Irresponsibility
I recently read John Steinbeck’s ‘The Murder’ and ‘The Fall and Rise of Mrs Hapgood’ by Martha Gellhorn. The former debuted in 1934; the latter some thirty years later. Encountering the pair was coincidence; I was looking for the author’s respective travel memoirs and wound up with short story volumes instead. This piece of luck brought me hard up against my preconceived notions about “literature”.
Almost everyone has read at least one short story by John Steinbeck. Few, I wager, have read any by Ms Gellhorn. I hadn’t. The jacket blurb on Pretty Tales for Tired People promising “ironical and entertaining contributions to the literature of social satire” didn’t tempt me, but I ventured in out of love for her journalism. The final story in the collection, ‘Mrs Hapgood’ hooked me with the declaration that the protagonist was: “fifty-one years of age and tortured by growing pains”. I read Gellhorn’s deft prose with growing awe – not just for its impeccable style but because it was telling a story I could relate to. Reading ‘The Murder’ a few days later was uncomfortable, but it felt familiar. I realised ‘Mrs Hapgood’ rewrites ‘The Murder’ from the female perspective. Presumably the very educated Martha Gellhorn read Steinbeck’s tale, though I have no idea if ‘Mrs Hapgood’ was a consciously written as a riposte (biographical accounts suggest not).
‘The Murder’ tells of the “great and important” moment when Jim, the protagonist, asserts his manhood by murdering his wife’s lover, and beating her “bad as [he] could without killing her”. ‘Mrs Hapgood’ tells of the eponymous Faith Hapgood’s great and important struggle to recreate her life after discovering her perfect marriage is a sham and her trusted husband a serial cheat. Only instead of outward violence she takes a knife to her cherished self-perceptions. “She did not want to blame and run away,” Gellhorn reports, “she wanted to dig in and find answers.”
What are the crucial differences between the two? Why did Steinbeck’s story win an O. Henry Prize. While Gellhorn’s drew damp praise, even from biographer Caroline Moorehead who writes it is, “one of her best and cruellest… however… the suffering is superficial, and the worldly pleasures provide a lasting balm”? Despite my Ivy League prejudice in favour of dead white men nothing about ‘Mrs Hapgood’ explains why it has been buried by history while ‘The Murder’ thrives. Why does Steinbeck’s work come branded “great literature” while Gellhorn hardly warrants a footnote? If the canon is chosen purely on merit, for the universal significance of its themes and overarching excellence of its artistry, why did I experience a completely novel sensation while reading Steinbeck and Gellhorn side-by-side? Why did I feel, for the first time, I was seeing both sides of the story?
I relate to ‘Mrs Hapgood’ easily, to her uptight desire to be self-sufficient, her paroxysms of righteousness, her naïve belief that respectability is a virtue and passion an unnecessary complication. I flinch, laugh, start with recognition. I read ‘The Murder’ and see, as if for the first time, how a male protagonist obscures, nearly obliterates, the female. Jim’s wife, Julka, is “so much like an animal that sometimes [he] petted her head and neck under the same impulse that made him stroke a horse”. She never emerges as anything more than a silent, doe-eyed cipher. Her adultery is the only indication of a functioning internal life. I don’t want to carp. A story can only really be about one person at a time. ‘The Murder’ is about Jim. Yet Julka has a story, and ‘Mrs Hapgood’ imagines her side. Faith’s imperturbability, her efficiency, her good-natured support of her husband’s hobbies, mirror Julka’s dutiful demeanour, the way she anticipates Jim’s wants, how she stays at home while he goes to town to flirt with the women in the saloon. Both women have learned a role too-perfectly. Their triumphal submersion in wifely duties repels their husbands, who want wives but desire women.
All the characters are trapped in a culture that makes an either/or distinction between desirable women and wives. In one sense, the stories are about each party’s struggle to adjust to these implacable social circumstances. Jim accepts the strictures of patriarchy and, through an outburst of violence, pledges himself to its perpetuation. He’s a man. A spot at the top of the heap is his for the taking. After committing murder and nearly killing his wife, he moves through life with new confidence; “he knows that when he goes to town with his plump and still pretty wife people turn and look at his retreating back with awe and some admiration.” Faith does not have the luxury of simply claiming a birthright. She is a woman. Who she is, and what she wants, repeatedly gets tangled up in who she’s with. Revitalised, at first, by a new lover, she soon discovers that ‘mistress’ is as constricting as ‘wife’ – neither allows her to be herself. Self-realisation means carving out an independent life. No men. No role-play.
The honest pessimism of ‘Mrs Hapgood’ sits better with me than the slick ending of ‘The Murder’, but that’s a matter of taste. What is irrefutable is that I have a richer, more nuanced understanding of human nature for having read both stories. It staggers me I’m so well-educated I’ve only ever read one side of the story. Joyce, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hardy – all authors I love and admire. I’ve spent a quarter of a century as a literary transgender; trying to put myself in a man’s body, and think with a man’s mind, so I can understand them. I would never denigrate the process. Part of education is learning to see through other eyes. But constantly making mental adjustments in order to discount my natural identification with the female in favour of the male is like dressing in drag. The clothes don’t quite fit the contours, no matter how artfully made. If it is such valuable intellectual exercise to imagine things from fresh perspectives why deprive men of the opportunity? Isn’t serving up (white, heterosexual) men a centuries-deep roll call of literary heroes robbing them of the chance to develop the agility and empathy that comes from walking in someone else’s shoes? As it stands, the literary canon does not expand men’s horizons so much as affirm their privileges. It leaves the majority of the world outside, looking in, while weakening its elite inhabitants by cosseting them from challenge. The universe, Thoreau wrote, is wider than our view of it. Literature is the best way to stretch our view. Shrinking our definition of greatness to accommodate only a sliver of human potential is a disservice to books, authors and to most especially to us readers.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Upton Sinclair’s masterwork The Jungle is essentially contemporary investigative journalism in period costume. It follows the misfortunes of a Lithuanian immigrant family as they are systematically cheated, exploited, and abused by the meatpacking industry. The grim expose didn’t have quite the impact Sinclair hoped for, however. Middle-America, with its penchant for “we’ll see what we want to” myopia made the whole thing about the meat – not the humans getting ground up by the industry.
I failed in my purpose… Sinclair wrote. I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what the industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by chance I had stumbled on another discovery…what they were doing to the meat supply
When the new immigrants arrive in The Jungle a local crone explains how the industry works:
Old Durham squeezed [the workers] tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces, and sending for new ones. The Poles… had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them
One-hundred-and-two years later, the LA Times reports: “Ads placed in immigrant newspapers across the country had drawn war refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s and from Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s” – followed by Latinos, and most recently African war refugees from places like Sudan and Somalia. These immigrants face exactly the same exploitative working practices as did the Lithuanians a century ago. Four companies – IBP, ConAgra, Excel (owned by Cargill) and Farmland National Beef – control more than 85% of the US market and the system remains as Sinclair described it: desperate people are recruited to do extraordinarily dangerous, exhausting, repetitive work; they work until they collapse then a new, more miserable group is found to replace them.
Meatpacking remains the most dangerous job in America, according to the Department of Labour. Packers still force employees to work ever-faster, while freezing wages and discouraging unions. There is little evidence The Jungle even succeeded in making meat safer. In January 2010 one US company recalled 900,000 pounds of beef in an E. coli scare.
Unfortunately, people are still sucking industry propaganda, blinded by faith in the so-called ‘free market’. Sinclair knew the type:
Some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life, had never travelled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything – [yet] when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, ‘I’m not interested in that – I’m an individualist!’
Further reading
Working In The Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs Americans Won’t Do, By Gabriel Thompson,
Nation Books, 2009
Posted by Irresponsibilty
Un-Holiness
Apparently Pope Benedict is in a snit because British equality legislation is curtailing Catholic’s sacred prejudices. Tragically the UK’s progressive thinking has “forced the closure of half the Roman Catholic adoption agencies because [of] the law making it illegal to discriminate against gay applicants.”
I particularly like the use of the word “forced”. Nobody forces Catholics to be backward-ass bigots. And it’s rich for an institution with a horrific record of institutionalised paedophilia to wring its hands about the horrible queers. If Catholics cannot cope with living in a diverse society, and if they care more about fostering homophobia than they do about putting children in loving homes then they ought to be “forced” out of business.
Posted by Irresponsibility
The Christian Right, to paraphrase an old aphorism about Republicans, believes in the right to life “until you’re born” — after that, you’re in God’s hands. Unfortunately, church proved no sanctuary to Dr George Tiller, who Scott Roeder shot in the head at point blank range one Sunday morning as the doctor was going about his duties as an usher.
During his trial, Roeder told a Kansas jury: “It is not man’s job to take life – it’s our Heavenly Father’s”. Amazing, not an expression of remorse, but of justification. He was talking about Doctor Tiller “taking life” by performing abortions — not his own egregious violation of the Commandment. Whatever God’s plans for Dr Tiller, they weren’t moving fast enough to suit Roeder, who had fantasised for years about murdering the doctor. Roeder testified he’d considered merely chopping his hands off with a sword but, worried Dr Tiller might teach others to perform abortions, decided cold-blooded murder was the thing. The only explanation Roeder deigned to offer was that he believed abortion was always wrong, even in the case of rape or incest, because “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Shame he didn’t apply the same thought process before trying to right a “wrong” by murdering Doctor Tiller.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Q: What do the US Army and the Hotel California have in common?
A: You can check out, but you can never leave.
This fact was brought to my attention by the story of Marc Hall – aka Marc Watercus – who is banged up in prison for writing a rap song protesting the Army’s stop-loss policy. Stop-loss is double-barrelled doublespeak describing this clause of the US Army enlistment contract:
In a time of war, my enlistment may be extended without my consent for the duration of the war and for six months after its end (10 U.S.C. 506, 12103(c)).
Stop-loss is allegedly intended to stop the army losing soldiers in the midst of active combat. After all, war isn’t an assembly line. You can’t just punch a clock when your shift is up and say: “Boss, I’m going home.” That’s the theory, at least. As Marc Hall discovered, the army definition of a combat situation is pretty flexible. He had returned home from Iraq and was looking forward to his 27 February discharge and returning to his wife and daughter.
Unfortunately Uncle Sam had other plans. The army invoked stop-loss and Hall was told he was going back to Iraq. According to online newsite Truthout, Hall first told his commander he was opposed to the war and wouldn’t go. He then wrote a rap tune protesting the policy. Lo, all hell breaks loose. Seems the US Army — finely tuned killing machine that it is — was reduced to a quivering jelly by lyrics such as:
I got a … magazine with 30 rounds/on a three-round burst
ready to fire down/Still against the wall, I grab my M-4
spray and watch all the bodies hit the floor
I bet you never stop-loss nobody no more.
For making this “threat” Hall was slapped into Liberty County Jail, Georgia, to await court martial. Where he remains.
How a reasonable person can conclude, as did the military brass, that Hall’s song “communicated a threat” to the Army I don’t know. Unless the US military is run by the same people who got all nervous over ‘Fuck tha Police’. Ask a soldier what’s scarier: a couple of rhyming couplets, or redeployment to Iraq? Bet they take their chances with the rap tune.
The plain fact is the brass is the biggest threat to the army. Soliders are dying for no good reason, in a war that has no definable aim. The contract states: “enlistment may be extended without my consent for the duration of the war“. This is problematic because, well, shit, what’s happening in Iraq isn’t even a war. Not in legally, since the United States has never formally declared war on Iraq. By definition something that never began cannot end. So the 120,000+ soldiers held under stop-loss are being illegally detained. Plainly, stop-loss is a form of false imprisonment (“restraint upon a person’s liberty of movement without legal justification“) and violates the Fourth Amendment Constitutional protection against loss of life and liberty .
Arguing that “Any soldier complaining about “stop-loss” being a ‘back door draft’ either lied when he/she signed their contract or is an idiot” is spurious. Common legal sense suggests an individual does not have the right to surrender basic legal protections. Euthanasia is banned in 48 states on the basis that people cannot voluntarily give up their legal protection against “murder”. If a terminally ill person is not entitled to choose a painless, dignified passing it is ludicrous to suggest soldiers’ are “entitled” to be forceably held in the sandbox of death. Moreover, even if a soldier “consents” to losing his or her freedom, the Army/government is still liable for unlawful imprisonment — as proved by the fact doctors are prosecuted for assisting suicide.
To recap: the war in Iraq is illegal, hence stop-loss is illegal. Even if it weren’t, it is illegal for individuals to give up certain legal protections. Even if they were, it would still be illegal for another party to break the law by violating those rights. That is a whole heap of illegal. Students of irony will have already noted the contradiction inherent in imprisoning soldiers to force them to fight for freedom. And those with a healthy interest in civil liberties will deduce that if the Army is above the law we’ve entered a brave new world.
In the land of might-makes-right, however, none of this means a damn and the Constitution is, apparently, not worth the parchment it’s scrawled on. Which is a philosophical minefield for civilians and a practical catastrophe for soldiers held hostage by the lies of the upstanding democracy they’re dying for. Stop-loss effectively turns Iraq into a lethal, 21st century forced labour camp. The US Government should ponder the historical record on republics that started funnelling their citizens into death camps. If I remember rightly, it’s not pretty.
If you want to let the Army know how you feel about this fucked-up situation put pen to paper and address it to:
CPT Cross, Commander, B 2-7 INF BN, Fort Stewart GA 31314
Caught the very amusing history of hip hop flick Krush Groove, about the rise of Run DMC, last week on a terrible New Year’s Day hangover.
Then heard Kurtis Blow’s brilliant record ‘If I Ruled The World’ at Someday lounge the other night. So tracked down the Nas ft Lauren Hill video. Don’t you love the way music connects the universe?
Posted by Irresponsibility
Steven Ward - the face of pure evil
I have seen my share of ghastly television, but for sheer can’t-prise-my-peering-eyes-from-the-telly-nor-stifle-my-howls-of-anguish VH1’s alleged dating show Tough Love takes the chocolate chip biscuit. “Alleged” because Tough Love is to ordinary dating shows what H-bombs are to BB guns.
The premise is Master Matchmaker® Steven Ward, with a little help from Matchmaker Mom JoAnn, oversees a houseful of love-hungry laydeez who, with the help of his Tough Love, are going to turn themselves into shiny, desirable sex toys for some lucky dude. Terrifying as plot is, it has nothing on the spectacle of tough love in action. Steven is a perky, foul-mouthed Drexel econ grad with a nice line in flat-front trousers; a small, glossy Jewish version of Gordon Ramsey. Only you’re his nightmare, sister.
Steve and 'the girls'
Steve prepares his crew of lovelorn eccentrics, including Rocky, the trout-pouted stuntwoman with 32 pets; Kanisha aka “Miss Gold-Digger”; and Taylor, who is basically a walking boob job with attitude, for finding TWUE WUVE with a combination of relentless bullying and glib promotional babble worthy of a sales conference, or a 12-step meeting in hell. He constantly exhorts the women that negativity is bad, positivity is good. At first his patter is irritating-but-harmless. The longer you watch Tough Love (and it is as addictive as meth laced with E-numbers) the more truly creepy it gets.
Every week Steve singles out a ‘girl’ to publicly berate in what resembles nothing so much as a communist brainwashing session. The others, urged to add their criticism to this queasy ritual, are routinely reminded it is for the victim’s own good. When Jenna, a former fatty with an pug face and a penchant for self-dramatisation, hits the hot seat in Episode 5 she goes into teary meltdown as the girls take it in turn to accuse her of not “taking things seriously” and – that worst of all female crimes – negativity. It is a Stasi-worthy performance.
Ward cheerfully owns up to mixing ‘help’ and manipulation, saying:
It’s been very fun because I have been able to pull all the strings. And have been like a master puppeteer…. being able to put these women into position to be successful and then to also to be able to set them up for failure, it gives me an incredible amount of power over their lives.
Not quite the caring attitude one might hope for from a love doctor. Love’s got nothing to do with it, however, at least not in any recognisable sense. The women are serviced with a rotating cast of blank-faced, 20-something men (aspiring actors?) Presumably they, too, are on the search for true love, but they aren’t held up for scrutiny. The men are there to judge. For women, his message is: “It isn’t about you. It’s about what they want” so…
1) Put yer ya-yas on display – in Episode 3 they are ordered to do a ‘sexy’ photo shoot, and chastised for being insufficiently hot.
2) Clamp a grin on your face and be positive at all costs.
3) Never do or say anything a man might not like.
Terrific advice if your ideal bloke is someone looking for a blow-up doll with a pulse, otherwise deeply disturbing. First, because in this equation it is always – and exclusively – the women who are paraded like livestock. Steve occasionally asks, ‘did you like him?’ But the woman’s answer is unimportant, as demonstrated in Episode 5, where he basically told two of the girls they were stupid for not fancying his choices for them. All Steve cares about is how they appear to the men; whether or not he’s broken them down enough (his phrase, not mine) for beady-eyed sexual opportunists to consider them boffable. Second, because it offers as gospel the truly depressing notion that love is a commodity. If you don’t have any, it’s because you aren’t offering the right currency. The Tough Love mantra is that finding a meaningful relationship is a matter of making sure you fit all the criteria, of ticking the boxes and double checking your inventory. If you don’t have love you are obviously doing something wrong and don’t deserve love until you’re ‘fixed’. If that isn’t an ethos to make you slit your wrists, I don’t know what is.
Posted by Irresponsibilty
Expert Dutch sailor Laura Dekker has been forcibly and unjustly detained in Venezuela, and is being transported back to the Netherlands to be questioned by police.
Her crime? Being a 14-year-old girl with a burning ambition to sail around the world. When teenage boys express a desire to sail around the world the media and sponsors leap, fawning, to absorb their words of wisdom (check out this BBC interview with Mike Perham, who recently took the record for youngest round-the-world sailor). When girls do, they are imprisoned by the government and subjected to psychological testing.
Posted by Irresponsibilty
Food poisoning from toxic strains of E. coli, mostly the O157:H7 variety, has become a recurring problem. The strain is responsible for an estimated 73,000 illnesses and 61 deaths across the country each year. – New York Times
Good news carnivores! The Agriculture Department has given prelimary approval to an E. Coli vaccine for cattle. So your flesh-fix may be marginally less likely to kill you. Or the new vaccine might cause the bacteria to mutate and create super-E. Coli. Or it might not work at all! Who knows! But eating should be an adventure; and nothing gets the pulse racing like a round of Steak Roulette.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Generic ex-American Idoler Adam Lambert is — oooh! Shock! Horror! — g-a-y. And when he performed at the American Music Awards he (Shock! Horror!) kissed a man as part of his routine. Homophobia is easily America’s favourite phobia, which is depressing but predictable. It far more irritating when prudish newspaper columnists gussy up their same-sex disgust as concern for public morality — as does a Guardian blogger, writing:
My issue, however, isn’t with the kiss but with the way Lambert has chosen to present his sexuality, particularly in his lyrics. Lambert’s idea of sex is imbued with aggression.
Oh shit. Stop the presses. Music where sex is imbued with aggression? That’s just terrible. Never seen or heard such a thing before. Why the kinky lyrics, like: “”I told you I’m a hold ya down until you’re amazed”? If only modern pop stars were more like those lovely Beatles (“You better run for your life if you can, little girl…Catch you with another man/That’s the end’a little girl”)
Or the Rolling Stones (“Scarred old slave driver know he’s doin alright/Hear him whip the women just around midnight/Ah brown sugar how come you taste so good”)
Or cheeky rockers Guns’n'Roses (“You’re a very sexy girl/That’s very hard to please… I, I wanna hear you scream“)
During his performance Lambert “simulated oral sex” and “cavorted in bondage gear”, prompting the blogger to primly note: “it became clear why an early morning programme would be wary of giving Lambert airtime”. Yikes. She has a point huh? Thank god Madonna, Britney, Christina, Rihanna, et al would never do such a thing.
The hand-wringing is not about sex, aggression, or leather chaps, it’s about our gawd-given right to not be reminded that sometimes boys don’t like girls, they like other boys. Heterosexuals are such delicate creatures.
