Shop Class as Soulcraft: a Book Report, Sort Of

That Other Blog Over There piqued my interest in Matthew Crawford’s SCAS some months back, but apparently someone or something did the same for many other Chicago readers, with the result that the public library didn’t have a copy available until last week. Sometimes that kind of situation makes me desperate enough to actually go out and buy the book, without even waiting until it comes out in paperback (which usually happens at roughly the same time that the Chicago Public Library acquires it.) Fortunately, this time, my current difficult finances enabled/required me to hold out a bit longer and finally read the library’s copy. I don’t mean to sound curmudgeonly, because SCAS was a reasonably good read. But it was not the wellspring of original thought that That Other Blogger led me to expect. It was, in fact, warmed-over Paul Goodman and David Riesman, without a single attribution to either of them.

Well, okay. See: The More Things Change… for more grousing about the same thing, and for a mode of reconciling oneself to it. Those who have not read Goodman and Riesman, as Santayana might have said, may have to rewrite it. With, admittedly, an interesting overlay of speculation about the financial crisis of the last couple of years, drawing a nice parallel between the alienation of labor and the commoditization of mortgages. These are still worthwhile ideas, and if books by Goodman and Riesman have become hard to find, Crawford is no doubt entitled to reintroduce their thinking to this generation, which probably needs it more than mine did.

And, like Goodman and Riesman, Crawford talks almost entirely about how our alienation from the world of physical work affects men. Which is a serious batch of issues, well worth discussing. But how about the way that alienation affects women, if in fact it does so at all, or even as much as it affects men? I think women are in better touch with the physical world, and physical work, than men, these days. We still, by and large, do the cooking and the cleaning and the housework. Admittedly, the portion of it that men agree to do is usually the least alienated and most interesting part of it, such as fancy cooking. But women do the day-to-day plain cooking, and take as many shortcuts in the process as they can afford, since they are under the same time pressures from the paid workplace as their menfolk. As a result, there are probably a lot fewer women around than in my mother’s generation who can tell you how to make a good non-lumpy gravy without buying it in a jar. Last night, for the first time in a couple of years, I made such a gravy. It took maybe ten minutes longer than the kind that comes in a jar, and that ten minutes was already tied up with various other tasks involving preparation of a pair of turkey drumsticks, so the total process didn’t take any longer. It felt like an accomplishment, even though nobody except Mr. Wired would ever have noticed.

Also, the other night, while working on a blog about the effect of third-party payment on the economy, I got so absorbed in this mind work that I forgot about the very material teakettle under which I had lighted the burner, until I discovered that the water had boiled away and the kettle had been ruined. Or rather (from Crawford’s point of view) its ruin, initiated by an inadequately performing whistle, was completed. So much for intellectual work versus physical work.

Generally, every night, I clean up the kitchen (having made the momentous discovery that the Elves will not do it for me, no matter how long I leave it, and that it really does feel nicer to make breakfast in a clean kitchen) and find the task quite satisfying. I proofread and copyedit my text as I type, and take pride in producing final text with minimal numbers of typos and fluffs. (It took me a while to understand that most people do not proofread their emails before hitting send, and that it is considered rude to call their attention to typos.) I don’t like messy text going out over any of my signatures. All of these activities are interactions with the physical world that lack the homespun glamor of Crawford’s conduit-bending and motorcycle repair work. So they lack even the narrow “public” of such predominantly male activities. They are mostly what industrial psychologist Frederick Herzberg calls “hygienic factors”—things, the presence of which does not noticeably please the person who benefits from them, but the absence of which seriously displeases him/her. A lot of women’s work fits into this category.

The other thing Crawford ignores, perhaps because he is a white male, is that the kinds of material immediate-feedback work he finds least alienated are also the kinds that attract many really intelligent “minority” workers and women. Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses this phenomenon at some length. She feels that choosing “staff” rather then “line” positions within the corporation limits the upward mobility of women and minority workers, and generally advises against it. But “staff”—such as engineers, computer analysts, medics, and janitors—perform work that can be quickly evaluated, with little room for the evaluator’s prejudice. A good engineer builds bridges that don’t fall down, even if her boss doesn’t like her because she is “too shrill” or “too quiet,” or even if he is Jewish or Asian or Hispanic and doesn’t quite “fit in” in the lunchroom. Crawford draws on Dilbert and “The Office” to ridicule personality-based evaluations, but it seems not to occur to him that this style of evaluation encourages not only groupthink and stupidity, but discrimination. And Kanter does not, evidently, realize that taking a staff position may limit one’s upward mobility, but also limits the likelihood of suffering discrimination for not being the “right sort of person.” (For a lot more information on this phenomenon in the history of the American legal profession, see Jerold Auerbach’s Unequal Justice.)

So anyway, read SCAS, but don’t buy it unless you have never read Paul Goodman or David Riesman and can’t get hold of any of their stuff now. And while reading them, listen for the bloody teakettle. Or just heat the water for your tea in a self-limiting microwave (something Crawford would no doubt appreciate.)

CynThesis

What’s So Bad About Doing Good?

Or, for that matter, about feeling good? Or even doing good in order to feel good? These questions, of course, are directed at the authors and devotees of “Stuff White People Like.” Admittedly, I’ve only read bits and pieces of SWPL itself, mostly as quoted in other people’s blogs. But SWPL is only the most coherent popularization of a strain of thought that has afflicted our culture for nearly a century now. It has its origins in a kind of pop Calvinism that has by now forgotten its origins, but is still basic to the American psyche.

Jean Calvin (no relation to the tiger’s pal), who brought us the Pilgrims and the Presbyterian Church, believed that people are inherently sinful, and can’t “save” themselves by doing good works. We are “saved” if and only if God chooses to save us. We have no way of knowing who is saved and who is damned, and we shouldn’t care. We should, of course, do good, but not to save ourselves from damnation. We should do good purely because that’s what God wants. We must do everything possible to guard against ulterior motives. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is no better than not doing it at all.

There are, Calvin tells us, lots of wrong reasons. Earthly rewards, like money and status and power. Heavenly rewards, like not going to hell. And psychological rewards, like feeling good about ourselves. Ideally, we should do good as secretly as possible*, and in ever-present uncertainty about our eternal destination. Calvin didn’t, so far as I know, have any helpful advice on how to keep from feeling good about having done good. Presumably, if we are all sinners, awareness of that fact should be enough.

Well, these days, it isn’t. Unlike Calvin and his ideological descendants, today’s Americans believe deeply in their inalienable right to feel good about themselves. We bump up our self-esteem for our skills, our temperaments, and our sheer lovability. As Senator Franken, in his earlier incarnation as Stuart Smalley, used to say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and—doggone it!—the Minnesota Supreme Court likes me.” Or something like that.

We are entitled to feel good about every aspect of our selves except—oddly enough—our attempts to improve the world we live in and the lot of its inhabitants. Not only are we not allowed to feel good about doing good, we are not allowed to feel good about being good, except in the sense denoting excellence of worldly skills. We still believe we are all sinners. But we also believe that, as Smalley would say, “that’s o-kay.” We don’t need to feel bad about being sinners, we just shouldn’t feel good about being do-gooders. That would imply that we do good for ulterior motives—namely, in order to feel good.

This at least provides us with a solution to the eternal conundrum of how to bad-mouth people we don’t like but about whom we don’t actually know anything discrediting—just say they’re only buying Fair Trade coffee/living in integrated neighborhoods/going to church regularly/sending their children to public schools/buying hybrid cars/etc. to feel good. It’s even neater than calling them hypocrites, which was the ploy before we discovered feelgood.

Admittedly, I come from the Jewish tradition, which is mostly profoundly behaviorist. With some rather esoteric exceptions, we don’t much mind if you do the right thing for the wrong reason—even reasons a lot wronger than mere self-esteem, like looking good to the neighbors, improving the image of your business, impressing eligible members of the opposite sex, or even intimidating potential opponents—so long as you do it. We figure the world will still be a better place than if you don’t do it.

For the same reason, we aren’t keen on doing good secretly. If your neighbors don’t know you donate to charity, they may feel they live in a world in which most people don’t donate. This may lead them to stop donating. It may also lead them not to bother asking for help when they really need it, because they don’t know anybody to ask. At the very least, it is likely to lead them to depression and even despair.

Moreover, as St. Augustine figured out a long time ago, it is just about impossible to delete selfish motives from our actions. Either we deceive ourselves about our motives, or we get paralyzed into not acting at all. This is not worth the trouble.

So, please, spare me the Stuff White Liberals Who Aspire to a Moral Code Loftier Than Al Capone’s Like. Nice people feel good about nice things. Nasty people feel good about nasty things. Pat yourself on the back and go on your way. Make the world a better place.

*This was the whole point of Magnificent Obsession, a very popular edifying novel of the 1950s.

Red Emma

Magical Thinking, Al Queda, and Aliens

The origin of Guantánamo is pure magical thinking, as is the current mainland US resistance to bringing Gitmo defendants onto our soil for trial before federal courts. Perhaps the ancient Hindu practice of untouchability is the clearest analog. A person who can pollute places and people by his very presence in a room, or by casting his shadow upon a Brahmin’s food, is, on one hand, the lowest of the low. On the other hand, he also has a kind of super-power. Remember cooties? Back when we were fifth-graders and the boys had decided that girls had cooties, the girls could chase the boys halfway across the playground threatening to pollute them. Oh, to have that kind of power again!

Well, Al Quaeda, and anybody even remotely suspected of being connected with Al Quaeda, has that power. If any of them are allowed onto US soil, we will instantly dissolve into terror and anarchy. The super-max prisons that now securely hold the worst of our worst home-grown criminals are presumed to be utterly ineffectual against these Muslim super-criminals. Never mind that the latter’s accents and looks make them a lot easier to spot and retrieve than our home-grown murderers and rapists. Never mind that many of them have probably been deprived of most of their physical and mental competence by their treatment at Gitmo. Once their feet touch US soil, they will gain 100 pounds, get a foot taller, and turn green and even meaner than, say, Ted Bundy, Ted Kosinski, and Brian Dugan.

We knew that back in 2001, of course, which is why we created Gitmo in the first place. Those of you familiar with pagan magick know about wards and circles, which create places outside normal space and time to which the most dangerous forces can be restricted. Well, that was Gitmo. The detention facility there was created to be a legal black hole, under no one’s jurisdiction for purposes of legal review, but under the absolute control of the US government for purposes of keeping the Bad Guys from our shores. Of course, as anyone who saw “A Few Good Men” well knows, there is legal US jurisdiction at Gitmo. That’s why the US military servicemembers stationed there can be disciplined and even court-martialed, right there on the base, if they violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they don’t like the result, they can even appeal, first up the military chain of command all the way to the Pentagon, and then to the civilian federal court system on the mainland. But, apparently, the US public can’t handle that truth either. They/we can accept the novel concept of an “unlawful combatant” who is in a different category from prisoners of war, spies and irregulars subject to being shot on sight, and criminal defendants. Such a person therefore cannot be granted any of the legal rights of POWs or criminal defendants. But by reason of some strange compunction, he cannot be shot on sight either (perhaps because many of them were never encountered by US authorities on the battlefield in the first place, but were picked up from local bounty hunters.) Presumably that’s one of the three impossible things a good American is required to believe before breakfast. But we can’t imagine allowing these people to touch our sacred soil, lest they pollute it, and us, with deadly weakness.

Which is closely related to what happens to our sacred soil when the wrong kind of alien touches it. And also what happens to the right kind of alien (ie anti-communists and especially Cubans) touches that same soil—they are immediately free and legal. The soil that renders anti-communist Cubans free and legal is itself rendered vulnerable and polluted by capitalist-wannabe Mexicans. Does Hogwarts know about this?

Red Emma

Bigotry and Low Expectations

No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.

1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.

2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?

3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?

The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.

Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.

Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.

The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.

Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.

When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?

Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.

So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.

CynThesis

Groups upset man wouldn’t marry interracial couple

“By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer Mary Foster, Associated Press Writer – 6 mins ago

“NEW ORLEANS – At least two civil and constitutional rights groups in Louisiana are calling for a justice of the peace to resign after he refused to issue a marriage license for an interracial couple.

“The head of the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana and the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice said Keith Bardwell should quit immediately.

“Bardwell is a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in southeastern Louisiana. He refused earlier this month to issue a license or marry Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black.

“Bardwell said he always asks if a couple is interracial and, if they are, refers them to another justice of the peace.

“He says children of such unions face troubling futures.”

Umm, like the President of the United States? Or Tiger Woods? Oh, never mind.

Red Emma

Living in an Immaterial World

A few weeks ago, Amazon.com did something that rocked the whole system of private property. And all most of us did about it was kvetch. We saw it as a mere inconvenience. You buy a copy of 1984 for your Kindle™, and some days later, you log back on and discover 1984 isn’t there. Since then, Amazon has explained, and apologized, and most recently cleared up the legalities between Amazon and George Orwell’s estate or whatever owns the rights to 1984, and most of those who bought it have had it restored. Most of us regard it as a mere pothole on the road of life. It’s patched now, all’s well that ends well and so on.

Given that most people buy books before reading them, rather than after, can we then conclude that those inconvenienced bibliophiles are only now reading 1984 for the first time, and only now realizing that Orwell pretty much predicted what has happened to his book? George Winston, after all, was in the business of making, and remaking, history, in the most basic sense, de-happening events that had now become inconvenient for Big Brother’s current ideology. Those of us who read the book before Amazon put it onto Kindle™, or at least some of us, are bloody spooked. Anybody who can make a book disappear from your library without any kind of notice, much less permission, can just as easily change the content of the book so that (for instance) Big Brother turns out to be the hero, and poor George Winston is just a pathetic dupe. Or rewrite the history of the Civil War to make slavery a noble cause. Or rewrite the JFK assassination to make Lee Harvey Oswald a Wahhabi Muslim and Marina Oswald a femiNazi.

How do you know that when you Google™ a news story from 2005, you won’t see George W. Bush™ filling sandbags and pitching in to reinforce the levees in New Orleans? Or Silvio Berlusconi™ inventing a new and vastly improved version of linguini bolognese? Or Governor Sanford entering a monastery?

Back in “the Sixties,” when Mr. Wired and I were active in all kinds of countercultural religion and politics, I took to clipping the papers regularly, to preserve stuff that I felt the next generation would never believe if I couldn’t produce it. (In the Talmud, BTW, you run across all sorts of weird stories to which the Rabbis themselves add a little note: “If it were not written, it would be impossible to believe this.”) I filled up most of a 4-drawer filing cabinet with high-acid-content paper (that was the flaw in my reasoning), which I only recently went through and mostly discarded, since it has mostly turned into stiff yellow snowflakes of indecipherable memory and I needed the drawer space for client files. Now, like most other people, I am at the mercy of the Mass Media and what little paper documentation the librarians have managed to preserve.

The Buddhists (with whom I have been hanging out occasionally of late) would not be seriously distressed by these developments. Nor would a client of mine from thirty-odd years ago who was trying to get discharged from the Navy as a conscientious objector because, while on maneuvers in Hawaii, he sat on a beach for an evening and became Enlightened. My usual approach to these cases is to refer the client to a psychiatrist who firmly believes military service is bad for most people’s mental health, especially that of people who think killing people is wrong, and encourage Uncle Sam to discharge the client for reasons of emotional stability. It’s usually faster and cheaper than using the official regulations for Conscientious Objector discharge. This client objected to the tactic. He wasn’t crazy, he explained. The Navy was crazy. They still believed in the reality of the material universe. The real universe is an eternally-flowing mesh of causes and consequences, assumptions and reactions.

Now, causality can reach backward as easily as forward. If we need the Reconstruction to have been a Bad Thing in order to accomplish some current political goal, we can revise it without even recalling and re-publishing the encyclopedias and textbooks that will shape the next generation’s understanding of history.

Which assumes, of course, that the next generation will have an understanding of history. Yesterday, a paralegal in our office, a smart and reasonably well-educated young woman, asked me who was on the other side in World War II. While Big Brother’s right hand is busy rewriting history, his left hand has managed to make the whole idea of history irrelevant to those who would ordinarily be expected to create its next chapter. When Seward, mourning the just-deceased Lincoln, said “Now he belongs to the ages,” he meant that Lincoln would always be part of what shaped America and the world. These days, when somebody says that a particular person or thing is “history,” they mean it’s gone, disappeared, never to be seen again. Even the History Channel™ is mostly taken up with the exploits of ice road truckers in Alaska and myopic analyses of the DaVinci Code pitting the Freemasons against the Bavarian Illuminati.

We are just now realizing that all the gee-whiz forensic technology that lies at the foundation of any criminal prosecution in which the State has somehow not managed to persuade the defendant to plead guilty, is highly fallible, precisely because it contains nothing so physical as a smoking gun, just a bunch of digital impressions on “a media” [sic] that the next generation of forensic “scientists” won’t even be able to read.

Friends of mine with libraries as extensive as the one in the Wired residence are contemplating selling them, or donating them to schools in the Third World, or recycling them for pulp, now that the best that has been thought and said is available in digitized format through Google™ or whoever, on “a media” the size of a good Cuban cigar. But a good cigar is, at least, a smoke. The best that has been thought and said can be rendered unreadable through a simple electromagnetic hiccup or an “updated” digitizing format.

We have already allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the best music and drama that has been composed and performed being recorded onto one short-lived medium after another. Those of us who really cared about such stuff now have more than six generations of it in our “media rooms,” accumulated over only a mere half-century. More reasonable people just throw out the last generation when the new one reaches an affordable price. The newest generation, of course, doesn’t exactly accumulate at all. Like the Kindle™ books, it merely takes up residence on our current “media” until we get bored with it, and then makes way for the next batch of stuff. We never own any of it.

I think (maybe I’ve been hanging out with Buddhists too long?) that this might be okay if the generations of ideas and songs and plays that wander into and out of our minds originated among real thinkers and artists, and not just the minions of media conglomerates who “own” most of what gets “created” these days. I’ve been through distributing the books and records and pictures of my deceased parents and friends, and part of me doesn’t want to put anybody through the same process again for my stuff. But if the alternative is to let Sony, Bertelsman, and Gulf Western do my thinking and my enjoying for me while I live, and leave no thoughts or music of my own to those who come after me, then, thanks, I’ll stay in the material world a while longer, even if it means stumbling over my accumulated books and music while I live and burdening my friends and family with them afterward.

Jane Grey

The Flabby Arm of the Law

Some of our colleagues are disturbed that the US government seems lackluster in its enforcement of immigration law.  If we were paying attention, this would surprise no one.  It is only a special case of a reality so long-established and widespread in this country that it isn’t even a “problem,” it’s just an essential component of our culture. Americans don’t like law enforcement roughly 50% of the time.  Or, as our daughter puts it, every American law includes one invisible clause: “except me.”

Our various ancestors came here in the first place to get away from onerous economic and legal systems in the Old Country.  Sure, the Puritans immediately set up what seemed like an equally onerous system here.  But read Perry Miller and George Demos on how it actually worked out.  The Puritans anti-sex?  Not if you count the number of public rebukes for fornication and adultery, and the number of “premature” births.  In the era before TV and central heating, the Puritans did what they had to to keep warm and entertained.  Anti-violence? Anti-theft?  Read the stats.

More important, consider what our ancestors, like our own legislators today, used the law for.  First, (Wired’s First Law) nobody legislates against what nobody does.  The existence of a law against fornication isn’t evidence of a society’s high regard for chastity.  It is precisely the opposite.  The people whose lawmakers pass such legislation know their constituents screw around (as, a fortiori, do the lawmakers themselves.)  They just want to get on the record, when they have the time to get out of that unsanctified bed, that they know it’s wrong.

Same goes for drunk driving, indoor smoking, drug use, and exceeding the speed limit.  We use these statutes mainly to proclaim that We Are Nice People.  Not that we are people who don’t drive drunk, smoke indoors, use drugs, and speed.

That’s purpose #1 of American laws. Purpose #2 is the control of “undesirables.”  We are also a thrifty lot, who don’t like to let useful stuff go to waste.  Now that we have all those laws lying around on the books, why not use them to keep Those Other People in line?  Prohibition, clearly, was a Protestant movement to keep those wine-bibbing, beer-guzzling Italian and German Catholics from having too much fun.  The War on Drugs began as a war on African-Americans and graduated to a war on hippies.  The only prosecution for fornication in an egregiously well-known Southern state in the 1960s involved two African-American honor students who were active in the Civil Rights movement.  You get the picture.  Once the statute books are full of laws everybody violates, everybody is vulnerable to prosecution.  We can pick and choose among our potential defendants.  Should anyone be surprised if those who do the choosing concentrate on Those Other People?

Every now and then, some court finds this bias too blatant to be acceptable.  That was what happened in San Francisco, roughly a century ago, in Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, the grandmother of all discriminatory prosecution cases, in which Mayor Mark Hopkins decided to close down all wood-frame buildings used as laundries, which—surprise!—included almost all Chinese laundries and almost no non-Chinese laundries.  Even the US Supreme Court of that era, hardly a bastion of equal protection (the same guys who brought us “separate but equal” Plessy vs. Ferguson and “three generations of imbeciles is enough” Buck vs. Bell,) thought that was too much.*  Every now and then the courts still follow that precedent, though mostly they just nibble away at it like ducks at a pizza, and hope for it to disappear entirely some day.

Legislators get lots of good publicity out of designating a Serious Problem and then passing a law against it.  Occasionally, they run into embarrassed staffers who, having been assigned to research The Problem and draft the law, discover there already is such a law.  Legislators do not get good publicity from merely proposing to enforce a law that has been on the books for a century.  That’s just “the nanny state.”  The laws that actually get enforced are a small proportion of those on the books, and the proportion of violations of those laws that actually generate prosecutions is even smaller.

Every now and then, one of Us gets busted for breaking a law clearly aimed at Them, and complains about it.  “The only reason I got stopped for speeding was that it was easier for the cops to catch me because I was only going five miles over the limit when everybody else was going fifteen miles over the limit. It isn’t fair.”  Most of the time, as noted earlier, the courts disregard this argument, unless it seems to have really blatant racial, ethnic, or religious implications.  Being the slowest-moving lawbreaker on the road is a bad idea.  Most people know better. OTOH, prosecutions for Driving While Black are actually attracting lots of negative publicity these days, and many jurisdictions are cracking down on them. (For more information, check this out http://www.jmls.edu/facultypubs/oneill/oneill_column_04b08.shtml)

But most of the time, even local judges are not too bashful to say, of a defendant who is about to catch an unexpected break from the criminal justice system, that s/he “is not a member of the criminal class.”  (I’ve heard it myself, and probably many of you gentle readers have too.)  At heart, we are all Aristotelians.  We believe character determines fate, what you are determines what should happen to you, and what you have done in the past is our best guide to what you are.  So if you are a high school dropout with no visible means of support and a record of minor misdemeanors, we have no trouble concluding you must be more guilty of buying or selling cocaine than the solid, middle-class citizen next to you.  This is common sense, and tends to be accurate more often than not.  As long as we don’t really feel obliged to determine whether the high school dropout etc. actually made the drug sale/purchase in question, we figure he will get what’s coming to him more often than not, and that’s close enough for government work.

In conclusion, the reason “the Sixties” are still a hissing and a byword among hard-line conservatives is not that people actually became less law-abiding, but that they became less willing to accept the American deal—act like a solid citizen most of the time, don’t flaunt your lawbreaking, and we will treat you like a solid citizen unless you are Black or poor or Indian or Mexican or gay.  People who were not any of those things suddenly began breaking laws in public, and worse still, objecting to laws against sex, drugs, and harmless recreation, proclaiming that We Are Not Necessarily Nice People, and shouldn’t have to be.  That way lies Armageddon, Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

So the immigration laws are a relatively minor casualty of something a lot bigger and a lot harder to clean up.  God’s Own Party has, wisely for their purposes, chosen to go about enforcing those laws by turning all illegal immigrants, and most legal immigrants, into Those Other People, unlettered Hispanics sneaking in here to take jobs and welfare benefits from good Amurricans.  It seems to be working.  Maybe it shouldn’t be.

Red Emma

Things the Bible Would Have Said if the Author Had a Better Quote Book

Warning: this is yet another rant from Jane Grey on people who cite the Bible without bothering to read it.  If you’re not in the mood, go buy some popcorn.

That Other Blog Over There just attributed “hate the sin but love the sinner” to Jesus.  The Other Blogger Over There is usually much more biblically literate than that.  A swift resort to Google tells us that nobody knows who really said it first, but everyone who bothered to check it out reports that it is not to be found anywhere in the Bible.  Which is consistent with my own research.

“God helps those who help themselves,” OTOH, is definitely Ben Franklin.  “To thine own self be true” is definitely Shakespeare.  “With malice toward none, with charity to all” is definitely Lincoln. All of them have, at one time or another, been attributed to the Bible.

The Bible, similarly, says absolutely nothing about abortion, and nothing directly about same-sex marriage.  And everything it says about homosexuality, it says in paragraphs adjacent to pronouncements about adultery, for which it recommends essentially the same punishments (except for the Sodom and Gomorrah story, which can be read several different ways, and which Jews and Christians in fact do read very differently.  The traditional Jewish reading of the story sees the Sin of Sodom as powerful people doing it to powerless people, rather than men doing it with men.)

The finer points of modern textual criticism enable us to determine that, even if all that stuff about wives submitting to their husbands is in the Bible, it wasn’t really Saint Paul who said it, but some cheap knockoff, which is kind of nice.  And, while ignoring Revelation may be easy for us Jews, we don’t get off that easily from looking at Daniel, which was in fact one of the sources of Revelation.  (Arguably, Revelation is a cheap knockoff of Daniel, in fact.)

But then, one of my dearest friends, of blessed memory, once talked a Jehovah’s Witness missionary off his doorstep by quoting scripture at him in English and Hebrew until the poor guy gave up.  Let’s hear it for a little learning (not, BTW, a little knowledge.  See Pope’s “Essay on Man.”  Not the Bible.)

Jane Grey

Starve and Shoot

How do you get rid of a mule when everybody else on the farm really likes it? First you cut out one of its daily feedings, then you cut back to food every other day, then every third day. By that time, the mule is so weak it can’t do any work at all, so nobody will blame you if you shoot it.

How do you get rid of a program (whether government, corporate, or TV) that people really like but you (one of the people in charge) really hate?  It’s easy.  You underfund it, understaff it, reorganize the caseload and the chain of command every four months or so, move it around so nobody can find it, and, in general, deprive it of all the things that made people like it in the first place. Then, when you kill it, if people notice its absence at all, they’ll just say good riddance, it had already jumped the shark anyway.

I have personally been involved in one such shameful episode (you may have your own) in our nation’s history, when the federal agency I worked for became the target of its own administration’s dislike.  That was how I found out that the administration, if it has any smarts at all, will not respond by firing everybody and shutting the agency down, because that’s expensive.  You have to pay severance and accumulated leave and set up COBRA payments and so on.  So instead, you just reorganize them every four months or so, which is just about the optimal length of time for people to have finally regained their competence and figured out where the copier paper has been moved to after the last reorganization.  A couple of rounds of this and everybody except the most hidebound and unimaginative careerists will quit on their own, one at a time, which is financially a lot easier to cope with than mass firings.

And of course, everybody has had the experience of not being able to find a favorite TV program as it gets moved around the clock and then replaced every other week or so by some kind of “special,” so that when it finally shows up again, you’ve forgotten most of the plot line.  If that doesn’t work, the producers just keep switching writers until the characters start sprouting multiple, and non-credible, personalities and the audience loses interest, which is mostly what happened to ER in its last couple of seasons.  Somebody who was a lesbian feminist in season 4 suddenly falls in love with her boss, gets pregnant, and becomes a stay-at-home wife-and-mother, and so on in season 6, then dies of cancer just in time for the finale of season 7, which, if the other characters are having similar gyrations, is probably the series finale too.

And then there’s the standard way bosses deal with high-performing employees they for some reason don’t like.  You change their job descriptions, or change their actual duties without changing their job descriptions; you move their cubicles to Outer Darkness, if possible you change their working hours—you get the picture.  And the hapless target of these behaviors, if s/he has never experienced them before, is likely to think, “If I can put up with this without letting my job performance deteriorate, they won’t fire me.”  Which is precisely the opposite of what’s really happening—they aren’t cr*pping on you instead of firing you, they’re cr*pping on you preparatory to firing you.  First they starve the mule, preferably until its performance deteriorates into total uselessness, and then they shoot it.

Red Emma

Do Americans Watch Too Many Hospital Shows?

Watching Marcus Welby may have led Americans of a Certain Age to expect house calls and long conversations with their doctors.  Watching ER may have led younger Americans to expect a lot of noisy rapid action.  Watching Grey’s Anatomy or General Hospital may have led many of us to sneak a peek into supposedly empty hospital rooms in hope of catching younger medical personnel in flagrante delicto.  Popular culture undoubtedly shapes our expectations of the health care system, for better and for worse.

Age, class, and gender play their part, too.  Younger males, especially blue-collar men, want as little contact with the health care system as possible.  Real men don’t go to doctors and don’t take meds.  Real blue-collar men watch ESPN, which rarely deals with medical issues other than the ingestion of illegal substances by professional athletes. Naturally, this tends to make doctors, when seen at all, the bad guys.

Women generally get stuck functioning as the designated interface with the health care system on behalf of everybody else in the family until they are old enough to need somebody else to handle those duties on their own behalf.

Middle-class, educated, white-collar Americans have higher expectations, because in addition to watching Private Practice and Hawthorne, they read Scientific American and the Health section of the daily paper.  Which leads them into the same trap we collectively fall into:  losing track of the distinction between what we can imagine being able to do, what science has worked out the how-tos for but not implemented yet, what elite medical care can provide if paid enough for it, what is actually being done in the majority of American facilities, and what poor people can get if they’re really lucky.  The popular culture culprit here may not be a hospital show at all, but CSI and other purveyors of gee-whiz technology.  In an earlier generation, we didn’t have so much trouble realizing that Dr. McCoy’s scanner was a couple of centuries away. Today, we rarely think about the fact that the various non-invasive technologies for imaging and surgery  that we really do have available now are EXPENSIVE.  ER was pretty good about discussing the financial facts of medical life where they were relevant to the plotline, but of course, in an emergency room, the law requires every bona fide emergency patient to be treated regardless of ability to pay, so the issue didn’t necessarily come up until much later, usually long after the show was over.

Quite possibly what popular culture and the health care system should be working on together is a medical version of Car Talk.  You know, that Public Radio show on which, every Saturday morning, two Italian-American mechanics (both MIT-educated, and one of whom has a PhD, so much for blue-collar credentials) take questions from listeners nationwide about the foibles and failings of cars and mechanics.  They have a pretty healthy and realistic attitude toward both.  Cars are mortal.  All cars eventually disintegrate and die.  Mechanics are fallible and sometimes greedy.  Car dealers and their repair and maintenance facilities are not necessarily much better.  But most of us can keep our cars running for well over 100,000 miles by paying attention to telltale noises (Car Talk makes me wonder if good hearing and possibly even perfect pitch are Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications for a car mechanic), tending to routine maintenance regularly, and not doing Really Dumb Things.  Some car problems are Really Dangerous, and some are just trivial or unpleasant.  Check with your mechanic to see which is which, and don’t hesitate to get a second opinion when the first one doesn’t sound right. Since most of their calls involve cars over five years old (that’s forty-five in people years), they have no gee-whiz technology to call upon, just basic grease-monkey stuff.  [Cars with GPS and rear view cameras are still brand new and under dealer warranty, so the Car Talk Boys never hear about them.]

This is precisely the level of technology most of us need to hear about when our bodies act up, except that we don’t usually give off telltale noises (other than the stuff stethoscopes listen for, which was probably a much larger part of the practice of medicine seventy years ago.)  Unfortunately, doctors are mostly too nervous about getting sued to offer medical advice to strangers on the public airwaves (note that the Car Talk Boys never issue any disclaimers about their advice. Is this because so far, most of us don’t sue our mechanics?)  There should be ways to work around this.  Because, at least until we start heading into the Geezer Years, most of us think of our bodies pretty much the way we think of our cars: we just want to keep them running reasonably well at reasonable cost for as long as possible.  We want our doctors to function like good car mechanics.  Mostly, we want them to specialize in doing things we mostly think we could do for ourselves if we wanted to take the time and trouble, but it’s easier to let somebody else do it.  We want hints on how to do some of the easy stuff for ourselves, and then we just want to leave the complicated stuff to them.  If we could drop our bodies off at the hospital and come back for them later, most of us probably would, especially if we could get a suitable loaner in the meantime (Here’s a slightly used Mel Gibson, shouldn’t give you any trouble, but it’s only got a quarter tank of gas, be sure and have dinner on the way home tonight…)

And in the Geezer Years, we probably don’t expect what the medical establishment seems to think we do.  We don’t want to live forever. We just want to keep functioning more or less normally for as long as possible. We don’t want to fight as long as possible.  Whose idea was it to depict medical intervention in terms of combat in the first place anyway?  These days, a lot of patients regardless of gender seem to buy into the model, but I suspect that’s mostly because they are made to think they ought to.  I know the denizens of That Other Blog will say I’m pushing euthanasia or assisted suicide or something, but I think if the medical establishment were willing to tell patients it’s okay to give up or give in beyond a certain point, a lot of people would, thereby sparing themselves a lot of unnecessary pain and perhaps also cutting down on the enormous proportion of lifetime health care expenditures that is now spent in the last six months of life.    Nurses are often better at talking about these realities than doctors, and maybe they should be encouraged to do it more often.  It is their primary job, after all, to care about how the patient feels. Maybe hospital chaplains should be recruited for these discussions too; they are mostly connected with faith traditions that tell us the soul is more important than the body, after all.  Doctors, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as the patient’s designated champion in the combat against death.

Well, enough of awkwardly chosen metaphors (a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?)  Now that Obama has started talking about what used to be health care reform as health insurance reform, we will need to start looking elsewhere to change the health care system.  Stay tuned for The Body Talk Boys, Mark and David Welby, and don’t eat like my brother.

CynThesis