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.

The Books of My Life: John Wayne's America

Over the years I have watched a lot of films including films starring the Duke, Marion Morrison, John Wayne. Recently I watched several movies starring the Duke, that I had never seen before, the Warner Brothers B Westerns Ride Him Cowboy (1932), please no jokes, The Big Stampede (1932), Haunted Gold (1932), and The Man from Monterey, two war pictures Wayne starred in, Back to Bataan (RKO, 1945) and Operation Pacific (Warner Brothers, 1951), and one war picture Wayne both starred in and directed, The Green Berets (Warner Brothers and Batjac, Wayne's company, 1968).

The Warner's B Westerns were, by and large, formulaic like all genre pictures. In most of them the Duke and his horse Duke were sent to some town, generally to take care of the bad guys. In good formulaic genre fashion the Duke defeated the bad guys, found the girl, who generally had some relationship, with a crypto bad guy, and eventually, one presumes, got the girl. Of the four Warner's B Westerns I watched  I found Haunted Gold to be the most interesting thanks to its attempt to marry the Western genre to the Gothic genre. That said, I don't think I would watch any of these films again for entertainment or educational purposes.

The Duke's war films I watched were really not that different from his Western films. The Duke and his band of merry good guys beat back the bad guys (be they the Japanese or the Vietnamese) with the help of their buddies (be they Filipino guerillas or the South Vietnamese) at, in the case of The Green Berets, the appropriately named Dodge City, pointing, in the process, up the close ties between the American Western and the American war film.

After watching these films I decided to read Garry Wills's book John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), a book I have wanted to read for some time.  The book, by the way, was published as John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity by Faber and Faber in the UK and Australia.

For Wills "John Wayne" is an American symbol grounded in several American myths including the key American myths of the frontier with its wide open spaces, uniqueness and exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and wilderness where some American men, like "Wayne" go in order to remain untrammeled and free to roam men.

It took years, as Wills notes, for Marion Morrison to become the American symbol "John Wayne". Three directors would, according to Wills, play major roles in the creation of the mythic Duke: Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, and John Ford. In Walsh's 1930 film The Big Trail, the first film "Wayne" got star billing in, Walsh created a "Wayne" who was at ease in the wild, so at ease, as "Wayne's" physical movements show, that he was almost a part of the wilderness of the American West. In Howard Hawk's Red River (made in 1946 but not released until 1948, Monterrey Productions, Hawks's company, and United Artists), a film that gave birth to the post-World War II symbol of the "Duke", Hawks created a "John Wayne" who was melancholy and weighed down by a sense of responsibility. In the 1950s and 1960s "Wayne" became the symbol of Cold War American imperial power, thanks, in part, to John Ford films like The Searchers (Warner Brothers, 1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Paramount, 1962), and the anti-communist action adventure film Big Jim McLain (Warner Brothers, 1952), a film in which "Wayne" stars as a HUAC investigator.

When I was a postgraduate student at the University of Notre Dame I sat in on an American Studies seminar offered by Wills while he was a visiting scholar in South Bend. It was a very interesting experience. So was reading his cultural historical study of "John Wayne" the symbol, the John Wayne who went to war only on celluloid--something for which, John Ford, who did go to war, apparently never forgive "Wayne" for--and the "John Wayne" who became the very symbol for many Americans--Wills calls them Wayneoliters--of America itself, of American individualism, of American destiny, and of real Americanism.

There were several things I liked about Wills's book including his emphasis on culture, the interplay of culture, politics, and biography, his emphasis on "Wayne" as an actor, and his emphasis on "Wayne's" celluloid body movements and speech patterns. There were a few things that annoyed me about the book. Wills poo pahs auteurism at one point noting that film is a collaborative medium. At the same time, however,  he praises and explores the themes of directors like Walsh, Hawks, including Hawks's role in reworking the scripts of Red River, and Ford, making the case for auteurism in the process. Additionally, there were times I felt Wills got a bit off the beaten track such as when he went on for several pages about the history of the Alamo in his chapters of "John Wayne's" film The Alamo (Batjac, United Artists, 1960). It was and interesting digression but a digression nevertheless.

Some Wayneoliters, by the way, have been critical of Wills's book. But for them "Wayne" is not a symbol. For them the myth is the "reality".

Recommended.

Musings on the Big Cube

Recently I watched the 1969 American and Mexican film The Big Cube. I didn't think it was a particularly good film. I did, however, think it was an interesting film. It seemed to me, as I was watching The Big Cube, that the best way to categorise the film is as a rare example of an Acid Noir film. In the film, Johnny (George Chakiris) is what, I suppose, we might call a narcissistic homme fatale. Johnny, you see, is using LSD not only recreationally but also as a weapon, as a means to drive the step mother,  Adriana (Lana Turner), of the woman he wants to marry, Lisa (Karin Mossberg), mad so that she can inherit the wealth of Lisa's rich recently deceased father and he, Johnny, can become rich. As is often the case in genre films Johnny gets his comeuppance at the end of The Big Cube as he is driven mad thanks to taking way too much acid one one delirium tremens night. As for Adriana, she is saved just in the nick of time from a life of forgetful madness by Lisa and Adriana's playwright friend, Frederick (Richard Egan), who Adriana, of course, marries at The Big Cube's happy end.

The Books of My Life: Isaac and Isaiah

I have long had an interest in culture, ideology, the social and cultural construction of identity and community, social and cultural movements, and culture wars. David Caute's Issac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (London: Yale University Press, 2013) serves up these and more.

On one level Caute's Isaac and Isaiah is a biography of the Isaac and Isaiah of the title, Polish born Marxist Issac Deutscher, author of well-known biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and liberal political theorist and Russian born Isaiah Berlin. But Caute's book is more than just a biography of Deutscher and Berlin. Both Deutscher and Berlin, in Caute's book, serve as key symbols around who a host of noted others, including George Orwell, E.H. Carr, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and Hannah Arendt, a host of noted Cold War events, and a host of familiar Cold War controversies, intersect and swirl. Caute's book is thus part history of the Cold War and the roles Deutscher and Berlin played in it, part cultural history--it explores the culture of Marxism and liberalism--part intellectual history--it puts Deutscher and Berlin in broad intellectual contexts--part academic history--Berlin was a fellow at All Souls, Oxford and Deutscher lectured in universities in Europe, the UK, and the US--part Jewish history--both Deutscher and Berlin were East European Jews who escaped from Hitler and Stalin respectively settling in England and who had personal and political interests in the Israel--part history of communism and anti-communism--Deutscher saw himself as a renegade Marxist who saw Stalinism as a detour from Leninism while Berlin had a hatred of Soviet communism and saw Stalinism as a continuation of Leninism--part critique of Deutscher, Berlin, and the Cold War, and part expose of Berlin's black balling of Deutcher's appointment in Soviet Studies at the new University of Sussex in 1963. By books end neither Deutscher or Berlin come off as saints though Deutscher was never the purveyor of ad hominems that Berlin, in private correspondence, was and who, on several occasions, expressed his hatred of Deurscher, who he regarded as the worst sort of apologist and polemicist imaginable

I enjoyed Caute's Isaac and Isaiah immensely. I highly recommend it particularly for those with interests like those mentioned above and for those interested, in particular, in the history of the Cold War and its ideologies.

The Books of My Life: Down and Dirty Pictures

Given that I had earlier read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls it was inevitable, I suppose, that I would read his sequel or follow up to that muckraking book, Down and Dirty Pictures Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), at some point.  Down and Dirty Pictures is, as Biskind states (p. 1), a sequel to Easy Riders Raging Bulls because the independent cinema of the auteur as independent artist, was, to some extent, one of the legacies of the movie brat auteur oriented cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, the cinema Biskind explored in Easy Riders.

Down and Dirty Pictures tells the tale of the rise, success, and decline of the American independent cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s. At the heart of the book, as the subtitle to the book makes clear,  is Miramax, the Sundance Institute with its filmmaker labs and film festival, and a host of other initially independent film "studios" of the era. In Down and Dirty Pictures Biskind argues that Mirimax, in particular, which began as a buying or acquisition house and distributor of independent films, transformed movie making in the US in the 1990s. Mirimax, Biskind contends, led the way in transforming film distribution in the American cinema of the 1990s, arranged the shotgun marriage of independents and big corporate studios, created the infrastructure of the American independent film industry, and brought American independent films, as a result, to a broader audience including those audiences who went to see films at America's cookie cutter mall based film chains.

Where Mirimax led, others--think Max Weber and isomorphism--like October and New Line, followed. By the mid and late 1990s once independent institutions like Mirimax, had become part of the studio system. Disney, for instance, bought Mirmax in 1993. October was purchased by Universal in 1997. New Line became part of Turner in 1994, part of Warner Brothers when Turner and Warner's merged in 1996, and was merged with Warner Pictures in 2008.

Success, as it often is, was, as Biskind makes clear, a double edged sword for American independent film industry. Mirimax, now part of a larger studio, was able to bid more for the right to distribute independent films and increasingly moved into the film production business and began to produce films just like the studios before it built around Hollywood stars with their big salaries, all of which drove up the cost of "independent" film acquisition and film production in the process. By the 2000s independent cinema, particularly mid-budgeted "independent" cinema, was on life support. The now studio owned independents were increasingly struggling and it became increasingly clear that the studio owned "independents" were of really of limited interest to the studios who owned them. The studios proved to be more interested in film by the numbers comic book films, broad comedy films, sequels to both, and nostalgic reboots of 1960s and 1970s TV shows, all of which continue to dominate Hollywood studio big budget equals big profit oriented filmmaking today. As a result low cost independent auteur films were almost back to square one.

Biskind's book doesn't neglect the dark sides of the captains of the American independent film industry. Harvey Weinstein, co-owner and  head of Mirimax with his brother Bob, is shown for the angry, intimidating, back stabbing, film editing (not always wrongly), user of completed films as leverage, bullying and belitting of employees, directors, producers, journalists, virtually everyone and anyone, make money at all costs flim flam man he was and is as recent events have shown once again. Redford is shown to be inconsistent and indecisive. Jockeying for power with its almost inevitable back stabbing is shown to be at the heart of American film corporate culture just as it is in broader capitalist corporate culture today.

Recommended particularly for those interested in how the Hollywood film making industry really works. Annoyance: Descriptive passages that read more like a work of fiction than a work of non-fiction. Caveat: the same caveats that applied to Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls.