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.