Day 11 Issues in Modern America February 12, 2002

1. Names. Into Color Purple for next time. Topical statements back—mainly quite good, though I have various ideas and suggestions, as usual. Next stage is historical overviews, which are due in a couple of weeks. This stage will require some serious research, and some thinking about the borders of your study: where do you pick up the issue, what do you concentrate on? As I wrote on some of your proposals, the focus of the course is on modern America, though we’ve looked back over the past as preparation; your eventual focus should be on modern America, though the historical survey might of course look behind a fair distance. Talk with me if you have questions.

We’ll start Color Purple on Thursday, so read as much as you can.

A brief and sort of odd combination here. I want to get some feedback on the course so far, which as I’ve said repeatedly is an experiment, and I also want to get some sense of whether all those of you who weren’t there last night actually did see the movie on your own.

2. What about Roger and Me? Where on the political spectrum is Michael Moore? He’s, I’d say, an old-style, working-class, labor-union leftist. Not New Left or leftover sixties radical, hmm? Note the movie comes back over and over to the 1937 sit-down strike which forced GM to recognize the United Auto Workers as the legitimate representative of the workers.

What happened in Flint? Auto industry went through major recession in 70’s with oil crises, demand for small cars, competition from Japan, etc. In 80’s American companies recovered, became profitable again; 80’s plant closings were not because companies were losing money, but because they hoped to make more money by shifting production overseas, replacing high-priced US workers with cheap foreign labor. It worked, more or less, in that company profits increased, shareholder returns and executive compensation went through the roof. . . .

These days GM is still profitable, those who still have jobs are making good money, and the top executives are getting, well, filthy rich.

What about the characters in this movie? Moore himself? Roger Smith? Tom Kay the company p.r. person? Bob Eubanks, who keeps telling rude jokes? The rabbit woman? Fred Ross, deputy for evictions? Workers? Bob who cracks up? Anita Bryant, who says hang in there, be positive, today’s a new day, thank God for the sunshine? Pat Boone? It’s nobody’s fault, he says. In a free, capitalist society there are shifts . . . the key is attitude.

Two views: that the “shifts” are external, natural forces, painful but inevitable. Or, that specific human beings make particular decisions that have particular effects on others . . .

The Amway color woman. She just seems deluded, hmm?

The lady golfers: You can’t help them. They just don’t want to work. Some of them anyway.

Reagan: move to Texas.

Schuller: tough times don’t last, tough people do. Turn your hurt into a halo. He gets 20 grand to come to town.

The attempts at urban renewal: “Our spark will surprise you.” In some areas, money is still flowing; $11 mil. for Hyatt Regency, $100 mil for Autoworld. They both go broke. Puppet autoworker singing love song to robot that’s going to replace him on the line. “Me and My Buddy.”

Back to the rabbit lady: what about her? Why should she gross us out? Isn’t she doing what the Anita Bryants and Pat Boones recommend, making the best of things, setting up a business, keeping herself going?

Anybody see a parallel between the way she treats her rabbits and the way GM treats its workers?

She’s in the movie not as a symbol but as metonymy: a part that stands for a larger whole. She is to her rabbits, more or less exactly, as Roger Smith is to the workers of Flint. She needs to do what she needs to do, and when the rabbits are too old to be pets she needs to find some other way to use them. She doesn’t hate them; she likes them, in her own way. But she’s got to live, right? She cares for her rabbits, but she doesn’t see them as people. Smith “cares” for the workers at the GM plants, but . . .

Tom Kay: Why should GM be loyal to Flint? Its goal is to make money. What do you think?

Crime on the rise: the stolen Nightline truck, the new jail. Couples spending $100 to spend a night in it. Whoopee.

What lines or divides in our society does this movie show? Does it exaggerate the division between working and upper class? Or is it the way that it is? Do those above the line show much understanding of those below it? Solzhenitsyn: “A man who’s warm can’t understand a man who’s cold.”

The Roger Smith Christmas message, intercut with Deputy Fred evicting people on Christmas Eve: not too hard to get the message here, hmm?

What about this view of the country and the economic system? The film is hardly a “comedy” in the usual sense of that term, is it? It’s more in the tradition of black comedies like Mash or Catch-22, in which the laughter is the only remaining defense against the brutal violence of war. Here the brutality is economic, not military, and the casualties are merely thrown into the street, not killed outright; but otherwise it’s not much different.

Is he right or not? Or, does this point of view matter? What makes this movie so surprising, I think, is that it treats social realities that are generally avoided in the mainstream media, for all we hear about how “liberal” they are. Small/midsize midwestern cities are just about invisible; people who live in New York or LA, where most media stuff comes from, tend to live in the illusion that there are only a few thousand people scattered in between the coasts, unless some schoolkid in one of those towns starts shooting his classmates.

Cf. Ragged Dick and the American Dream. There Mr. Whitney is the great benevolent father, helping out the plucky lad. Here Roger Smith is the Bad Father, the one who abandons his children and hires underlings who blame it all on impersonal market forces. The message isn’t “Work hard and you’ll get ahead,” but “Work as hard as you want, you may just get screwed anyway.” Hmm? Meanwhile the folks above the unemployment line are still repeating variations on the old line.

Also, cf. the recent shooting in Mount Morris: a 6-year old boy, his father in jail, his mother evicted from her house, using drugs and working “during the day and into the evening” according to a neighbor. He didn’t have a bed of his own. He was often in trouble, he had a social worker.

Now, what’s the deal here? Whose fault is this? Is it the mother’s for being morally weak? The father’s for abandoning the family, for getting himself locked up? Do the people who closed down the plants in Flint and shipped those jobs somewhere else bear any responsibility?

3. What about unions in America? Look at some of the web sites I found--the Haymarket riot, the Flint strike, information about labor history and current statistics. Say I wanted to write about labor issues--I’m more than halfway there already.

Note also looking for stuff on various sides of issues, and recognizing bias. The AFL-CIO, the guy who spoke at Hillsdale, the government report.

What’s true? That unions are the last best hope for the American working person, that union members almost inevitably get higher wages and better working conditions than non-union members in similar jobs? Or that unions are bent on destroying our freedoms, ruining the corporations their money comes from, stifling free enterprise everywhere, and turning the country into a hapless socialist dystopia? Well, you decide.

It is true that union influence and membership have been steadily declining, along with manufacturing jobs that paid high wages for relatively unskilled work. . . .

http://workers.labor.net.au/86/c_historicalfeature_donations.html A report on the current situation regarding plant closings and the threat of closing/moving plants as a deterrent to labor organizing.

“In the most comprehensive survey ever of U.S. union organizing campaigns, Bronfenbrenner found that "the majority of employers consistently, pervasively and extremely effectively tell workers either directly or indirectly that if they ask for too much, or don't give concessions, or try to organize, strike or fight for good jobs with good benefits, the company will close, move out of state or move across the border, just as so many other plants have done before."

In union organizing drives in the United States in 1998 and 1998, she found, more than half of all employers threatened to close all or part of the facility if workers voted to join a union.

But the situation is even worse than that figure suggests, because for some types employers it is difficult to make credible threats to move -hotels and hospitals, for example, are to a onsiderable extent tied to place.

In mobile industries -- manufacturing and other companies that can credibly threaten to shift production -- the plant closing threat rate was 68 percent. In all manufacturing, it was 71 percent. In food processing, it was 71 percent.”

What’s Mike been up to since? http://www.michaelmoore.com/ has links to order his new book, Stupid White Men, and a recent essay on the Bush administration and Enron. If you believe Amazon.com the book is #8 on their sales list, though it won’t be released for another week. (!)