This is outsourced almost entirely to Wallace Shawn, who is one of those exceptionally intimidating talents who seem capable of making art and engaging ideas in almost any way he chooses.
He’s got a new book out, (that would be a new book in 2009; yes I’m that slow) which I’m about to buy, titled, simply, Essays. Commenter Arundel pointed me to this selection from that work, (an addition to the paperback) a piece published in 2011, titled “Are You Smarter than Thomas Jefferson.”
It’s a genuinely wonderful example of essay-form, a direct descendent from the ur-specimen we credit to Montaigne. Shawn puts on a masterly display, demonstrating just how much power derives from the concentration of a sharply individual point of view on experience and ideas — which is the essence of the personal essay.
In this case, it’s the gaze of a man of the theater that leads us into a sequence of images and thoughts that land at a devastating moment of moral vision.Beyond the story it tells in its own frame, the piece captures for me some large part of why our current politics leaves me so full of dread and sorrow.
And with that, let me turn over the podium to Mr. Shawn, adding only that there’s more and better (for not being chopped and excerpted to avoid the charge of simply stealing the piece):
I’ve sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War II, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a “selection,” choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these “selections” are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.
As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto them and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them.
If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label “factory worker” and thrown down into a certain particular pit. And when the moment comes when one of the babies is fully prepared and old enough to work, she’ll crawl out of the pit, and she’ll find herself standing at the gate of a factory in India or in China or in Mexico, and she’ll stand at her workstation for 16 hours a day, she’ll sleep in the factory’s dormitory, she won’t be allowed to speak to her fellow workers, she’ll have to ask for permission to go the bathroom, she’ll be subjected to the sexual whims of her boss, and she’ll be breathing fumes day and night that will make her ill and lead to her death at an early age. And when she has died, one will be able to say about her that she worked, like a nurse, not to benefit herself, but to benefit others. Except that a nurse works to benefit the sick, while the factory worker will have worked to benefit the owners of her factory….
…
Even those of us who were selected out from the general group have our role and our costume. I happen to play a semi-prosperous fortunate bohemian, not doing too badly, nor too magnificently. And as I walk out onto the street on a sunny day, dressed in my fortunate bohemian costume, I pass, for example, the burly cop on the beat, I pass the weedy professor in his rumpled jacket, distractedly ruminating as he shambles along, I see couples in elegant suits briskly rushing to their meetings, I see the art student and the law student, and in the background, sometimes looming up as they come a bit closer, those not particularly selected out — the drug-store cashier in her oddly matched pink shirt and green slacks, the wacky street hustler with his crazy dialect and his crazy gestures, the wisecracking truck drivers with their round bellies and leering grins, the grim-faced domestic worker who’s slipped out from her employer’s house and now races into a shop to do an errand, and I see nothing, I think nothing, I have no reaction to what I’m seeing, because I believe it all.
I simply believe it. I believe the costumes. I believe the characters. And then for one instant, as the woman runs into the shop, I suddenly see what’s happening, the way a drowning man might have one last vivid glimpse of the glittering shore, and I feel like screaming out, “Stop! Stop! This isn’t real! It’s all a fantasy! It’s all a play! The people in these costumes are not what you think! The accents are fake, the expressions are fake — Don’t you see? It’s all –”
One instant — and then it’s gone. My mind goes blank for a moment, and then I’m back to where I was…
As I said, there’s more, presented as Shawn intended. Go read the whole thing.
Image: Pieter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1611 or 1612.
Egg Berry
Cool essay. Thanks for putting it on the front page.
Ahem, however:
Only one of those it’s is correct.
Chuck Butcher
Ouch
Poopyman
I wandered over to TomDispatch to read the whole thing. Now I have to go buy the book.
khead
You know, a great essay might have been noticed by BJ readers sometime in the year it was published.
Or the next year even.
Or even the year after that!
I mean, since it’s so great and all….. shouldn’t we have seen it before now?
Just like we are not headed to a Weimar Republic – see here – someone who invokes Auschwitz to describe the various categories of life in which we may fall is not what I would call “an exceptionally intimidating talent who seem capable of making art and engaging ideas in almost any way he chooses”.
Not now, not ever. Get a fucking grip. Mr. Shawn too.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
This bit doesn’t sit well with me:
. . . because the last sentence suggests to me that the author has little concept of the dignity of labor. Oh dear oh dear all those poor deluded people, their lives have been thrown away for nothing, all that they do, and all that they can ever achieve, is to work all day driving trucks and making things and serving others, when if but for the mischance of an arbitrary and evil fate, they could have been somebody, somebody like an exceedingly clever bohemian writer, for example. Which is obviously the only working occupation with true dignity and worth that allows a person to make good on the talent they were born with.
Well phooey on that, so far as I’m concerned. Perhaps some of these people have a better idea of their own self-worth as they toil in their hunble occupations, than does the author who contemplates them. When you start viewing other human beings as mere actors and actresses playing a role, perhaps that is a sign that you’ve lost the plot.
WereBear
But the Republicans like to tell us that if just one Dickens or Disraeli, one Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, manages to climb out of their own pit and do better than destined; then it’s possible and we should all stop whining and do it.
John O
It’s “Deep Thoughtful Post” day at BJ. This is not a bad thing.
cathyx
But I don’t really like the part I was given or the costume. Can I exchange it with someone with a better part?
BGinCHI
@khead: Never go in against a Sicilian with death on the line.
Tom Levenson
@Egg Berry: Fixt
@khead: You know, if you read with care what Shawn said, he did not claim that the global market was the SS; he said that the image of the selection reverberates, and frames how he sees.
It happens that this image is one that I have in my mind a lot, though I was born quite a while after the war. It does not seem to me to be illegitimate to build on that reference a sense of the relentless arbitrariness of privilege. YMMV
Paul in KY
if ‘Global Market’ means money, then I agree with the author’s premise. It is money, access to stable supply of money, that generally allows the ‘selecting’ IMO.
jibeaux
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: My husband printed this out for me a couple of years ago and brought it home, so I’m going on old memories, but IIRC it’s not about people who *choose* any career. It’s more of a rumination that billions of people in the world have little or no choice in how they spend their working lives. I don’t think khead is understanding the analogy either. Shawn isn’t going Godwin making that analogy, which is about the profound effect that something arbitrary has on a person’s life. If you prefer, just picture a kindergartner going down a line and saying duck, duck, duck, duck, goose. I mean, you don’t have to be a soshulist to acknowledge that every day there are girls born in Pakistan who could someday solve the energy crisis or boys born in rural China who could be brilliant artists or what have you, if life had cast them on a different path.
Tom Levenson
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: You know, I think that this is a criticism I buy much more the khead’s. I’ve read this thinking about all the reporting recently on the human cost of Chinese manufacturing boom – and our iPhones and the like. But doing a job that isn’t a comfortable boho work of the sort Shawn does isn’t on the face of it a mark of suffering.
Scott
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I took that to mean less “these people are mindless worker drones” and more “what’s wrong with me (and the rest of the world) for seeing these people solely as mindless worker drones?”
Tom Levenson
@BGinCHI: Those land wars in Asia get you every time too.
jibeaux
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: My husband printed this out for me a couple of years ago and brought it home, so I’m going on old memories, but IIRC it’s not about people who choose any career. It’s more of a rumination that billions of people in the world have little or no choice in how they spend their working lives. I don’t think khead is understanding the analogy either. Shawn isn’t going Godwin making that analogy, which is about the profound effect that something arbitrary has on a person’s life. If you prefer, just picture a kindergartner going down a line and saying duck, duck, duck, duck, goose. I mean, you don’t have to be a soshulist to acknowledge that every day there are girls born in Pakistan who could someday solve the energy crisis or boys born in rural China who could be brilliant artists or what have you, if life had cast them on a different path.
Adam
I don’t think that’s actually a very good essay. Global capitalism is often predatory and privileged people are lucky to be born that way, hold the presses! The “we’re all playing a role” thing is true yet inane, and the condescending attitude toward the unwashed masses is, well, condescending.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Scott:
Could be. I may be misreading the author’s tone, although I like to flatter myself that I’m a reasonable well-read and well-educated reader, and if that is in fact the case then it doesn’t say much about the author’s skill as a writer if his tone is that easily misunderstood.
Of course even granted that your conjecture is the case, I would reply back to the author that an answer which comes very readily to mind, to the question: “what’s wrong with me (and the rest of the world) for seeing these people solely as mindless worker drones?” is that perhaps you (meaning the author) privilege cultural production above other forms of labor much more than you should.
This is of course a very easy mistake for a writer to make. Personally I prefer a bit less florid drama and a bit more self-awareness in my essays, but that’s a matter of taste.
uptown
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Totally agree with you. It’s the writer who seems to have the sense of privilege. Maybe if he spent a few years working for a living instead of trying to be clever.
cathyx
@jibeaux: Well said.
JPL
@khead: I just read a book originally published in 1979 that I think is an important work. Lest Innocent Blood be Shed… Although it’s poorly written, the story is pretty straight forward. French village saves thousands of Jewish children. The book was suppose to be uplifting but what I took away from it was that it could happen here. Neighbors disappear to ICE, the NYPD investigates all Muslims and Daniel Pipes preaches how we need to wary of blacks since they go to jail and convert to Islam or something and we turn a blind eye.
pamelabrown53
Tom, you forget that Wallace Shawn is a symbol of scorn for those “presidential beer sharers”. C’mon, “Dinner with Andre”? But then again, Santorum wants to repeal public education. Reminds me of the the dark ages when the Catholic hierarchy guarded the books, supported iliteracy, so that the masses wouldn’t be corrupted.
Dave
Pieter Paul Reubens did the Holocaust???!!!
aimai
I had the same apercu years ago. I was bathing at an open water tap in my little village in Nepal, with some of the other young girls in the village. You bathe by pulling your petticoat up over your breasts and bathing, modestly, by soaping and washing under its cover. One of my friends was just sixteen, very beautiful, and about to be married off. I turned around at saw her, nearly naked, without her lungi and shawl and head covering and pottuka (big wrapped belt), just a very young girl laughing in the sun with her hair all wet and realized “holy shit this thing, this national identity, this social position, this wedding, this life of unremitting farmer’s toil is happening to a girl who is just sixteen. In America she’d be hanging with her friends, finishing highschool, looking forward to college–marriage would be the last thing on her mind.” I experienced total vertigo and still do when I remember that moment.
aimai
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yep.
Shawn’s saying that we all buy into the illusion to some point- his “I” in that graph that believes the illusions is the part of him that’s had his life invested in the same illusions without ever thinking about it, but it’s a different, analytical “I” that is writing the entire essay.
dyz
@jibeaux: Agreed. Any other interpretation would seem …. inconceivable.
uptown
I recommend Studs Terkel’s “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do”.
toschek
Thanks Tom for the link. I’ve shared this with all my friends. How sad and eloquent a piece this is, I found myself welling up with tears throughout.
eemom
A lot of words self-consciously expended in self-homage to a self-perceived insight with the depth and originality of “life’s a bitch and then you die.”
The genius eludes me.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@eemom:
Yeah, he probably could have written “There, but for the grace of God, go I,”and left it at that, but it’s an interesting explanation of how he came to that conclusion.
dyz
@aimai: What an amazing story. Thanks.
parsimon
Wow. Thanks, Tom, for bringing this to our attention. Thanks to Wallace Shawn for writing.
Karen
That reminds me of the “C Ark” concept of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” I’m paraphrasing here because I saw the BBC show a long time ago so if I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me.
There was a planet who sent three Arks to a new planet. The “A Ark” was the Intellectuals, Philosophers, Teachers and Great Thinkers. The “B Ark” was the Artists: writers, painters, the creators of artistic works and the performers of artistic works. Athletes were also in this ark because they were considered to be performers of a different type.
The “C Ark” was everyone else. Since those were not seen as useful that ark was programmed to auto-pilot into the sun. The other arks landed as intended.
I’d say that the GOP and a lot of the Dems like Manchin are easily C-Arkers.
khead
@Tom Levenson:
I read it. If Wallace wanted…..
….then I can direct him to any number of small communities in southern WV that have felt the wrath of coal industrialization as well as the wrath of an asshole teacher whose students would be better off – according to that teacher – to listen to their elders and not rock the boat by doing what was expected of them. You know, by heading underground to dig.
The point can be made by looking in America. No Auschiwitz required. I suggest searching “rocket boys”.
jibeaux
Another anecdote vis a vis choosing work, husband also once interviewed/became friends with a marvelous, brilliant old lady who had left school at 14 to work in a textile factory, which she did her whole life. She could play chess and do the NYT crossword puzzle, but never wanted an intellectually stimulating job because then she would have to think about THAT all day instead of what she wanted to think about. She saw winding thread as mindless work, which was liberating because her mind wanted to go places. And she never had to bring her work home, when she clocked out she could spend the rest of her time with her family doing as she pleased. It’s a wonderful way to think about it, but my guess is FoxConn workers’ lives don’t much resemble a John Mellencamp song.
toschek
@eemom: I see your point but why make it? It just makes you sound like a bitter asshole.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
This doesn’t solve the problem for me, though. The impact of the essay rides on the reader receiving a little shock due to the author’s sudden juxtapostion of those two different “I”‘s and the differing ways they perceive those working people. The first “I” sees the role, the second and more perceptive “I” sees the actual actors beneath the roles and costumes.
But the moral outrage which the second “I” feels derives from his realization that the roles and costumes were chosen for these people arbitrarily, and but for that constraint they could have been so much more. But it seems to me that the latter judgement arises in part because the second “I” privileges some occupations more highly than others, especially in terms of the relationship between the worker’s occupation and their inner life. But he does all this without talking to any of these people to find out how they feel about this state of affairs. It smacks of false consciousness in a way which is condescending towards the people he is observing and which objectifies them. Not in a serious way, the way that global capitalism does, but still. The author is committing the same sin he wants us to deplore in society as whole.
Nancy
The question for me after skimming the essay very quickly is how many Mozarts, Einsteins—pick your area of expertise and favorite example—are lost to the world because of this categorizing that begins before birth. Surely their genius is not as rare as it would appear to be.
Keith G
@aimai: You own a village in Nepal? Cool.
FWIW: Former ESPN headline guy speaks.
jibeaux
@khead: If I’m not mistaken, you’re kind of making Shawn’s point there.
khead
jibeaux:
Except that Shawn could have done it without invoking Nazis.
DFH no.6
I don’t know. The bit I read resonates with me, but then I suppose I’m fairly shallow and all.
YMMV, obviously.
To expand somewhat on my own shallowness, I just wish I’d taken the blue pill as my conservative fellow homo sapiens appear to have done.
jibeaux
@khead: I think you’re misunderstanding the point of the analogy. It’s about arbitrariness, not Nazism. Really, not every reference to anything that happened in World War II is going in the same direction.
khead
@jibeaux:
Since not every reference is a Nazi reference, then maybe someone could find a similar situation in the US instead of invoking Auschwitz, no?
I can provide a few hundred thousand examples in my native southern WV. One would think that an MIT guy could find a few more?
Seanly
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Yes, but the tale lies in the telling. Maybe a little wordy, but the idea is for other people to open their eyes.
Almost everyone reading this blog is probably in the very lucky slim minority of humans who can have a good life. People for whom everyday is not a terrible toil.
I know that I am blessed not because of my own hard work, but because of all that has been given me directly or by assumption because I am white, male & American. Oh, I’ve worked and I’ve failed too but my journey would be much more difficult if just one or two portions of the lottery had gone against me.
Oops, this was kinda more meant for eemom…
dead existentialist
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: It’s odd how an actor would assume that these are the only roles these people ever played in their lives. Hell, I’ve “played” a number of “roles” in my life. I’ve been a gas station attendant, truck driver, cook, dishwasher, teacher, coach, day laborer, and hustler to name a few.
I’ve even been a bohemian!
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yeah, you’d have a point if Shawn, the perceptive “I”, hadn’t prefaced the part of the essay you’re addressing with:
jibeaux
@khead: He wasn’t talking about the US in particular. He wasn’t talking about China, or Germany in particular either. He was talking about global capitalism, and about arbitrary results, in this case not made by any malicious power but by luck/bad luck/fate, circumstances. He’s comparing the arbitrariness of the universe to the arbitrariness of a Nazi officer deciding who lives and who dies. He could have used another analogy, like the duck duck goose one I talked about, or any number of other things, but he didn’t because that particular analogy resonated with him. I fail to see what’s offensive about it or why he’s supposed to scrupulously avoid it.
Maude
@khead:
I agree that the picking who gets to go to work camp as an analogy sucks, big time.
The writer is ignorant.
khead
@jibeaux:
Because – as someone who grew up among the many who were already told their fate back in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s (in the mines) – I escaped that fate and went on to better things. And I am not alone.
There are hundreds of thousands of folks just like me that GOT OUT OF SOUTHERN WV even though some dumbass labeled us in the manner that guards in Auschwitz labeled their prisoners.
There are problems with class in the United States, but being labeled by some jackass is the least of those problems. See, for example, our own ABL. That problem can be overcome in the USA.
If it were Nazi Europe, those problems meant death. Last I checked, there wasn’t an Auschwitz in southern WV.
uptown
jibeaux
@khead: Sure, and that’s great, and I’m glad that you did. How is someone born into subsistence farming in China with no resources or public schooling supposed to escape the life fate has mapped out for him? It’s not much of an exaggeration to compare the two situations.
khead
@jibeaux:
Who labeled those folks in China as folks who can’t escape their fate?
I mean, aside from you, of course.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Then why pivot from the very disturbing plight of Third World sweatshop workers to the more prosaic neighborhood where the author lives? What is the point of that pivot, if not to get us to sympathise with the workers in the author’s backyard, as victims of the same arbitrary fate?
It seems to me that this essay traffics in muddled and emotionally inflammatory metaphors (see also the Godwin bit that other commentors here are finding a bit off) to make the author’s point, which is that life isn’t fair, as a substitute for either an observation that is less trite, or deeper thinking about the subject at hand.
Just to take the “he/she could have been another Einstein if but for fate” trope (which I realise is comming from other commentors here and not from the author, but it does seem a reasonable extrapolation from the ideas in the actual essay), there is some real irony here because Einstein performed his early gedanken experiments while working at a dull job as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. Presumably if the author had been living in that time and place, he would have seen the young Einstein trudging to work and thought “too bad, that poor clerk could have been a brilliant scientist”. That is what I take issue with, the occupational stereotyping and objectification of people that the second Shawn “I” engages in while observing real people in his home environment.
If you like this style of writing, good for you. Doesn’t do much for me but then tastes differ. I wish the author success regardless.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Seanly:
My own story is one of a conscious decision to jump the track. My life has been full of grunt work.
That doesn’t me I’ve accepted my “lot in life”- just the contrary. The people with whom I’ve pushed the rock up hill day after day aren’t robots or numbers, but individuals due more respect and care than they receive from a society based on division of labor. There’s nothing I despise more than manager that points to the college degree on his/her wall, who displays critical thinking skills inferior to those of my most of my coworkers, yet lords it over us as if some sheepskin they got from paying tuition to Directional State University- and the unimpressive C+ average they worked so hard on between frat parties- has granted them aristocratic privilege.
jibeaux
@khead:Dude, there are some situations that just don’t come with bootstraps. You can answer the question as to how you escape subsistence farming with no education and no resources, or we can discontinue the discussion. I have all the faith in the world in people. I do not have faith that everyone’s circumstances allow them to succeed to the best of their ability despite whatever misery life throws at them. If you do, then you ought to run for the Republican nomination right quick.
Some Loser
@jibeaux: I bet you’re one of those delightful people who think rape is a proper descriptor for a mild inconvenience, too.
jibeaux
@Some Loser: Good name!
jeff
Shawn will always be Vizzini to me.
Mark B
My brush with fame story. I was walking through Greenwich Village (near Cooper Square) in the 80s and I happened upon Wallace Shawn taking out his garbage. I totally lost my cool, and told him how great he was and how much I loved his work. He was kind enough to say thank you and wave. I still feel embarrassed about it, it would have been much more cool to let him carry out his garbage in peace.
Schlemizel
@toschek:
so, you haven’t met eemom.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Why? Maybe because that domestic worker is assumed by our society to not be entitled to health care in the same way the son of an editor of The New Yorker is.
This completely ignores the fact that Einstein’s middle class family could afford to get him the schooling that the family of some poor Slovakian peasant couldn’t.
Some Loser
@jibeaux: Thank you.
khead
@jibeaux:
Dude, wrong tree to bark up.
My point – distilled – is this:
Nazi Germany is a shitty analogy. A really shitty analogy. It was shitty in the example I cited before and it’s shitty now. Tom has a bad habit of endorsing shitty Nazi analogies, it appears. That’s not really my problem.
Nazi Germany is an especially shitty analogy because the very people who COULD pull themselves up by their bootstraps and prove everyone else wrong – as they could here in the US – would have been gassed to death in the very scenarios the esteemed Mr. Wallace has desribed in his essay.
Put another way, in Nazi Germany I’d be dead because I would have told the folks at Auschwitz to go fuck themselves because I’m claustrophobic and not going in the mines. In America, I managed to find another way to make a living, regardless of the label of others.
Does it suck that folks “label” others? Yes. Absolutely.
Does it matter more when that labeling means death? Yes.
Has this occurred in the US? Not lately.
jibeaux
@khead: All right, you choose option B. See ya ’round.
Tom Levenson
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I’m leaving this thread to debate itself — which is I think what a good essay should provoke.
I do have some sympathy with the more considered reading (not the knee jerk “Godwin! my fainting couch” stuff) that suggests that Shawn doesn’t give enough deference to the idea that others have more agency than he suspects in their choices of work and selves; but it’s clear from the essay as a whole that he’s thinking about the globalization of a kind of labor that isn’t chosen, and I think that’s an important notion, especially as expressed through his meditation on the duality he and all of us face between the roles we enact and the people we are or wish to be.
All that by way of saying that I don’t know much, but I do know something about Albert Einstein, and the patent technical examiner job he had was anything but dull. In fact, there are a number of scholars who suggest that the intense visual thinking he had to do to evaluate patents helped mold the way he thought about physics in general.
It wasn’t the job he wanted when he left university, and the idea of being a guy with a day job wasn’t the sense of himself he had for most of the two years he spent looking for work, but once he got the job and settled into it, he found his circumstances much more to his liking than not — and it was the setting and context in which the work of his “miracle year” was done.
Now — had he to spend fifty hours a week cutting meat or something, that would have been a real obstacle, I think. But he didn’t.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@khead:
In this case, it isn’t. It’s an example of the way society puts us on certain tacks, distilled. Take away the racism inherent at the platforms of Auschwitz and you’ve got someone saying, “We need this many people of this body type to do this sort of work– the rest can just die.”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Dammit, why does balloon Juice always make me leave for work so effin’ late?!
Love this post Tom! Thanks!
khead
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
And if you take away the Auschwitz component, how many die?
Chuck Butcher
Jeeze, our social and economic realities are artificial constructs – all of them are. They are no more “real” than the actors roles other than the fact that they exist. Roles are determined, maybe less arbitrarily than by the SS, but some are going to be cannon fodder, some laborers, some… and those are the results of our artificial constructs.
Capitalism is no more real than Marxism or Collectivism or… Social stratification by income, religion, race, etc is not real, it is a construct and it is a method of selection.
Some people choose to work in labor intensive arenas, most do not. I did, I had every advantage from income and genes to education along with the “brain-power” to chose damn near anything. I chose a direction most wouldn’t for my reasons and that isn’t the same thing as most. When you see me sweating, covered in sawdust, wearing a nail apron and work boots you don’t see a rocket scientist or investment banker – you see my role. I may have chosen it and it may in fact reflect a lot about me, but that is me and not most people. I do this work and I know better. Most of the folks do choose this over other comparable paying labor, but they’d choose something else in another arena and they’d certainly choose better pay and more respect.
People who “bang nails” are not paid what they are because of the value of their work or the importance of it. They get paid what they do because that is what the construct wills. Their “value” to society is what is determined by the construct. Now, doing something about that is another matter, but it also isn’t what the author is trying to write about.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Tom Levenson:
Tom,
Thanks for the correction. One of the pleasures of discussion in these parts is that somebody who knows the topic well will show up with regularity to correct the record, on just about any subject.
Tom Levenson
@khead: One last time: Shawn did not make an analogy; he presented the backstory of where he got the image of selection. He doesn’t say the selection for a life of tending a machine in a Chinese factory is the same as being selected at Auschwitz; rather, he talks about what it does mean.
You can argue whether his picture of the tragic nature of that arbitrary division into narrowing elites or much more constrained lives is correct, or overstated, or misses the fact of historical change (e.g., factory life in Shenzhen may suck, but peasant life in the hills of Honan sucked more, and you can see the industrialization of China as a major step forward in aggregate human comfort and possibilty). But you cannot read his essay as you should read any argument — trying to put the best rather than the worst construction on the author’s intent — and say he is using the Auschwitz example to say “B is like A.”
And as for your more general dig at me about my use of the history of between-the-war Germany, I think you suffer from a common historical misconception: the Weimar post you seem to have disliked was explicitly engaged in the idea that very bad things can emerge from seemingly milder beginnings, which is why you should take the crazy talk on the right seriously…and that Weimar itself was not the inevitable prelude to Nazism. My own work and that of many others points to all the contingent events that took place, and the point of invoking those examples is to say that this time around, we should pay attention to such contingencies and avoid the possible worst.
You don’t like that? Fine. That’s why they have comment threads.
handsmile
This comment has little to do with the quality of theme or craftsmanship of this particular essay by Wallace Shawn, though I welcome Tom Levenson’s occasional posting of essays that catch his fancy. After all, for one thing, his day job is about nurturing and promoting fine writing, and I’m happy to benefit from his expertise.
This is about “My Conversation with Wally.”
Two weeks ago (February 4 to be exact), mrs. handsmile and I found ourselves seated behind Shawn and his wife, the writer Deborah Eisenberg, at a screening of the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s most celebrated work, Decasia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decasia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-FJyJjH6IE&feature=related
I was speaking about the Komen Foundation’s reversal of their decision on Planned Parenthood funding, when both Shawn and Eisenberg turned around to express their pleasure with this victory and its ramifications. We introduced ourselves (“Yes, Mr. Shawn, we’re familiar with your work,” and fortunately we knew of some of Eisenberg’s fiction as well) and proceeded to speak for some time about how progressives were becoming more successful in combatting right-wing political and social agendas; the Occupy movement was discussed as another example.
Our conversation was interrupted by the filmmaker Morrison, who spying Shawn in attendance, came over to greet them and to recommend that they move to the reserved seating section, closer to the screen and live orchestra (!). A typical New York City encounter, in all respects.
Some commenters may not be aware of Wallace Shawn’s work as a playwright, but two of his most-acclaimed plays, Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Designated Mourner, specifically address issues of personal reflection and experience with Nazism and Latin American fascism.
khead
@Tom Levenson:
I’d rather read you and criticize. Sorry, I certainly appreciate your contributions to BJ cause I love this place, but I’m an asshole like that.
See post 68 and then tell me how many folks have died in the US because they didn’t fit their teacher’s expectations. If it’s anywhere near the number of folks killed in Auschwitz due to being deemed unfit for production by some SS jackass – and you and I both know that it is not – I will stop.
Good luck with that.
Bruce S
Shawn was on Chris Hayes Sunday:
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up-with-chris-hayes/46446027#46446167
Anne Laurie
@Karen:
Uh, no. According to Mr. Adams, the “A” Ark was for the leaders & rich people, the “C” Ark was for the actual workers (farmers, factory hands), and the “B” Ark was for, as he expressed it “mid-level managers, hairdressers and telephone sanitizers” — the semi-parasitic class of upper-level servants endemic to any sufficiently prosperous society. And in Adams’ story, once the “B” Ark was shot into space (not the sun), the other two arks never left their home planet… partially because “they all died off, victims of a disease carried by unclean telephone handsets“. The analogy was not about disposing of an unworthy class, but the dark comedy of how labelling certain social groups ‘dispensible’ will come back to bite its arbiters.
Tom Levenson
@khead: Note the edit to my rather unkind sign off on the previous post.
(b) repeating the same statement is not the same as responding to the argument presented against that statement.
khead
@Tom Levenson:
My bad. I repeated it because I thought you didn’t give it enough credit.
Consider this yet another repitition. See post #68. Try responding to it anytime you have the time. If you can come up with some outpost in southern WV where we exterminated folks that didn’t meet the teacher’s requirements I mentioned, I will apologize. Profusely, even.
Mr. Long Form
One thing that always bothers me about the bootstrapping argument of human achievement (which no one here seems to be making too directly, but which seems to he hovering around this topic) is that even the ability to pull oneself up is itself one of the unfair things about one’s lot in life. Not to take anything away from the potential vocational delight one might feel in a life of subsistence farming or coalmining, but if one really really hates it and would like not to do it, but if one is shy and fearful and easily intimidated and ugly and stupid, then there you are, left to take what life hands out. Just another way of saying life sucks, I guess; but it does, for most people.
eemom
@Seanly:
Thinking that this essay is a self-glorifying piece of tripe has ZERO to do with understanding that life is a terrible toil for most people on this earth.
In fact, it’s kind of the obvious, bleak, in-your-face FACT of that which makes Mr. Semi-Prosperous Bohemian’s sudden revelation so eye roll-worthy.
Also too, anyone who describes themselves in those terms? Instant “fuck this shit.”
Karen
@Anne Laurie:
Thanks Annie Laurie! Like I said, my memory sucks and now I know it really sucks!
Karen
Isn’t the point of the essay that life is random? How you start off in life is based on where you grow up? I think the way he made his point is very overdramatic (by invoking Auschwitz and Nazis) and definitely patronizing when it comes to how he sees labor and how he sees himself. It’s definitely a position of condescending privilege. But life is random. How you start off in life is based on luck and opportunity. It doesn’t mean that life is static and that circumstances don’t change.
Chuck Butcher
@khead:
Would another area do? Like maybe Iraq, or say Japan, or how about AmerInd where ever in the US. Outcomes of selection. You can say, “had to,” but that is “had to” as an outcome of other selections. What we construct as a social and economic structure has outcome – there are some that aren’t so nice.
Annamal
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Ummm….actually the plight of workers in the author’s back-yard rates a “very disturbing” to my partner who often notes that their circumstances (parents periodically on welfare, one parent permantly disabled, big childhood health condition and on-going health conditions) would likely leave them either dead or permanently poverty stricken if they’d lost the birth lottery and been born in the US.
wau
Great article, shame about all the priveleged yammering on about bootstraps and the quiet dignity of the underclass, and certainly the pearl-clutching about the holocaust analogy of the arbitrary unfairness of our existence.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
this guy as david brooks could be the role of a lifetime.
Hob
Some people are just not going to get Shawn’s writing, no matter what. His essays are never really arguments, they’re more like dramatic monologues or sermons and sometimes he just throws in an image that’ll never be entirely explained, it just feels right. If you’re easily annoyed by people who don’t just say what they mean, or if you think a historical reference should only be deployed in the service of a precise analogy, then you’d be better off reading something else.
Still, I don’t think this piece is hard to understand at all. He’s not saying that all the workers of the world, or the people in his neighborhood, are crushed by the system. He’s saying that the economic forces that crush some people are directly related to our habits of thinking: specifically, a failure of imagination when looking at other people. It’s almost impossible to avoid falling into the habit of seeing people in terms of a social role, a job, a haircut, etc.– leading to the assumption that people are generally in the appropriate place for them, and that there’s nothing we can really do about it. He calls himself a socialist in the sense of wanting to build a society that really serves people’s needs rather than the other way around, and he’s proposing that the first step toward that is learning to see each other just as human beings with unknowable potential, as if anything is possible and the system is just what we choose to make of it.
This admittedly isn’t a practical suggestion so much as a philosophical one; no one can really stay in that state of mind all the time, except maybe with drugs. But there’s value in keeping that ideal in mind and remembering to question the assumptions you’re making.
By the way, this essay really benefits from being read out loud by Shawn. In print, it’s possible to miss that a lot of it is pretty funny. His tone isn’t somber or haughty at all, it’s more like a kid trying to grasp the craziness of the world.
Hob
Tom, could you un-moderate my last comment? I sinned by repeating a forbidden word that is IN THE TITLE OF THE DAMN ESSAY.
fuckwit
Bill Hicks said it well too, almost 20 years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7criyE09uy0
I’m grateful to Michael Moore, in one of his movies, for introducing me to Mr. Shawn’s particular genius.
Inconceivable!