Month: October 2013

Whether or not my senioritis-stricken students are getting anything out of it I can't be certain, but my seminar on political literature has given me a great opportunity to re-read some of The Classics. This week we're doing The Jungle. Everyone is assigned it at some point and I doubt many people read it. That's a shame.

The reason it's important goes beyond its rather ham-fisted message – Oliver Stone took most of his lessons in subtlety from Upton Sinclair – to accomplish things its author never intended. Sinclair lamented the fact that the message about socialism was largely lost on his audience. Not many people seemed concerned with the workers, whereas most readers were in an uproar about food safety. The author gave all of the characters flaws in order to make them more believable. As a consequence, many readers were more apt to moralize about personal responsibility than to sympathize with the extent to which the characters were brutally and systematically destroyed. Stop me if that sounds familiar.

Post-1980 America is a land in which it is impossible to engage in a discussion about a System with college-aged people without inevitably and almost immediately devolving into mini-soliloquies on Good and Bad choices. Why have so many kids? Why did he start drinking? And they signed a contract without reading the whole thing! Everyone knows not to do that.

This is what I mean when I describe college students, when I'm forced to generalize, as extremely conservative. They aren't necessarily hardcore political conservatives in the context of Washington politics, but they have thoroughly internalized the message that their parents and the media have been hammering them with since birth: everything that happens to you is your fault. There are no innocent victims of anything. This is a coping mechanism / cognitive bias called the Just World Phenomenon, wherein people victim-blame as a means of coping with the random cruelty of the world. Rather than accept that horrible things happen to good people – and, thus, that a horrible fate could befall them at any moment – people choose to retreat into the comforts of believing that everyone Had It Coming.

These are young adults who believe sincerely that since they have made Good Choices, nothing bad can happen to them for reasons beyond their control. The idea of being unemployed is literally incomprehensible to many of them – I'm in college and I even get decent grades, of course someone is going to hire me. This is where, as critics both liberal and conservative have often moaned, the constant self-esteem building of kids born in the 1990s shows its ugly side. Each student tends to believe that he or she is special and smart and the world, being a meritocracy, cannot fail to recognize this. Some of this simply is the normal naivety of youth that only life experience can erase. I honestly believe, strictly as a matter of opinion, that the hyper-individualism that dominates post-Carter politics is influential as well.

Sometimes I try to push back when this rears its head in the classroom, despite the obvious futility. What if your job gets outsourced to Asia? Well, I would never enter a field where that could happen, or I would Get More Education and change fields. Oh, I see. That should do it. It does not occur to them that their employers will be able to cornhole them with abandon, as they see themselves and unique, irreplaceable, and thus able to dictate their own terms. If they don't like it, they can quit and find another job. How hard could that be? They see the bleakness of the economy all around them, yet they see themselves as impervious to it.

This is the real value of reading The Jungle for kids of this generation – the message about unions and socialism may be lost on them, but it's hard to miss the message that shit happens. Bad things are going to happen to you. People are going to screw you and you won't be able to do anything about it. As you age, the market will do all that it can to purge you from the workforce. You will get sick. The fine print Terms & Conditions that no one, anywhere, ever reads will bite you in the ass at the worst possible times. There is much we can do to prepare ourselves to weather everything that life is going to throw at us, but we can't make ourselves invincible.

This is a generation that sees everything they do wrong as someone else's fault but everything that happens to other people as a matter of personal responsibility. Reading a tale of hard working, well intentioned people getting reamed by a corrupt system even as they work themselves to literal death might be an eye-opener. Sure, it will sail right over the heads of some of them. I feel, though, that the understanding that the world is not fair, life is hard, and getting by is often a tremendous struggle is a necessary precondition to having meaningful political attitudes. The idea that everything that happens to individuals in our society is their own fault poisons our entire culture, from our politics to our communities. People like Sinclair saw through this over a century ago, but somewhere along the way we chose to forget.

My current city is essentially a company town.
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There is a bit more here than simply Caterpillar, but everything else lags far behind one of the fifty largest corporations on Earth with $100 billion in assets and operations in something like 100 countries. It is not an overstatement to say that Cat runs the show around here; all local governing is done with the company's blessing and most of the very small number of things to do here are funded directly or indirectly by the company coffers.

As is the case with all company towns, the city has risen and fallen with the fortunes of its great patron.

At least it used to, that is. Now the company continues to rise and the city continues to fall, as it has followed the trend of closing up facilities here in its Midwestern home and shifting them to developing countries or, if they really feel like slumming it, the deep South. In fact, on the day I moved from Athens to Peoria, Cat announced the closure of a Peoria manufacturing facility to be replaced by a new facility in Athens complete with the usual Southern governments' buffet of free money, tax abatements, infrastructure investments, and promises of a docile $10/hr workforce. I can say without exaggeration that I was traded to Peoria for a major industry to be named later.

So while the city lives and dies by the company, there is less of the company here with each passing year. Part of the reason is the quest for cheaper labor and more obsequious state and local governments. Another part of the reason is that Peoria is a world-class dump. Think Flint, MI or Youngstown, OH with the headquarters of a major global corporation plopped in the center. I've said enough about it to fill volumes; suffice it to say here that Caterpillar does not relish bringing leaders in the business world to Peoria. It's pretty embarrassing.

This isn't idle speculation; I know a handful of white-collar Caterpillar folks, and they complain regularly about the condition of the city.

They have berated the city government for lacking suitable hotels (now being built or remodeled downtown with plenty of "incentives"), restaurants, entertainment, or airport. The downtown looks neat from a distance but up close is an abandoned Scooby-Doo ghost town. They have legitimate complaints.

However, they also seem ignorant of their own role – arguably the leading role – in the city's decline from the post-War boom years to its present sorry state. Whenever Cat people, be they acquaintances or the top executives on TV and at city council meetings, complain about what a dump they inhabit I have to suppress the urge to say, "That's funny, because it looked a lot less like a dump when you had 30,000 factory workers here compared to the few hundred here now." And by "suppress the urge to say" I mean that is what I say.

This is not new; General Motors has been doing it to Detroit for years, as have General Electric, Kodak, Dow, and other companies that make up the crumbling cities of upstate New York.
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They openly pine for the neatly manicured office buildings, suburbs, and downtown chain restaurants of a Phoenix, Dallas, or anywhere-in-Florida. And they criticize their cities – cities and people that have bent over backwards to make them the enormous successes that they have been for a century or more – as though some exogenous force (alien invasions, perhaps) have destroyed everything. It never occurs to them that if they would like the city to be full of the kinds of things that sprout up wherever sizable populations with disposable income exist then perhaps they should stop cutting the workforce and perhaps even consider expanding it. Of course, that suggestion inevitably leads into the race to the bottom that is modern competitive federalism – why stay here when Alabama's politicians are willing to write blank checks and its people are willing to work for half as much because Freedom?

For people and institutions who hold the principles of capitalism so dear, they sure do seem to struggle with "You get what you pay for."

Recently we had a campus visit day, the highlight of which is watching high school students try to act cool while walking around campus with their parents. As this is scientifically proven to be impossible, hilarity ensues.

As I walked to my car I saw a group being led around by a student tour guide who I recognized from class. I said hello and made some sort of PG joke like, "You didn't show them the dorms with the mold problem, did you?" Oh, Ed. You card. She explained to the group that I was one of her professors last year.

Side note: I have a pretty swell car. It was not terribly expensive (more on that in a minute) but I take exceptional care of it. Having just spent the Labor Day weekend working it over with an orbital buffer, it currently looks like it just rolled out of the factory. Eyeing the car, one of the parents said "Well I guess that's why tuition is so high!" Ha ha ha. Good one. Laughs all around. Here's the thing. Two, actually.

First, it's ridiculous to assume that I bought the car new.
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I bought it used after stalking it on eBay for six goddamn months and getting the dealer to agree to a ridiculous deal. I paid less for a used BMW than, for example, a new compact car like a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla. If I was getting into a 2013 Honda Civic, would anyone be making jokes about my extravagant Professor Lifestyle?

Second, although it was clearly intended as a harmless joke, parents (and students) are constantly telling us we make too much money. To our faces. Students will flat-out tell us, "Tuition keeps going up because of professor salaries." This is not only beyond inaccurate – tuition increases are happening because of the money schools spend on 1) administrators and administrative salaries, which have increased five-fold since 1990, and 2) infrastructure. The money essentially goes to people the students never see and to their fancy new gyms and dorms and classrooms and all the other stuff they demand to turn college into the four-year middle class kids' vacation that it is becoming.

The implication is that I don't look poor enough. As a professor, if they see me in anything other than a Carter-era sportcoat as I load my dilapidated briefcase into a 1983 Volvo station wagon, then clearly they're being ripped off. If I can afford anything other than tuna and ramen, then obviously the school needs to pay me less. Professors shouldn't have anything new or fancy-looking; those are our tuition dollars!

This is a mild version of something I see and hear constantly – complaints that The Poor don't look sufficiently poor. God help you if you're within earshot of a Hard Working American when they see a poor person with an iPhone or a fresh hairdo. WHY ARE YOU SPENDING MY HARD EARNED TAX DOLLARS ON BLAH BLAH BLAH. Maybe her friend did her hair for her, or maybe she bought the iPhone second-hand or received it as a gift. But the point is, this poor person does not look sufficiently poor. If you're on food stamps or Medicaid or anything that even tangentially involves a tax dollar, Americans want to see you wearing rags, smeared with dirt, and eating gruel. How dare anyone who's poor try to have some self-respect and look decent.

Certainly I have things a lot easier than the poor people everyone loves to judge as a spectator sport. But the principle at the heart of this kind of self-important behavior is the same: that people should look a certain way based on their perceived status. How dare poor people wear, eat, or own anything nice. We don't just want people to be poor, we want them to look poor so we can feel better about our own status. Everybody just loves a good bitch-and-moan about what the undeserving Others are doing with their Hard Earned Money.
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It never occurs to them that I also have to work hard to earn money (conservatives in particular believe that they personally invented the concept of hard work and nobody except them has ever done a day of hard work worthy of the compensation received) or that I might not be as well-off as something superficial like the brand of car I drive suggests. It never occurs to them that maybe my income is pretty modest but I happen to have no dependents, a low cost of living, and a fondness for ludicrously fast German sports cars. No, it must be that my nonexistent Professor Union guarantees me a six-figure salary that necessitates annual tuition increases.
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But that's where we're at after thirty years of lurching to the right as a nation. We see public employees attacked for having pensions and insurance, as anything other than a subsistence wage for people who take Our Hard Earned Money is too extravagant. How it must please our financial elite to see us shrieking at our peers for earning too much money like crabs pulling one another back down into the bucket.