>I spent the first 18 years of my adult life making an average of $12,000 a
>year. If any of you are of that class and want to criticize me, then I welcome
>your comments.
Well, I make less than that. (I teach English.) My family is working-class, by anyone's definition. My father used to be a steelworker (now a security guard). And my mother has always held a variety of low-wage jobs: bagging grocery at a supermarket, cooking at a diner, etc. You get the picture. (BTW, I'm from Japan.) But I ask you to remember that this picture doesn't cover the whole of the working class; many who hold white-collar jobs--snotty as many of them might now be about manual labor--are _still_ workers, not fat cats.
I hope you have taken what we said--criticism, praise, ambivalence, and more--as a lefty artist should; what you got from us is honest responses from people who care about workers and films about workers. Films that don't provoke us into vigorous discussion--criticisms included--aren't worth making, are they?
>My comments in the Nation about those who went to Nicaragua in the 80s were
>not meant as a put down. I went to Nicaragua in the 80s. It was my
>responsibility as a citizen to try and stop our war against the people there.
>I was only asking why the left ALSO didn't come to Flint.
Fair enough. But you _know_ that the class-conscious left are very small in this country. And the reason why it's small is that the same forces that waged war against Nicaragua and workers in Flint had earlier destroyed the left: the red purges in unions and universities, the mental grip of cold-war anti-communism, etc. Americans--even many so-called progressives--still suffer from fear of being labeled communist. (To offer one more criticism, for what it's worth, I think _Roger & Me_ gives the audience nostalgia instead of history, in its portrayal of happy workers during the post-WWII boom, when you say, 'every day was a great day.' Those were the very days when the American Left was made to disappear from the unions, creating conditions where such great working-class leaders as Owen Bieber could later preside over the destruction of jobs and communities. Workers ain't stupid; we deserve truth and real history.)
Small as the class-conscious left is, however, we aren't nothing. We _have_ been involved in many kinds of labor struggles, mostly local ones, I think: sometimes as workers trying to organize a union, at other times as supporters of strikers and organizers, and at yet other times on the cultural front endeavoring to create the audience who would respond with solidarity to struggles of other workers. Since we are small in number, we often look, yes, ridiculous, but part of your job as a lefty film-maker is to send a message that joining a good fight is the thing to do, not to ignore those of us who have been there all along.
Also, even though you may not force a choice between Flint and Nicaragua upon us, there are many who would like to do so, including some among the posters here and those intellectuals who pretend to speak for workers in Flint (such as Richard Rorty, Eric Alterman, etc.). So I would like to ask you to make it clear, if you write on the subject again, that it is _not_ a matter of either or. I don't want you to be included in their company, coz they don't really speak for workers, whether they are in Flint or Nicaragua.
best wishes for your future work,
Yoshie Furuhashi