It's like an Airplane

When the hearts of men attack

Gentle reader, my dad had a heart attack late last week.  Atttaaaack!  He had one artery totally blocked.   They flew him in a helicopter while his heart limped along trying to catch up.  We visited him in the hospital, watched him while he slept, and attempted to miss (not always successfully) viewing his little tush peeping from his hospital robe when he finally got up to walk around.

Fortunately enough, in my life and generally in the lives of the scrappy catgut crew, theory follows, buttresses, and substantiates real life.  So it did not surprise me, as I sat at the foot of my dad's hospital bed, to open Barbara Ehrenreich's "The Hearts of Men" only to find that I had just begun her chapter on heart disease.

It turns out that the growing prevalence of male heart problems in the 20th century has been tangled up with the way we think about men and their burdens.  (I'm not being facetious here, gentle reader.  I am very much aware that men have burdens.)  In previous centuries, women died earlier from pneumonia, childbirth, and other pesky problems, while men lived longer.  But come the 20th century, for a host of reasons we do not really understand but have come to summarily refer to as "stress," men officially became the weaker sex, dying younger than women.

Evidently this "stress" factor is a myth.  Women work the same long hours that men do, many in the same competitive environments, and their hearts do not fail them.  But in our collective consciousness, we came to accept that these heart attacks were the indication of a social calamity: that men were over-worked, over-tired, and over-burdened.

My dad has a phrase that I swear is straight out of Leave it to Beaver: "From dawn of day to setting sun, a father's work is never done!"  I pretty much agree.  I've always felt that my dad was over-burdened: by a job I wasn't sure he wanted, by guilt that he didn't remember my teacher's names, by the sense that he could be doing something else with his life.

According to Ehrenreich, men in the 50's who had heart attacks were considered lucky (if they survived): while recovering, they were given permission to escape the rat race for long enough to re-think their lives.  This is just what I imagined for my dad as I sat with him in the hospital.  I want him to wake up and smell the coffee.  Of life. 

All of this has only further convinced me that we're still living in the '50s.  For in-depth musings on the peculiar thing that is a dad, check in later.       

This article is about pork plants and American labor, not sex

Judging from the breakdown of comments I'm getting, the results are in: people like it when I write about sex and don't like it when I write about labor.  Oh well.

The NY Times sole labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, published a really scary piece on unionizing a pork plant on Monday:

In 1997, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union lost a unionization election at the sprawling plant, built in this rural town 75 miles south of Raleigh. But it was not until 2004 that the National Labor Relations Board upheld an administrative law judge's decision that threw out the election results.

The labor board found that the Smithfield Packing Company not only had prevented a fair election by illegally intimidating, firing, threatening and spying on workers but also had a union supporter beaten up the night of the vote count.

You have to read this piece if you have ever wondered whether organized labor is still relevant to American workers.  It's like Gotham City out there folks!  Or, more like Sudan, as the president of the union described it.  In this pork plant, about 65 percent of the plant workers are Hispanic, 25 percent are black, and the remaining 10 percent are white or American Indian.  Ever wonder why we used to care about unions and we don't anymore?   Ever wonder why unions were considered such a central part of American life 60 years ago?  You need look no further than those numbers.