Why I Quit the "Coop"

After working at Honest Weight for five years, five years that sometimes felt like ten, I decided to resign from the "Coop". The primary but not only reason I resigned was the fact that I was bullied, harassed, and embarrassed by a staff member at the “Coop” one not so wonderful Thursday evening.

The harassment happened during my shift on 16 August 2018. One of the new front end supervisors, let’s call him N after that Russian tradition where the guilty are made anonymous thanks to the letter N, asked me, in front of a customer, why I did not come and get him to deal with an expired coupon. I didn’t because I have never been asked to do this by management and had never done this during my years at Honest Weight. My understanding was that once a coupon had expired it had expired. Later during the same shift, N, as I was bagging at another register being run by NN, walked up to me and muttered  "you decided to actually work tonight". First of all, joking or not joking aside, doing this in front of a customer and in public is very unprofessional and unacceptable, at least in my book. Then, a minute or so later, I asked the same customer I was bagging for, if she wanted another shopping cart since her cart was full and I had to put a bag on top of other bags that contained soft items like bananas. N made fun of me for asking this question of the customer.

Management, of course, did its due diligence. It investigated the report I submitted on this incident. N apparently denied remembering anything. NN, apparently did a Sgt. Schultz saying she knew nothing, heard nothing, and saw nothing. I know, by the way, that NN heard the third of N's school yard performances because she looked right at me and gave me one of those WTF quizzical looks.

Here was the rub. For the first time in my volunteer and staff work life at Honest Weight I didn’t feel comfortable working or even coming into the store. After all while one bullying time may be an accident, two bullying times is not a charm, and three bullying times is a pattern of behaviour.
I would, by the way, have stayed at HW for a few more years if management had changed my schedule so I didn't have to work with the bully, but they refused, so I quit.

After all that happened way too much proverbial water had passed under that proverbial bridge. Additionally, I really don't need to work at Honest Weight to make it economically. Add to this my health problems--asthma, sinusitis, osteoporosis, and degenerative musculoskeletal arthritis, all of which were affecting me more and more at work--and it was was perhaps the right time to go.

For the most part, I enjoyed working at Honest Weight over the years. It has, of course, always been a crazy place to work with its petty and silly political cold and hot wars and its quite evident inconsistencies and contradictions. Still I will probably miss it once in a while.

The Books of My Life: Return From the Natives

Peter Mandler's Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (London: Yale University Press, 2013) is a superb archive driven and theoretically aware exploration of the role Social Scientists played in World War Two and the Cold War. At the heart of Mandler's book are Cultural Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Social Anthropologist, linguist, Semiologist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, and neo-Freudian Geoffrey Gorer. Though Mead, Benedict, Bateson, and Gorer are centre stage in Mandler's book other famous and not so celebrated Social Scientists, like Claire Hold, Elizabeth Hoyt, Métraux, Clyde Kluckhohn, Nathan Leites, John Dollard, Samuel Stouffer, Edward Hall,  Robert and Helen Lynd, Erich Fromm, David Reisman, and Ralph Linton--who comes off as a misogynist macho jerk--make important cameo appearances as well.

Mandler's Return from the Natives, which is part biography, part history of the Social Sciences, part social and cultural theory critique, part biography, particularly of Mead, Benedict, Bateson, and Gorer, is an important and nuanced corrective to much contemporary history of Social Science analysis that sees the Social Scientists who served their countries in World War Two and the Cold War as top down social engineers. Mandler argues, rightly I think, that there was more than one type of social engineering during World War Two and the Cold War, top down social engineering and social engineering for a respect of global diversity and a respect for other cultures. Mead"s and Benedict's engineering for cultural diversity with its Boasian anti-racism and cultural relativism, falls into the latter category.

On the theoretical level, Mandler's book is an exploration and critique of neo-Freudianism, the attempt to contextualise Freud more broadly in sociological, ethnological, and ethnographic terms. In Mead's, Benedict's, and Gorer's case this neo-Freudianism led to the development of the culture and personality school of 1930s to 1960s Cultural Anthropology, and particularly in Gorer's case, gave rise to the notion that national character was the product of swaddling and toilet training processes that took place during infancy. As Mandler notes such and approach saw culture in holistic and ultimately static and I would argue functionalist terms, and had little place in it for the role economic, political, and cultural factors played in national character, or perhaps better national identity, and social and cultural change.

On occasion, Mead, Mandler notes, did contextualise her work more broadly. Mandler notes that the Mead edited collection Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, which was written for UNESCO, prefigures the critiques of international development as imperialism (economic, political, cultural) one finds in post-Vietnam era Social Science.

Finally, Mandler notes that Mead, particularly during the Cold War, often had one foot in the engineering in the name of American nationalism camp and the be wary of nationalist social engineering relativist camps as a result of her attempt to gain government funding for Cultural Anthropology in the wake of World War II and in her effort to promote cultural relativist sensitivities in the American government and its intelligence apparatuses.

Mandler's book is one of those books, like Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic--a book which had an immense impact on my intellectual life--that I would put in the pantheon of published works that I have read. It is a book that, in my opinion, should be read by every Social Scientist and Historian. I would also recommend that it be read by everyone in government service as a cautionary tale. I can't recommend Return From the Natives more highly.

The Books of My Life: The Poltics of Rage

If you want to understand how the Republican Party of today morphed into the Dixiecrats of yesteryear there is no better book you can read than Emory historian Dan Carter's The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Carter's book, which is part biography and part history of post-World War II American politics, explores the role Alabama politician and former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace played in what Carter calls the Southernisation of American politics or what I call the dixiefornication of American politics.

Wallace, in the 1960s and 1970s, as Carter shows, used the politics of White rage and resentment (negative emotions are easy to manipulate) over integration, busing to achieve integration, federal government "tyranny", the "tyranny" of the federal courts (both of which were pushing integration at the time), high taxes, welfare freeloaders and cheats (a code word for Blacks), the lack of law and order (code words for dissidents, civil rights activists and Blacks protesting in the streets), along with the rhetoric of states rights (a code word for keeping your hands off of our Jim Crow and our local schools), the far too great expansion of the federal government and government spending (code word for welfare spending on Blacks), anti-communism, anti-counterculturalism, and anti-intellectualism to achieve political prominence and notoriety not only in his Deep South home but also in the American North and West in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the appeal of these issues to Southern Whites, angry White Southern evangelicals (custodians of the lost cause living the myth of being poor poor persecuted Christians), angry suburban Whites, angry Catholic Ethnic Whites, and angry blue collar Whites.

Republican Richard Nixon and strategist Kevin Phillips would, of course, steal Wallace's thunder in order to appeal to the same White rageoholics Wallace did, helping, in the process, to create a new Republican Party that today is dominated by perhaps that most dixiefornicated of New Yorkers, President Donald Trump, who is, in many ways, channeling the ghost of George Wallace right down to his ties to the KKK, White Supremacists, and his use of manichean rhetoric to stir up his "saintly" supporters against the "demons" of the press and "liberal" protesters in his audience, who, like those at George Wallace political revivals, were also physically attacked. Sometimes, it seems, history runs in cycles. 

While I found the political history of the book more compelling than the biographical parts I still highly recommend Carter's excellent and insightful book. If you have an interest in the history of the Republican Party particularly in the post WWII period or a history of the dixiefornication of America, check it out.