurels of decades-old achievements while failing to demonstrate its relevance to today’s workers. 

Even in the face of the conservative propaganda machine, organized labor should have been able to hold its ground better than it has.  Union membership in the U.S. has declined to a depressing 11% of all employees (and only 7% of private sector workers), from a high of 34% in 1954.  The current business opposition to federal “card check” legislation is only the latest episode in the long war on unions.

Resistance is futile, it seems—whether it’s resistance to the 1% or resistance to public apathy.  Occupy Wall Street, which appeared to have the makings of a genuine mass movement at its inception just a short year ago, has become a punch line not only for the SUV-and-tract-house set but also among the very people who should have been its natural allies.  By dismissing the OWS protestors as unkempt pot smoking freaks, mainstream society ignores the ice rapidly melting under its own feet. 

In retrospect Occupy was more street theater than political force.  Its message was that substantive change can occur only if each of us takes responsibility for safeguarding our personal and collective rights.  (That last phrase needs to be spoken more often.  It sends a chill of dread down capitalists’ spines.) 

As the national discourse turns into a right-wing monologue, controversy over trivial utterances such as the President’s recent “you didn’t build that” remark illustrates a fact frequently missed: The heroic businessman (or woman) lauded in our culture can accomplish nothing without the efforts of their employees.  Confronting declining work conditions and the growing lack of available skilled jobs, workers must struggle to preserve their human dignity and fight being considered as little more than beasts of burden.  The struggle can only be effective when conscientization is followed by organization.

Enjoy your rights while you still have them.

Happy Labor Day.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Bright Profs, Small Campus (A Bad Parody of a Popular 1980s Novel)

In honor of my fellow adjuncts who are returning to work over the next several weeks, I humbly offer this small diversion…

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this during the last week of summer break.  But here you are, and you cannot say the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the past three months have made the details fuzzy.

The summer has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where Memorial Day weekend changes into the few short days before classes begin.  You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line behind which all is the pleasure of a long vacation and beyond which is the anticipatory palsy of knowing you must soon face classrooms full of slack-jawed freshmen.  Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment when you signed your contract for the fall semester. 

You are seated at a small desk in a big room filled with your colleagues.  The occasion is the semiannual faculty meeting at Snowflake College.  You glance idly at your fellow faculty as they saunter in.  Most of them are locals who live in Treetop.  You can easily identify the profs who commute from out of town.  They’re the ones who aren’t dressed like mannequins in an REI store.

The seats around you fill up quickly.  You nod to Jan as she takes the desk in front of you.  Phil, the business professor, takes the seat to your immediate right.  You like Phil; he’s a decent sort.  Duckie grabs the seat to your left.  Duckie is an affable fellow, particularly popular with the young female students despite his diminutive stature and uncanny resemblance to Jon Cryer.  He also has the grating habit of punctuating every third sentence or so with a rapid fire, staccato chuckle.  You alone seem to have noticed this tic.  You have no particular reason for disliking him that you can put your finger on, but you do anyway.  Despite this, you make small talk as you wait for things to start.

Like a conductor tapping her baton on a lectern, Dean Kimpossible clears her throat.  Everyone looks up.  The meeting begins.

Kimpossible is a stout, fortyish blonde who in unguarded moments wears a hard, vaguely pissed off expression.  In conversation, she affects a calculatedly empathetic air.   You have deduced from her various public pronouncements that her philosophy is mainly a pastiche of bumper sticker aphorisms such as “Not all who wander are lost,” grafted onto odd bits gleaned from Esalen, est, and Gestalt therapy, by way of 1970s Marin County.    

Kimpossible holds a doctorate in Wiccan mythology from an online degree mill, of which she is inordinately proud.  She has been the campus dean for the past four years, but likes to burnish her street cred by teaching at least one section a semester.  She is well-liked by most of your peers.  Your stomach churns at the very sight of her.  You are normally tolerant of flakes, but a flake with an agenda scares the living hell out of you.  You fidget uncomfortably in your cramped plastic chair.  

“Hello, and welcome to our staff meeting.” 

Kimpossible clasps her hands before her and tilts her head slightly to one side.  “Please forgive me if I’m not one hundred percent tonight.  I’ve experienced a family crisis over the past couple of weeks.  My beloved Schnauzer, Fritz, suffered an intestinal blockage.  He nearly died.  Twice!  But I called upon the Earth Goddess to guide the veterinarian’s hands and heal Fritz, and She answered me by making Fritz whole again and in harmony with the cosmos.”  Everyone around you murmurs sympathetically.  Kimpossible acknowledges their approbation by nodding slowly and softly saying, “Thank you, thank you.”

You settle in resignedly as Kimpossible covers the same stale topics you have heard at numerous staff meetings.  You surreptitiously check your watch every few minutes.   You shift and shift again in your seat, trying in vain to get comfortable.  The hard plastic of the chair gradually numbs your posterior.  You regret having had that second bowl of black bean vegetarian chili at the pre-meeting potluck.  

As the dean chatters on, you desperately seek a diversion.  You stare transfixed at the back of Jan’s head and the mass of long, stringy hair spilling over the back of her peasant blouse.  Jan teaches Vedic meditation three times a week.  This is a very popular class at Snowflake.  Clearly, there are few experiences more gratifying than sitting crosslegged on your very own mat with forty other people in a large circle, chanting “Om” in unison for fifty minutes at a stretch while earning college credit. 

Your path and Jan’s ordinarily do not cross.  Regrettably, this has not always been the case.  Your Monday evening section last fall had the misfortune of meeting in the same room as Jan’s afternoon class.  You soon discovered that Jan, carried away by the rapture of communing with the life force of the universe, invariably ran over her scheduled class time leaving you and your students waiting in the hallway. 

You suffered in silence for a couple of weeks.  You wanted to be a team player.  You did not want to make waves.  You learned the custodial staff was not nearly as magnanimous as you.  They complained to Kimpossible about having to set up desks in the room after Jan’s class to accommodate yours. 

You were disappointed but hardly surprised to learn that, in the face of this dilemma, Kimpossible made a perfectly logical decision: Rather than tell Jan to wrap things up on time, she moved your class into a stifling broom closet of a room downstairs over your bitter protests.  Your students blamed you for their discomfort.  They swore they would take Vedic meditation the following semester.        

After what seems an eternity, Kimpossible gets to something resembling a point: “Tonight, we’re going to discuss how we evaluate our students and keep them engaged.  Remember, Snowflake College is like no other college and our students are unique.”

You groan inwardly.  You think, oh god, here it comes.

“First, I want to talk to you about the ways we measure student progress.  Sometimes you just can’t rely on A’s and B’s alone to show students how much having them in your class means to you. 

“I’m also aware that a few of the less enlightened among you are demoralizing students with C’s, D’s, and F’s when you know that all of them did their best and many of them have always been ‘A’ students.  This has to stop!

“Let me give you an example of positive reinforcement that you can use in your classrooms.  When Fritz was clinging to life in the pet hospital, a technician came in to draw blood.  He tried, he really tried, but he just couldn’t get the needle into a vein. 

“Fritz was howling in pain, and I could see that the technician’s self esteem was affected by this.  So I patted him on the arm and said, ‘That’s okay.  You did your best.  That’s all that matters.’

“You should have seen his face!  He brightened right up!  He still couldn’t find a vein, but the important thing is he gave it his best effort and he felt good about himself afterwards.  We must make sure our students feel good about themselves, too!

“Now, I’d like you to share your student engagement strategies with the group.”

You sense an opportunity to shine.  You raise your hand.  Kimpossible frowns.  “Yes, Unassuming?”

“Well, I like to assign small group work—“

Kimpossible sighs and cuts you off impatiently.  “We don’t have time for a story, Unassuming.  How about you, Duckie?”

“In my classes, I give them small group work.  I find that keeps them engaged.  Because, you know, they need to be engaged, right?  Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh!”

“Oh my gosh!  You are so right, Duckie!  No wonder your students love you!  How about you, Jan, what do you think?” 

“I really believe in kinesthetic learning,” Jan says breathily.  “Only by moving around can students get in touch with their inner spirit and fully appreciate the beauty that is the world.”

“True, so true, Jan!” Kimpossible pauses for effect, then continues: “These are all great points. 

“We have to adapt our teaching style to keep our students’ attention.  I’ve decided to start with this fall’s Mavens & Intuitions series.”  Mavens & Intuitions is Snowflake’s monthly community speakers program.  You have attended several events in the past.  You found them interesting and informative.  You find that Kimpossible felt otherwise.

“I don’t like lectures!” Kimpossible proclaims.  “Lectures are boring!  They’re only good for communicating useful information efficiently.  People should learn stuff that’s fun!  That’s why Mavens & Intuitions this year will be about entertainment and doing things people enjoy.

“In the same spirit, I expect all of you to make your classes a truly enriching experience for our exceptional students.  Have a blessed semester!”

At last, the meeting is over.

You leave the building and practically sprint for your car.  You sink into the driver’s seat and take a deep breath.  The smell of the surrounding pine forest envelops you.  The thought of tonight’s meeting and the prospect of teaching another collection of entitled brats sticks in your throat and you almost gag.  You will have to go slowly.  You will have to learn everything all over again…

Then again, maybe you won’t.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar