Please Back Off

I’ve just finished watching Won’t Back Down, last year’s movie about parents who defy the odds to improve their kids’ education.

Won’t Back Down, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businessman Philip Anschutz, promoted by Michelle Rhee, and touted by conservative school “reform” advocates, makes its point in a predictably hamfisted fashion so that even the densest teabilly Wal-Mart shopper can figure it out.  I thoroughly hated it, as I expected to.  The story was inspired by a real-life incident a couple of years ago where parents used California’s parent-trigger law to convert a failing public school into a charter institution.

The producers signed a raft of well-known names for the project.  Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the main character, Jamie, while Viola Davis plays Jamie’s ally, Nona.  Clearly the project was well-financed, considering they also brought on Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. 

Despite the strong cast, I was underwhelmed by the acting.  There was very little chemistry among the actors, and I just wasn’t convinced by their performances.  Also, and I can’t explain why, the Gyllenhaal siblings have always rubbed me the wrong way.  And so I couldn’t help but chuckle at thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal, a paragon of liberal smugness, cynically accepting the lead role in a right-wing propaganda flick.  Really, Maggie?  Did you need the money that badly?

Back to the film: Jamie is a plucky single mom who works two jobs while raising a daughter with learning disabilities.  Frustrated by her little girl’s lack of progress in school, she joins up with burned out elementary school teacher Nona after discovering a loophole in the law which allows parents and teachers to take over a school if it is failing.

Gyllenhaal and the scriptwriters self-consciously strive to imbue Jamie with an air of blue collar authenticity.  Jamie speaks in malapropisms while letting her daughter watch TV and munch Snickers bars after school.  She’s awed by Nona’s neatly kept home.  Her sense of boundaries is poor at best as she importunes parents, teachers, and administrators alike to do what’s right for her daughter. 

Won’t Back Down is a mostly conventional buddy film / fight-the-system tale.  Predictably, it concludes with the obligatory corny feel-good scene I remember in every Eighties inspiring teacher movie from Stand and Deliver to The Dead Poets’ Society.  But that’s not its worst sin.  At least twice in the film, Jamie quotes Gandhi’s purported aphorism, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as justification for her efforts.  It’s like when wingnuts such as Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck quote Martin Luther King; it just comes off as vaguely sacrilegious.

At its heart, Won’t Back Down is an odious anti-union, anti-public education screed.  Throughout the movie, Jamie and Nona are stymied at every turn by two-dimensional cardboard cutout foes in the form of a sclerotic school bureaucracy, a do-nothing board of education, and a union which protects incompetent teachers through tenure.  (A “job for life after two years,” as one character puts it, perpetuating a cherished conservative myth.)  Unionized teachers, we’re given to understand, have no incentive to educate beyond collecting their inflated taxpayer underwritten salaries.  

While Won’t Back Down is a poorly made hack piece which will be soon forgotten, I wish I could say the same for the movement that spawned it.  We are on a slippery slope toward school privatization and teacher deprofessionalization because of the moneyed conservative forces working toward this end.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one well-known culprit.  The Walton Family Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation are two others.

But the worst of the rogue’s gallery of charitable foundations, to my mind, is the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.  Mr. Broad, who made his fortune in insurance and by building innumerable subdivisions of tacky tract houses, did what any other egotistical plutocrat would do when faced with the prospect of paying taxes.  He simply donated a fair chunk of his wealth to a charitable foundation he created then devoted himself to doling it out as a means of wielding power.  Among its programs, the Broad Foundation sponsors an “academy” to train school administrators for the new reality of K-12 education, which is that public schools must produce a uniform “product” regardless of students’ widely varying individual aptitudes.  The test will tell: Poor scores equal unemployed teachers.

Eli Broad suffers from the same conceit other wealthy individuals share.  Because he was successful at business, this makes him an expert in every other field of endeavor.  This is especially true when it’s a service provided by the public sector.  As we all know, government’s sole raison d’être is to siphon off the hard earned wealth of job creating entrepreneurs.  Therefore, it can only be made efficient when business people either privatize, or at least apply private sector practices to, government work.  (Never mind the non sequitur underneath this assumption; there’s no moneymaking potential in taking the liberal arts courses where you would learn what one is.)

The Broad Foundation is gradually making inroads into higher education.  My alma mater recently opened a new field house built with money donated by the Broads.  To my deep distaste, the president of the endowment foundation of the college where I work is the CEO of a real estate development company owned by Eli Broad.  I believe these are harbingers of a larger trend.  It won’t be long before pressure is brought to bear on college presidents and boards of trustees to scale back or eliminate general education requirements and non-vocational majors in favor of the University of Phoenix model of workforce training.  It’s never a good idea to encourage the life of the mind when the kind of people you want working for you are narrowly trained technicians who don’t ask a lot of probing questions.

If there is a hell, I hope there is a special corner reserved for Eli Broad.  As it is, the evil he’s done in his lifetime will be perpetuated through his foundation.   And I am not one of those progressives who put their faith in the secular eschatology of revolution.  Sometimes the bad guys win.  The hardest part is when everyone around you is convinced they’re the good guys and are cheering them on to victory.

Just like in Won’t Back Down. 

     

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Don't Call Your Soul Your Own

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar