At 10:41 AM 4/20/2005, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
<...>
>In fact, I am very troubled by people who are willing to kill others in
>order to get out of rut in their own life.
A rut? Like they got off track? What track? They were born into a track and, as we know, any sense that people were ever "movin' on up" in the last 50-60 years was the result of _structural_ changes in the economy, not because people worked harder than they used to or worked harder than they do now.
The number one lesson here is that this isn't about _their_ anything. Where they are has zippo to do with their personal moral characteristics. I'm not denying that there are people who are blowing money ond DVDs when they should be saving it. I'm not denying that there a people who abuse alcohol and then don't have the gumption to get out of their own way and clean up their trashy yards. :) I'm not denying that I'd like to kick my friend M's ass because she spends money partying and makes her kids buy her cigarettes -- to the point where my "other daughter" left home and moved in with her dad, dropping out of school to do so. Bri had dreams of becoming a nurse. I just got off the phone with her and I'm working on her, to get her ass back home and move in with us if she has to. R and I will be happy to sleep in the living room to see that girl has some semblance of a future.
Anyway, I _am_ saying that even if every last person worked hard to get out of the rut, it wouldn't make a difference. A capitalist economy manufactures scarcity. It's built into the system at its core.
This economy utterly depends on the existence of also-rans and an ideological infrastructure that tells people over and over again that it's _their_ fault if they are among the also-rans. So what if it is? Is it right that people be denied the very things you enjoy because, say, they got pissed at their mom, dropped out, and left home? So Bri ends up as a babysitter all her life, working at Walgreen's. What does it matter. someone has to work at Walgreen's. So if Bri straightens up and flies right, it just doesn't matter. That doesn't mean, obviously, that I counsel Bri to say, "Fuck it all." Quite the contrary.
Maybe no one can truly understand this, but if you did what I did, worked hard to get out of a rut (and btw, I never thought I was in any rut. It's only reading LBO and some experiences in grad school (the look of horror on people's faces --lefties-- to think I wore thrift shop clothes) that makes me realize that most people think the life I led was unadulturated hell. You have a garden or you pick wild berries or shop at a thrift store because that's what you do. You don't think you deserve something more. Nor do you lament the fact that you can't shop at a boutique. It doesn't occur to you to shop at a boutique. (see this essay which I wrote a few weeks ago. I'm not making this up on the fly, to rationalize a thing. It's what I've understood for many years, it just came out in a rant to another list about something completely unrelated.
.. hmm where was I? Oh yeah, so you work hard and you pull yourself out of the rut-- cuz you'd gotten off track. What do you learn, if you have any brains at all? That you are no different, no more special, no smarter, no better than the rest of the people you left behind. You realize that, even if _you_ get out of your "own" rut, someone else is going to fall in or the rut they're in will sink deeper, so the people who _think_ they got out, aren't really out at all. cf. Carl's comments and my own comments about Mike's family.
And sure, Woj, it's relative. But I can't abide by this claim that there are people who are truly poor but not 'merikans who have their subsistence needs met with $8/hr jobs. (Don't take this the wrong way. I could illustrate everythign I"ve said here with statistics and evidence from research so dismissing it as mere rationalization is B.S. You're making claims aboout pople you don't know either--such as claiming that they go into the military to get a free ride. I don't have a problem with personal examples, and you shouldn't either. I'm must responding to your claims.)
Anyway, advocating a social science that looks at personal failing of individuals seems like a waste of time to me. We can't get rid of the poor, not because there's a culture of poverty, but because this economy depends on them. Someone has to do the shit jobs. Someone has to work for a pittance. There is nothing objective to say that a cook deserves less than a secretary than a technical writer than a professor of sociology. And yet....
As for killing people. I'm curious: would you be troubled were this a real enemy? I don't know about you, but were we in a state of revolution, I'd be the first one to sign up to kill people. I'd have no problem killing people who wanted to thwart a socialist revolution. I'd be scared and hope it wouldn't come to that, but I'd see it as my duty to the future of the world. I can't think of a better thing to risk my life for: crushing the capitalist state. Can you?
I don't know why you can't, once again, put your right shoe on your left foot and see that stoopit 'merikans think they are defending a way of life they think is good, true, and beatiful. It's like your family -- you have all kinds of problems with your family and you know just exactly what neurotic, twisted things go on in your family, but if someone attacks it, you're going to defend it. If someone calls your mother names, no matter how much your mother drives you nuts, you're probably going to get prickly and defend your mother.
If I didn't read this list, I'd be in about the same position as everyone else: pretty clueless about what's going on 1000s of miles away. I'd think that there are terr'ists and WMD and a threat to the U.S. I'd think that the guys butchering people with their bare hands are pretty nasty dudes and I'd think we ought to fight them. I don't read Time or NewsWeek or the WashPo or the NYT. I glance at the headlines if I get the paper at all. I slouch in my easy chair and catch a bit of some bland anchor person droning on and maybe a pic or two of our proud military buoyz and girlz and then maybe a recuriting ad for the few, the proud, and the brave. And maybe I'd see Uncle Johnny, who gets all misty-eyed thinking about his dayz in the service, who tells you that the service'll make a man outta ya, son.
But more. I don't think I quite conveyed this: other son and the handful of kids that I know who've joined up since 9/11 do not see going into the service as signing up to kill other people. Even today, when you'd think war is a reality, they really don't think they'll be the ones to shoot people.
In the first place, they tend to try to get positions that will shield them from that kind of duty. It is probably unrealistic, I know, but see below. Also, the military waits 'til the last minute to lay all the cards out on the table, letting you know exactly what you're getting into. But, by then, what do you do? You probably have a family that is tired of you living off them. They want you to do something with your life or maybe they can't afford to support you much longer. Or, you're just itchin' to get out on your own.
You back out, after all that? After months of saying that you're joining. And then you have to slink back home and admit you're a loser who didn't follow through? Because that's how they feel about it, they're losers.
I don't think it's especially odd. It's hard to understand why war isn't a reality, but I think it's a matter of putting your right shoe on your left foot for a moment. Think of sonshine, who will never be more than 6 feet tall, who was bound and determined to be a pro-b-ball player. I could stand there and recite the stats on his opportunities for becoming even a pro-benchwarmer. Didn't matter. He wanted to play ball.
And even if I hadn't had those stats, he's got eyes. He can see how tall those guys are. But you know what he said: "But there's that one guy, so and so, who's only 5' 8." (sports fans who follow pro-ball, help me out?)
There's that one guy. There's that one chance. It's damn difficult to get through the day thinking that you'll inevitably be among the also-rans. Who lives like that? Who goes to grad school believing they'll end up working a min. wage job. We know it happens. We know a certain percentage will flunk our or whatever. No one ever believes it's going to be them. Everyone who lands a tenure-track position also knows the stories of people who don't make tenure. No one ever thinks it's going to be them.
When I was in graduate school, one of the more striving, status conscious grads said he wanted to work at a sexy, cool school, like Berkeley or something. I just laughed to myself thinking he was insane. Work at Berkeley? Who's he trying to kid? In the first place, I'd be happy to get "free" graduate training so I could land a high school teaching job. In the second place, I'da been happy at a community college. Berkeley? Why on earth would I want to go surround myself with a bunch of twits? :)
One of my mentors was deeply troubled by what she saw happening to Ph.D. candidates, many of whom were fidning themselves landing adjunct jobs after graduation, who were increasingly asked to take on more and more responsibilities, teaching their own classes, for instance, to save the university money. She led a seminar called "Sociology of the Professions" which focused on a number of things, one of which was learning about all the things that, conventionally, you are supposed to absorb by osmosis. E.g., we had to face some facts: we were in a third tier department. The university system is a hierarchy and you move _down_ the hiearchy, not up. Don't point at this prof or that one who got their degrees at the uni and are now working at the uni. That is a thing of the past. The best you are likely to do is land a job at a four yr state college and a bunch of you won't land one at all, not a tenure-track professorship at any rate. You will be expected to have published during grad school. None of this crap where you get a tenure-track job while you're atill ABD. Thing of the past.
True facts. None of that stopped any of us from plugging away. While we may have been fine with teaching at four year colleges, most people who got into research hoped to teach at a school that would value it. None of us believed that we would be among the portion of people who would spend their lives as adjuncts or who, after 4 or 5 years of unsuccessful job hunting, would end up having to face the True Facts: no one's gonna hire you if you haven't landed a job in five years because you're old news. If no one wanted you, why should a university want you? Don't tell me those aren't True Facts: I sat on two hiring committees and listened to faculty, fucking sociologists (progressives! feminists! race/class/gender types!), say those very things.
Why did we not let any of this lead us to give up? Why did we believe we wouldn't be among the also-rans? For the exact same reason an 18 year old thinks they won't see bloodshed.