Dodging the issue

When I was in 7th grade, our gym class played a game called "bombardment," or basically dodge ball.  As an elementary school student, I had loved dodge ball.  But in middle school two things were different.  First, the balls used were much harder (the ones in elementary school were softer, "nerf" variety, the ones in middle school were the inflatable hard rubber type....there's probably a better term here, but I don't know it).  Second, a certain proportion of the students were much, much taller and stronger because, well, puberty had happened.  They could throw those balls hard and it could hurt. 

I hated "bombardment."  And it hurt.  On at least one occasion (but admittedly probably only one), I was hit so hard in the chest that I had a hard time breathing afterward.  It wasn't a medical emergency and within seconds I was physically all right.  But I was really afraid.  Some of those balls came hurtling so fast, banging against some sort of metal heat register that created a booming sound when it was hit. 

In colder weather, when we couldn't have gym class outside, there was always a possibility that we would have to play bombardment.  Fridays, on inside days, were always reserved for bombardment while occasionally other days the gym teachers would "surprise" us with an unscheduled game.  I grew to the point where I hated Fridays and where I hated rainy days (which I otherwise loved....the dry Colorado weather sometimes can make rain a welcome thing).

Once, for some  holiday--I think it was before Christmas break, but it probably wasn't a Friday because it wasn't a scheduled "bombardment day"--one of the gym teachers talked about how in the spirit of the holidays, we had to give each other "gifts."  And the other teacher (we had two gym teachers), who was hidden in the ball room, started lobbing out the bombardment balls, and most of the other kids seemed to get really excited that they now got to play their favorite game.  I remember a sense of panic rising in me, almost to the point of wanting to cry.


At the end of the 7th grade year, we had to choose our electives for the 8th grade year.  Gym wasn't required for 8th grade like it was for 7th, so it was optional.  But we also had to have our parents sign off on our choice of electives.  And I thought that my mother--who constantly feared that I wasn't getting enough exercise or eating enough--would be angry if I didn't take gym.  So I put it on my schedule.  However, the electives were done through a ranking system.  We had to choose 8 electives and rank them based on preference.  I put gym at 7 or 8, hoping that would be enough for me to, err, dodge the gym obligation.

I worried much of the following summer about what my schedule would be.  The school would mail us our schedules in August.  When my schedule came, it had me down for a gym class.  I remember actually crying when I saw that.

This was one instance where I stood up for myself.  I actually walked to the middle school a week before classes started, and respectfully asked for the school to drop me from the gym class.  I didn't say why.  After enduring a lecture from the guidance counselor about how not everyone's preference could be satisfied, my schedule was changed. 

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Now, I hear that one school district in New Hampshire has banned dodge ball [this is a yahoo news link, so it probably has a short life] on the grounds that it can be a way for some kids to target and bully others.  Cameron Smith, in the linked to article, calls this move "the latest episode of an over-active school board making an overtly PC move."

The linked-to article has an embedded video from "NBC sports," in which the two hosts bemoan the move, too.  One of them, trying to play devil's advocate, says, "if you had a small weak kid...." and his colleague interrupts him, "First of all, I wouldn't."  But to more seriously answer the question, his colleague says such moves like the banning of dodge ball make her "cringe when I think of what kind of kids we're raising and what kind of adults we're going to end up having walking around."

The other host then calls it "the wussification of America" and says "it's a lot like the kids that get trophies for everyone."  He then adds that as much as he wanted to play devil's advocate, "I think dodge ball like a lot of things breeds character."

I don't have much to say about whether dodge ball is a vector for bullying.  Although the claim makes a certain amount of sense, I for one was never explicitly targeted.  I wasn't singled out.  In my case at least, as much as I hated it and feared it, it wasn't an instance of bullying.

But I find the dismissive attitude represented by Cameron Smith and these two NBS Sports peoples to be reprehensible.  It's not about "wussification."  It's about subjecting people to low-level physical battery and not giving them a real chance to opt out.  I for one was not particularly confident that I could go to either of my gym teachers and explain that I wanted to sit out the game.  Over the door to the locker room, they had a sign that said "No Wimps Allowed."  Neither was I confident that I talk to my parents, for reasons that I won't go into here. 

Now, maybe it did build character.  For example, it taught me to, or reinforced my tendency to, want to placate people who are stronger than I am, or to hide in the shadows in order to avoid loud and strong people while they rant and express their rage through their physical strength.  Who knows?  If enough people have to live through bombardment, then maybe they can grow up to write the great American novel, or become secretary of defense and oversee the invasion of a small country.

And--I mean this next point seriously--maybe it wouldn't have hurt me to take a few licks, to learn that getting hit a few times by balls that in reality left no lasting damage wasn't the end of the world.

But the choice should have been mine.  And it should have been meaningful, too, not one of those "okay, you opt out....here's your yellow pariah card you have to wear while the non-wimps play dodge ball" choices.

Again, I haven't much to say about the bullying aspect--although a link between dodge ball and bullying wouldn't surprise me--but I'm not going to criticize that school board for banning it.

Quo vadis, conservator americane?

Not that anyone cares much of a wit, but a careful reader of my blogroll will notice that I have deleted the link to the "American Conservative" site.

I have done so not necessarily because I intend to stop reading that site--in fact I have saved a link to the blog of Noah Millman, one of my favorite commentators there--but rather because I believe that by linking to the site in general, I am giving some endorsement to it, or at least stating that it is a site worthy of being shouted out at to.  (P.S.:  if I were grading this blog post, I would write "awk" next to that last sentence.)  But I cannot do that as long as the site continues to sport columns by Patrick Buchanan and Rod Dreher.  The former resorts consistently to thinly and not so thinly veiled racism.  Perhaps I am still judging him for his speech at the 1992 Republican convention.

The latter, whatever "ism" he is or isn't guilty of, adopts a "beggar-thy-interlocutor" approach to public discussion, eliding all nuance in favor of drive-by arguments and the "look at me, I'm hurt by a modern liberal society that just won't understand my needs!".....unless, of course, the discussion veers toward food, and then he adopts all the nuance you can ask for, including admonitions to his fellow conservatives about too quickly condemning healthful eating as some sort of liberal-elitist plot to undermine good, wholesome American freedom fries.  It's not that his food blogging is bad (it's not exactly my cup of celestial seasonings tea--and I probably have more sympathy/empathy for the defensive "but I like my Doritos and frozen pizza!" posture than many liberals I know--but his food blogging is well done, I admit).  It's that he doesn't, it seems, carry his thoughtfulness over to almost any other issue.  (I must add, though, that I have often offered comments to his moderated page that disagree with what he has said, and he has always posted my comments despite the fact they disagree with him.)

There is much to praise about the site, however.  As I said above, I admire Noah Millman's work.  Daniel Larison and Alan Jacobs, from what I've read of them, aren't too bad either.  (However, I ought to be careful, at least in respect to Larison.....perhaps I like him because he was quite a vocal opponent of Romney and eschews the neo-con hawkishness one can find among some movement conservatives.  In other words, I already agree with him, so I cannot claim to be exposing myself to new ideas by reading him.)

Follow up on strikers' problem in a liberal society

My recent post on "strikers' problem in a liberal society" tried to make the point that there is what I call a conflict in values when it comes to unions' resort to striking tactics.  I hope I made clear (despite the indulgent footnotes [1] (and several parenthetical remarks (and related meanderings (which I am wont to do (especially when I have a lot of time (like now))))) what the basics of this conflict were.

However, I think I left the reader hanging a bit, without giving much indication of where I was going or what I wanted the takeaway to be.  Here's a brief (I hope) summary of what I want people to come away with as well as a qualification of some of my harsher language.

First, I think it's possible someone could have read my post and come away with the impression that I was accusing labor historians as being apologists for violence.  I do think someo of them fall into that role, and more certainly, a number of them gainsay violence.  However, what I call "gainsaying" is often no more than establishing necessary context to counter a simplistic, manichean narrative of "business good, unions bad."  Also, I have trouble finding any labor historian, save one (a trotskyite acquaintance of mine), who has actually in their writing or in their personal statements given me any reason to believe they condone violence by workers, and even the exception is prone to contrarian-sounding hyperbole that may mask a more decent motivation that I sometimes decline to see.  Finally, several labor historians have written on labor violence and have not shied away from exploring unions' role.

Second, I mentioned in a footnote, but did not elaborate further, that the state during strikes is often very guilty of perpetuating or condoning unnecessary violence or itself engaging in it.  It is possible that state-implicated "unnecessary" violence ("unnecessary" being perhaps a term of art) is used more against unions during strikes than  union-implicated violence is used or even threatened against employers or replacement workers.  This is, at least theoretically, an empirical claim that might be proven or disproven, and I'm open to the possibility that what I call the "specter of labor violence" is perhaps only a subset of, or a defensive reaction to, what is a fundamentally violent system.

Third, my principal goal is to address an attitude in a criticism I sometimes see.  This criticism goes, "the strikers were advocating for a just society, and they might have succeeded if the state hadn't 'sent in the troops.'"  My point is that there are perfectly understandable reasons for the state to intervene in strikes that have the potential for violence, and further, that if one accepts commonly held assumptions about the rightness of violence and the principal function of the state, then state intervention is (in principal and perhaps even usually) a good thing and something to be welcomed.



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[1] Hah!

The strikers' problem in a liberal society

First, let me clarify what I mean by "Liberal society." It can mean many things, but for the purposes of this blog post, it means a legal regime that recognizes a person's legal right to pursue any lawful calling and to quit his or her job whenever he or she wants.  A corollary states that the liberal state, as part of its obligation to protect its citizens those others who reside in its jurisdiction, has the sole prerogative to use force and thereby denies to others the use of force to constrain others' choice of where and whether to work.[1]  No society, including the United States, is perfectly "liberal" in this sense, but I wager that the U.S. is at least liberal enough to fit the bill for the average case. I say "liberal society" and not "liberal legal regime" because "liberal society" sounds better and "liberal legal regime" is too toothy and cumbersome.  But in this blog post, I mean "liberal legal regime."

Now, on to strikes. During a strike, the union's goal is usually to convince its members to abstain from work, to withhold their labor collectively, in order to convince the employer to negotiate with the union or if the employer agrees in principle to negotiate, to convince the employer to adopt certain contract terms the union finds acceptable.  Another, closely related goal, is to advertise to others that there is a labor dispute and, especially if the employer is involved in a customer-oriented industry, to induce customers to boycott the employer's product.

This description is quite a wide brush stroke, because there are shades of other reasons people and unions strike: "hate" strikes (when, for example, white workers refuse to work alongside black workers); "syndicalist" strikes (workers strike over one or even several points of dispute, but don't necessarily seek a contract, preferring instead to use shop-floor revolts to assert their preferred labor conditions); "sympathy" or "secondary" strikes (striking to support workers in another dispute or refusing to cross picket lines simply because they are picket lines even if the workers who so refuse are not involved directly in the dispute). I think these are all related to the general phenomenon of strikes I am writing about, but I will focus on the simpler case of workers in a shop trying to withhold their labor to force a concession from their employer.

To address the strikers' problem, I am positing a situation that does not always occur, namely, a situation in which the employer tries to use replacement workers.[2]  Sometimes, of course, the employer prefers to wait out the work stoppage. (In some cases, the employer may welcome the work stoppage, such as when business is slow and keeping people on the payroll represents more an added expense, or when, especially during an industry-wide strike, the work stoppage creates a shortage in supply of whatever good is produced and creates a corresponding increase in demand.)[3]  In such a situation, where the employer introduces replacement workers, he or she is trying to undermine the union's attempt to withhold labor.

What's the union to do? In a liberal society, not much, at least not much that is legal. The union pickets can shame the replacement workers (e.g., call them "scabs"), can try to reason with the replacement workers (e.g., explain why they are striking in an effort to convince them not to cross the line), can try to offer inducements not to work (e.g., during a smelter strike in Denver in 1899,the union offered food vouchers, redeemable at sympathetic stores, to replacement workers who pled hunger as a reason for crossing the line.  The goal was to encourage these workers to honor the strike).

What strikers cannot do in liberal society, inasmuch as the state's monopoly over "legitimate coercion" is concerned and inasmuch as the state is truly "liberal" in the sense I discussed above, is use "coercion" to prevent the replacement workers from crossing the picket lines. Strikers cannot legally, for example, threaten replacement workers who cross the line, and (I assume) they cannot legally form some sort of "human barricade" to prevent free passage of the replacement workers.  The state in the liberal society, again inasmuch as that society is liberal and the state aligns itself with that liberalism, is charged with ensuring that people's right to pursue any lawful calling. It might use its own "legitimate" mechanism of force--the police or national guard--to ensure that right when it is allegedly endangered by strikers.

In case it isn't clear from what I wrote above, I am hinting toward the specter of "labor violence." In American labor history, and most other "[Name-the-nation] labor histories," there have been occasional and spectacular instances of violence arising in the midst of strikes.  For America, think of the 1877 railroad strikes, the Pullman Strike in 1894, and the "Herrin Massacre" during the 1922 coal strike.  There are also more punctuated and more targeted instances of violence that might be ascribed to labor radicals, such as the attempted assassination of GM CEO Alfred Sloan.  But I'm focusing more on the instances where the goal of violence is to discourage strikebreaking. 

These instances illustrate a potential problem for strikers. If the state does its job to protect people's right to work where and when they want, it must at some point draw a line against activities that can be described as coercive.  We can probably mostly agree that certain activities fall among the proscribable activities within the competence of the state qua state.  Taking a baseball bat and battering a replacement worker, for example, is "violence" by almost every recognized sense of the word "violence."  I suspect that even the very union-friendly labor historians whom I know would acknowledge such battery to be "violence," even if they (or some of them) insist that the violence is somehow justified.  It is also, I believe, at least understandable that the state sees its responsibility in such a situation as to prevent the violence.  Even those same labor historians who might claim that in some cases striker-initiated violence be justified might recognize that the state has an interest (even if they say it's not a defensible interest) in asserting its prerogative to control or prevent violence.

There are some instances where the line is fuzzier. Some of the tactics I mentioned above that strikers might use might conceivably be considered coercion.  Shouting "scab!,"  for instance, might imply a threat that something worse than being called a name will happen to the replacement worker.  Setting up pickets to "inform" passersby that a labor dispute is going on might at least by implication have an effect that is more strident and more robust than simple education on current events at the factory.  Sending a "conscience committee" to represent "the situation" to recalcitrant replacement workers is to my mind even iffier


And herein lies one problem.  Where and how ought the state to draw the line?  In the early 20th century, up to about 1930, the state sometimes drew the line at places we of today's sensibilities might bristle at.  During a smelter strike in Denver in 1903, for example, a state judge issued an injunction that forbade strikers not only from threatening replacement workers, but from advertising the strike. The context for this injunction, it should be noted, was a very destructive move by the union in question when it commenced its strike (the workers left the smelters without drawing down the furnaces, an action that essentially ruined the part of the property in which the melted ore froze over; one might also mention incidents of outright fighting between union members and replacement workers.)  Still, extending the prohibition the mere advertising of the strike likely seems too far to most of us in the U.S. in 2012. [4]

And another problem for strikers, it seems to me, is that they--most of them, with some exceptions as always and allowing for the inconsistency of thought-in-practice that afflicts almost all humans--sincerely buy into the notion that "informing" and "persuading" and "shaming" are as far as they ought to go.  I'll even venture the hypothesis that whatever strikers' actual feelings, which might be a historically contingent fact, in practice they have usually acted this way.  I suspect in other words that if one took a tally of every single event in history that could count as a strike, one would find the vast majority to include no instances of what most people would identify clearly and unambiguously as "violence."

By saying this is a "problem," I do not intend to interject a criticism.  Some apologists for violence and some champions of the working class and some advocates for "labor militancy" see such a disinclination to violence as a sort of "false consciousness." [5]  But I'm inclined to see it as a sincere respect for some standard of right and wrong.  And I happen to agree with that standard.  I'm no pacifist, but I do think that violence, domestic or foreign, ought to be either a last resort, or an only resort, to obtain "a vitally important end."  As desperate and "vitally important" as a dispute over wages and working conditions on jobs can seem--and I admit, I have never myself been in the severe and degrading circumstances that have in the past been the context for much of labor violence--I don't think these issues necessarily become therefore "a vitally important end" in the sense that I intend it.[6]

I'm saying, rather, that (most?) strikers' notion that violence is unacceptable is a "problem" in the sense that it's a conceptual difficulty strikers deal with.  They might speak as if the jobs they are striking for are "their" jobs, with perhaps a whiff of a belief in a proprietary interest in these jobs.  They might even speak as if the jobs are extensions of themselves in a way that, say, a mere piece of non-real property is not an extension of oneself.  They may believe, in short, that something approaching 'self-defense" is on the line, and yet I posit that most of them, at least today, would not endorse actual, according-to-Hoyle, physical violence.

What I'm talking about is more than the difficulties of simple line-drawing, although the difficulties of line-drawing are an issue.[7]  I'm suggesting also that there is a conflict in values, and a conflict over the legitimacy of those values most of us in the U.S. in 2012 are inclined to accept.  We place a value on life and safety from violence.  We place a value on peaceable assembly.  We place a value on freedom of association and the attendant freedom of speech to promote one's views.  We place a value on personal autonomy.[8]  All of these values enter the picture when it comes to strikes.

I ask my pro-union friends and my fellow labor historians to keep in mind some of the costs involved when they promote "labor solidarity" or even more modest, institutionalized tools to help unions, such as union shop laws (which, for lack of a better term, is my name for what are called "right to work" laws).

[1] Perhaps this is more of a feature of "states" in general, whether liberal or not.  Max Weber supposedly elucidated this concept--a monopoly on legitimate coercion or a monopoly on legitimate violence--as the defining feature of the state.  The one source that people often link to in order to demonstrate his definition is an essay he wrote on "Politics as a Vocation." [click here]  I must not have read it closely enough or understood it as well as I ought to have, but although Weber in that essay does mention the state as that which observes a monopoly on violence, he does not seem to theorize the concept all that much in the essay, or at least not as much as I would expect from the instances in which his name has so often been invoked in support of the concept.  I have some reservations about the concept, especially the "legitimate" part of "legitimate violence."  And I also wonder about the many instances of what can be called "violence" that are in some way tolerated by (or more accurately ignored by) the state, as well as other practices that might be deemed "coercive" but nevertheless accepted (or ignored) by the state. There seems to be a question-begging aspect to this definition that bothers me.  Again, as I'm not a theorist or a political scientist, and I don't mean to question that definition overmuch.  And I recognize that I may simply be misunderstanding Weber's essay.  I do think, however, that any "liberal state" worthy of the attribute "liberal" would protect people's basic prerogative to pursue any lawful calling and, especially, to quit their jobs.  My own definition of "liberal society" is question-begging in this way (how is a calling "lawful" in a way that doesn't invoke the definition of "lawful" in the first place).

[2] I'm not a fan of the word "scab." People who serve as replacement workers are often in very marginal positions and I wager that as often as not are in worse situations than the strikers. To smear them as "scabs" represents, in my view, a striking lack of compassion or empathy. Of course, maybe I'd feel differently if I were the striker and someone was crossing picket lines to take "my" job.

[3] I'm no economist, and perhaps I am using "shortage of supply" and "increase in demand" incorrectly, as far as the discipline of economics is concerned. However, I wager that in some cases, employers and sometimes even unions think along the lines of limiting supply and increasing demand. This way of thinking appears to have been true of the administration of the United Mine Workers and the coal operators' associations of the "central competitive field" of bituminous mines (mines located primarily in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania) from c. 1898 through c. 1910.

[4] I should note I am purposely bracketing, for the sake of this blog post, state and quasi-state violence that goes over the line.  One might cite President Cleveland's zealous use of soldiers--over then Governor John Altgeld of Illinois--to break the Pullman Strike on the disingenuous pretext that the federal government was merely protecting the free-flow of the mails (I say "disingenuous" because the union offered to facilitate the free-movement of rail cars carrying U.S. mails.)  One might also cite the violent liberties various "citizens alliances" took during the Colorado "labor wars" of 1903-1905 (and in other states in other years), under the tacit--and sometimes explicit, with the aid of national guardsmen--approval of the governor, George Peabody.  Any discussion of "the state and the unions" ought at least to acknowledge that the state goes (sometimes? often?) overboard in its exercise of powers against workers.

[5] I name all three separately--"apologists for violence" and "champions of the working class" and "advocates 'labor militancy'"--because I see them as discrete positions.  I submit that even if those who hold these positions sometimes overlap, they need not necessarily overlap.

[6] Maybe sometimes it can be.  I can imagine scenarios--company town, company store, little possibility of exit or "voting with one's feet," robust and arbitrary enforcement of "vagrancy" and "criminal breach of contract" laws--where the resort to violence approaches something that can be justified.  Even in those instances, I believe that violence is to be considered an altogether regrettable, even if necessary, action.  At any rate, it behooves me, as jester at scars who never felt the exact same wound, to keep in reserve at least some of the moral judgment I might mete out in such situations.

[7] Per my discussion in footnote [1] above, I have concerns about what is and is not "coercion" in the sense entailed by "monopoly on legitimate coercion."  It seems to me if one takes the definition attributed to Weber very far, one must claim that the state has at its core pretensions that are essentially totalitarian.  Maybe that's the point and maybe it's supposed to be a thought-provoking parable on the dangers of (too much) statism.  I confess that my thoughts have been so far provoked, but I'm not sure what else I can do with the concept other than reassert the definition.

[8] I suggest that even at the points where such values cause such disagreement--abortion; the death penalty; time, place, and manner restrictions on some forms of speech; campaign finance reform; the PPACA mandate--people on most sides of these issues, at least when pushed gently, acknowledge the existence of these values as legitimate and state either that the conflict is not rally a conflict of values, or that exceptional circumstances require the circumscription of these values.

Not an easy piece

An iconic scene in an iconic movie has an iconic character played by Jack Nicholson who faces the pettiness of an iconic waitress and who comes up with an iconic retort to that pettiness.

In case you don't want to click on the Youtube link, here's a summary:  He orders some sort of breakfast, with special requirements: an omelet with tomatoes instead of potatoes.  The waitress says "no substitutions," so he orders an omelet and asks for a side of toast.  The waitress says the diner offers no sides of toast.  He protests.  She threatens to get the manager.  He orders a chicken salad sandwich on toast, with no butter and no mayonnaise and no chicken, with a bill for the chicken sandwich so she will not have broken any rules.  When she asks what to do with the chicken, he tells her to hold it "between your knees."

I have just presented the scene out of context and it's out of context that I'll continue to discuss it in this blog post.  But first, something about the context.  I have seen at least part of the movie the diner scene comes from, "Five Easy Pieces."  Or at the very least it was on TV several years ago back and I channel-surfed, and I saw much of it in between watching other shows on other channels.  As far as I can tell, the movie is some character study of a piano virtuoso born into an upper-middle-class family who for some reason opts for the semi-anonymous life of an oil rig operator.  (Apparently, being an oil rig operator is so easy even someone who is born into the upper middle class and whose life to to that time had involved no training in that job can do it.)

During the movie, Nicholson's character goes through a series of adventures, one of which is the famous diner scene I have described and linked to above.  The scene probably plays an important role in the movie.  It probably helps define, and elaborate on the viewer's understanding of, Nicholson's character.  One clue to the role of this scene is the admission, at the end of the clip, that Nicholson's character didn't get his toast.  (In fact, he and his gal friends are thrown out of the diner.)  In short, I allow that if I fully understood and appreciated the movie (and my understanding and appreciation is less than "full"), the scene would resonate in a way that is much more nuanced than it might seem without the context.

What's my gripe with the scene then?  It's the way some people celebrate it.  Some people seem to think of the diner scene as one of those "perfect retorts" of the sort that one would have oneself oneself if only one had thought of it first.  And the target of the retort is the rules-supersede-all-that-is-sensible-and-decent mentality, what people seem to mean when they rail against the "bureaucratic mindset."  You see, we all encounter stupid rules and inflexible employees who enforce these rules without giving any or at least much regard to how the inflexible enforcement of the rules affect those the rules are enforced against.  The waitress is standing in the way of something that Jack Nicholson's character wants and something that he has a right to:  a side order of toast.  She is the machine of bureaucratic rules, and Nicholson finally pops and rages against the blind subservience to the rules.  (Hah!  you thought I was going to say "rages against the machine," didn't you?)

My claim is that those who celebrate this scene sometimes go overboard.  They operate under the assumption that if rules seem stupid, then they necessarily are stupid and must be broken regardless of the collateral damage.  Worse, the celebrants operate under the assumption that it's okay that Nicholson's character insults the waitress, or at least it's not so bad as to call into question his actions.  She deserves it because she's a bureaucrat waitress.

"Sometimes" really means "sometimes" and not always or not even necessarily most of the time (after all, I did write it in italics, and when I put something in italics, I mean it!).  I am pick and choosing my anecdotes (cue in the tired but true point that the plural of anecdote is not data....there I go with the italics again, but this time not for emphasis!), and the celebration I claim others make of the scene may be more noticed by me than other interpretations of the scene offered by people who, unlike me, have seen the whole movie.

Still, at least one anecdote illustrates my point.  Take this post at the "middle-age cranky" blog.  The author uses the scene as an example of what is for him a decent illustration "of the frustration in that time [c. 1970] for people who blindly followed the rules, no matter how nonsensical those rules were."  He doesn't really comment on whether the waitress deserved her treatment--except perhaps when he describes her as "rigid," and we're probably supposed to know that "rigid" people don't deserve our respect--and he uses the scene primarily as a starting-off point to discuss the allegedly mindless rules he encounters in his career as a freelance technical writer.

Now that the caveats are out of the way, I'll start by noting how convenient the scene is for those who praise it as a strike against THE MAN (well, as a strike against THE PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE RESTAURANT EMPLOYEE).

First, the rules in this case border on the extreme and unbelievable.  I find it incredible that a diner would not serve sides of toast.  The audience might have viewed it differently, or slightly less sympathetically, if Nicholson's character had noticed that the diner served huevos rancheros and therefore had ordered a side of corn tortillas.  After all, you need corn tortillas to make (some versions of) huevos rancheros, but people don't generally order sides of corn tortillas with their breakfast.  Not that having them for breakfast is wrong, but it's just not the staple of the good ole American dining experience.  I'll also point out that when Nicholson's character learns he can't have "tomatoes instead of potatoes," he accepts that limitation, if grudgingly.  My point is, I imagine the character or the audience might accept a similar limitation on corn tortillas

My second point about the scene's "convenience" is the waitress's rudeness.  She is not only "rigid" in her enforcement of the rules.  She is also pretty far to the rude side of the rude-friendly spectrum, and not in the waitress-who-works-at-a-truck-stop-diner-and-seems-rude-but-has-a-heart-of-gold sense.  She was unapologetic about the restaurant's policy and adopts a tone of "of course these are the rules, didn't you read the small print by the asterisk we put on the last page of the menu?"  If anyone is deserving of the Nicholson treatment, she is.

Fair's fair.  The categorical "no toast" rule is a foolish one.  It might have been different if it had been a special circumstance, say, the diner is perilously short on bread and it needs to, temporarily, impose the ban to make sure there's enough bread for the sandwich-rush at lunch and dinner.  But that doesn't seem to be the case here.  And again, what diners, as a matter of policy, don't serve sides of toast?

And there are indeed rude servers. I personally think it's better to approach encounters with such people with the assumption that the server is overworked and underpaid, or perhaps is having an off-day, or has to deal with a dictatorial manager, or the restaurant is short-staffed, or what seems like rudeness might actually be only a defensive ploy because she knows the management is inflexible on the "no substitutions" policy and she'll get in trouble (or at least scolded for the n'th time) if she doesn't enforce it right away.  But I acknowledge it can be frustrating to deal with passive and not-so passive aggression of that sort.  Certain people (say, a piano virtuoso born into an upper-middle-class family) might not have the service industry experience to make approaching the situation with empathy a realistic possibility.  And maybe at the end of the day one can make a plausible case that a rude affect calls for a sharp retort.

So where are we?  What's accomplished by the Nicholson character's put down of the waitress?  He doesn't get his toast and he and his colleagues get kicked out of the diner.  He's also delivered one of those witty comebacks that other frustrated patrons who have to deal with the lowly service workers wished they had given in lieu of resorting to lectures about good service and about how traumatic it is not to get it.

I think I'm saying something more than simply "we need to be nice to service workers," although we do need to be nice to service workers.  In keeping with my wonted humorless and priggish disposition when it comes to such things, I see in the Nicholson retort a fundamental disrespect for others, a facile notion that the proper comeback is sometimes something you just gotta do regardless of who gets hurt in the process and regardless of the triviality of the "offense" you have suffered.

Wow!  I probably come off as a moralizing jerk.  I admit that my point, taken to an unwarranted extreme, would require me to be courteous to the executioner as I'm walked toward the scaffold, should my circumstances ever become so dire.

And again, the function the scene serves in the movie might very well be more nuanced than I'm allowing.  Maybe a careful viewing of the movie suggests that we are to see Nicholson's character as someone to be criticized and not as someone to celebrate, as someone who really wants to be an island but can't because no man is an island, or as someone who doesn't realize that living in a society means complying with some stupid sounding rules.  And I'll also say that the point of view represented by "middle-age cranky" above, from which I have gathered so much anecdotal straw to build a knock-downable scarecrow out of, might be an interpretation that strays from the movie's main point.

But my main takeaway is that we shouldn't celebrate that comeback uncritically.

UPDATE 12-1-12:  I've edited this post for clarity.

Mining for a heart of gold: my 3d party vote

[This post is cross posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, all with a nifty photo of James Weaver, third party candidate for the Greenback Party in 1880 and for the Populist Party in 1892:  click here to read it and the comments there.]

As I've noted, I voted for Gary Johnson.  In large part, I drew the inspiration for my vote from Jason Kuznicki's point that we might look at our vote as an expression of how we affiliate ourselves, as a sort of self-declaration of principles (again, my apologies if I am in some ways misconstruing his argument, but that was my takeaway).  One feature of such self-declaration, however, is the false sense of purity one might take away from it.  This feature is dangerous and probably unavoidable.  And although self-declaration seems the way to go, any disposition toward honesty requires the self-declarers to acknowledge this danger upfront.

One reason to vote for Johnson is that in theory, he would scale back or check the power of the military, and (even more theoretically and more doubtfully had he by some fluke actually won) he would scale back the power of the executive.  Affiliating with this idea is pretty easy, but dangerously so.  Yes, on paper I am disgusted with Obama's martial rhetoric and his robust prosecution of war and targeted killing, all the while wondering whether targeted killing, to the extent it's truly targeted, might be an improvement over bombing an entire neighborhood in the hopes that the "bad guy" will be killed amid all the innocent victims.  But in my day to day life, I don't really think about it other than as something that is really unfortunate and that I wish weren't happening.

I also have to entertain the suggestion that I, to quote Colonel Jessup, "can't handle the truth."  To point out--rightly, I might add--that America's military adventures often don't make us safer or that any true invasion of American soil would likely be met by effective armed resistance by the citizenry, such as was done during a policy disagreement over taxes in the late 1700s, does not negate the fact that if someone tried to storm the walls that protect me, the military would likely be first in the line of defense and that I would appreciate its doing so.  (Heck, if my life be in danger, I probably would not hesitate, if I could, to call 911, and be grateful to the very police department that has recently been proven to tolerate torture in the past.)

Similarly, although in an issue less momentous than war, I chose my side and chose it early when it came to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  I wanted and want the act to survive, and that outcome is much more likely with a President Obama than it would have been under a President Romney, or, I will add, under a President Johnson whose first name isn't Lyndon.  I rooted for Obama this time around in a way that I really didn't in 2008 because of the PPACA. In 2008, I wanted him to win but was distrustful of what I interpreted as, as I've mentioned before, the idolatry of a mere human and a might makes right mentality.


To be clear, I see something to be concerned about in some of Johnson's positions.  One example is his position that "TSA should take a risk-based approach to airport security. Only high-risk individuals should be subjected to invasive pat-downs and full-body scans."  He might be right on the merits, but considering who in practice might be targeted as "high-risk individuals," that policy statement, taken by itself, might easily appeal to a constituency more inclined to find scapegoats than security threats.  Although this is perhaps a subject for another day, his immigration policy strikes me as having the (unintended) potential for draconian results.

Yet I got the happy (for me) result of an Obama victory with the self-satisfaction that comes from endorsing a candidate whose message mostly coincides with the type of approach I would like to see when it comes to defining and resolving America's problems.  Like everyone else, I live in an imperfect world condemned to imperfection.

Why I shall (probably) vote for Obama [UPDATED!]

Having just written a post about why I'm disappointed in Obama, I'm now going to write about why I shall (probably) vote for him, and not Mitt Romney, Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.  (There are other 3rd party candidates, but Stein and Johnson are the only ones on the Illinois ballot, and I don't know much about the others anyway.)

I'll repeat what I and others have said before.  One individual's vote will not decide the election.  I'm under no illusions that my vote means anything.  And a not too rational part of my psyche tends to believe that the Chicagocracy might (accidentally, of course) neglect to count my ballot if it contains a vote for president for someone whose last name does not rhyme with "Oh bomb, hah!"

Having gotten that out of the way and ignoring what to some might be the logical takeaway (i.e., don't waste the time voting, then), I'll mention the two reasons I'm aware of for voting that don't involve whatever value comes from representing myself to the people at the polling place (i.e., my neighbors) as someone who votes and therefore as a respectable citizen.  Here are the two reasons:

1. It still is one vote and it adds to the message of total votes.  What's more, if I vote for a third party, the "marginal utility" of that vote is magnified (a little bit) in that it's one more chunk on the pile in advocacy for the  type of change I really can believe in.
2. As Jason Kuznicki suggested at the League, how we vote--because it's essentially a private act--is more of a decision of how we choose to affiliate ourselves.  (Read his post here, it's possible I'm misrepresenting somewhat his argument, but I think I'm capturing its spirit.)

Reason #1 above might justify, even to the point of encouraging, me to vote for either Stein or Johnson over Obama or Romney.  If I vote for Stein or Johnson, I'll get more bang pop! for my buck.  Reason #2 is perhaps as good an argument as I can find for voting my conscience, seeing it as a way of affirming my commitments with the universe, or whatever.

I don't wish to deride #1 too much, but it is unclear what politicians will take away from the votes that Stein or Johnson will get.  A vote for Stein might assure the Democrats they're doing the right thing, from their strategists' point of view, that is, they can claim that whatever support Stein wins demonstrates that the Democrats truly are the party of the center.  A vote for Johnson would probably be interpreted as disaffected Republicanism, and I don't think the GOP will look at it as a repudiation of their position on civil liberties or foreign policy or the drug war.  Rather, the GOP (just like the Dems) will interpret it and spin it how they want to.  That's the cynic in me speaking.

Jason's point is more provocative, even if I'm not completely understanding it or accurately representing it.  (I've never met him personally, but I can tell from his writing that he's much smarter than I am, and when I read his posts, I usually sense I'm not fully getting all that's in them).  It also allows me to consider each of the candidates more seriously.  So here's my rundown.

Romney.  I simply cannot vote for him.  I really do believe he will be at best Obama-lite on foreign policy or at worse Bush-lite.  I'd prefer the Devil I know to the one I don't on that score, at least when it comes to someone who until very recently adopted what I believed to be a war-mongering stance against Iran, Syria, and even Russia.

I do admit that he probably would operate as more of a centrist on domestic policy than his primary rhetoric would have me believe.  But I believe that the one, low-cost (for him) way to appease the social conservative faction in his own party will be to appoint social conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

When it comes to health care I think Romney is a gamble (of course, I realize the ACA itself is a gamble and that my bar for success is quite low).  At least from the time of his convention speech onward, he has changed his "repeal Obamacare" talk to "repeal and replace Obamacare" and even to "repeal the bad parts of Obamacare [the mandate] and keep everything else that people like."

I suspect that's what he sincerely would like to do, but I think there are three scenarios in which a president Romney "reforms" the ACA.  The first two would depend on a a GOP-dominated Congress (defined as a GOP majority in the House and a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate) winning enough votes from the other side of the aisle to pass something.  This something will be either a repeal of the ACA with a replacement along the lines that Romney is suggesting, or a repeal of the ACA with the promise of a "bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission" to look into further reforms of health care, whose conclusions will be both more respected and more ignored than the conclusions of the Simpson-Bowles commission.  I think the latter is at least a possibility, and I don't trust Romney to veto it and insist on the former.

The third scenario does not require a GOP-dominated Congress.  All it does is require him to appoint as Secretary of Health and Human Services someone who is hostile to the law and frustrate, or even "suspend," its implementation.  That may or may not be legal, but there are a lot of shenanigans that he could do.

Since there is no real reason why I might vote for Romney, the choice comes down to Obama, Stein, and Johnson.  Again, the "marginal utility" argument for voting for a 3d party might or might not work, but that isn't something I'm going to look too much at.  My main concern is Jason Kusnizki's argument about who I affiliate with.

Under that argument, I would like to believe I would choose to affiliate with Stein or Johnson.  They are pretty good on civil liberties and ending, or putting us in the position to see the end of, the state of perpetual war.  At least one or both of them also promotes some policies that I like, such as curtailing the war on drugs.

But it's not a slam dunk, either.  I read Johnson's platform several months ago and at the time decided he engaged too readily in starve-the-beast type of reforms.  Now that I've reread the platform (see it here), I think he either sounds less extreme or has changed the platform to accommodate people like me.  (That is, I'm sure that one day, he was reading my blog, decided my critiques of libertarianism were spot-on, and then ordered a change in platform.  Such is the influence of Pierre Corneille!)  Still, he wants to repeal the ACA and the principal solution he has to the problem of "uninsurable" people is what strikes me as the x-factorish "simple block grants to the states, where innovation will create efficiencies and better care at less cost."

I'm lukewarm about some of Stein's prescriptions.  They seem to follow the mantra of "if only we enact a law that mandates what we want, then that's what we'll get."  I admit that I haven't looked over her platform as thoroughly as I have Johnson's.  But she seems too.....optimistic about what the state can do without things going awry.

Which brings me to Obama.  Should I affiliate with a president who has what some call a "kill list"?  Maybe not, although I confess that from my standpoint much of that talk strikes me as academic or, in some ways, overwrought.  The "strikes me as academic" stance ought to offend anyone who cares about such issues, but I really do suspect that whatever the "kill list" refers to is an organic continuation--even if it's a continuation that worsens things--from past policies dating back at least as far as Harry Truman and probably further.  A president Johnson or Stein would, I am sure, on their first day issue several executive orders renouncing all sorts of practices.  One month later, however, when the actual authorizing statutes come up for consideration for repeal, or when other statutes are offered to criminalize certain executive actions that otherwise met some (if arguably specious) standard of legality, they would demur to whatever committee is working on it in Congress.  Six months later and after daily counterterrorism and national security briefings, they would note that while they support "the spirit" of the pending legislation, they would advise against a rush to action and offer to issue another executive order that offers a super-duper promise never to use such tactics in exchange for withdrawing the pending legislation.  Eighteen months later (if not sooner), in their first bona fide national security crisis, they'll quietly rescind the super-duper-promise executive order and order an attack against a person who is a clear and present danger to some U.S. military base that they have theretofore declined to dismantle per their campaign promises.

That's a very cynical view of things, and it ignores the main gist of Kuznicki's argument that we are choosing to affiliate with the pure of heart.

But I'm not.  I want Obama to win.  However satisfactory it would be for me to vote for Johnson, I admit that I'm rooting for Obama, although I also admit the country will be an interesting place if the Libertarian or Green party gets 5% of the vote and qualifies for federal funds, provided they have an organizational structure in place that'll prevent a fight-over-money that we saw with Perot's party-child.  In short, I fear that affiliating myself with Johnson (or Stein) would be hypocritical.

Anyway, that's probably why I'll vote for Obama.

UPDATE:  I voted for Gary Johnson.