Political will

An item in yesterday's news brought back an event that happened over thirty years ago in one of our Power Labs. A group of disgruntled Bottoms, tired of being put off again and again by the Tops, broke into the Tops' home gaining entry by smashing a glass panel in their front door. "We demand immediate action." The action they got came from one Top who, taking note of the broken glass panel,immediately established a "blue ribbon commission to study the causes of violence." A very democratic commission it was - one Top, one Middle, and two Bottoms. And so the commission went about its business: studying and studying while managing to keep any changes of significance from happening.

It's either too soon or too late. It was a report on the Senate Intelligence Committee that brought all this back. (Boston Globe, July 27, 2005) Prior to the last presidential election, Pat Roberts, the Republican Committee Chairman, promised that the committee would probe into whether the Bush administration intentionally misconstrued intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Did the administration pressure CIA analysts to give them data they needed -- even if not based on fact  -- in order to pursue a war they were pre-determined to pursue? One might assume, given the stakes of war, that a probe into a potentially scandalous affair would have the highest priority. Apparently not.

A year and a half has passed with no probe. Initially it was postponed, according to the chairman, so as not to politicize the upcoming presidential election. And now it is on the back burner because, again according to the chairman, it is more important to look forward than backward. Yikes! Orwell himself could not not have written a more cynical script.

Without political will, nothing happens. One thing that struck me while reading Triangle: The Fire that Changed the World is what did and did not affect change in labor laws. There were protest marches involving a quarter of a million people; they didn't do it. There was a high-power blue ribbon commission composed of super-wealthy, well-intentioned progressives; that didn't do it. Two young state senators - Robert Wagner, who later became mayor of New York City, and Alfred Smith, soon to be governor of New York and then presidential candidate - did do it. Their lesson: without political involvement,rallies, marches, and blue ribbon commissions will come and go, leaving little to show for their efforts. Wagner and Smith worked the state legislature, laws were enacted, and the world of labor was transformed.

So, one wonders about now; how could this critical probe be so easily fobbed off,then and now? Millions marched against the war; web sites mobilized many more; yet the war proceeded unperturbed. Where was political will, where is it now? Think about it.  How much political will could be mustered  given that Democrats and Republicans alike colluded in the war, the only campaign argument being: who could conduct it more effectively? And the only genuinely anti-war candidate being trivialized  as an out-of-control. far left, ultraliberal, screamer? Given that basic collusion, political will was and still is reduced to an impotent nagging whimper. And the probe? Hey, don't look back, look ahead.

Without political will, the marchers and bloggers, like our Power Lab Bottoms, are fobbed off once again.

 

Breakdown in the Labor Movement

Part I. Labor Unions as a Response to Vulnerability. The labor movement schism has come just as I was finishing Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. Though the book focuses on the 1911 shirtwaist factory fire that took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women (some as young as 14!),it puts that tragedy in the context of a world in which owners did not have a union to worry about: sweat shops, unsafe working conditions, firetraps, child labor, 84-hour 7-day work weeks, wages too low to adequately feed yourself and your family, where complaining led to dismissal, demonstrations were broken up by police, retaliation against harassment from goons and scabs could lead to your being put in jail.  And all the while, undisturbed by unions or other restraining forces, the profits and private wealth of owners mounted. Bottoms versus Tops in a heavy-duty Power Lab. [To get beyond numbers and abstraction that can numb you, see if you can personalize this situation; visualize it as your 16-year old daughter or sister or niece who, after suffering all these conditions, dies in the Triangle fire, piled up with other bodies before an exit door illegaly locked to prevent worker theft.You go to identify her body, but, because of the intensity of the fire, there is not much left  to recognize.]

It is in that context of shared vulnerability to Tops (owners/executives/managers) that Bottoms coalesce; their consciousness shifts from isolated and powerless "I" to a unified and powerful "WE;" and it is in that shift that worker movements are formed and unions are born.

These days, working conditions are vastly improved, but these changes did not come about through the benevolence of Tops; they happened largely in response to the collective power unions have been able to exert on owners and government.

Part II. Today's tension in the Bottom Group. The conditions have changed, yet for millions of workers, the vulnerability to distant uncaring Tops remains - a business-favoring Republican White House and Republican-controlled Congress, a consensus around globalization in which jobs are shipped overseas, unemployment misleadingly remains steady while worker real wages stagnate or fall.

The tension that led to the defections of the Service Employees International and Teamster Unions from the AFL-CIO is a familiar one in Bottom groups. We see it regularly in our Power Labs. On the one hand, there is the pressure to maintain a unified force ("In unity there is strength"); on the other, there are inevitable disagreements as how best to manage our vulnerability. And disgreements are difficult to handle when the strength appears to come from uniformity. I am quite certain that, even in today's radical groups, there are tensions between "hards" (kill everyone) and "softs" (maybe we shouldn't kill women and children).

In the AFL-CIO the tension was between two approaches to handling vulnerability: one was to reduce vulnerability by  aggressive recruitment efforts and cracking down on those who fail to achieve their recruiting goals; the other was to reduce vulnerability by working to elect politicians who were more favorably disposed to labor and unions.

From uncertainty to certainty. As is the case with all such divisions, there is no clear-cut objectively correct answer as to what is the best way to handle vulnerability; but this does not stop the parties from falling into fixed and opposing positions. Relatively small differences polarize into opposing camps; each overstates the correctness of its position and the weakness of the opposition; it becomes personal, a power struggle,mutual denigration; the differences eventually are felt to be irreconcilable, and the whole splinters.

The painful truth is neither party had a lock on the solution to labor vulnerability;  there were and are possibilities in both positions and weaknesses in both, and that the best hope for dealing with vulnerability might be in finding a way to incorporate both orientations into a single more complex strategy ("In diversity there is strength.")

Sex-Obsessed Conservatives

You all know the one about the psychiatrist who is administering the Rorschach (ink blot) test to one of his patients. Showing the first card, he asks, "What do you see?" "A woman's vagina," answers the patient. Then comes the second card; "What do you see?" "A woman's vagina," says the patient. The third  card. "What do you see?" The patient smiles. "Trying to trick me, are you? Why it's clearly a woman's vagina again." The psychiatrist asks "Does it puzzle you that all you ever see is a woman's vagina?" In a huff, the patient shoots back, "Hey, you're the one who's showing me all the dirty pictures."

The joke came back to me while reading Naomi Wolf's essay (New York Times Book Review, July 24, 2005) dealing in part with Edward Klein's "The Truth About Hillary." Show Klein Hillary Clinton, and he sees lesbian: "To Arkansans, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian and looked like a lesbian. Ergo, she was a lesbian."  Show him Hillary's advisers, and he sees lesbians: One "looked like a Marlboro man in drag," another is a "dominatrix," and still another is her "dark-haired mannish-looking chief of staff." (Wolf points out that all these women are heterosexuals.) One more look at Hillary, and Klein sees a "would-be lesbian."

If Klein is merely a Clinton hater who is making up stories and knows he is making up stories, then there is some hope for his sexual clarity. (His morality, however, would still be up for question.) If, however, Klein is describing Hillary as he really sees her, then serious work needs to be done regarding his sexual identity.

We could ask Klein, "Does it puzzle you that every time I show you an assertive, accomplished, competitive woman, you see a lesbian or would-be lesbian? And I can hear Klein, in a huff, "What do want from me, Barry? You're the one showing me all these lesbians."

Inkblots. They're just ink blots. The rest is you.

Whatever Happened to Karl Rove?

I may be paranoid, but, if so, it's not entirely my fault. (Isn't this what all paranoids say?) In a world in which the power people lie, deceive, play with words,change their stories to fit the latest developments, it feels like normality is to doubt EVERYTHING and suspect EVERYTHING. For two days running, there has not been one word about Karl Rove in the New York Times.What happened? The President names John G. Roberts as his choice for the Supreme Court; liberal and conservatives fly into action. The spotlight shines on Roberts, Rove fades from the scene. Are we experiencing one of Rove's finest moves? The Machiavellian principle: Take their mind off of a scandal by giving them something bigger to worry about.What could be bigger than a Supreme Court justice who just might shift the balance on Roe v Wade. Renewed hope for some, despair for others, front page news for all, and guaranteed to take one's mind of off blowing a CIA operative's cover. Is this paranoia or seeing through another one of Rove's fogs?

Gum Disease For The Poor: Finding The Third Way

The story was on National Public Radio, July 6, 2005. It told of the dilemma poor folks face regarding dental care. Untreated gum disease leads to loss of teeth and may be the cause of other serious illnesses such as heart attack, stroke, and premature birth.

Poor people are faced with a choice: the expensive alternative: gum surgery, which, at $1500 or so, is beyond their means and is not covered by insurance; or the cheaper choice: have your teeth pulled.

During the interview, a dentist described the needed gum surgery: a slice and a flap all of which would slow decay. It brought back an identical conversation a dentist friend had with me thirty-three years ago as the two of us sat drinking coffee in our neighborhood drug store. (There were neighborhood drug stores then with lunch counters.) I recently had lost two teeth, and, given my family history, was concerned about rapidly losing them all. The dentist friend looked in my mouth,then drew on a napkin a picture of my gums, where the slice would be, and the flap he would make. Even with the friendship discount, the cost of surgery was steep.

Fortunately, our old family dentist, Norman Becker suggested a very different course of treatment: no surgery; but I was to stimulate my gums daily with these wooden picks (STIM-U-DENT is the brand name.)  My gums  were sore so, initially, this was a painful process. In time, the pain disappeared, pink gradually came back to my gums, all signs of disease disappeared, and I stopped losing my teeth. Since then, "stimudenting" has become a regular part of the morning dental care treatment. Seventy-three years old, and the teeth are still there. Currently, the cost of a package of 100 STIM-U-DENTS is under $3.00. That could be a two to three month once-a-day supply.

[Note: Flossing is not a substitute for stimudenting; it does not provide the necessary gum massage.]

There is something in this story beyond dental health care. There is something about gentle versus harsh, about bringing out versus imposing upon, about encouraging a body, any body, to heal itself, about looking beyond the alternatives and seeking a third way.  And the message: Just because you have the power to do something, doesn't mean you need to use it.

This message is not endorsed by the American Dental Association, the makers of STIM-U-DENTS, or even Dr. Norman Becker.