I was raised in a union household. Both my dad and my step-dad worked at the local Ford plant as electricians–they went through apprenticeship programs and earned journeyman’s cards, which I think is just about the coolest thing in the world. If I had been a boy in my family, I would have my card, now, too. Various aunts, uncles, and cousins also worked at Ford, as did my step-mother for a short while. My youngest brother worked there until drug addiction spun him out its doors. Though I failed the drug-test that would have led to my own job at Ford, I was, at one time, a Teamster, working at a factory that packaged service parts for Ford and GM. In addition to my own relationship with the Teamsters and to my familial link to the UAW, my great-grandpa was a miner in Tennessee, and he was one of the mountain-folk there who stood up to intimidation and violence in order to bring the union into the coal mines.
Though it’s been almost 10 years since I’ve worked in a factory myself, my connection to the auto industry, to factories, and to working-class issues remains strong. In the past several months I have seen both my dad and my step-dad forced into early retirement as the Ford/Visteon/ACH plant they had each worked at for more than 30 years closed its doors. They both believe that if they could have worked for just a few years more, retirement would have been a welcome respite from a long life of physical labor. Now, they’re each talking about getting new jobs—but where? They’re over 60-years-old. And they’re scared.
I am scared.
And I am angry.
I have studied labor history a bit, and I recognize that unions are often bastions of corruption, and I also understand that they have worked in conjunction with both government and industry to contract instead of expand workers’ rights. Still, as the talk of the nation, and even the world, centers on the Big Three Bailout, I am frequently hearing criticism of the union workers themselves—as if they are to blame for the crisis that government, industry, and union leaders have created with lack of regulation and oversight combined with perverse greed and shortsightedness.
Once again, when faced with incontrovertible evidence that corporate leaders are selfish, greedy, and incompetent, pundits, politicians, and citizens point their misguided fingers at the folks at the opposite end of where the true power—and, thus, responsibility—lies: the unionized workers. There’s a lot of talk right now about how Big Three laborers make $50, $60, $70 an hour, and people’s heads are exploding all over at the thought of it. While these figures may be close to the truth for the wage plus the full benefit package earned by a UAW worker, the average wage alone for Big Three workers is less than $30-an-hour. New workers earn half of that—about $15 an hour. But let’s say that factory workers did earn $70 an hour. How does this compare to the $10,000-an-hour that the CEO makes? How has this become an acceptable discrepancy—that some people’s labor is worth $5, $15, $30, or even (gasp!) $70 an hour, but other people can earn $10,000 an hour!?
I mean, we have people making $12 an hour who are angry at UAW workers who make twice as much as they do, but they accept that there are those who make 900 times more than they do! What is wrong with Americans—most of whom will never even make $20 an hour—that compels them to always place the blame for this country’s ills not on its leaders or on the people with wealth and power, but on the people who are shoulder-to-shoulder with them, struggling with them, bearing the heavy, crushing burden of the rich with them?
Here’s a novel idea: Slash executive salaries permanently, tie health care coverage to citizenship instead of employment, and invest in a new infrastructure for mass transit. I am obviously passionate about this issue, but I lack the command of knowledge and fact that folks like Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes possess—do yourself a favor and check out their article here at Common Dreams.
Some of the highlights:
Every Big Three worker could work for free, and it would still only knock 5% off the sticker price
Even including their benefits, labor costs in the Big Three's plants account for less than 10% of the sticker price
General Motors alone provides health coverage to a million people -- workers, retirees and families. The annual price tag is about $5 billion.
Jukebox Hero
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Blood in the Machine
I have spent the past hour typing and deleting, typing and deleting, struggling like mad to find the right words to begin this entry.
We are lost, people. We are so very, very lost. We go further adrift with each passing day, and the ways to count how far we have strayed are countless.
Here is another:
In America, land of the free, home of the brave, a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by rabid Black Friday shoppers.
Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old temporary employee at the store, was crushed underfoot as thousands of shoppers, chanting “push in the doors,” did just that—ripping the doors right off their hinges, these desperate-for-a-deal maniacs stampeded into the store, massacring Damour under their heavy, relentless feet, which I guess were so caught up in marching to the capitalistic tune of consumerism that they just couldn’t register the life they were squeezing out of the man beneath them.
There are no reports of any shopper attempting to help Damour. On the contrary, Damour’s co-workers, as well as paramedics and police officers at the scene, all tell of hostile shoppers who impeded assistance to Damour and who became angry when the announcement came over the PA that the store would be closing because of Damour’s death.
Since hearing about this horrific murder—and this is a murder—I have made myself nauseous imagining Damour terrified, gasping for air, the weight of all those shoppers grinding him into the floor. But, the truth is, I have also found myself unable to stop thinking about the connections between his murder, and capitalism, and consumerism. I cannot help but think that this horde’s behavior really isn’t all that far off from how consumers in a capitalistic society are programmed to behave. Think of this: if a corporation’s purpose is to maximize profit, isn’t a consumer’s purpose to minimize price-paid? That is, in order to be the very best consumer you can be, don’t you need to seek out the lowest-priced goods? Further, capitalism teaches us to celebrate those who achieve success and material wealth, even as we acknowledge that “getting to the top” often involves scrambling up over the backs of fellow human beings. Sure, driving your heel into the flesh of a man trapped beneath you is a bit more visceral than the sort of bloodless exploitation that corporate climbers employ, but the impulse—the drive for personal success or satisfaction; the ambition to meet one’s own needs at any cost—springs from the same notions of individualism that lay at the heart of a capitalistic system.
In the movie Dirty Pretty Things, a character, Okwe, makes a statement about the sorts of people with whom we share our world yet often do not acknowledge—he says:
“… we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your [hotel] rooms. And suck your cocks.”
I think about this whenever I think about one of this country’s most enduring mythologies: the American Dream. As the story goes, everyone is born equal in America, into a country with a level playing field, where, with hard work and perseverance, anyone can achieve economic stability and financial success. Integral to the idea of this American Dream is the notion that those who do not “make it” fail because they choose to fail. This is an important part of our mythology, and it is convenient for explaining the existence of the people Okwe mentions. How do we reconcile the poverty and desperation we see all around us? Or the knowledge that we share our world with people whose lives are miserable and hopeless and grim? By believing that they are responsible for their own wretched existences. Otherwise, we have to admit that the system is flawed. And if we admit that the system is flawed, then we will have to change it. For many people, this is not only a terrifying notion, but it also seems impossible. Further, tempering any impulse to demolish the capitalistic system is the fact that we are so seduced by the elusive promise of wealth and privilege that the falsehearted dogma of the American Dream is a stronger motivating force than is the reality that we see all around us.
We are complacent.
And gluttonous.
And divided.
And, in the words of the late poet Reetika Vazirani, from her poem "It's a Young Country",
We say America you are
magnificent and we mean
We are heartbroken
I will admit that this tragedy at Wal-Mart is an extreme occurrence and that my parallels are stretched. Still, I really do believe that within a capitalistic society, especially one that is teetering, seething, and grasping as desperately as ours is, this sort of brutal, every-man-for-himself mentality is likely to manifest in more and more every-day occurrences. Capitalism can behave in no other way—it exists for only as long as there is a class of people to exploit. As Ezra, the prophet of the documentary Zero Degrees of Separation, says: Without the cogs, there would be no machine.
We are all cogs in this plutocracy we call “America”. And we chew each other up to bloody bits while we keep this brutal machine running.
Jdimytai Damour, I am sorry beyond words. Sorry for your brutal, inexcusable murder and sorry that I used your tragedy as a springboard to other issues.
Whenever a loved one dies, there are words I say, and I say them now, softly, for you:
May the stars welcome you home.
We are lost, people. We are so very, very lost. We go further adrift with each passing day, and the ways to count how far we have strayed are countless.
Here is another:
In America, land of the free, home of the brave, a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by rabid Black Friday shoppers.
Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old temporary employee at the store, was crushed underfoot as thousands of shoppers, chanting “push in the doors,” did just that—ripping the doors right off their hinges, these desperate-for-a-deal maniacs stampeded into the store, massacring Damour under their heavy, relentless feet, which I guess were so caught up in marching to the capitalistic tune of consumerism that they just couldn’t register the life they were squeezing out of the man beneath them.
There are no reports of any shopper attempting to help Damour. On the contrary, Damour’s co-workers, as well as paramedics and police officers at the scene, all tell of hostile shoppers who impeded assistance to Damour and who became angry when the announcement came over the PA that the store would be closing because of Damour’s death.
Since hearing about this horrific murder—and this is a murder—I have made myself nauseous imagining Damour terrified, gasping for air, the weight of all those shoppers grinding him into the floor. But, the truth is, I have also found myself unable to stop thinking about the connections between his murder, and capitalism, and consumerism. I cannot help but think that this horde’s behavior really isn’t all that far off from how consumers in a capitalistic society are programmed to behave. Think of this: if a corporation’s purpose is to maximize profit, isn’t a consumer’s purpose to minimize price-paid? That is, in order to be the very best consumer you can be, don’t you need to seek out the lowest-priced goods? Further, capitalism teaches us to celebrate those who achieve success and material wealth, even as we acknowledge that “getting to the top” often involves scrambling up over the backs of fellow human beings. Sure, driving your heel into the flesh of a man trapped beneath you is a bit more visceral than the sort of bloodless exploitation that corporate climbers employ, but the impulse—the drive for personal success or satisfaction; the ambition to meet one’s own needs at any cost—springs from the same notions of individualism that lay at the heart of a capitalistic system.
In the movie Dirty Pretty Things, a character, Okwe, makes a statement about the sorts of people with whom we share our world yet often do not acknowledge—he says:
“… we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your [hotel] rooms. And suck your cocks.”
I think about this whenever I think about one of this country’s most enduring mythologies: the American Dream. As the story goes, everyone is born equal in America, into a country with a level playing field, where, with hard work and perseverance, anyone can achieve economic stability and financial success. Integral to the idea of this American Dream is the notion that those who do not “make it” fail because they choose to fail. This is an important part of our mythology, and it is convenient for explaining the existence of the people Okwe mentions. How do we reconcile the poverty and desperation we see all around us? Or the knowledge that we share our world with people whose lives are miserable and hopeless and grim? By believing that they are responsible for their own wretched existences. Otherwise, we have to admit that the system is flawed. And if we admit that the system is flawed, then we will have to change it. For many people, this is not only a terrifying notion, but it also seems impossible. Further, tempering any impulse to demolish the capitalistic system is the fact that we are so seduced by the elusive promise of wealth and privilege that the falsehearted dogma of the American Dream is a stronger motivating force than is the reality that we see all around us.
We are complacent.
And gluttonous.
And divided.
And, in the words of the late poet Reetika Vazirani, from her poem "It's a Young Country",
We say America you are
magnificent and we mean
We are heartbroken
I will admit that this tragedy at Wal-Mart is an extreme occurrence and that my parallels are stretched. Still, I really do believe that within a capitalistic society, especially one that is teetering, seething, and grasping as desperately as ours is, this sort of brutal, every-man-for-himself mentality is likely to manifest in more and more every-day occurrences. Capitalism can behave in no other way—it exists for only as long as there is a class of people to exploit. As Ezra, the prophet of the documentary Zero Degrees of Separation, says: Without the cogs, there would be no machine.
We are all cogs in this plutocracy we call “America”. And we chew each other up to bloody bits while we keep this brutal machine running.
Jdimytai Damour, I am sorry beyond words. Sorry for your brutal, inexcusable murder and sorry that I used your tragedy as a springboard to other issues.
Whenever a loved one dies, there are words I say, and I say them now, softly, for you:
May the stars welcome you home.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Queers on Film, Part Two
With Zero Degrees of Separation, filmmaker Elle Flanders offers a vision of the Palestinian Occupation that manages to be both devastating and dreamy. Flanders, whose grandparents were instrumental in the creation of Israel and who spent part of her childhood there, grew interested in returning after coming across her grandparents’ home movie archive. In Zero Degrees, footage of Flanders’s return to Israel and her interactions with two mixed (Israeli/Palestinian) queer couples is interspersed with footage from these home movies. To see these sepia-toned images of the first hopeful steps toward Jewish statehood juxtaposed against contemporary images of the devastating fallout of that march is both enthralling and unsettling, like the deepest, darkest fairy tale, where all has gone awry.
In addition to mixing old footage of an infant Israel with contemporary footage of the Occupied Territories, Flanders also peppers her film with numerous captioned facts—from population statistics and geography and history lessons to figures about the various sorts of barriers used to corral the Palestinians and to separate them from their land and resources. I guess it goes without saying that these barriers also work to keep Palestinians alienated from one another, and, thus, isolated, powerless, and fragmented. While this may be the optimum moment to talk of suicide bombings and other atrocities, my focus here is not on the response of an oppressed people to the violence done them, no matter how appaling I may find that behavior. I focus, instead, on a thoughtful, well-made film and its intimate depiction of four people who daily navigate a world that I only know through media.
Flanders’s subjects are a gay male couple, Ezra and Selim, an Israeli and a Palestinian who live together in West Jerusalem despite Selim’s constant harassment and numerous arrests, and a lesbian couple, Edit, an Israeli, and Samira, a Palestinian, who live together in Tel Aviv where, despite similar political temperaments, they struggle to navigate the psychic distance that divides them. Through the eyes of these four people we see the grim realities of the Occupation, and as they each negotiate their relationships with their lovers, their selves, their ethnic compatriots, and their ethnic enemies, the complex workings of power, ethnicity, humanity, nationalism, and identity politics are illuminated.
As I was watching this film, I began to think about how the checkpoints and other barriers that are intended to disrupt the natural flow of life while creating tangible, geographical borders and margins begin to inscribe metaphorical borders around bodies themselves, so that it becomes impossible to imagine Israeli and Palestinian as anything other than mutually exclusive categories with impassable boundaries. Flanders deftly handles this notion of impenetrable borders by focusing on four individuals whose daily existence flies in the face of it: these four are, indeed, border-crossers, and while their sexuality is never in question, that they are queer is almost incidental. That they are human, however, is everything. I think that’s really refreshing.
Still, it is one thing for me to spend time thinking of nice sentences to describe the ways that these particular four people forge relationships with their lovers—that is, it is one thing to note, in an attempt to be clever, that their relationships with one another “cross boundaries,” with this kind of casual nod to the geographical and tangible boundaries that the Israelis build throughout the Occupied Territories. It is quite another thing to see the Israelis’ handiwork—the trenches and earth mounds, the concrete barriers and armed checkpoints, the fences, the walls, the razor wire … I carry this image with me, now, of ragged Palestinians moving through a disintegrating world, and, in particular, of an older Palestinian woman scaling concrete rubble, navigating hazardous ruins, stumbling forward into her ever-shrinking existence.
I understand that the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories cannot be summed up in a clumsy review of a documentary, or, even, in the documentary itself. Still, I believe that there are certain truths that are self-evident, and this documentary presents them in a clear and unvarnished light. In her focus on four individuals negotiating various volatile landscapes—physical, emotional, political—Flanders shows us a dream of statehood buried deep under the wreckage of a dystopic reality.
In addition to mixing old footage of an infant Israel with contemporary footage of the Occupied Territories, Flanders also peppers her film with numerous captioned facts—from population statistics and geography and history lessons to figures about the various sorts of barriers used to corral the Palestinians and to separate them from their land and resources. I guess it goes without saying that these barriers also work to keep Palestinians alienated from one another, and, thus, isolated, powerless, and fragmented. While this may be the optimum moment to talk of suicide bombings and other atrocities, my focus here is not on the response of an oppressed people to the violence done them, no matter how appaling I may find that behavior. I focus, instead, on a thoughtful, well-made film and its intimate depiction of four people who daily navigate a world that I only know through media.
Flanders’s subjects are a gay male couple, Ezra and Selim, an Israeli and a Palestinian who live together in West Jerusalem despite Selim’s constant harassment and numerous arrests, and a lesbian couple, Edit, an Israeli, and Samira, a Palestinian, who live together in Tel Aviv where, despite similar political temperaments, they struggle to navigate the psychic distance that divides them. Through the eyes of these four people we see the grim realities of the Occupation, and as they each negotiate their relationships with their lovers, their selves, their ethnic compatriots, and their ethnic enemies, the complex workings of power, ethnicity, humanity, nationalism, and identity politics are illuminated.
As I was watching this film, I began to think about how the checkpoints and other barriers that are intended to disrupt the natural flow of life while creating tangible, geographical borders and margins begin to inscribe metaphorical borders around bodies themselves, so that it becomes impossible to imagine Israeli and Palestinian as anything other than mutually exclusive categories with impassable boundaries. Flanders deftly handles this notion of impenetrable borders by focusing on four individuals whose daily existence flies in the face of it: these four are, indeed, border-crossers, and while their sexuality is never in question, that they are queer is almost incidental. That they are human, however, is everything. I think that’s really refreshing.
Still, it is one thing for me to spend time thinking of nice sentences to describe the ways that these particular four people forge relationships with their lovers—that is, it is one thing to note, in an attempt to be clever, that their relationships with one another “cross boundaries,” with this kind of casual nod to the geographical and tangible boundaries that the Israelis build throughout the Occupied Territories. It is quite another thing to see the Israelis’ handiwork—the trenches and earth mounds, the concrete barriers and armed checkpoints, the fences, the walls, the razor wire … I carry this image with me, now, of ragged Palestinians moving through a disintegrating world, and, in particular, of an older Palestinian woman scaling concrete rubble, navigating hazardous ruins, stumbling forward into her ever-shrinking existence.
I understand that the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories cannot be summed up in a clumsy review of a documentary, or, even, in the documentary itself. Still, I believe that there are certain truths that are self-evident, and this documentary presents them in a clear and unvarnished light. In her focus on four individuals negotiating various volatile landscapes—physical, emotional, political—Flanders shows us a dream of statehood buried deep under the wreckage of a dystopic reality.
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