Bradley Manning
27 Dec
“How come most people don’t vote in this country in elections? In Australia voting is compulsory. You have to vote or you get fined. So when people vote they find out why they vote and they generally vote for their best interests such as free medical care, free education, decent old-age pensions, care for the mentally ill and the indigent. Therefore the people vote for their taxes to be used to their benefit. When people don’t vote here, they leave a huge vacuum. Into the vacuum pour the multinationals. So your tax dollars are used for corporate benefit. The best way to make a buck in this country if you’re a corporation is to build weapons, because they make 75% profit. There’s no competition. It’s a cost-plus industry, whereas if you make cars you only make 15% profit. So you can’t afford not to be making nuclear weapons and delivery systems if you are a corporation in this country. Therefore, every company, directly or indirectly, is involved in making weapons of mass destruction, even General Foods, who make cereals, etc. How come? They sell their products to the military.
“So the corporations have you by a stranglehold. It’s a corporate White House. Who does Bush represent? He represents corporations. Who did Reagan represent? I don’t know if he knew who he represented. I think he still doesn’t, but he did represent the corporations. He was like Chauncey Gardner in Being There…I can say that now. If I’d said that a few years ago some of you would have had my throat. I met him in the White House in 1983 and spent 1 1/4 hours with him, and it was a very devastating experience, about the most devastating of my life. We spent an hour and a quarter in intense dialogue, mostly coming from me. He said some things but they were all wrong. I had to hold his hand so that he could be a bit relaxed because he got quite uptight and he quoted me from the Reader’s Digest…He was a nice old man. He’s not senile. He’s always been like this. His I.Q. clinically was about 100, and that’s the truth. You have to wonder how come a man of that caliber got to be running your country and could press the button if he so desired. It’s a very serious situation.
Drone, Gold Bars, Uzi, Poppy, Oil Drum, Diamond. Set of six color pencil and pen-and-ink drawings on Bristol paper, 3 x 3 in. ea., from 96 drawings used for performance, Dress for Success, at Jonathan Shorr Gallery, New York, on July 8, 2006; involved built costume and movement, in collaboration with sculptor John Landino.
“So here is a corporate President, and so is Bush. The Congress is a corporate Congress. It costs $60 million to run for the Presidency, $30 million to get to the Senate, and $2-$3 million to get to the House of Representatives. So, you can’t get there unless you’re a millionaire or unless you’re bought out by corporate money before you get there. That’s not right. That’s not democracy. So something has to change.
“”The Pentagon is run by the corporations. The Department of Energy, which runs the nuclear power plants and builds all the nuclear weapons is run by the corporations. This last week, as I’ve been traveling the country, reading the New York Times in the airplanes as I fly, articles about the fact that the DOE is run by corporations and the people who are employed by government virtually don’t know what’s going on. James Watkins, the Secretary of Energy, was embarrassed recently to find a report he gave to Congress about building nuclear weapons was written by one of the corporations who makes the nuclear weapons. He was really embarrassed. So the DOE is run by the corporations. It’s a pretense to think that the American government is run of the people, by the people and for the people. Now theretofore you need another revolution…And that doesn’t mean sitting on your bottoms writing letters. It’s [sic] doesn’t mean lobbying Senator Hatfield and whoever else. It means actually getting out there and putting your bodies on the line like Gandhi did. It means the equivalent of the salt marches. It means taking over the Department of Energy in Washington and staying there, like the students did in the 1960s, taking over the administrations. It means taking over the Pentagon, getting in there. It’s your Pentagon. Take it over. It means getting into military facilities and taking them over. It means dismantling equipment that kills people and other species…” — Dr. Helen Caldicott, excerpted paragraphs from “Helen Caldicott: Lecture given on November 12, 1989, National Radio Broadcast, Portland, Oregon USA,” Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, Pamphlet No. 4 (1991), pages 1-2.
I first listened to Dr. Caldicott lecture on nuclear disarmament watching a film directed by Terre Nash called If You Love This Planet (1982). Caldicott is an Australian pediatrician and a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility. The excerpted text above displays a wonderful randomness and the entire speech at times approaches an incoherence that most listeners would probably find difficult to follow. Yet, her language is direct and simple and meant to reach those not within the halls of power she speaks of above. This is how I want to remember Ronald Reagan, the same president who did not publicly speak about AIDS until May 31, 1987 with 36,058 Americans diagnosed with the disease, 20,849 dead, and the spread of the disease to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases (see Allen White, “Reagan’s AIDS Legacy / Silence equals death,” sfgate [June 8, 2004]; http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-06-08/opinion/17428849_1_aids-in-san-francisco-aids-research-education-cases; accessed 12/26/2011). (Dale Carpenter argues that Reagan was prompted by a question from a reporter regarding inadequate funding to speak about the pandemic during a press conference in September 1985. Carpenter’s article first appeared in the Bay Area Reporter on June 24, 2004 and is available at: http://igfculturewatch.com/2004/06/24/reagan-and-aids-a-reassessment/. As a man who has lived through the pandemic since its beginning, Reagan’s silence as thousands of people died was palpable.)
What Caldicott teaches us is that nothing is random in the world of politics. Everything is connected. Consumer Americans should take into account speech like this because nothing that is presented on their behalf otherwise makes these important connections. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex before he left office. Since then the term has been expanded by some to the military-industrial-media complex. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a perfect example of the non-complex terms with which this cyclopean is rendered for American public consumption. Americans thrilled to scripted visual narratives of a military that bombed its way to the center of Baghdad. Yet, this public had not been informed by the same media end of the military-industrial complex of prior military incursions into Iraq to destroy vital energy grids and other infrastructure for the purposes of setting up business post-invasion. This was, after all, a corporate war, including Dick Cheney’s profiteering by sending his company Halliburton to “reconstruct” the damage that the United States had inflicted to Iraq over time.
This particular war was scripted from the very beginning. President George W. Bush, Jr. depended upon scripted narratives based on false assertions leading up to his decision to engage our country in the invasion of another. “Weapons of mass destruction” was the war cry, one which Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated to the United Nations to justify our action to the world. As Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistle blower of the Vietnam War era, explains in his memoir of that period, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002), any truism that secrets cannot be kept within government is false (page 43). As a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John T. McNaughton, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Ellsberg had an insider’s view to the Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” on U.S. warships in August 1964. These incidents as they were portrayed by the military were important because they allowed the President to press Congress to agree to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This gave the President vague, but wide, discretionary power to choose aggressive action against North Vietnam, including direct combat involvement. Heretofore, the United States was limited to providing military personnel as advisors in the field to South Vietnam according to the 1954 Geneva Accords. The Accords were based on agreement made during conference in Geneva, Switzerland between the Soviet Union, the United States, France, the People’s Republic of China, the United Kingdom, and other countries, addressing not only the First Indochina War between France and the Viet Minh, but also the reunification of Korea. Ellsberg’s account is enlightening. Although the reports of attacks against U.S. ships were contradictory and dubious, official word up the line to the President, and thence to the American public, portrayed North Vietnam in terms of “naked aggression.” It was not until years later that these reports were totally debunked. And, in fact, Ellsberg details what were deliberate actions by our government to provoke North Vietnam (see pages 7-20), actions being withheld from public knowledge.
In 1964, as a liberal Cold War warrior, Ellsberg supported this kind of governmental secrecy and manipulation of truth: “self-discipline in sharing information…and a capability for dissimulation in the interests of discretion were fundamental requirements for a great many jobs…The result was an apparatus of secrecy…that permitted the president to arrive at and execute a secret foreign policy, to a degree that went far beyond what even relatively informed outsiders, including journalists and members of Congress, could imagine” (page 43). By 1969, Ellsberg was willing to tell the truth to Congress and the press, “to give up clearances and political access, the chance of serving future presidents, [his] whole career, and to accept the prospect of a life behind bars” (page IX).
In 2004, I was outraged when revelations about the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to public attention, through a 60 Minutes II news report (April 28) and an article by Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker magazine (posted online on April 30 and published days later in the May 10 issue). Although at the time of this media release of information an initial criminal investigation was underway by the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, resulting in the Taguba Report, it is easy to imagine a different trajectory if whistleblower, Army Reservist Sgt. Joseph Darby, had not taken a CD containing images of torture to higher command in January of that year. Darby was given a CD as a memento by one of the torturers, Army Spc. Charles Graner, who would receive a sentence of ten years in prison (see “Introduction: The Abu Ghraib files,” Salon [March 14, 2006], http://www.salon.com/2006/03/14/introduction_2/, and, Michele Norris, “Abu Ghraib Whistleblower Speaks Out,” NPR [April 15, 2006], http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5651609; both accessed December 20, 2011). What was especially troubling was the fact that sexual humiliation was within the arsenal of torture techniques under employ by the Army and CIA. As a gay man, I knew too much of the history of discrimination against gay men and lesbian women in the armed forces.
Chris Clary, 52-Card Pick-Up, installation for Body Commodities / Queer Packaging, Works/San José (2006). Printed photographs on card deck, dimensions variable.
We have today what we had during the Vietnam War: a government and military that lies and covers up. State secrets are the excuse for preventing an American public from knowing what torture techniques were used, by whom and under whose authority, at what facilities, and for how long. Soldiers on the lowest rung of military hierarchy were the only individuals convicted of wrongdoing in a few, of a vast number, of incidents, that were actually tried in military court; their superiors were never convicted of crimes. Classifying information that effectively shuts it away from public scrutiny is good business for corporations as well. The public is not allowed to know what chemicals are used for the dangerous process known as “fracking” that extracts natural gas from the ground. So there are corporate secrets that are as powerful as state secrets.
It was troubling, then, for me to know that Pfc. Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, imprisoned since July 2010, and not formally charged with crimes until March 2011, was to be tried for “aiding the enemy” by purportedly sharing classified government documents with WikiLeaks. The military pretrial hearing began on Friday, December 16, 2011. The presiding officer, Paul Almanza, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, actually works as a Department of Justice prosecutor in civilian life, for the same government agency that is conducting a criminal investigation against Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder. No wonder that Bradley’s defense team argued on day one that Almanza should recuse himself because he was biased. Also questionable is Almanza’s decision to accept unsworn statements from the “original classification authorities,” denying the defense team a request to question these individuals as to why the documents published by WikiLeaks had been classified as secret material (see David Dishneau and Pauline Jelinek, “Manning Hearing Bogs Down Over Dispute,” Associated Press; http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/manning_hearing_bogs_down_over_dispute/; accessed 12/16/2011).
What is most troubling to me about the hearing is the defense argument that Bradley suffered from gender identity confusion during the time he was sharing documents. I accept as business as usual that the government would put in place a presiding officer that is working on its behalf to move closer to their real target, a man who was not on trial here (the hearing ended with closing statements on Thursday, December 22nd; for fuller information, visit the website http://www.bradleymanning.org/). And, of course, the American public should never know about “Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, State Department cables and a classified military video of a 2007 American helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 11 men, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver” (Dishneau and Jelinek). Oh, no. But the world knows better now than the American people would ever really want to know about how this government and other governments have acted in collusion. We can thank this leaked information, in part, for the sudden and unexpected Arab Spring. And, thus, the current unrest exhibited by the Occupy movement. I want to think that any individual so brave or foolish to release this kind of information has the integrity of a Daniel Ellsberg. For what Ellsberg knew, and others have known, is that we are not living in a democracy when secrecy at the highest level of government propels us into wars we have not chosen. The button pushers Caldicott refers to indeed have the power to initiate or expand nuclear war, but instead exercise a more insidious form of directive by sending us into endless war for the sole purpose of rewarding corporations with obscene profit. I stand by Bradley Manning, confused or not.
The above photographs without captions are from the performance Detainee, organized and performed by the author at The Roger Smith Hotel, New York, from January 29 to February 3, 2007, in collaboration with Beverly Richey (image projection), Max Yawney (wall painting and performance), Patrick Todd (sound composition) and a host of artists and non-artists who participated as interrogators. The photographs are unattributed. The performance was filmed by a bystander and posted at YouTube. It can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFlQv7XeMys
Black Friday Revisited
5 Dec
Steve Zeltzer, Protecting the Merchandise on Friday in San Francisco, digital photograph, 2011.
“When such men as these, together with the cheap college professors and still cheaper writers in muckraking magazines, supplemented by a lot of milk-and-water preachers with little or no religion and less common sense, are permitted to assault the business men who have built up the great industries and have done more to make this country what it is than all the other agencies combined, it is time that vigorous measures are taken up to put a stop to those vicious teachings which are being sown broadly throughout the country.” — Lamont Montgomery Bowers, in a letter to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., October 11, 1913, (vice president, treasurer, and chairman of the board to owner of Colorado Fuel & Iron [CF&I]), quoted in Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2007), page 92
“…[the CF&I Primero mine was] probably caused by some miner smuggling in pipe and matches, the use of which is prohibited. The mine was thoroughly ventilated, but, like most soft coal mines, has pockets of gas that are struck which causes explosions, and then the dust ignites and havoc follows. The latest reports indicate that the mine is not damaged, and work will resume as soon as the miners get over the excitement.” — Bowers in a letter to Frederick T. Gates, a Rockefeller advisor, February 1, 1910, on an explosion that killed 75 workers, quoted in Martelle, page 45
Indeed, the Colorado coal mining region at the time of Bowers’s writing was the site of a deadly class war, just as it had been in West Virginia. Earlier union organizing struggles at the Colorado fields had resulted in the suppression of that effort in 1903. The mine operators then imported labor from areas of Europe, including large numbers of workers from Greece and Italy, a payroll reflecting thirty nationalities, with the intent of replacing an English-speaking force of American-born workers and immigrants from Cornwall, Scotland, and Wales. The purpose was, of course, to thwart unionism’s progress by “produc[ing] in advance a condition of a confusion of tongues, so that no tower upon which they might ascend the heavens could be erected,” according to what Edwin V. Brake, Colorado’s deputy labor commissioner, learned by admission from one of the coal companies in 1913. Further, the newer hires were inexperienced in mining, “not conversant with the rate of wages or the conditions that prevail in this country, and they will submit to conditions that men will not tolerate who have had experience as practical miners.” This second point is why mines were so dangerous when operated by owners who were virulently anti-union (see Martelle, page 26, for quotations and points).
With this understanding, it is clear why Bowers would rather wait until the “excitement” of his company’s workers subsided in order to resume business as usual, workers’ reaction in reality probably closer to shock and fear at the death of 75 others. The Colorado coal companies at the time flouted state law regarding mine regulation and safety. They also had the ability to prevent miners from seeking legal avenues of redress since these companies controlled local law enforcement and the courts.
Corporate business has always had the upper hand in this nation’s affairs. As Robert Scheer observed on the recent dismantling of the Occupy Los Angeles encampment: “The bankers slept well. Their homes in Beverly Hills were not spotlighted by a noisy swarm of police helicopters, searchlights burning through the sanctity of the night, harassing the forlorn City Hall encampment of those who dared protest the banks’ seizure of our government” (Scheer, “You Can Arrest an Idea,” Nation of Change; http://www.nationofchange.org/you-can-arrest-idea-1322835690, accessed December 2, 2011). Concrete barriers were erected following the eviction of tent encampment occupiers, Scheer surmising: “However, the result was the same as elsewhere; the bankers were protected from the scorn they so richly deserve and there will no longer be a visible monument to the pain that they have caused.”
The dominant rhetoric employed to dismantle Occupy camps across the country cites concerns for health and safety. Corporate media safeguards the cover of this tone of language in order to further the corporate cause. Dan Whitcomb and Mary Slosson, writing for Reuters (picked up by Yahoo! News), reported: “…city officials complained of crime, sanitation problems and property damage…” City park workers were tasked with “rehabilitat[ing] debris-strewn ground whose landscaping was ravaged by campers…,” later “collect[ing] 30 tons of waste from the site…” Mind you, police pulled down and flattened tents, so the reader cannot know from the text how much of the strewn debris was a result of police action. A police lieutenant is cited to convey that “some protesters had been reported to be storing human waste at the site for unknown reasons” (italics mine). Additionally, the article claims “police entering the camp had encountered a ‘horrible stench'” (see Whitcomb and Slosson, “Police take down Occupy L.A. camp, arrest nearly 300,” Reuters [http://news.yahoo.com/police-down-occupy-la-camp-arrest-nearly-300-015210061.html; accessed November 30, 2011).
The dependence upon portraying Occupy protesters as filthy individuals challenging public health and safety relies upon a formula of containment that runs deep in our history. The logic behind such containment stresses the distance from the mainstream of elements of society, but in terms that avoid true ideological or political points of contention. Much as Communists and homosexuals were constantly portrayed as infiltrating the American population, as if they were organisms entering the human blood stream, from the end of World War II through the end of McCarthyism, today’s protesters are portrayed as infecting the body politic.
Within the structure of containment, infection and political infiltration — read social infiltration as highlighted below in Lait and Mortimer’s exposé — are one and the same. Rather than portray today’s Occupiers as representative of a more widely held view that American society is not functioning to the benefit of all, as some news agencies are willing to do, these protesters are presented by corporate media as infectious stains that must be removed from public spaces. The one element of Zeltzer’s photograph that truly stands out are the hands of the police officer in the foreground, wrapped in rubber. The first time I knew of police officers using rubber gloves to handle protesters was during the 1980s as AIDS activists took to city streets, corporate offices, and government headquarters to protest restrictive drug policies and pharmaceutical corporate greed. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) inspired a generation in its use of bodily occupation of space, contesting the boundaries between private and public (dates and actions can be consulted at: http://www.actupny.org/documents/capsule-home.html). On June 1, 1987, as ACT UP protesters staged an action of civil disobedience outside the White House, police wearing rubber gloves removed activists. On June 23, 1988, ACT UP met with the homeless at a “Talk-In” at a tent city at City Hall Park in New York, “built to protest the city’s policy on the homeless.” September 14, 1989: “ACT UP once again makes history by stopping trading on the Stock Exchange floor. Seven ACT UP members infiltrate the New York Stock Exchange and chain themselves to the VIP balcony. Their miniature foghorns drown out the opening bell, and a banner unfurls above the trading floor demanding ‘SELL WELLCOME.’ Other ACT UP members snap photos which they then sneak out and send over newswires. Four days later, Burroughs Wellcome lowers the price of AZT by 20%, to $6,400 per year.”
Not only do the rubber-encased hands in the Zeltzer photograph make immediate reference to government policy regarding political and social infection, but they also act as figurative conductor’s hands, ready to orchestrate the movement of a phalanx of police officers guarding the entrance to Macy’s. During these current tense days of provocation and suppression over the occupation of public space, relatively little has been reported regarding the health and safety of the occupation of outdoor and indoor space as Black Friday shoppers progress to point-of-sale. Yet, clearly, the danger to public health and safety is greater at WalMart locations across the country on Black Friday than at Occupy sites currently being dismantled by city governments. We can expect more of the same during next year’s holiday season, i.e., more maiming, more killing, because corporate America ultimately governs how public space is policed. Nor, should we hope that the public take on the issue of health and safety on Black Friday, since the buying public, the mass of individuals who agitate to obtain goods of consumption, descend upon their destination somewhat akin to the animated zombie of the West African Vodun and Haitian Vodou, the hypnotized person “bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie). The witchcraft involved here relies on the manipulation of markets by corporations and their tools: advertisers and merchandisers.
Scheer refers to a decision by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff in a case against Citigroup for that company’s “sale of a billion dollars’ worth of toxic securities that were designed to fail and which the bank had bet against.” While the Securities and Exchange Commission found Citigroup guilty of “negligence,” Rakoff points out that the company had already been fined for four similar scams, thus, one would expect far more serious charges to be leveled against such a repeat offender. Rakoff is quoted from his case summary: “…in any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth. In much of the world, propaganda reigns, and truth is confined to secretive, fearful whispers. Even in our nation, apologists for suppressing or obscuring the truth may always be found.”
Page from Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Washington Confidential (Crown Publishers, New York, 1951).
This Is What
26 Nov
Black Friday Specials, pen-and-ink on Bristol paper, 9 x 12 in., 2011.
“…From the beginning the occupation movement has been resolutely antihierarchical and participatory. General assembly decisions are scrupulously democratic and most decisions are taken by consensus — a process which can sometimes be unwieldy, but which has the merit of making any manipulation practically impossible. In fact, the real threat is the other way around: The example of participatory democracy ultimately threatens all hierarchies and social divisions…” — Ken Knabb, “The Awakening in America,” Slingshot, Issue #108 (Hella Occupy Extra Edition 2011), page 14.
Oh, the joys of holiday shopping. The annual prequel to Sunday football. Shop, and if you survive, relax with a beer in front of this year’s flat screen TV. Consumers, the living dead.
It’s Work
17 NovSince moving to San Francisco I have done anything anyone has offered in terms of work: editing travel guides, scanning files, entering data in computer databases, escorting individuals to medical appointments, making and serving coffee drinks, selling and serving food, pulling weeds, de-installing convention site vendor booths, laying grout, cleaning empty apartments, assisting individuals moving, working on-call at a bookstore, listing a seller’s online items, installing exhibitions, serving wine at receptions, preparing mailings, jack hammering concrete, and editing a dying man’s manuscript (never finished). I have taken my own initiative to raise money by selling old books and posters online and my art to people I know. It never adds up to enough, embarrassing for a person over fifty.
Where did this all begin? How did I come to this? One’s history of employment is a sorry affair when it does not lead to home ownership and a retirement package. Besides Dad retiring from a job with Los Angeles Police Department, and other family members making it to retirement, Uncle Jess (Robbins) was the only person to make it big. Twice in his life he was wealthy and twice in his life he lost it all. His first success came as a camera man and then director for silent films. His second success came as a munitions manufacturer during World War II. Late in life he spent his days alone in a small warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles tinkering with inventions.
My first job was during a high school summer break assisting post-retirement Dad on his gardening route. That was cool. One of the best jobs I can remember. It went downhill from there. I next assembled newspaper advertisement inserts in a warehouse after school. The work was piecemeal: we were paid 10¢ for every 100 inserts. If I really focused I was able to make minimum wage, which was much lower than it is today. Thank goodness that only lasted a semester. We stood on rubber mats on a concrete floor during an eight-hour shift. Just think of the varicose veins I would have developed before age 21. I began a “real” job at Avery Label Systems in Azusa. This was repetitive like stuffing newspaper inserts, but at least I could take my time with a guaranteed hourly wage. I conducted tensile strength tests for chemists using a small variety of testing machines. They all involved pulling apart label material using precision recording equipment. My mistake was thinking I had an interest in chemistry. I was bored after one month but stayed on for two years. I promised myself never to stay with a job again that bored me.
I learned I could avoid boredom by letting fellow employees entertain me. At a Der Wienerschnitzel franchise next to Los Angeles City College, I dressed hot dogs while George, the owner (also a seasonal coach for the Dodgers), screamed at his employees. The complaint was always, Faster! George especially liked yelling at Larry because he could call Larry names. Larry had been with the business since George had bought the franchise. Though likable, Larry was a total loser. At age 30, he stilled lived with his parents and still wore his hair long. When George wasn’t within earshot, Larry would curse his own existence, usually with an invective aimed at George. Once Larry was out emptying the garbage cans at the perimeter of the parking lot. Suddenly he cursed George and hurled a garbage can ten feet in front of himself, full. When he realized he had spread the garbage over the parking lot, he cursed himself. As part of the closing crew, emptying the deep fryer was one of our nightly chores. A memorable night came when Larry opened the drainage valve while his feet were in direct line of the flow of hot grease; he had forgotten to place the bucket under the valve. Did he scream! He made a beeline to the hose outside and drenched his tennis shoes in water. His moans were comic relief.
But, I suppose Cooper, the most pathetic employee to be picked upon by nearly everyone around her, could be amusing as well. At MBW Advertising Network in New York, Michael, the owner, used his office loudspeaker only when he wanted Cooper to come to his office; he seemed to receive pleasure publicly humiliating her. At an age close to forty, she was mousy, disheveled, and wore glasses held together with tape. She came in and left every day carrying full paper bags. There was a closet next to her desk. When an employee tasked with moving details attempted to open the closet, Cooper panicked, pleading that the door be left closed. Lo and behold, the closet was stacked to the ceiling with several piles of newspaper that Cooper tucked away: the mysterious contents of the bags.
While typing job recruitment ads in a typing pool at MBW, I befriended my three co-workers, Linda, Maggie and Kathleen. Kathleen, a tall Irish woman with a keen sense of everything, gradually convinced Linda and I to demand changes to the structure of our pool so that we could barter for higher wages. But Kathleen would do the talking for the pool. I was too naive to believe there was something rotten in store for us in Kathleenland. Maggie’s abstention should have been warning enough. But, perhaps I could have guessed otherwise. After all, Kathleen told me with vicious glee about the lawsuit she brought against her lindy hop partner because he had fractured her jaw while they competed in a dance event. Accidents do happen, but not with Kathleen. By the end of Kathleen’s private conversation with the owner, her typing pool comrades were informed that she was promoted to pool supervisor and that any other changes would wait. We never saw her after that since she now had an office of her own. When I bumped into her months later, she was coming out of her private office in a robe and slippers headed for the bathroom.
Not every job was entertaining. Some jobs were downright disturbing. While working for the Group Reservations office of the Education Division at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was troubled by the harassment that two fellow employees received from management personnel. Frank had been passed over several times in terms of promotion. He fought back by taking his case to a state-level agency that investigated racial bias at the workplace. While his suit was in progress, the Museum’s Education Division managers decided the best way to fight the suit was to make the job so inhospitable to Frank and his colleague Shirley, who was his closest source of support, that they would both choose to leave before a successful outcome to the civil suit. One morning I witnessed our direct manager, Bill, and a fellow non-management employee, DeWayne, heavily berate Shirley for not being where she supposedly was expected to be five minutes earlier. It did not matter that she was working around the corner from the office at the time. Their accusations became a streaming tirade, with Bill and DeWayne alternately lobbing shouts, after Shirley quietly stated where she had been. Standing there stunned, I finally interjected to ask what was going on. As if snapped out of a trance, Bill abruptly stopped speaking and rushed out of the office. DeWayne returned to his desk. The next day I complained directly to the division manager about Shirley’s treatment. I was fired the next business day. When I had my day in court two months later, a mock hearing where I had been promised I would have one hour to defend my employment, Bill used my time to present a sixty-page document to the Museum’s counsel. Co-workers who had vanished from the state of New York were recorded as having complained about my behavior on the job. It was the first time I heard of these complaints. Kafka-esque, indeed.
As an HIV+ person, I realized in hindsight that the stress the job created could only be harmful to my health. I worked for several years at various offices through temporary placement agencies. This was a boon to my peace of mind and enabled me to take control of on-the-job anxiety-producing situations. I dispensed with loyalty by never taking sides; I stayed entirely out of disputes. I remained free of jealousies. I did the best job I could do, and if that was not appreciated, I never concerned myself as to why. None of the issues I had learned to feel deeply about mattered once I became a temporary employee.
One cannot remain unimpassioned, though, without the loss of purpose and fulfillment. By the time I was working in earnest for Teachers College I was happy to be contributing to a team once again. It probably also helped that as I concurrently worked on a thesis for Hunter College, I had complete access to the materials at the Columbia University and Barnard College libraries because of my work status. By this time I found amusement in situations where I only saw divisive issues before. At the Development & External Affairs department, I came to love Surekha, my immediate supervisor. A devout Hindu, Surekha was the only religious person I knew who absolutely lived by her beliefs. There were no boundaries to her kindness and compassion. One of my fellow workers, Marshall, a devout Christian fundamentalist originally from South America, objected to my suggestion during a weekly staff meeting that we honor information about same gender partners. He said he would never enter this information into our alumni database. Surekha was firm: we would collect and record this information without argument. One Monday morning Surekha received the news that Marshall needed help re-entering the United States from Canada. Apparently he did not have a proper visa to do so. College personnel went to his rescue. Much later, we came to find out that Marshall had been moonlighting at a second job on campus, but he had not told either of the two departments that he was holding two jobs at the same time. He was fired. Another devout Christian showed up at our door. A new department director from a very prestigious Pennsylvania foundation, he would surely lead us successfully in our important capital campaign. One day he called me to his office to ask how he should begin composing a letter to a wealthy donor. I advised him that my skills in composition were not very good. To my astonishment, he picked up the telephone and asked the campus president how he should begin the letter. He did not last another month. For a time, Surekha’s supervisor was a Jewish fellow named Irving who was liked by all. Irving knew how to bring passion to the job. He frequently talked about his collecting mania: Kung Fu (the television series) memorabilia and copies of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in as many languages as he could find. He bought everything at eBay. He seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time behind a locked office door. I began to notice that he frequently stopped at Sheb’s desk with special instructions, gradually realizing he was directing her in bidding on items he wanted at eBay. There were other improprieties on Irving’s part. He was the next to leave.
My time with Siemens Transportation Systems in New York as a document control manager was ideal. I can say it was the best office job I ever had. And I was assured of a career there, that was, until I decided to relocate to San Francisco. It looked as if I would see another career possibility here in the city. After applying as a transit operator with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, I received clearance two years later to begin training. The six-week training program is stringent, with a six-points-your-out policy. Points can be accrued for tardiness, absence (excused absence is not available), not learning driving methods once shown, and driving accidents. I made it through three weeks before reaching Point 6. Was this a blessing in disguise? After all, we were drilled about the horrors on the job, especially from a city public with bizarre and sometimes nasty behavior patterns. I can remember an F Line streetcar operator telling me he had been assaulted several times because he was firm about potential passengers paying their fare. Somehow I believed I could handle a diverse city population. One of my fellow trainees did graduate. A former SamTrans bus operator, she looked and acted like graduate material: confident, assured, determined. I later learned she walked off the job, leaving passengers on a bus. Another training graduate explained to me one day he was smoking cigarettes again, after a ten-year hiatus. My next career? Horticulture.
Untitled, 2010, pen and ink on Bristol paper, 9 x 12 in.
Call For Bread And Roses 100th Annual Strike Commemoration Art
13 NovJanuary 12, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bread and Roses garment mill workers strike in Lawrence, MA. And just as today’s Occupy Wall Street movement focuses on the 99% and 1%, the truth of 1912 was that 1% of the richest Americans owned 50% of the country’s wealth. Conducting a difficult eight-week struggle during the dead of winter against “Textile Trust” mill owners, banks, state militia, police, clergy and local government, this strike involved thousands of immigrants, nearly half women, fighting for justice and human rights, a watershed moment in the history of American labor struggles. LaborFest will be commemorating this event with a cultural and arts event at ILWU Local 34 at 801 2nd Street, San Francisco, next to AT&T stadium.
We call for submission of works from the San Francisco Bay Area that honor the Bread and Roses strikers and also connect that historic struggle to immigrants and working people today. Also welcome are works that explore, within the conceptual framework of labor, the disparity of wealth then and now and the paradox of a society still entrenched in the 99% / 1% equation one hundred years later. Artists may submit work in any medium. Please send one to four digital images (.jpg or .pdf file format) to David Duckworth, Curator: duckdiva@yahoo.com. Deadline for submission is Saturday, December 10th. Artists will be notified of inclusion by Friday, December 16th. Please include complete contact information, including mailing address and telephone number, artist’s statement, and brief curriculum vitae. For further information:
dpduckworth 