After World War II, psychologists tried to use the work of Freud to explain that of Hitler. They began with the simple model, drawn from physics and the steam engine, that human energy must be channeled. If it is not, it is diverted into aggression. Without a safety valve, that aggression becomes bigotry and mass hatred.
Since last summer, when people began admitting the economy had problems, there has been an increasing number of examples of undiffused aggression when people showed up at John McCain or Barak Obama rallies primed to vent their anger. More recently, political groups have been trying to manipulate that rage to destroy Obama’s presidency.
Many in the media are trying to identify what they call the astroturfers, the lobbyists and political spokesmen who hope to gain from public demonstrations of anarchy. Others are saying the anger is legitimate and we must listen to what demonstrators are saying. Still others are suggesting it isn’t what they say that matters, but that they are so easily enraged.
With all our sophisticated knowledge of non-verbal communication and the deconstruction of language, we sometimes lose our ability to know when to listen to what people are trying to say and when to probe deeper.
When Timonthy McVeigh said he blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 because the federal government had overstepped its powers when it attacked Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, he believed what he said. Many of the people who use their web sites as journals of self-loathing are trying to understand themselves. We would we wise to overcome our Morsberger responses and listen when people are trying to say something we have a hard time understanding.
When what we hear is pure rage it’s harder to listen. If you confronted some people at public rallies who are attacking Obama with accusations of racism they would deny they were bigots because they don’t see genocide as a solution. Their rage is simply looking for an outlet, and they take up whatever slogans are available. As Marshall McLuhan would have said, their medium is their message.
The important social question is why are so many people so angry? Even if you discount those who have been maladjusted since childhood, there is still a great deal of raw emotion floating in the ether. Everyone has a pet theory he or she can trot out - it’s the lack of jobs, it’s the role models of the media, it’s the loss of social mobility and status, it’s jealousy, sexual inadequacy, the abandonment of a religion that confronts human weakness.
My particular hobbyhorse is that we’re back at the corner Twelfth and Clairmount.in Detroit on July 23, 1967, before everyone agreed the cause of urban unrest that summer was racism rather than something structural in our economy.
We’ve now gone through forty years, while the economy has been contracting for uneducated workers, using race to argue about allocating the remaining jobs, and elected a president who made clear he wouldn’t continue the tactics of men like Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson who navigated those treacherous waters.
In a way people are right when they say we are post-racial. It doesn’t mean people are any more tolerant or that Blacks have any more opportunity, but that the rage that fed the urban riots in 1967 has now spread to the general population and cannot be dismissed as bigotry. We are challenged to confront the problems we evaded back then, but like every time a cultural problem is ignored, when we face it again, our tools have devolved, this time when decisions were made to export our manufacturing and devalue our belief in a community supported by taxes.
Showing posts with label Culture Breakdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture Breakdown. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Sunday, August 09, 2009
School Shootings
Gun violence has become so common, it rarely stays in the news for more than a few days. The ones that shocked me, Columbine and Virginia Tech, were the ones that could not be dismissed as individual anomalies but indicated institutional failure.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
How Long Can It Take?
When Michael Jackson died we were told it would take several weeks for lab results to tell us the cause of death. When my friend got the plague she was told it would be several weeks before they knew if any of the animals in her area were infected. When the body of a five-year-old girl was found in Monroe, Michigan, her family was told it would be several weeks before tests would tell them if she was the missing Nevaeh Buchanan.
Fortunately, I have limited experience with lab tests. Some had a day’s delay caused by the need to air express samples out of state. In the cases of Jackson, Buchanan, and my friend the tests were done by state laboratories that could be reached quickly by a car. With Jackson and Buchanan, the transporting cruisers would have been justified if they used sirens.
Tests I’ve had done to detect bacteria took time because the samples needed to sit in conditions that would accelerate the growth of the small organisms. It took a week before they could tell my friend only her dog had traces of the plague in his blood and that none of the wild animal’s they trapped had been infected. The source of the fleas is still unknown.
Buchanan required DNA testing; Jackson chemical tests. Neither have the time constraints that organic tests have.
When they finally identified Buchanan’s body, the state police said they placed her tests ahead of "others backlogged for months - hundreds of them homicides." It still took four days for a family whose child had been missing sixteen days.
Michigan, of course, has had budget problems for years, and probably long ago cut forensic staffs. One can only guess what’s going on in California as the state careens towards bankruptcy, and the Los Angeles police department has done little to improve its credibility since it arrested O. J. Simpson.
The promise of Sherlock Holmes that tests could provide positive evidence has disappeared in a cultural refusal to support science and a willingness to accept the consequences. In Buchanan’s case, three known sex offenders were arrested because they knew her mother, and two are still in protective custody waiting to be punished for knowing the woman. They may have committed no other crime, but in the anxious waiting period when nothing was known people needed assurance their children were safe and demanded the police show some sign of action.
If Detroit is frequently listed as the murder capital on the country, it isn’t simply the city that’s responsible, but all those taxpayers who are willing to let hundreds of cases languish in understaffed facilities where samples can be lost or deteriorate if it means they can have a few more dollars to spend on themselves. Too many people learn early there is no connection between actions and consequences.
No doubt some of the best lab technicians left for other jobs when the state work load became so large there was no hope of ever actually solving problems. Every year Michigan watches many of its college graduates leave the state because they know the remaining opportunities are not desirable. They still believe in a connection between behavior and reward, and realize they can only benefit from their years of education if they leave. Those who remain either burn out or never rise above mediocrity.
When a society separates actions from consequences, the very act of dissociation has predicable consequences. When those who deny science also deny the value of any social unit beyond the nuclear family, then the outlaw culture that develops is one that reinforces their expectations. It’s the rest of us, with expectations for improvement, who are punished.
Notes:
Hunt, Amber. "Nevaeh’s Case Becomes Top Priority for Crime Lab," Detroit Free Press, 9 June 2009.
Fortunately, I have limited experience with lab tests. Some had a day’s delay caused by the need to air express samples out of state. In the cases of Jackson, Buchanan, and my friend the tests were done by state laboratories that could be reached quickly by a car. With Jackson and Buchanan, the transporting cruisers would have been justified if they used sirens.
Tests I’ve had done to detect bacteria took time because the samples needed to sit in conditions that would accelerate the growth of the small organisms. It took a week before they could tell my friend only her dog had traces of the plague in his blood and that none of the wild animal’s they trapped had been infected. The source of the fleas is still unknown.
Buchanan required DNA testing; Jackson chemical tests. Neither have the time constraints that organic tests have.
When they finally identified Buchanan’s body, the state police said they placed her tests ahead of "others backlogged for months - hundreds of them homicides." It still took four days for a family whose child had been missing sixteen days.
Michigan, of course, has had budget problems for years, and probably long ago cut forensic staffs. One can only guess what’s going on in California as the state careens towards bankruptcy, and the Los Angeles police department has done little to improve its credibility since it arrested O. J. Simpson.
The promise of Sherlock Holmes that tests could provide positive evidence has disappeared in a cultural refusal to support science and a willingness to accept the consequences. In Buchanan’s case, three known sex offenders were arrested because they knew her mother, and two are still in protective custody waiting to be punished for knowing the woman. They may have committed no other crime, but in the anxious waiting period when nothing was known people needed assurance their children were safe and demanded the police show some sign of action.
If Detroit is frequently listed as the murder capital on the country, it isn’t simply the city that’s responsible, but all those taxpayers who are willing to let hundreds of cases languish in understaffed facilities where samples can be lost or deteriorate if it means they can have a few more dollars to spend on themselves. Too many people learn early there is no connection between actions and consequences.
No doubt some of the best lab technicians left for other jobs when the state work load became so large there was no hope of ever actually solving problems. Every year Michigan watches many of its college graduates leave the state because they know the remaining opportunities are not desirable. They still believe in a connection between behavior and reward, and realize they can only benefit from their years of education if they leave. Those who remain either burn out or never rise above mediocrity.
When a society separates actions from consequences, the very act of dissociation has predicable consequences. When those who deny science also deny the value of any social unit beyond the nuclear family, then the outlaw culture that develops is one that reinforces their expectations. It’s the rest of us, with expectations for improvement, who are punished.
Notes:
Hunt, Amber. "Nevaeh’s Case Becomes Top Priority for Crime Lab," Detroit Free Press, 9 June 2009.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Immigration - Part 4 - Fear
My boss’s family is from mainline Philadelphia. His mother’s father was a society doctor and they moved in the orbit reserved for hangers-on to the well-to-do. The family tree she chooses to remember is her mother’s from Virginia.
She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.
But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.
In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.
Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.
He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.
My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.
Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.
My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.
We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.
The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.
Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.
The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.
We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.
Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.
We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.
We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.
She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.
When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.
When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.
The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.
When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.
Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.
It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.
After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.
We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.
The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.
She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.
Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.
She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.
But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.
In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.
Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.
He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.
My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.
Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.
My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.
We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.
The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.
Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.
The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.
We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.
Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.
We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.
We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.
She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.
When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.
When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.
The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.
When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.
Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.
It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.
After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.
We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.
The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.
She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.
Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 3 - Heroes
Conspiracy is a popular explanation for events. However, the theory seems to have little basis in reality.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 1 - Graffiti
Graffiti represents the failure of the state in its most fundamental roles. Cities fail the young when they give them no vested interest in the community, then fail the adults when they refuse to protect their property.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
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