Curse of the Working Class

Socialist writer Barbara Garson admits, in All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, that she began researching labor issues assuming that work itself is an unjust imposition by a hierarchy that sees humans as disposable equipment. It didn’t take long to realize why she was wrong. While managers resented her intrusive, sometimes inflammatory interviews, laborers were mostly pleased that someone took an interest in their work. She concluded that human beings need, and even enjoy, work. But management consistently begrudges its mere human workers.

This should not surprise anyone who reads Judeo-Christian theology. Christian theologians traditionally emphasize God’s injunction in Genesis 3:19:

By the sweat of your brow
  you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
  since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
  and to dust you will return.

From this theologians derive that humans must work. Labor is not optional drudgery, or something we can escape. Work is a divinely ordained part of human existence. Observe people who lack meaningful work: they drift quickly into what psychologists call existential malaise, or what theologians call the Dark Night of the Soul.

But scripture is not absolute on this. Work—like religion, family, and other God-given blessings—can impede anybody’s true calling. When Moses came to Egypt and distracted the Jews by bearing Yahweh’s liberating word, Pharaoh ordered: “Make the work harder for the people so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies” (Exodus 5:9). Later, one of Moses’ commandments said:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns (Exodus 20:8-10).

Poet and philosopher Wendell Berry, in The Unsettling of America, notes that few people anymore work where we live, or live where we work. Labor forms a separate part of our lives, something we go to and then leave. Not coincidentally, he notes that we no longer have personal access to life’s ingredients. We do not grow our own food or draw our own water, and thanks to industry, we have limited access to clean fresh air.

By abandoning agrarian culture, wherein people work the land they inhabit and own the product of their labor, we have grown indifferent to ourselves. America, Earth’s most industrialized nation, also has the highest rates of depression and other affective disorders. We work jobs that enrich others yet give us no meaning. This, Berry says, is no way of life. Abandoning God’s work makes us poorer, sadder, diminished people.

It goes further than Berry may realize. Joshua Holland, in The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy, claims that less than eight percent of Americans in 2009 were unionized, though nearly two thirds say they would like to join unions. Where is our era’s Samuel Gompers? Like Pharaoh in Exodus, or the trusts in the Gilded Age, bosses today work employees beyond the point of exhaustion, and not surprisingly rule their empires with little dissent.

I was recently offered a job with a decent wage and benefits, contingent on a seven-day work week. This seemed so obviously absurd that, when I commented on Facebook, I was astounded by how many people said I should take it, because “you were offered a job.” As though the bosses were magnanimous philanthropists presenting a gift from their largess, rather than needing me to do something for them.

Even disregarding Scripture, the human body isn’t built to work that way. In the 1990s, the Tokyo Zoo experimented with running every single day, but discovered that, unless the animals had one day in seven to rest, they became sick, and even died. Workers who do not receive one rest day in seven—a number that applies across cultures—develop heart disease, musculoskeletal disorders, mental illnesses, and other crippling conditions.

Work is good. I accepted another position, with a six-day week, in the same company, and am much happier than when I was unemployed. But work is not good for its own sake. If it stops making meaning for workers, and becomes the nucleus of their lives, what lives do they have left? Humans are not machines to use and discard. We should not accept those who would treat us as such.

Why Johnny Only Thinks He Can't Read

I conclude every semester teaching university composition by telling my students this story:

In his memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the famous runaway slave and eloquent speaker recounts how he learned to read. Sold at age ten, his new master’s wife took pity on the boy and began to teach him the alphabet. When the master discovered young Frederick had rudimentary literacy, the master beat the slave within an inch of his life. The master then delivered a matching beating to his wife, and declared that, if Frederick continued learning to read, the master wouldn’t hesitate to hang him.

After the story, I ask my students why the master would beat not only his slave, but his own wife, because the slave was learning to read? In the antebellum American South, literate slaves were hanged. Free people who taught slaves to read faced stiff fines and prison, and though they seldom risked execution, some white activists and free black teachers were lynched. What made literacy so offensive?

My students never get the answer right away. After watching them tapdance, I rephrase myself: what can literate slaves do that illiterate slaves cannot? Now they recite stock answers—“Follow the news?” “Write their ideas?” “Think?”—until one, usually near the back, finally reaches the right answer. Literate slaves can communicate with someone not right in front of them. Corollary: literate slaves can organize.

Put another way, literacy gives individuals power over their own lives. Similarly, mathematics isn’t about balancing your checkbook; it grants the ability to apply reason and answer questions you’ve never encountered before. History lets us see our actions in humanity’s larger social context. Educated persons, by definition, do not necessarily know their subjects. They know themselves, and no other human being can ever unjustly dominate them.

Early American colonists claimed to save slaves’ souls, so teaching them to read Scripture was mandatory. But after King Cotton made bottomless unpaid labor necessary, and Nat Turner’s rebellion proved slaves weren’t really happy, keeping slaves compliant took priority. (The BBC’s Huw Edwards reveals something similarly controversial in the history of British Sunday School: “if you could read the Bible, you could also read Tom Paine's The Rights of Man.”)

Compared to American slaves or British colliers, my students—usually white, usually middle class—generally come to school secure that nobody will beat them with a hickory switch for refusing to tote that bale or drag that cart. Though my small regional university receives few scions of wealth, my students generally do not fear going hungry, unclothed, or otherwise deprived. This can let them feel complacent, and take education for granted.

Resisting apathy isn’t helped by students’ prior schooling. When I ask about their background in my field, many say they see writing, literacy, and most English language and literature as distant from their real lives. If they can complete a job application and write e-mails and text messages, they’re satisfied, which makes me an imposition on their time.

I can’t blame them, if their education resembled mine. My 9th grade English teacher said our class could tell Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was profound because we couldn’t understand it. Only when I entered the university and saw future teachers taught did I realize my teacher probably didn’t understand the book either. Most teacher education consists of classroom management; prospective teachers have little grounding in their subjects.

Please don’t misunderstand: I respect teachers. Most I’ve met are enthusiastic people of high ideals and sterling character. But both teacher training and school culture encourage them to perpetuate ignorance and boredom in their students. Administrators increasingly come from non-educational backgrounds. American schools, already underfunded and short-staffed, are generally first on the chopping block during budget cuts.

Convinced that core academic disciplines are distant and artificial, but told repeatedly that they need degrees to get good jobs, students enroll at universities already alienated and bored. We teachers must (metaphorically) beat them to make them read. The reversal from Frederick Douglass is complete. Education no longer occurs at school, and our efforts have already failed.

Unless the point of school is to encourage illiteracy, innumeracy, and indifference. Unless school deliberately produces docile graduates who look to others for motivation and identity. Then school is a rousing success. But I cannot accept that. We must recapture that Frederick Douglass spirit, if not for society’s cultural and economic future, then because that attitude is just ethically right.

The time for change is now.

Three Women of Strength and Character

Kristen Jane Anderson’s suicide attempt came at the culmination of several traumas: death in the family, a friend’s suicide, and a brutal and degrading attack on her body.  But she held her despair inside, as our society expects women to do, until it became too much to bear; then she threw herself beneath a train.  That’s when the real misery began.

Anderson’s memoir, Life, In Spite of Me, details how she discovered she could not rely on her own strength.  Even in trying to kill herself to end the pain, she misfired: the train didn’t kill her, it just severed her legs.  Thus she sank into even greater pain, and wondered at her own inability to even commit suicide correctly.

And who can blame her?  American society has very strict expectations of women.  We expect them to remain cheerful, never complain—especially about men—and beam forth pollyannaish rays of sunshine.  When Anderson tried to do that, after suffering demeaning violence, it came to nothing.  Her human strength could never overcome the inevitability of failure.

But Anderson’s memoir doesn’t just detail her steady decline.  When she reached what she considered her lowest point, she realized her family, friends, and God were there.  As long as she relied on human strength, she came to nothing; only when she trusted in something greater than herself did she find meaning.

Unfortunately, such bastions can be hard to find.  Like Anderson, Kristen K. Brown lost everything she thought she had in one cruel sitting.  In The Best Worst Thing, she describes the torture she felt when her husband, only thirty years old, died in his sleep.  Kristen went to bed one night a happy young wife and mother to an infant, and woke a widow and a single mother.

Brown enjoyed constant support from family and friends, and even investigated her faith more deeply (though her insights remain fairly abstract).  But if she learned one lesson, it was that loss germinates inside until it seems as large as your universe.  Like Anderson, though, Brown finally reached the point where, to keep living, she had to surprise herself and do something profound.

Unlike Anderson, who tells an essentially religious story, Brown’s memoir deals with the secular struggle of loss and recovery.  Nevertheless, she learns the importance of turning outside herself.  If she wants to survive, she must stop relying on her own resources and join the larger human community.  Only then does she become who she was meant to be.

I like Brown’s memoir, but it lacks Anderson’s unity.  Now a working minister, Anderson has found a voice to reach an audience, and her story has a clear through-line with an unmistakable take-home message.  Brown’s story is more anecdotal, a string of occurrences to create a mood.  Only in the final fifty pages does she bring the threads together into a meaty story.

Missy Jenkins combines the best of both worlds in I Choose to Be Happy.  As the worst-hit survivor of the 1997 Paducah, Kentucky, school shooting, no one would blame Jenkins for nursing her grievances.  After all, she lost every dream that had anything to do with walking.  Yet she realized she had a choice, and let self-pity go by the wayside.

On the one hand, Jenkins describes how formerly routine activities, like getting up and getting dressed in the morning, have become excruciating.  But where she had previously drifted through life as aimlessly as any teen, Jenkins suddenly found a purpose.  Once she regained her autonomy, she found herself an unlikely celebrity and acknowledged expert on youth violence.

Life, for Jenkins, became a constant discovery.  She uncovered the dark side of her pristine small town, and how many youth suffer in silence.  Then she discovered an unmet need that she was uniquely positioned to address.  As a guide and counselor for victims of violence, both through her media life and now in her profession, she has become a source of strength for others.

Like Anderson, Jenkins offers her readers a mainly religious resolution.  Though I have occasional problems—I fear she makes forgiveness look too easy, especially for those who struggle to forgive—her story of how she didn’t let someone else write her script is both uplifting and bold.  And like both Anderson and Brown, Jenkins proves we cannot trust our strength alone.

These three insights into life lived despite tragedy remind me why life remains worth living.  And it gives me three women I can look up to with pride.

Why the Kindle Hasn't Killed the Book

When George RR Martin’s A Dance with Dragons appeared this week, my local bookstore held a midnight release party so readers could grab the book as early as possible on its official release date.  Just as with the new Harry Potter and X-Men movies, determined fans want their favorite books early, not to be the first to read them, but so they can enjoy them with fellow fans and peers.  This proves, I believe, why printed books will survive the digital revolution.

As I’ve said before, premature postmortems on print literature overlook books’ cultural significance.  The Kindle and other electronic readers ballyhoo themselves on the same grounds that critics once used to claim that movies, radio, or TV would kill print: the ease, speed, and economy of more advanced technologies should make them more desirable than books.  Amazon recently emphasized this in an admittedly well-done and funny ad:




I cannot deny the Kindle’s ease.  As the first person in my English department to own a Kindle, several people who make their living parsing books approached me early to ask what I thought of the device.  My favorite anecdote involves me entering my local brewpub, ordering a beer, and clicking “Buy Now” on a book I’d wanted for some time.  My book arrived before my beer did.  That’s clearly both easy and convenient.

Yet I still purchase print books.  Not only do I read hard copy, I hoard it, making regular trips to the hardware store for new shelf space to stockpile my books.  If Kindle books are so clearly superior, reason dictates I should donate my paper books to Goodwill and go all digital.  Why don’t I?

Henry Jenkins, America’s foremost scholar of fandom and fan culture, writes in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers that fans, often derided as nerds and outcasts, actually build strong communal identity around whatever they adore.  Our pluralistic society is no longer unified by religion, language, patriotism, or even national myths like the Pilgrims or cowboys.  In lieu of this, fans congregate around some cultural artifact, like books or movies, to forge a shared heritage.

This very brief paraphrase doesn’t do Jenkins justice.  But I offer it because sharing is no mere luxury.  Where it is absent, people seek it wherever they can find it, often looking in wildly inappropriate places.  Many people who return from cults, hate groups, and other destructive social syndicates admit they joined not because they agreed with the groups’ defining principles, but because they felt loved and accepted.

Despite Ayn Rand hyperbole about individualistic supermen and parasitic crowds, humans are psychologically geared toward group membership.  We make friends early and often, not because we need them to do our work or create mutual utility networks, but because we get simple pleasure being around people we care about.  But in our mobile, professionally segmented society, few people make friends based on physical proximity or career compatibility.

Love of a common artifact, like a desired book from a celebrity author, links people around both the object, and the experience of enjoying the object.  Sharing books builds important bonds.  Back in high school, I lent my friend Edward some books by humorist P.J. O’Rourke, and we bonded by reading each other our favorite passages.  Edward and I remain in touch today—which I cannot say about “friends” with whom I lacked such bonds.

I appreciate my Kindle because it lets me snag information quickly.  If I need to dredge up a fact, or consume a book for the knowledge it contains, I reach for my Kindle.  And it makes a convenient door into publishing for new authors in today’s conflicted economy.  After Time-Warner dithered on publicizing my friend Jerry’s first novel, he jumped ship and published his short story collection God, Time, Perception & Sexy Androids digitally.  It has received several warm reviews from true fans.

But digital reading is an innately private phenomenon.  I can’t share my book with friends.  (The Nook, with which I have no familiarity, lets readers share books.  I’ll withhold judgment for now.)  For true book lovers, those who forge an identity with others over reading, this is no small loss.

Today, you can purchase nearly anything (other than perishable food) online, usually cheaper than in a store.  Yet shopping remains an important social enterprise.  As Jack Trytten says, we seldom purchase what we purchase; we actually purchase some virtue we associate with the purchase.  In the case of shopping, especially shopping for cultural experiences, we purchase the bond the item brings.

Digital reading does not yet provide that bond.  Until it does, print books will occupy a unique and irreplaceable pinnacle in our culture and our lives.

Holy Vigilante, Batman! (Part Two)

Defining Justice in a Nihilistic Universe

Note: this essay was intended to appear last Wednesday, but got pushed back because I felt the need to answer the outcry surrounding the Casey Anthony verdict. I have amended a few points here to reflect what I said last week.

In Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus, a notorious sophist, claims that “justice is the advantage of the stronger” and laws primarily exist to enforce social hierarchy.  Philosophers debate whether Thrasymachus, an actual historical figure whose writings survive only in fragments, really meant this claim, or if he was Plato’s straw man.  We can say with confidence, though, that many unjust people create ad hoc justice around themselves to fend off a world that remains appallingly heartless.

Comic book writer/artist Frank Miller created Gotham gangster Carmine “The Roman” Falcone as Batman’s first nemesis in Batman: Year One.  He has appeared occasionally since then, evolving as comic book characters do—comics’ ongoing, soap-operatic format lends characters to shifting interpretations.  Altogether more interesting, from a social mythology standpoint, is Falcone’s appearance, played by British actor Tom Wilkinson, in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.

In Nolan’s interpretation (which differs significantly from Miller’s), Bruce Wayne is spurred to venture into the world and cultivate his Batman persona after confronting Falcone in his private tavern.  Though the subterranean street outside his door is squalid and littered with detritus of urban collapse, Falcone’s tavern is softly lit, subdued, and marked by the customers’ posh dress.  Just walking through the door, Wayne sees that Falcone has built a fortress of order amid Gotham’s rapid entropy.

Wayne and Falcone have an brief exchange, culminating in a storytelling device sometimes derided as “The Reason You Suck” speech.  In this wheezy trope, one character, usually a villain, trumpets another beaten character’s supposed shortcomings to emphasize innate superiority.  Brandishing a gun, Falcone says:

Look around you: you'll see two councilmen, a union official, a couple off-duty cops, and a judge.  Now, I wouldn't have a second's hesitation of blowing your head off right here and right now in front of 'em.  Now, that's power you can't buy!  That's the power of fear.

Though distinctly stereotypical in its sentiments, Falcone’s speech makes a significant point: for all Falcone’s disregard for law, order, or human life, he is no mere evil plaguing the world as indifferently as the weather.  He wants something from humanity.  He wants their fear.

As business guru Jack Trytten says in his book The G Point (previously reviewed here), people never buy a product because they want that product.  People buy products because they want what the products can provide: ease, economy, prestige, or whatever they lack.  Falcone does not want people to fear him because he wants fear, nor does he run a massive crime enterprise because he wants lawlessness.  Carmine Falcone wants power—presumably because he feels powerless.

In other words, like Batman, Falcone sees Gotham falling to ruin and wants to do something about it.  Unlike Batman, who turns his desire for justice outward, Falcone presents a self-centered world, but one no less geared to fighting urban decay.  Those loyal to Falcone enjoy the perks of his world, emblematized by his posh, comfortably tavern.  Those outside, like the homeless man warming his hands over a burning trash barrel, live in fear.  Falcone becomes a law unto himself.

Compare Falcone to Depression-era bank robber Willie Sutton.  Though he denied saying he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” he admitted another reason.  In his memoir, Where the Money Was, Sutton said: “Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life.”  At a time of economic collapse, when countless Americans despaired of constant bread lines, Sutton took control.  He made his life mean something, even if that meaning was counterproductive.

Comic books and movies regard Batman as heroic because he turns his efforts to punishing those he considers lawbreakers, those who victimize the powerless.  But consider the history of organized crime.  Al Capone was born to immigrant parents in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and fought his way out of poverty.  Jesse James backed the losing side in the Civil War and was branded an outlaw because he rode with Quantrill’s Raiders.  John Gotti grew up in a poor ghetto and took up crime to offset his dissolute father’s gambling losses.

Born rich, Batman has the luxury of turning his attention to others.  Born in the belly of a decaying city, Carmine Falcone can’t build justice for anyone else until he builds it for himself.  Sure, he’s a criminal; but the justice system failed him, so he had to build one of his own.  While this does not excuse his crimes, it certainly suggests that, like Batman, Falcone only wants to protect the powerless, especially himself, and not let strangers run roughshod over the people.

We can debate whether justice is the advantage of the strong.  But we know justice is certainly the prerogative of the strong.  So, to some, Carmine Falcone is the better hero than Batman.

Part One: Sanctifying Civilian Justice
Part Three: Bane's Dichotomy Between Servitude and Chaos