It's like an Airplane

Living Wage / Schmiving Wage

Here's an impossible-to-read-if-you-don't-have-Times-Select NY Times Magazine article about local living wage movements in the States.  The article is hopeful at a time when Democrats have no hope.  It features compelling portraits of workers living way below the poverty line. And still, somehow it left me wanting more.  It's not that I don't like the idea of a living wage.  I just feel a little suspicious.  Suspicious -- because it's not clear whether people like the living wage all on its own.  I think everyone is excited about it because it's working.   

Let's take a moment and be those annoying economics tight-asses in the dining hall and list all of the reasons why the living wage won't help poor people.  I remember these reasons quite well, mostly because I learned them as a first-year during the Harvard Living Wage campaign arguing with ec concentrators who dripped condescension on me like hippies drop flowers.  The fears: it raises property values, making it more difficult for people to live where they work.  Because businesses have to raise costs, it drives customers away, ultimately taking business and jobs elsewhere.  It forces employers to hire fewer people to make up costs.  Another theory that I don't hear as often (probably because it's not as pc) is that giving people more money won't necessarily help them out of poverty.   

Although there is strong economic evidence to support the argument that a living wage actually doesn't have an effect on hiring practices, supporters of the living wage quoted in the article don't really care to use economic arguments at all.  They just say it's about humanity.  You have to pay people enough to live on.  Period.  If you're working full time, you shouldn't be earning wages that put you under the poverty line.  End of argument.

Liberals really have an almost gleeful excitement about this brand of moral stance.  As conservatives know all too well, moral arguments have a blanket power, a talk-to-the-hand-because-the-face-isn't-listening kind of authority.  People feel confident using them to dismiss even the most trenchant economic critique.  That's why liberals are so excited about living wage movements--now it's our turn, they say, to offer sweeping ethical claims that no one can fight.  They've enlisted religious leaders who cite the Bible as the source of their support for a living wage.  Now it's our turn, they say, to be stubbornly righteous. 

The movement seems to be working.  Wages are rising in targeted cities, and gosh darnit, people like the message.  It's something for Democrats to stand on.  Why can't liberals use morals more often to such a great effect?  In fact, much of the labor movement's arguments: workers deserve better health care and child care, and they should be organized and represented by someone other than their employer, all seem to have pretty strong moral components to them.  And we've got religious backing!  Democrats are always accused of picking up anti-religious causes that require long, complicated messages, while, while, the criticism goes, republicans instead have simple, bold, faith-based messages.  Maybe there's something so simple and bold about the living wage message that makes it work.

But, all the same, isn't the moral highground a slippery slope? (whew, mixed metaphors)  Sure, the religious leaders like it, but doesn't this just mean that they looked up the Bible on Sparksnotes and it said "poor people should be respected and dignified"?   What is so expressly "living wage" about this textual analysis?  Conservatives use this same message to say completely different things.  To me it sounds like we're dangerously close to "the good book told me so" kinds of arguments, the ones we don't like hearing from the Other Side.

The take-home-message of the living wage movement, for me, is that we're learning something (not so) new about how liberal politics should work.  We're learning, for instance, that religious leaders need to play a bigger part in democratic message-making.  We're learning that if the messages are clear and simple enough, and start local enough, change can happen.   These three strategies can also be referred to as beating Republicans at their own game.  This is what I think is so special about the living wage movement.   

This post has sat around in my draft box getting really stale, and now I'm not really sure whether I agree with it anymore.  Am I just being grumpy and contrarian?  If anyone wants to convince me that living wages are really central to the war on poverty, I am all ears.  For now, I'm signing out.  Happy Birthday, Maddy!   

How journalists today are lazy and wimpish, and why it has to do with the class divide

Here's a great article in the NY Review by Michael Massing about how journalists are increasingly timid in presenting views that are unpopular with the Bush administration and, to some extent, with the public at large.  We already knew this, right?  Well, it's even worse than we thought. 

There are lots of fun (read: terrifying) points in Massing's lively essay, but one to focus on is his argument that the press is becoming more and more removed from blue collar workers and Midwesterners.  Along with media's dependency on market shares, which drives reporters to produce stories and shows that sell, Massing is also concerned that the press is writing for themselves and people like them.  This seems certainly to be true, but the hole in this argument is that most reporters are liberal, and most press services are also liberal.  So why the show of not caring?

Massing begins his article with an anecdote about a LA Times reporter, Ken Silverstein, who covered Republican efforts to prevent democratic voters from voting in the 2004 presidential election only to find his story twisted into the headline "Partisan Suspicions Run High in Swing States."  In the aftermath of that messy affair that was the 2004 prezzies, it has become pretty clear that Republican efforts to stop Dem votes were much more concerted and strategic than the other way around.  In other words, we've confirmed what Ken Silverstein saw.  The paper's attempt to produce "balanced" reporting resulted in weak, yuck, nothing reporting.  Well, let's actually call it Bad Reporting.  In a letter to his editors, Silverstein wrote, "God forbid we should...attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes."

Massing uses this anecdote to talk about how the press is steering clear of having an opinion.  But he doesn't exactly say why they're doing this.  We could all take an educated guess: maybe it's because the press is afraid of looking liberal.   This makes sense, right?  The press is so often accused of liberal bias that they're moving in the opposite direction.  We saw this when Bush was making the case for Iraq: the press sat there stupidly, too afraid to make a move.  Analytical, investigatory practice went down the tubes.

How does this have to do with the class divide?  Massing later discusses the shortage of labor coverage in American newspapers.  Has anyone else noticed that when companies cut thousands of jobs, the news ends up in the Business section?  As Massing writes, "the business sections are addressed to members of the business world and are mainly concerned to provide them with information they can use to invest their money, manage their companies, and understand Wall Street trends."  So, sure, papers cover corporations.  They just don't investigate them, criticize them, or think at all analytically about them.  They just write about them so we'll know when to sell our stock. 

The problem, identified by ex-labor reporter Nancy Cleeland (she used to be the lone labor reporter at the LA Times, like Stephen Greenhouse for the NY Times) is that her editors didn't care about labor for labor's sake.   "They were always looking at labor from a management and business perspective -- 'how do we deal with these guys?'"  It's not exactly that the press doesn't care about the working class, they just don't have real empathy: "They don't consider themselves hostile to working-class concerns, but they're all making too much money to relate to the problems that working-class people are facing."   

The connection is there but Massing doesn't actually quite make it.  The press has so little personal grasp of blue collar Americans or Midwesterners, that they're letting conservatives define these Americans and dictate what they want to hear.  They're timid because they don't know what Red America looks like, except for the picture Republicans have painted.  (Not to conflate Red America with blue-collar America, but you can see where I'm going with this.)

When the class divide widens, people stake claims, and often, become spokespeople.  Suddenly, George Bush knows more about working class people in the Midwest than labor reporters do.  Suddenly, big business republicans get to have a monopoly on working-class and middle-class values.  Losing real empathy with working-class Americans, as Massing claims the liberal American press is doing, means losing touch with the ways that a political position speaks to them.  "Balanced reporting" is bad not only because it favors the Republicans, but because it obscures the ways that working-class Americans are being duped by the Right (the majority of Dems barred from the polls on September 2nd were working-class minorities).  If the press is so scared of the hold conservatives have over Red America that they can't produce good news that reveals this hold, and they can't envision how their politics is relevant to others not in their demographic, they might as well abandon everything beyond the Upper West Side to the Republicans once and for all.

Prairie sex

One of my first memories of sexual pleasure was when I was in kindergarten and I insisted on “staying at home” in my kindergarten boyfriend’s bed, while his brother, my sister and he went out to explore the wild frontier. The babysitter said “Rebeccah, are you sure you don’t want to go exploring with everyone else?” Maybe it was all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder I was reading, but I was perfectly contented to stay in bed in my white flannel nightgown. Perhaps I planned to do some metaphorical bed sweeping. 

Since then, I’ve moved away from the frontier paradigm in my sexual partnerships. But there are times, with certain people, when it all seems so pleasurably familiar to return to. I remember lying in bed in college with one particularly outdoorsy, old-fashioned woodsman type, when he mentioned that one of the tutor couples in our dorm were getting married. It was a simple enough comment. But as I lay my head on his shoulder and glanced contentedly at our hardy, wholesome bodies, I realized that he was telling me this because he was imagining us as a couple. As if we were sitting around the wood stove, as the wind and snow swirled outside the log cabin window, talking of marriage, the price of the new oxen, and the muslin I would buy to make a dress. It was both disturbing and kinky. New roles entered into my roleplay lexicon: lumberjack and buxom wife.

Funny how something that seems so modern can actually be a re-enactment of hot, hot, hot retrogression. People thought it was so liberated and hip that I didn’t want a relationship with my dorky mountain man. Little did they know that we were getting together and reenacting Little House on the Prairie.

*** 

It’s a shame to continue this post by theorizing, but I will anyway. I just want to add, ahem, that it’s really too bad how difficult it is these days to talk about sex that could in anyway be deemed retrogressive. It seems that the whole point of queer theory is that it’s OK if your sex or gender seems somehow derivative of traditional sex or gender, because in making it your own you’re actually co-opting the tradition and inverting it. But that’s not really what’s happening. Instead, anyone who’s doing anything traditional or vanilla are considered totally uncool and unrealized. Like how Judith Halberstam made fun of birkenstock lesbians who barbeque.

To take a page from Linda Hirshman’s fingerwagging, we can’t just say that ‘it’s all good’ and that people can do whatever they want. And I do think that generally people are sexually limited and don’t really get what they want out of sex. But when it comes down to it, all of those above people, and then all of the people like me who get turned on by Little House on the Prairie (among other things), end up exploring their ‘conventional’ desires even less. That’s boring! So much for liberation.