The New American Serfdom, Part Three

This essay follows Walmart and the New American Serfdom, and The New American Serfdom, Part Two

Serfdom as depicted in the documents of its time

American and world history often plays out with the inevitability of a medieval morality play, at least in public (state) school classrooms. At any given moment, history’s most noxious operators may dominate the scene; but wait long enough, and someone will swing in brandishing our society’s most beloved virtues, and rescue us from tyranny. Dr. King was obviously heroic, while Bull Connor was obviously villainous—nothing more to discuss.

Individual teachers frequently resist this moralism, certainly. But in doing so, they’re fighting the tide. As the late James Loewen demonstrates, scholars write textbooks under corporate supervision, with an eye toward state education boards, which have approval authority over textbook selection. Especially in “red” states, including populous states like Texas and Florida, textbooks admitting to moral ambiguity, or acknowledging that America isn’t relentlessly virtuous, are doomed in advance.

This tendency to reconstruct history as a movement from ignorance to enlightenment, from injustice to parity, is sometimes called “Whig history.” The term comes from British historian Herbert Butterfield, who said that Britain’s now-defunct Whig Party believed all history is a narrative of improvement. To Whigs, in Butterfield’s writing, we’re becoming less monarchical and more democratic, less religious and more secular, less authoritarian and more free.

Whig history infects America’s primary school classrooms. Using more than a dozen widely read classroom textbooks, Loewen demonstrates that students learn American history as an arc from violence to peace, from slavery to liberty, from colonialism to modernity. This arc overlooks that modernization doesn’t inevitably lead to liberty. English-speaking Americans made the choice to start keeping slaves, for instance, and institutional slavery became more cruel the closer emancipation came.

When I speak of “serfdom” infecting American economics, it’s important that serfdom isn’t something European monarchies abandoned. Serfdom—an economic system where the manorial lord owns the land, and the land owns the people—only became possible late in feudalism. Human ownership only became possible after manorial lords didn’t have to constantly defend their lands against Huns, Avars, and Turks, and could afford to pave roads and standardize measurements.

Early in feudalism, when lords primarily defended against foreign invaders and natural disasters, serfdom would’ve cost too much money, and diverted manpower from more pressing issues. Peasants’ lives under early feudalism weren’t bucolic by any means; most lived on porridge three meals a day and died of childbirth or the plague. But at least their lords didn’t own them. If they paid their rent regularly, they lived mostly in peace.

One face of modern serfdom: the American meatpacking plant

Only after Turks no longer threatened Christendom, and international trade routes ensured everyone had access to plentiful food, could manorial lords spare money and time enough to throttle their subjects. The improvements which accompanied peace made it possible for feudal autocrats to curtail freedom in their domains. This was around the time European nations began “discovering” distant lands, keeping chattel slaves, and (officially)burning witches.

This violates official state narratives, of course. I, an ex-Republican, grew up on myths that prosperity creates liberty. Maybe it does, for certain individuals; but in the aggregate, prosperity trends upward, creating a wealth and power bottleneck. This matters today, when we’ve created a new economic class, the centibillionaire. Just like in late feudalism, we’ve created a minority too rich to care about the people whose lives they control.

When Walmart constricts its workers’ wages, it doesn’t only hurt Walmart workers. Because big-box discounters displace locally owned businesses, and the professionals like lawyers and PR personnel they support, Walmart cutting wages reduces the amount of money circulating in communities. Some large cities can absorb this pressure because they have economic diversity and a broad tax base. But small towns and suburbs have no choice but to accept enforced poverty.

The same applies to other industries. A century ago, America’s meatpacking industry was centralized in Chicago; now it’s diffused nationwide. This has created history’s cheapest, most abundant meat, a boon for America collectively. But it hurts workers individually: if Cargill undercuts wages (and they do, frequently), workers can’t take their skills across the street to Tyson or JBS Swift. The only major employer in town holds its workers hostage.

Perhaps this is why conservative nationalists fight so aggressively to constrict schools: so ordinary Americans can’t see that history is not just, progress is not inevitable, and prosperity is often harmful. Serfdom only ended when the entire feudal economy collapsed, when technology ended the agrarian society. Unless we resist this arc, it will happen again, ending in either widespread poverty or social collapse. Or maybe both.

Walmart and the New American Serfdom

Last week, Walmart, still America’s largest employer, announced it would reduce starting wages for new hires by a dollar an hour. Though no existing workers will see reduced wages, Walmart retains their fiscal advantage, partly, through constant employee rollover; they’re banking on shedding most current workers quickly and refilling their ranks at lower wages. Under ordinary circumstances, this might anger customers and workers, but would be forgotten quickly.

Except that same Walmart announced a $20 billion stock buyback program in November. That means Walmart had $20 billion in unallocated revenues, and rather than spending it on wages, benefits, or corporate development, they rededicated that money to manipulating stock values by creating artificial scarcity. Contra the Reaganite belief that wealthy people plow revenues into the common good, Walmart is actively using its surplus to take value off the market.

On one level, this demonstrates the falsehood underlying libertarian thinking: most people might do right without compulsion, but the rich absolutely won’t. They became rich through resource hoarding, market manipulation, and wage theft, and they won’t stop unless somebody in authority forces them. On another level, though, this demonstrates not only an economic outcome, but a social principle. We’re witnessing the return of a modern technocratic serfdom.

Throughout my lifetime, Americans have accepted a public ethic that employment is a moral imperative, regardless of anything produced. We expect teenagers to get jobs at McDonalds, Walmart, or the mall, the minute they’re physically capable of working and handling the equipment safely. Not only have we accept that teenagers should work, to gain putative “skills,” but we accept the obverse: that low-skilled, poorly paying jobs are for teenagers.

This moral imperative to work continues into adulthood. Since the 1990s, America has tied receipt of poverty protection, like EBT and WIC, to having a job—regardless of whether regions and communities have employment available. This commitment is bipartisan: the work requirement was shepherded through Congress by Newt Gingrich, and ratified by Bill Clinton. Administrations representing both major American political parties have preserved this requirement ever since.

The current administration seems unlikely to reverse this. As Joe Biden said at the 2020 Democratic National Convention: “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity…. It’s about your place in the community.” Biden has repeatedly stressed work’s moral component ever since, speaking some variation of his 2020 bromide: “My economic plan is all about jobs, dignity, respect, and community.”

All due respect to Brandon, but nobody applies to Walmart seeking dignity. The uncomfortable uniforms, Spartan conditions, and dismal hours are compounded by customers who believe themselves entitled to treat poorly compensated employees abusively. People seeking dignity work for themselves or their families—where that’s feasible. People seek employment outside the home because they need to get paid. Dignity and community aren’t negotiable currencies to cover rent and groceries.

So people need employment, but we’ve cheapened work by making employees ubiquitous. Walmart stores live and die by workers’ contributions, but when the corporation has excess revenue, it doesn’t return to employees. It enriches those who own stocks, which are inert legal documents that produce no value without workers. The fact that America’s largest employer can devalue wages during a period of surplus revenue demonstrates that America doesn’t value work.

When workers don’t own their produce, and work only for the enrichment of “owners” who don’t manage workplaces, this increasingly resembles serfdom. Conditions are worse than medieval serfdom, though, because lords of the manor at least had an obligation to their serfs’ health and defense. Modern aristocracy, by contrast, has liberty to cut employees loose, retain the value of labor already provided, and return revenues to the ownership class.

This pattern repeats throughout the economy. When schoolteachers in red states struck for better conditions in 2018, or the actors’ and writers’ strike right now, we hear defenders of the status quo insisting that workers should value their work, and gain satisfaction from jobs well done, regardless of pay. Whenever necessary workers demand more respect and better pay, some asshole inevitably says, “just quit.” It’s like clockwork.

Like slavery before it, this modern serfdom isn’t sustainable. Workers demand pay because they have obligations: housing, clothes, food. But modern aristocrats pay below the subsistence level necessary for these goods. Housing prices are worse now than they were before the 2008 housing bubble meltdown. Public health is as bad as it was before COVID-19. After twenty years of lessons, the aristocrats running our lives have learned nothing.

The New American Serfdom, Part Two
The New American Serfdom, Part Three

Mr. Clean and the Home-Grown Revolution

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

Anyone who knows me well, knows I’m a pretty poor housekeeper. My house looks exactly like an unmarried man lives alone there. This contrasts with my personal appearance, which is carefully controlled and doesn’t permit unwanted creases in my long-sleeve button-down shirts. I’ve spent much of my adult life inventing justifications for my sloppy skills, most of which reflect that my parents used housecleaning as a punishment.

But if I pause my self-serving justifications momentarily, I know that’s confusing cause and effect. My parents used cleaning as a punishment because, if they didn’t, I’d never do it. I resisted cleaning because I considered it abjectly futile. The reward for vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing the household porcelain, was the opportunity to repeat it next week. What meaningful task, I wondered, was never truly done? What a waste of time.

A few weeks ago, though, even I, the eternal housekeeping refusenik, realized I couldn’t stand these conditions anymore. I couldn’t afford to have company over, I couldn’t cook dinner for a date, I couldn’t even invite my sister around to feed my cats and water my plants if I needed to leave town. My parents’ old household techniques of vinegar and sponges weren’t working. So I bought myself a pack of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

Some household dirt was months or even (I blush to admit) years old. Sponges, vinegar, all-purpose cleaner, and scouring powder all failed to remove it. Yet a Magic Eraser and some elbow grease worked wonders; dirt, soap residue, and hard water stains just rolled off. I mean literally rolled off, as it formed convenient little pills which I rinsed with water and watched flush down the drain. Years of dirt, gone.

Without exaggeration, I’d forgotten that my bathtub was originally white, not ecru. I’d also forgotten that my shower spigot was shiny chrome, not dingy lime-scale. These scrubbers peeled off not only my dirt, but some that, I’m sure, lingered from my home’s previous tenants. But these scrubbers didn’t just uncover dirt, they uncovered something deeper: my sense of pride in keeping my own house.

Like many members of their class and generation, my parents didn’t see cleaning as just cleaning; they considered it a moral expression. People who didn’t maintain their houses were inherently bad people. “Nobody,” I recall my father saying while driving the family through a notoriously run-down neighborhood in a major city, “is ever too poor to clean their yards and wash their windows.” Slovenly people were clearly moral reprobates.

Spot which part of this faucet was cleaned with a Magic Eraser and dried overnight

I was more conservative then, but even I realized this was, at some level, fallacious. Even if they’re married, poor couples often work three or more jobs between them to cover rent, groceries, childcare, and utilities. Telling overworked, underpaid people that further household busywork makes the difference between moral and immoral people, is a massive class-based imposition. My father’s unspoken message was: “Shut up and act White.”

What arrogance! In a world wracked by poverty, violence, and structural injustice, my father wanted poor people to abandon social solidarity, and instead organize their own lawns. I was too young, White, and conservative to explain it in those terms, but that encapsulates the underlying thought. White, middle-class demands for household cleanliness were, and are, demands for atomized individualism in the face of organized injustice.

In a society organized so unfairly that one in eight American children faces chronic hunger, housecleaning seemed like a retreat from the conflict. This tendency was compounded because, like many suburban White kids, very few people outside my family ever saw the inside of my house. As I became increasingly conscious of America’s ingrained injustices, cleaning seemed increasingly self-indulgent and luxurious.

Yet, watching old dirt form pills and rinse down the drain, I realized: keeping my own house is part of participating in the community. I cannot invite fellow reformists to my house to plan and organize, or even to share common meals and a beer, if I don’t have a bathroom I’m willing to let others see. Solidarity is always public-facing and vocal, yes, but true community solidarity starts at home.

This change is new. I’m still feverishly cleaning old, stained surfaces, wearing out Magic Erasers like there’s no tomorrow. Yet I do it because, for the first time in years, I’m starting to feel proud of my house. I’m starting to feel like I can invite people around and let them see the place where I live. I’m starting to see that housecleaning isn’t injustice or punishment, it’s home.

The Truth About America’s Rural Poor

Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Sarah Smarsh has no patience with bromides about how honest and simple America’s poor rural core might be. Born a fifth-generation farmer outside Wichita, Kansas, she faced the rootlessness and despair which poverty generates among America’s working classes. Far from Norman Rockwell simplicity, she faced a childhood buffeted by falling crop prices, inability to own anything, and transience. She attended over a dozen schools before twelfth grade.

The product, Smarsh writes, isn’t the picturesque rural ideal beloved by political campaigns and Frank Capra movies. She describes a childhood dominated by banalities, driven by despair. She watched her very young parents build their own house, then lose everything to natural disasters and exploitation. Her construction worker father lost his livelihood when rising interest rates wrecked his industry. Meanwhile, her mother, a farmer, barely  survived the 1980s Farm Crisis.

Smarsh structures her book as an open letter to the daughter she never had. She came from several generations of women who got pregnant as teenagers, and who went through several spouses because society deemed marriage necessary, even when the marriage was palpably harmful. Smarsh grew up conscious that such could happen to her, too, and she planned for the eventuality of winding up with a mouth she was too poor and young to feed.

She describes a childhood surrounded by powerful women who wouldn’t break under life’s pressures. Women like Grandma Betty, who survived several violent husbands and her own mother’s schizophrenia diagnosis to become Wichita’s most competent and respected parole officer. Or her mother, Jeannie, who persevered under intense pressure and lost everything anyway, yet somehow increasingly believed Reagan-era bootstrap mythology.

Smarsh’s narrative moves from the personal to the global, and back again. Her storytelling heart stays closest to her Kansas upbringing, and her family’s voluble storytelling traditions. She reconstructs not only her own life, but the lives of the women around her, lives characterized by big dreams and small, persistent disappointments. The women around Smarsh scarcely move forward before somebody, usually a man, often a husband, kicks down the ladder.

Sarah Smarsh

Poverty, Smarsh asserts, doesn’t just inexplicably happen; it comes from powerful people making deliberate choices. After the American government subsidized rapid expansion through the Homestead Act and land-grant colleges (freely distributing land the federal government had stolen honestly), it abandoned the rural population by shifting to urban industrialization, then to suburban single-family home ownership. At each stage, the government abandoned populations it once actively supported, letting farmers and urban cores rot.

Throughout, Smarsh finds ways to retain her dreams. Schools deem her academically “gifted,” though that means little when she transfers frequently while her parents hunt for employment. She’s particularly talented at public speaking. Most important, she alone among the women around her doesn’t have an abusive father or husband. Her father, Nick, and step-grandfather, Arnie, give her stability that her grandmothers, cousins, and other kinfolk lack.

She also has August, the name she selected for her future daughter. Smarsh describes her increasingly direct relationship with the daughter she never had, asking herself when faced with difficult choices or powerful temptations, what would I recommend to August? This gives her a long-term perspective which her relatives, beset by hunger and abuse, couldn’t afford. Smarsh occasionally addresses August directly, in the second person, grateful for the steadfastness.

I recognize some of myself in Smarsh, but less than I’d expected. We’re close in age, and for much of her Kansas childhood, I lived nearby, in Nebraska. But some aspects don’t jibe altogether. She describes adults encouraging her to leave the homestead and pursue a life of urbanized upward mobility. As the Farm Crisis decimates American small towns, Smarsh writes, nobody dreamed of bequeathing the farm to their children.

Really? Hitting early adulthood in Nebraska, I remember being explicitly told that desiring to leave the state or aspire to employment beyond hourly wage-earning was dishonest. State legislators perform massive economic contortions to keep homesteads in their respective families. Maybe it’s because I was geographically stationary in ways Smarsh wasn’t, but my experience with place and rootedness appears to have been very different from hers.

Despite this, Smarsh tells her story well. Rural simplicity, often extolled by political candidates and big-city nostalgia merchants, Smarsh identifies as simply the choices necessary to get by. Hard work isn’t ennobling, and is often degrading, especially as billionaires cannibalize rural communities for parts. Smarsh asserts that poor, rural “virtues” aren’t heroic qualities. They’re the tricks and techniques poor people use to survive, often despite the world around them.

The Law vs. Black Children and Families

Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

When “Defund the Police” became a political catchphrase, many advocates suggested state social services agencies to partly replace the police’s role. University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts balks at this substitution. To Roberts, the police and most child protective services agencies suffer the same problems: profound power in Black communities, scanty oversight, and only one violent tool to solve every problem.

Operating under the premise of preserving youth from dysfunctional homes, Roberts writes, child services agencies have broad authority to enter private homes, vet parents’ choices, and make decisions about families’ future. Their evaluation criteria are subjective, which leaves them vulnerable to abuse. In many jurisdictions, they have only one recourse for effecting change: taking children from their families and putting them in foster care.

Roberts calls these agencies “family policing,” and claims they’re part of the same prison-industrial complex we’ve heard so much about. She doesn’t make this claim frivolously. Like uniformed police, family police have a cloak of benign motivation, and use language of peacekeeping and community. But like the police, family services disproportionately target Black, poor, and Indigenous communities, regularly breaking up families.

We’re taught early that child protective agencies rescue children from violent or sexually exploitive circumstances. Yet, as Roberts demonstrates, family police agencies regularly miss these cases. The preponderance of children removed from homes are justified behind “neglect,” which usually means insufficient food or clothing. Yet agencies seldom have authority or resources to provide families with housing, healthcare, or cash. Their first, and often only, recourse, is seizing children.

Reading Roberts’ descriptions, a pattern emerges: family policing agencies see non-White parents as adversaries, not only to state agencies, but to children. Because social workers often travel accompanied by police, they often answer even nominal resistance with arrest and trial. Because these supposedly neglectful parents often just need assistance, the result is that they treat cash-strapped parents as literal criminals.

Moreover, the criteria that family police use to identify neglectful families are remarkably targeted. House too small? Cupboards too bare? Can’t afford childcare while parents are working? These all supposedly indicate unfit parents. Coupled with a tendency to overpolice poor and BIPOC communities, these criteria mean Black and Indigenous children enter the system in wildly disproportionate numbers.

Dorothy Roberts

This racialized outcome isn’t incidental. Child protective laws are often written to target things people of color do: for instance, sharing childrearing among a network of grandparents, cousins, and other kin is common in Black and Indigenous communities. But in many jurisdictions, that’s a designated neglect criterion. That’s just one example Roberts cites of how family policing sees Blackness as inherently damaged, and damaging.

Nor is this tendency new. Family policing became widespread only after other racial regulations were repealed. Black children were frequently “apprenticed,” against their parents’ will, to former slaveholders, while Native American children were sent to boarding schools that explicitly aimed to expunge their Indigenous traditions. Forced family separations only preserve the tendencies these overpowered state agencies have always used in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

The consequences remain universally disastrous. Scholars have done only limited research into long-term effects of family separation (perhaps because scholars rely on state agencies for funding), but what research they’ve conducted indicates that children moved into foster care suffer PTSD, oppositional-defiant behaviors, and nightmares. They’re also more likely to wind up subject to human trafficking. This applies even when home environments are quantifiably bad.

I have friends working in child-related social services, so I anticipate their objections. How will we ensure that legitimately unfit parents don’t repeat generational abuse? Roberts answers that, in terms too nuanced to repeat here, but the salient point is: when circumstances have forced family police agencies to stand down, community and kinship networks have stepped up. Abuse reports have, not surprisingly, gone down.

Many people enter child protection careers with benevolent motivations. They want to improve the communities where they work; Roberts quotes many such great souls. But before long, social workers, like schoolteachers and police officers, discover they can’t fight a system that devalues non-White lives. Most of Roberts’ sources either quit, or find themselves forced to adapt their ethics to suit the institution.

Dorothy Roberts identifies largely the same problems with family policing that Alex Vitale finds in regular policing: they’re more cause than solution. The problems both agencies create could be ameliorated by fighting poverty and lifting racial barriers. But in both cases, that’s unlikely to happen, because powerful people profit from them. Maybe, if we ordinary people care more and act accordingly, we can reverse the damages.

Sensitivity, Shmensitivity

This is literally my co-worker's truck. These are the attitudes I work with.

“Well that was a complete fucking waste of time!” bellowed ‘Jack,’ though his tone was jocular. “I didn’t retain any of that. I can’t believe we wasted an hour of our lives on that shit!”

Late in his book Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond recounts an experience observing a chronically destitute Milwaukee family. Arleen and her elementary-age sons have a cat, Little. But because they’re evicted and forced to relocate immediately, Arleen has to leave Little behind. Coming back to retrieve some belongings, the boys see Little wandering the neighborhood and react with joy. Arleen doesn’t agree:

“Put it down, dang!” Arleen yelled. She jerked Jafaris’s arm back, and Little fell to the ground.

Desmond explains, with sources, that poor families teach children to “love small.” Caring about things, people, and communities, only works when we have stability and continuity. Poor people, who change jobs and residences often, can’t afford to care. So Arleen teaches her children to love pets, neighbors, even herself, as fleetingly as possible, so they don’t get devastated later. It’s perhaps her most loving lesson: don’t love too much.

I’ve written extensively on this blog, recently, about the racism I’ve witnessed, working construction. Growing up White, suburban, and lower middle-class, I once thought naked bigotry was a dwindling historical relic. Notwithstanding the occasional David Duke or Timothy McVeigh, I assumed I’d live to see the extinction of Jim Crow-ish prejudice. Because, basically, I assumed racism arose from ignorance and backwardness.

Working this industry, though, I’ve noticed it isn’t so. Not only does racism persevere, so do other sectarian hatreds. These guys love sitting around, bullshitting on the clock, and it frequently turns to attempts to verbally destroy anybody they consider weaker than themselves. Women, homosexuals, animals: they’ll demolish anyone they consider puny, isolated, and different.

For years, I thought it reflected the nearly all-male nature of the industry. Though we have some women electricians in our area, and some women working office and bureaucratic positions, they’re the exception; I can literally go weeks without seeing a woman on the job. Not until reading Matthew Desmond did I realize these men share another important characteristic: they’re all poorly paid and economically tenuous.

Dr. Matthew Desmond

So I had low expectations when, on Friday, September 18th, we attended mandatory “sensitivity training.” That is, the company wanted to institute top-down awareness and empathy in men who’ve grown scars on their souls to insulate themselves against life’s casual brutalities. I have co-workers who have Confederate flags on their trucks, who use the N-word conversationally, who drink to numb themselves to life. A one-hour Zoom seminar is likely to change nothing.

They entered the seminar already opposed. One guy loudly bellowed: “If I’d known this was happening, I’d’ve printed a mask that read ‘Fuck Your Feelings,’” a line which got wide laughs. (Though the seminar happened online, several of us piled into a company conference room to control the number of lines into the call. To my surprise, all wore COVID masks.) Such heckling was the norm, not the exception.

In an ideal world, like a novel, some guys might’ve changed their minds. We might’ve seen epiphanies happening like leaves dropping. Instead, as the facilitator, hired from an outside consultancy, launched into her pre-written PowerPoint presentation, even I, the company’s token Leftist, lost interest; when I realized she was reading a pre-scripted litany of buzzwords, I felt the compulsive need to check Facebook on my phone.

Afterward, to my surprise, I discovered almost the entire regional company was watching from local offices: when the Zoom meeting ended, twenty guys milled around the lobby, jeering what we just witnessed. After Jack’s outburst above, a site supervisor, ‘Dan,’ emerged from a back office and sneered: “So we’re only supposed to communicate in sign language now?” Dan is the supervisor who once suggested stopping asylum-seekers by shooting their leaders.

I leaned back and let my brain drift to Matthew Desmond. These aren’t “bad” guys. They’re hard-working and loyal; most are married, mostly to their first wives, some for decades. They maintain their houses, join civic leagues, and tithe at church. But they also slap racist logos on their trucks and use epithets conversationally. They have to limit their empathy, because they’re poor. (Our company owner has an Omaha mansion and a stable of show ponies.)

And yeah, maybe it’s also because they’re all men. This unscheduled after-party was a sausage fest; the local office’s only two women, a bookkeeper and a secretary, are working from home during COVID. Nobody who does something awful does it from an isolated cause. Poverty, powerlessness, lack of women, and the fatigue that comes with difficult labor, create an ecology of antipathy. Racism, sexism, homosexism, and other hatreds, just happen.

Desmond writes that nobody hates poor people worse than other poor people. This workplace intolerance, this knee-jerk opposition to “sensitivity,” is the inevitable consequence of men kept perennially poor while working multi-million-dollar jobs. They know money’s being made, and they’re not making it. The ownership economy has left them too broke to care.

The Real War on White Americans

Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee statue, erected in 1924 and removed in 2017

“You will not replace us!” chanted the Charlottesville marchers at their Unite the Right rally on Saturday, August 12th, 2017. And, more tellingly, “Jews will not replace us!” This fear of being replaced speaks significantly to the almost entirely Caucasian marching party, which nominally came together to protest the removal of a heroic-scale bronze sculpture of Robert E. Lee. But the language revealed a more deep-seated fear of humans, particularly white humans, being rendered obsolete.

This idea isn’t new to Charlottesville. I haven’t studied the history of racist rhetoric, though fear of getting displaced by numerically insurgent minorities has a past, being part of Hitler’s claims about Jews and Gypsies. The shooter at Emanuel AME church, whose name I’ve purposed to never repeat, justified his violence by telling friends “blacks were taking over the world.” Fear of imminent displacement seemingly infects racism altogether. I’d argue this fear isn’t without merit.

Marchers outed for racism have included, most prominently, a college undergraduate, facing probable graduation into a job market massively narrowed by automation, and a restaurant waiter, denizen of an industry that hasn’t seen its federal minimum wage adjusted since 1997. These are people on the front lines of the widening gulf between work and reward. Despite libertarian economic principles, hard work and diligence don’t raise most workers above their roots anymore. If they ever did.

In high school American history, I learned that Gilded Age American workers successfully organized, beat back corporate thugs, and pushed Teddy Roosevelt to bust trusts and break the industrial oligopoly. My textbooks conveniently omitted that industries answered this organization by moving work outside organized areas. Iconic industries like the Pennsylvania ironworks and Chicago stockyards, exist today only as museums. The work itself is massively decentralized, moved to “right-to-work states” like Oklahoma and Indianapolis, or overseas.

When I first voiced a less polished version of this idea, a friend countered by indicating that several Charlottesville protesters who’d been outed on Twitter weren’t laborers. Those identified—sometimes, tellingly, in error—included college professors, regional entrepreneurs, business owners, and more. These are skilled professionals, presumably with standing in the community, who contributed their faces to a mass march that has chilled the nation. Calling them laborers, my friend implied, is classist and uninformed.

But I’d contend even these skilled professionals have reason to fear being made obsolete. One person wrongly, let me repeat wrongly, accused of participating in the racist march, was an engineering professor specializing in researching wound treatments. As a former college instructor, I’ll defend the idea his position is vulnerable, as adjunct instructors and other part-time faculty are the numerical majority in many American colleges today. Our children’s teachers have to hustle for grocery money.

We could continue the reasoning this way: entrepreneurs, particularly brick-and-mortar business owners, are constantly jeopardized by advances in online marketing technology. Where once companies like Amazon once paid delivery drivers, they’re now researching drones and other human-free delivery to further trim costs. National retailers moving online shutter stores. People like Jeff Bezos call this friction-free marketing. But that friction is you. This philosophy sees human beings, not as drivers for the economy, but as impediments.

Neighborhood entrepreneurs take personal pride in hiring locally, and deserve recognition for that. But to national and multinational corporations, labor is a sunk cost wise investors avoid. If jobs can be seconded onto machines, they will be, especially since human labor is a tax liability, but machinery is a write-off. The marchers flashing Hitler salutes and brandishing torches insist Jews and minorities won’t replace them, but in many places, they’ve already been replaced by machines.

Even where work exists, it’s pretty sketchy. Anglo-American sociologist David Graeber notes that, as jobs which once produced valuable goods and services have been automated, the economy switches onto “bullshit jobs,” his technical term for busywork labor which contributes no value. The massive rise in supervisory positions means the economic pyramid has been heavily flattened. As nominal management jobs become commonplace, we see what happens whenever any formerly scarce resource becomes abundant: it becomes valueless.

The Charlottesville racists therefore have foundation for their complaints. Our economy has bifurcated into a powerful management class and grunt labor, with little chance to move between. Yet when faced with a rich, mostly white management class systematically replacing them, they turn their outrage onto politically powerless minorities. I understand their outrage; I share some of it. But in targeting minorities, they’re doing management’s work for them. They’re hugging the boot that stomps them down.

The White Working Class Is Revolting!

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 72
Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

The first thing that surprised me about Professor Nancy Isenberg was that she doesn’t apparently define “class” economically. She doesn’t discuss how we treat the financially poor; she focuses attention on how society treats its nonconformists, those who reject upper-class white social graces. Americans extol the poor, at least verbally. But roll up your sleeves and piss on your lawn? You’ve stepped outside American culture.

Class, like race, reflects less our actual state of being, and more how others treat us. Marginalized people behave in marginalized ways. From the beginning, Isenberg shares my great reservation about Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird: though forward-thinking on race, Lee proves herself downright reactionary regarding non-conforming poor whites. Like many Americans, Lee assumes those born crude will remain crude forever.

Isenberg unfolds America’s fraught history of class chronologically. Unlike the mythology our society feeds us from childhood, America’s earliest white settlers weren’t, mostly, Europe’s hardiest stock. They weren’t religious refugees or intrepid adventurers. Europe, and England especially, saw America as ready landfill for the homeland’s “waste people,” the vagrants and beggars which literate Europe undisguisedly compared to excrement and trash.

Europe sent its lowest inhabitants to America, and those who survived—which was by no means guaranteed—managed to rebuild themselves as hardy. But that happened only later. Only after that first generation, often reduced to cannibalism, died out, did anyone lionize their putative accomplishments or make them heroes. In Isenberg’s telling, this pattern of posthumously celebrating those the upper crust condemned in life repeated itself, verbatim, after Westward Expansion.

White America’s Founding Fathers made great noise about American refusal of European aristocracy. But they mostly just said that; their actions seldom matched their words. Isenberg dedicates one chapter each to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who each arose from, erm, humble origins. Both praised the idea of class-free mobility in their writings. But both fronted legislation designed to keep the poor firmly placed, with little hope of improvement.

Nancy Isenberg

Franklin and Jefferson both wanted an open Western frontier for reasons identical to why England wanted American colonies: to dump unwanted poor whites. Early white frontier settlers were mocked as “squatters” and “crackers,” terms as hateful in their time as the N-bomb. The American bureaucracy essentially promised poor whites they could advance socially, since they were white, while reminding them they were often socially lower than slaves.

Not that the system was inflexible. As Isenberg notes, certain poor whites have infiltrated America’s higher echelons. She speaks briefly of Davy Crockett, and extensively of Andrew Jackson. Frontier politicians have often needed to prove they could play the fiddle, smoke with vigor,  and drink corn liquor. Mass movements of organized poor have frequently reversed the social order, though usually only for brief stretches before money and power reassert themselves.

This played heavily into the Civil War. Each side rhetorically attempted to prove themselves the true heirs of Anglo-Saxon hardiness, immune from class consciousness, though both lied outright to do so. Simultaneously, each side embraced the insults their opponents slung: Abraham Lincoln wore fashionable tailored suits, while adopting the “mudsill” slur Jefferson Davis hung on him. The Civil War was a rhetorical battle, as much as military.

But the language hit new lows during the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. “Well-bred” Americans long believed class traits bred true, but Darwinian evolution provided pseudoscientific justification for class bigotry. Half-understood science made a nasty witches’ brew with political demagoguery. This ugly, venom-driven movement culminated in the Supreme Court legalizing the state forcibly sterilizing anyone, mostly women, declared unfit to procreate.

Though the eugenics movement petered out, its underlying philosophy survived. The Civil Rights movement functionally pitted Blacks, who only wanted a fair shake, against poor whites, who previously accepted their lot because hey, at least they weren’t Black. This demonstrates how thoroughly, in Isenberg’s telling, race and class are accompanying social issues. Race and class are both power contests, pitting the powerless against the helpless, resulting in culture-wide paralysis.

Isenberg’s analysis continues into the present, when the white “underclass” rose against its fetters, and others squashed it down again. From Elvis Presley to Bill Clinton, much American culture in living memory has pitted rich establishmentarians against poor whites, no longer embarrassed and, now widely literate, no longer silent. This isn’t the first lower-class rising, certainly but the longest-lived. So much remains unresolved and dangerous.

In Donald Trump’s America, one wonders where the battle goes next. Two things are certain, though: the battle wasn’t unpredictable. And the poor didn’t fire the first blow.

Manhattan Fraudster Squad

Camille Perri, The Assistants

It starts stupidly enough: Tina Fontana, executive assistant to Manhattan's biggest media mogul, accidentally double-bills her boss's airline tickets to the company expense accounts. The resulting check is a rounding error for the unsubtly named Titan Corporation, but large enough to write off Tina's student debt. She considers the resulting fraud a one-time incident... until an accounting aide catches it. To buy silence, Tina launches a relatively ambitious embezzlement ring.

Somewhere around page 120, I began sketching notes for a diss review of Camille Perri's debut novel. It's not bad, really, just self-consciously topical and vague in language, and I prepared to teasingly upbraid Perri's reliance on stock characters and safe, market-tested situations. But I kept reading, and somewhere after the one-third mark, her tone changes. The story remains anodyne and remarkably low-friction, but becomes distinctly more readable and engaging.

Seems Emily, the gorgeous but insecure (and possibly alcoholic—her vaunted beauty won't withstand that wine intake) accounting gnome, also has insurmountable college debt. Tina starts double-billing nickel-and-dime expenses, which Emily quietly buries. The perfect crime, until a mid-level auditor skims the books. The ladies soon find themselves underwriting everyone else's lingering debt, straddling the line between The Devil Wears Prada and The Bling Ring.

Meanwhile, Kevin, a handsome rising star in Titan's legal department, begins courting Tina. Their unlikely romance flourishes, though her self-recriminations about the embezzlement, which dance perilously close to whining, keep her from truly committing. She misleads him about her extracurricular activities. That's how, in a "loose lips sink ships" moment, he accidentally makes an online journalist think she's about to save America from student debt. Then the floodgates really open.

Tina, Perri's first-person narrator, makes snap decisions about other characters, which we're supposed to consider binding. She judges other women by wardrobe, hair, and cup size. She wonders why Kevin chooses her, since she repeatedly reminds everyone how flat-chested and androgynous she is. This latter never gets resolved, because he's the only male given any depth in this female-centric ensemble, besides her boss Robert, who speaks in folksy gnomic Texas-isms.

Camille Perri

Plus, Tina's guilty conscience gets pretty annoying. Long after she should've developed thick skin from all the fraud she's committed, she remains as skittish as a middle-schooler caught pinching from Mommy's pocketbook. Don Corleone she ain't. This timidity results in philosophical asides about as deep as Pretty Little Liars soliloquies. Does Perri think childlike self-doubt makes her protagonist more human? Because I kept hoping Tina would act like a grown-up.

But after the slow, chugging introduction, a change occurs. As increasing numbers of glamorous, well-put-together female assistants begin approaching Tina for relief from their student debt, she realizes her "imposter syndrome" is entirely in her head. Everyone around her who doesn't have assistants, is probably yoked into debts that keep them scared, desperate, and compliant. Manhattan splendor absolutely requires peons too burdened to rebel against their subjugation.

That's where Perri develops an actual thesis. Early on, Tina describes her penny-ante Robin Hood scheme as "an Oxygen network original series waiting to happen," and I yawningly agreed. But once Tina discovers virtually everyone shares her feelings of fiscal despair, her dominant trait shifts from despair to action. Realizing her problems are normal, that everyone around her also suffers in silence, motivates her to get off the pot.

Not that she stops acting relentlessly nice. Even once the story develops actual cojones (a word this story loves and overuses), Tina remains committed to us liking her. She mostly flinches from confrontation, unless she already controls the table, so little is actually risked. The story mostly centers on discussions around kitchen tables and trendy Midtown taverns. These conversations remain polite and idea-driven; disagreements primarily involve allocating the loot.

Joseph Stiglitz notes many young college graduates have high aspirations, but accept lucrative, meaningless jobs to subsidize their debts. I have an MA and work construction; I sympathize. But dreams postponed become dreams abandoned. This novel does best when addressing these issues. A little Cagney and Lacey proceduralism could've driven Tina past kitchen-sink drama, into the themes that clearly excite Perri.

Perri's press biography states she wrote this book's first draft while working as an executive assistant. Therefore we can attribute this story to Perri's wish fulfillment, and Tina's self-flagellation to Perri's own imposter syndrome. That lends this novel a certain authenticity, and probably bolsters the understated humor. If only Perri set Tina free to risk without being the authorial proxy, this novel might've transitioned from merely good to great.

Holy Vigilante, Batman! (Part Four)

Who is the Real Voice of Alfred?

Jeremy Irons

Jeremy Irons’ voice just exudes charm. Most people who’ve seen him perform would agree with that statement. Over a forty-five year career, his most prominent roles have traded on him playing somebody suave, unflappable, and dapper. Certainly, that trend cuts both ways: some of Irons’ most memorable roles involve disingenuous charm, from Scar in Disney’s The Lion King to Adrian Lynn’s completely unnecessary 1997 Lolita remake.

This makes Irons a noteworthy choice to play Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s loyal butler and right-hand man, in the upcoming Batman Vs. Superman spectacular. Unlike fellow British actor Henry Cavill as Superman, or Welsh actor Christian Bale as the prior Batman, Irons plays Alfred in his own voice. As have Sean Pertwee in Fox’s Gotham, Michael Caine in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and Michael Gough in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman campfest.

This rotation among actors has significant effects. Advance trailers show Irons speaking with what linguists call Received Pronunciation (RP), the first live-action actor to do so since Gough. Caine, as an aging Alfred, speaks with Caine’s own postwar middle-class London accent, a dialect actually disappearing in Britain. And Pertwee, a sometimes contender to play lead in Doctor Who, speaks a gruff working-class accent, almost but not quite Cockney.

Comic books, being an innately silent medium, don’t enunciate Alfred’s accent. Though early appearances portrayed Alfred comedically, and tried phonetically spelling his accent (“Mawster Bruce,”) Alfred’s Britishness has been largely tacit and accepted throughout the comics run. Thus comics largely traded on stereotypes of stiff upper lip British constancy, without digging any deeper. We accept Alfred as “English,” a broad category that says everything while meaning nothing.

Michael Caine

Alfred’s backstory remains studiously vague. During the 1990s Alfred briefly quit Wayne Manor in outrage; when Batman found him later, he was doing Shakespeare in repertory. Since American theatres generally perform Shakespeare with either general American or RP accents, we can assume Alfred speaks RP. Except that British actors are aggressively trained in accents, in ways American actors aren’t; any stage accent Alfred delivers can’t be considered definitive.

This matters when considering how adaptations handle Alfred’s accent. Most British actors adapt their voices to suit changing roles. Gough, Caine, and Pertwee all paid dues playing gangsters and horror monsters before gaining enough fame that their voices became part of their brands; and as noted, Irons’ characters often use charm to conceal moral corruption. Every Alfred actor originally found fame playing characters basically Alfred’s diametrical opposite.

In 2007, Cardiff linguists Coupland and Bishop, with BBC assistance, surveyed British volunteers for their attitudes regarding accents. Their results are perhaps not surprising: in subjective opinions, British residents rated urban accents better than rural, rich better than poor, white better than black. They also rated the RP, the accent preferred by journalists and public officials, as “normal” British English. Accents become a shorthand for how we value individuals.

Americans similarly consider RP, sometimes called “BBC English,” more normal than regional accents. Like the Midwestern hum Bale and Cavill adopt as “General American,” foreign and domestic listeners agree “normal” accents exists. (Directing a play, beaucoups years ago, I asked one auditioner whether she could do accents. She boasted of her “British accent.” I asked which British accents she could do; she said “I don’t understand.” She didn’t get the part.)

So, Gough and Irons portray Alfred having a “normal” British accent. By implication, Caine’s and Pertwee’s accents are “abnormal.” Yet, given Caine’s history in movies like Zulu and The Italian Job, critics regard him as iconically British; short of Prince Harry, one struggles to imagine casting an actor who more embodies Britain. So Caine somehow is British without sounding British, in the “normal” sense. He simultaneously embodies and defies stereotype.

Michael Gough

Pertwee, meanwhile, gained fame playing gangsters, roughnecks, and soldiers. Americans raised on Masterpiece Theatre may consider his gravelly, proletarian voice nonstandard, but his career history implies, whenever he opens his mouth as Alfred, that he’d take a bullet for young Bruce. Without needing to say anything specifically, Pertwee’s “abnormal” accent informs audiences that Bruce Wayne has a fierce warrior protecting his future.

Thus every actor portraying Alfred reinforces his innate Britishness, but conveys entirely different characters. Just as Keaton, Bale, and Affleck clearly play different Batmen, these divergent actors create unique Alfreds, each with distinct relationships to Bruce. Though directors consistently stuff Alfred into largely interchangeable suits, these actors need only speak to stake their particular interpretations. Simply with their voices, actors define their particular Alfred—and, by implication, their particular Batman.


Part One: Sanctifying Civilian Justice
Part Two: Defining Justice in a Nihilistic Universe
Part Three: Bane's Dichotomy Between Servitude and Chaos