Big Box Blues

Today in Chicago an ordinance was passed (the mayor can still veto it, but there were enough votes in favor to override if necessary) which will require "big box" stores--Wal-Mart and the like, behemoth-sized stores owned by behemoth-sized companies, sprouting up all over the country--to pay a minimum wage of $10/hour and provide $3/hour worth of benefits for all employees.

Wal-Mart is claiming this is bad for workers. (Huh?! Show me a retail clerk who is better off making $7/hour than $10. All the stuff about hiring fewer workers because they cost more: bullshit. It takes however many workers it takes to ring registers and stock shelves, and if you don't have enough, you don't have a store. These people have run a few of these stores; they know that.)

Wal-Mart and Target are complaining that the requirement that they pay their employees almost enough to live on will keep them from opening more stores in Chicago. You know, because one of the most populous cities in the U.S. won't provide them with a large enough customer base to make money if they have to pay a slightly larger pittance to their serfs. This is just a negotiating ploy. I guarantee that after the whinging is over, they will once again notice that Chicagoans' money is still green and clamor to open all around the city.

And if they don't--GREAT! Good for small businesses the boxes might have driven out. And if they prefer, Chicagoans needn't be deprived of cheap goods sold in giant quantities, because Costco has no problem with the ordinance: they already pay their workers in accord with the ordinance minimums. Costco will happily, I expect, take over the Chicago market if the others make good on their threats (which, as I said above, they won't). Because Costco management has noticed that people making ten bucks can afford to spend more in their stores and communities than people scraping by on six or seven bucks. And people making ten bucks are a little more likely to stick around long enough to become skilled at their jobs and thereby work more efficiently.

So kudos to the Chicago City Council for showing some guts, doing something right for the city and the people, and not being bought. (That last proves that this is not the City Council of my youth, that's for sure.) And if Daley the Second even thinks of vetoing this, well, I think we all know what that says about him.

Yup, they still play the Blue State in my home town. Yay, Chicago!

Addendum: Whoa, the Republican Party has finally figured out that hourly workers have the same right to vote as CEOs. There is movement to increase the federal minimum wage before they have to face the electorate.

If You Beat a Dead Horse in the Forest, No One Can Hear You Scream

I don't know how I missed this when it was originally posted over at BGF Central, but you definitely need to read it if you had any interest in the discussion we had here and my rant here.

First question: when is it cultural appropriation? I take the view of intention, much as I do for a lot of things. I wrote a story called "PRAVI" (which you can read in my collection, plug, plug, which you can order here, plug, plug--see, I'm getting better at self-promotion) which arose from the question of whether morality is dependent on the actor or the acted upon. In western culture and religion, we generally say it's the acted upon: what you do to your TV is different from what you do to your dog which is different from what you do to your child which is different from what you do to an adult stranger. Seems logical until you realize that it gets us to things like devout Christians, people who were genuinely trying to be good people, keeping slaves ("they're not the same as us, they're more like animals, they need us to control them this way")--all it takes to change the moral equation is to believe that the acted-upon is Not Like Us. And there were certainly slaveholders who sincerely believed that; it was accepted knowledge in their circles. These good Christians weren't the ones beating their slaves mercilessly, but they were nonetheless keeping them as slaves, stealing their autonomy, forcing them to labor, and running their lives. Because they weren't quite people, really, in their view.

The equation shifted and blacks officially became human. Because they weren't before, right? Otherwise there couldn't have been good people holding slaves.

What does that have to do with cultural appropriation? Again, it's in the actor, not the acted-upon. If a writer comes at something from a different cultural tradition and draws from it much as s/he might for any other piece of information, history, myth, background, story, hey, go for it. (If you do it well, so much the better. But we all have the inalienable right to suck at our craft, and just like our Miranda rights, we would prefer not to be in a position to invoke that right, but sometimes shit happens.) When the use is for the purpose of deception, or to condescend to that other culture--that becomes appropriation, and is, shall we say, inappropriate.

BGF asks about Nasdijj and Asa Carter versus Equiano the African. What Equiano did was okay in my book. Is, as she asked, the answer based on their races? Nope, based on their intent. The first two were using someone else's culture for their own baser motives; the latter was using someone else's experience because it was an effective way to make a point he felt strongly about. Equiano was trying to move the reader; Nasdijj and Carter were trying to con the reader.

As BGF points out, though, most of us don't even make the effort. We stick to our own little world and don't make the effort to get into the skins of anyone not like ourselves. While we're busy marching for our right to use the myths of another culture, we're at the same time as a culture producing literature that might as well not bother, because most of it looks like our minds have not strayed beyond our own four walls. We can imagine a tentacled alien . . . but can we comprehend a person in the here and now who is, by virtue of color, sexuality, gender, religion, whatever, very unlike ourselves? The tentacled alien is a lot easier, because you can't get it wrong.

And it's not all on the writer; it's on the reader, too. Check out What Sells. Majority-culture readers as a group are more comfortable with things that don't challenge or threaten fundamental assumptions about race or sex. Like the slaveholders of the 19th century, they don't really want to know that people Not Like Them might really be more like them than they realized, because that would change their whole worlds.

But as in the 19th century, change is just what's needed.


(Oh, the title of this post--what the f? you ask. I dunno. I just felt the urge. Got your attention, though, didn't it?)

That Nice Old Man with the Crazy Hair

Albert Einstein's personal letters have been released, per his stepdaughter's will, twenty years after her death. (Einstein himself died just over fifty years ago.) What I have seen so far of them is enlightening, to say the least. I am eager to read them in their entirety.

My impression of Einstein has always been of the scientist, the man always deep in thought, the one who reportedly told someone that he was not interrupting because the scientist was always thinking, or words to that effect. I know that's an unrealistic portrait and that, as with anyone, the truth is much more complex.

And indeed Einstein was a complicated man. Various sources have chosen to focus on different aspects of the man, and each is distinct. There was the philanderer who had the temerity even to talk to his beloved stepdaughter (the custodian of these letters) about his affairs and ask her to pass messages to a lover. There was the anxious, competitive scientist cagily fearful of mathematician-physicist David Hilbert's effort to beat him to the general relativity punch.

But the aspect that most shocked me was his reaction to his younger son's mental illness. On the face, it's pretty distressing:

. . . if only the cursed drive to beget children didn't aim to extend the misery into infinity! This drive, in concert with the medical arts to keep alive something that is not viable beyond the years of fertility is undermining civilized humanity. So it would be urgently necessary that physicians conducted a kind of inquisition for us with the right and duty to castrate without leniency in order to sanitize the future.

Castrating to sanitize the future?! Didn't a fellow named Hitler come along with a not dissimilar idea a few years later? (The difference being that Hitler did something about it.)

The context is presumably his frustration with his son's schizophrenia, one that would leave him institutionalized for the rest of his life because there were no other options for treatment. (Truth is, even today's drugs work well for some people but leave others nonfunctional.) He also goes on to worry about the expense of the boy's care and his inability to manage it. Certainly many parents of severely ill children have had thoughts in the dark of night about whether the child might have been better off dying or not being born; few have committed them to paper and even fewer have been notable enough to have those thoughts published for all the world to see.

I would like to believe that the entirety of the letters will paint a more flattering picture. I suspect they won't. That's disappointing, but is no comment on the quality and importance of Einstein's work. It only makes him, in spite of his genius, a much more normal if much less admirable human being.

Is Your News Source Covering This?

A series of coordinated explosions have hit trains in Mumbai, India, during the evening rush hour. Early estimates are more than a hundred dead, hundreds more injured. Although no one has taken responsibility, initial speculation seems to lean toward Kashmiri militants.

First and most important: Our thoughts and prayers must be with the people affected--those on the trains, their loved ones, and all the people of Mumbai. Take a moment to offer whatever it is in your belief system to offer, whether a prayer to a higher power, or a simple moment of your attention and care.

As time passes and more is learned, I will be interested to see how U.S. news outlets cover this story. Below the fold or late in the newscast because despite the human cost, how many Americans even know (or care) what country Mumbai is in? (I suppose if they say "Bombay" people will get it.) Or look for an al-Qaeda connection (however tenuous it may turn out to be) and shout to the rooftops that Osama is behind it? How many will point out where Kashmir is, much less what their beef is?

I've become more than a bit cynical about news media. As with so many industries, I can't fault the individuals (with certain exceptions) doing the gathering and reporting. It's the entire system in which the news is supported by advertising dollars, which in turn depend on the maximum number of people watching/reading, which in its turn is a product of the undeniable fact that more people will choose to read or watch news that is simple, dramatic, titillating, and local than news that is complex, analytical, and global.

If an event happens and nobody covers it, is it news?

I do believe that these horrifying events in Mumbai will get some attention in this country; I just wonder if that attention will linger beyond a day or two, and in what form.

Today at least, let us feel for these far-off people who have had their lives literally blown apart, and remember them.

No, This Part of the Story Just Doesn't Make Sense

Okay, there are clearly pod people or something inhabiting the bodies of the leadership; they just aren't acting like the evil, fascist plutocrats we have come to know and hate. First the rich start paying taxes again all of a sudden, then the U.S. decides out of the blue to abide by the Geneva Conventions. This isn't just a bit uncharacteristic of our overlords; something is completely out of whack. I am not sure whether to be overjoyed or worried about what we're being softened up for.

Maybe it's those alien cells. Truth to tell, I'd trust weird alien spores sooner than I trust the current U.S. government. You'd think I'd choose the devil known over the devil unknown over the devil unknown; the thing is, I know W and Company are evil, while I have no evidence of same for the aliens (if any).

And it's a sad state of affairs when alien cells are as good an explanation as any for the plutocracy behaving in such a wildly implausible way that were it fiction it would immediately be dismissed as out of character and badly written.

Not Dead Yet

Maybe it's living with a conspiracy fanatic--or could it be living under a government that spends a lot of time waving hands and shouting "Look over there!"? Naaah--but the first thing to cross my mind when I learned yesterday of Enron schemer Kenneth Lay's apparent death by heart attack was that it was darned convenient.

Did Lay perhaps pay a few people off to declare him dead, then retire to the Caymans or somewhere? If I were the prosecutor, I'd have agents keeping an eye out in places with comfy accommodations and no extradition treaties with the U.S., and watching where some money might move.

It's not such an original thought. It's not often that the New York Post and I have the same view on something, but their headline today (I'm saving you having to actually visit the Post site and sully your pristine browser, unless you actually want to, like to visit Page Six, for example) reads: Before They Put Cheato Lay's Coffin in the Grave, Check He's In It.

It wouldn't be very difficult: fake symptoms to get an ambulance to the hospital (old guy, under stress, reporting chest pain--the paramedics wouldn't have to be persuaded to think heart attack), pay off a friendly doctor and medical examiner; then hop a private plane to a friendly island. "Kenny Boy" (as W called him) probably has enough friends in government to smooth any bumps.

The reason I immediately wondered about this is probably not an obsession with conspiracy; more likely the continuing pattern of the leaders of big business getting away with screwing people under the current administration (can anyone say Halliburton? how about windfall oil company profits?)--it's a reasonable reaction in light of the evidence.

That is to say, not so much a conspiracy as a habit.