Today's recommendation is the California Newsreel documentary Unnatural Causes, an important documentary that examines how social and economic inequality contributes to the declining life expectancy in the United States, to the decaying social fabric of our society, and many other things. It examines the interrelation of many factors: stress, biology, income, and rather than screeching banshees pointing fingers, the DVD takes a rationalist, biological point of view.
It is a disturbing, upsetting documentary, full of truths you probably don't want to face (or have wanted to avoid thinking about). However, it's one you need to see. It's one you are morally obligated to watch. It's one that examines the few choices we still have, although it may be too late.
The sad truth is, inequality IS making us sick. America is not tenable in its current, apocalyptic, amoral cancerous state of capitalism at all costs. If you don't believe me, watch this masterful 4 hour documentary, and then we'll talk.
Today's recommendation is resisting Americanist rhetoric about being the master of your own destiny.
I read a lot of personal finance blogs, which is really stupid, because they just depress me. They're all the same, and they are frankly all written for the wealthy. Nobody writes personal finance blogs for the people who need them the most. I know everything I should do with a 401 (k) and a Roth IRA, but I have never in my life been in a position to have either. I have condescendingly been patted on the head and sneered at and told that it all comes down to what I can expect to earn with my preshus major, but nobody who writes about personal finance can offer a single useful thing to career academics. I have literally never seen a single thing in a persona finance book or blog ever addressed to anyone working on a PhD, although there's plenty for law & medical students.
The best they can offer is vagaries about asking yourself if you Really Want to Go Back to school and are you just going to hide out you lazy bum haw haw haw. I have JD Roth on our blog roll, (mostly because he likes the Decemberists and seems like a nice enough guy) even though I think his blog has really declined in the last year, especially since he's started hooking up with sleaze balls like that I Will Teach You to be Rich douchebag.
That's what today's post is all about. When I was teaching in Germany, one of the lessons I had to teach from a book dealt with a study that showed how in America, people believe they are responsible for what happens to them - moreso than in any other country in the world. If I can remember the name of the book, and the study, I'll cite it. Take it for anecdata for now. In America, we believe that if we squeeze our eyes shut, we have a classless meritocracy and hard work is rewarded, and if you forego coffee in the morning you will magically get to retire and if you have to declare bankruptcy it's your own fault, you filthy slob with no self-control. Just fucking check your credit report and cut up your credit cards and all will be magic, forget about the endemic un and underemployment problems in this country. The product these blogs sell is stability. I grew up in a house where my father worked in the kind of mind and soul-numbing, frustrating office job that these blogs purvey. Leave at 6 AM, come back at 9 PM, work hard, invest in your company's 401 (k). The day of my 18th birthday, my father was laid off. He has not held stable employment since. He has had to cash out his 401(k) just to pay the bills. It bothers me that so many people buy into this one-size-fits-all prescriptive philosophy that sings the praises of a deeply flawed system that simply provides a way for the puppetmasters of the capitalist system to stay wealthy & powerful while the plebeians struggle and eat cat food in their golden years. But don't mind that. Just pay off your credit card and put $50 a month into a Roth IRA. It's all about your mind. It's all about your attitude. You broke your leg and you're bankrupt? You must have a bad attitude. You deserve what you get!
This is the rhetoric of personal finance blogs, the upper class elites who make a fortune off selling books and seminars to people (who buy these things on credit, naturally - except Dave Ramsey, who makes a big show out of not accepting credit cards, but he's more part of the fundamentalist scene than the personal finance scene, but that's another blog post) simply to reinforce the ideology of America, which is that you need to internalize a feeling of "empowering" "control" so that if you screw up, you blame yourself and feel like a failure, and if you blame anyone else, you go on a talk show and everyone hates on you at a water cooler and clucks their tongues about this "victim" society.
I am here to tell you that this is ridiculous. Obviously you can make minute and meaningless choices about shopping and personal spending. That, and only that, is what life in post-apocalytpic capitalist America is all about. Which coffee shall you get and at which store in the mall shall you get the shirt? Or not? But in the larger sense, counting these pennies (with apologies to Elizabeth Warren, the only personal financier who only kinda makes a little bit of sense) is a feeling of false control, just like much of American society. It's pointless to blame yourself and plan for retirement spending in a country that is clearly derailing, a country and empire that is far too huge, fractured, and arrogant to govern effectively, especially when most of the country is crazily ignorant and hideously greedy. It is pointless to scrimp and save when breaking your leg will bankrupt you. It is pointless to work hard for an elite education when you can't get a job, any job.
I'm not just talking about the conversation I always seem to be having with the knuckle-draggers who really, really, really love money, the people who sneer at me and laugh with spit flying and ask me just what the hell I expected, majoring in books. Uh. I'm talking about my friends with teaching licenses who can't find teaching jobs, even in states (e.g., Florida) with stated teacher shortages; I'm talking about the evaporating jobs while the filthy, vile, indolent rich get filthier and more indolent.
So - my recommendation today is Resist, resist, resist! Fight the power! Resist marketing, resist spending, resist conspicuous consumption, and resist ideologies that tell you that you are to blame for the failures of a system that keeps a very few people wealthy & powerful. Work hard, don't blame yourself, and fight for a better system. Whether you use the Republican bogeyman word "socialism" to describe it or not is up to you, but I am beginning to think "capitalism" is far worse. You're poor, you want advice? Cut down on smoking, or quit altogether. Arrange a childcare cooperative to reduce childcare costs (note: I neither smoke nor have children, so these may be assvice-y suggestions). Fight for your rights. Join a union. Use your library. Don't fall for slick marketing, including that of anti-marketers (does that make sense?). Demand to know every side. Read the fine print. Don't accept your situation, although you must accept that mathematically, as things stand, the middle class in American society as it is today is a dinosaur (the Onion put it best in 2004). Nobody wants to be poor, but most people are going to be. Either be poor with dignity or fight and don't be anyone's stooge. I'm not sure if this results in anything more but feel goodery and anti-vagaries and unquantifiable yearnings no different from that of the rhetorics I urge you to fight against and I urge you to read critically for that. But I had to say my piece, and that's my recommendation.
It goes without saying that there are some problematic dynamics at play here – namely, the fact that I am heterosexual, and therefore this is not necessarily my issue (N.B.: the tendency of some to claim ownership of an issue and not allow those outside of it to either stand in solidarity with them or to show them how the issue has an effect on the larger culture/society has always been a pet peeve of mine) – and because this is currently a widely-debated and complex issue, I suspect that my writing about it will ultimately be somewhat redundant with writings on other blogs and also incomplete (and quite possibly disorganized and incoherent). Perhaps one day I will take these ramblings and hone them into a more thoughtful and focused piece, but for now, I want to express my feelings on the issue and hopefully do so in an idiosyncratic way that can stand out in some way from the rest of the discourse.
(N.B.: All I have written so far is my opening paragraph and a disclaimer/statement of intent, and this post is already tl;dr. So it goes.)
A few years ago, I got into a pretty intense debate with a close friend of mine concerning this topic. My friend is fairly progressive, stands where I do on a lot of the issues, and shares a lot of the same friends and acquaintances, some of whom are homosexual or bisexual. He is African-American, and a single father. He was also strongly opposed to same-sex marriage.
I had trouble wrapping my head around this, and we argued back and forth for about half an hour over the telephone about it. The definition of marriage, he said, was a man and a woman. When I asked why it couldn’t just be two people, he responded that that is just the way it is. Besides, New Jersey had legally recognized civil unions. Shouldn’t they just be happy with that?
My head was spinning to think that a friend of mine with whom I shared so many political platforms would use such an argument. I invoked another argument from the past, one that I perhaps shouldn’t have, but it just seemed so apropos – separate but equal. Isn’t this the same mentality that enabled legal segregation in the south? Wasn’t it found that separate was not, in fact, equal? At all? Wasn’t excluding homosexuals from certain rights tantamount to racial segregation? He said no, it wasn’t. It was different. In the end we agreed to disagree on this topic.
But here I am several years later insisting that no, it isn’t different. And honestly, it has filled me with an immense sense of both pride and vindication to see the developments of the last couple of weeks. I have heard before that Iowa gets overlooked and lumped in with the Bible Belt states, to which it supposedly does not really belong. But still – did anybody really see this coming from Iowa? I certainly didn’t. Vermont was not a big surprise. And D.C. – well, I’m just trying not to get too far ahead of myself.
These are exciting times. There is a lot to be gloomy and depressed about, but when things like this are happening in real time, I feel the optimism with which I was imbued in November has been justified. I really do feel that the country is turning a crucial corner. No, everything will not be perfect. However, it is victories like these that make me believe in our system in spite of myself. I am, and I remain, standing in solidarity with those who have been denied this right, and will continue to do so until this wrong has been reversed.
Remember, the point here is not for me to be politically correct. This is about just, decent, and equal treatment and rights for fellow citizens and human beings.
***
Appendix
So I was initially planning on responding to all of the usual arguments against gay marriage rights in the main body of my post, but I decided against for a few very good reasons: 1) it was too obvious, 2) my answers would likely be too obvious and too redundant when compared to other blogs on the subject, and 3) I have to admit I have not done a tremendous amount of research on the topic, so I thought it would be better to have a passionate personal response rather than an unresearched pseudo-intellectual one. There are, however, a couple of anti- arguments that I want to mock, and one very big and often overlooked point that I want to make.
We will start then with the point I want to make, in response to the separate but equal argument. There is one very, very, insanely big way in which civil unions are inherently unequal from marriage: financially. With so many federal laws on the books making reference to marital status, the inability to marry presents a large financial liability to same-sex couples, particularly in the current economy. Again, I have not done all the research here, so I can’t go into detail, but if anyone is interested in finding out more about this issue, Dr. Lee Badgett, an economist who teaches at UMass Amherst, has done some extensive research and publishing in this particular area.
And now on to the mockery, much of which will be obvious. First off, the idea that the sanctioning of homosexuality will be a “gateway” to the sanctioning of pedophilia, bestiality, etc.. I understand why the fear-/hate-mongers chose to associate homosexuality with pedophilia, but really, when will this stop? Aren’t we past that? If I were less classy, I would argue that the sanctioning of Catholic priests is a gateway to sanctioning pedophilia. But I’m an adult and I refuse to lower myself to those kinds of tactics, so I won’t say that. What? Did somebody say something?
The whole argument that homosexuality is a sin and that “God hates fags” is just ridiculous. Can we please make those people go away? First of all, I thought Christians were supposed to believe in the kind and loving and benevolent God 2.0 from the New Testament, not the vengeful, fire-and-brimstone beta testing version from the Old Testament. If there is a God (and I do mean God in the capital-G sense, along with all the bells and whistles that implies), I can practically assure you that he does not care with whom you are sleeping. The world is a really big place, and there’s a lot of more important shit to worry about that will keep you busy. Yes, even if you’re God. There are still only so many hours in the day. Besides, the idea that this country was to be founded exclusively on Christian values is just plain wrong. This has been documented extensively by so many sources that I’m not going to do the work for you.
Another frequent argument is that same-sex marriage will somehow destroy traditional marriage. Bullshit. Same-sex marriage should have no impact whatsoever on what heterosexuals do. You know what's destroying traditional marriage? Divorce. You want something to outlaw, well, there you go. Logic, people. Use it!
I was going to say something else, I think, but I forget what it was, so now I will just give you this, which you have likely already seen:
Not much to say about this that you can’t say yourself, but I do want to draw your attention to the 0:47 mark.
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