Welcome to the Jungle

Waiting for Lefty in Madison.

According to Rush Limbaugh, I am a "petulant, immature ... bottom-feeder freeloader."

That is, I am a teacher and a union member.  

Limbaugh was referring to the thousands of pro-union demonstrators at the Wisconsin state capitol.  He is not alone in his sentiments, as some anti-union demonstrators are there as well.

However, for all we know, the anti-union folks could be paid workers from nearby companies owned by the Koch Brothers.  They are the billionaires who seem to be Gov. Scott Walker's parent company and who have a vested interest in seeing labor unions destroyed.

Regardless of who the ant-union demonstrators work for, they seem to be just that: workers.  Folks who labor for pay from another person.  As Montgomery Burns affectionately calls them: "wage donkeys."

Release the hounds!

Yet there they are, demonstrating against their fellow wage donkeys -- in this case, state teachers -- who are fighting the governor's efforts to remove their union's collective bargaining rights.  The anti-union folks expressed resentment and perhaps even jealousy of the pensions and health benefits the teachers have.  They suggested the teachers are being greedy to attempt retaining anything the governor seeks to take away.  They seemed to believe the teachers should be grateful simply to have a job.

Their sentiments are echoed by a blogger for U.S. News and World Report's website.  The item is bluntly titled "Wisconsin Public Union Members Should Feel Lucky to Have Jobs."  In it Mary M. Shaffrey writes, "Having been laid off twice, I would be grateful for any salary and any benefits, because something is better than nothing. In this time of economic challenges, I would think most would agree with me, especially those who claim to represent the workers."

I am struck by the fact that the workers are directing their anger and resentment toward other workers rather than at the government officials threatening employee protections.  Has the competition for jobs become so fierce and are workers so desperate that they fight each other for the scraps of jobs and benefits that fall their way?  Rather than resenting the people at the table who are dropping them?

We can assume that those demonstrating against the union crowd work in the private sector.  The desperation there makes them envious and resentful of those who work in the public sector.  Yet rather than be resentful of the private sector leaders who seek to constantly lower wagers and benefits -- who send jobs overseas, who keep profits in the bank rather than create more jobs -- the workers want to reward them.  Perhaps the workers believe that if the corporations get more tax breaks, they will create some more jobs.

That seems to be the thinking of one anti-union demonstrator: "Corporations shouldn't pay taxes at all. That's a terrible idea," said Jay from LaCrosse, who identified as a libertarian and said that businesses would just raise prices and relocate to China if they faced higher taxes.

Forget whether any new jobs would be fairly compensated, provide benefits, or even be safe. 

Perhaps the union members in Wisconsin should be handing out copies of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle.  It tells the story of Lithuanian immigrants who come to America believing they will find better lives -- but instead they find a world of workers at the mercy of employers who offer low wages, unsafe work conditions, and no health care.  Those are all misfortunes that labor unions helped eliminate. 

The protagonist, Jurgis, sees his family disintegrate in a world with no protections against abuses and exploitation.  Finally, he is injured and finds himself unable to compete for even the lowest of jobs.

He could not hope to tide himself over by odd jobs of loading trucks; he could not even sell newspapers or carry satchels, because he was now at the mercy of any rival.  Words could not paint the terror that came over him as he realized this.  He was like a wounded animal in the forest; he was forced to compete with his enemies upon unequal terms.

The power of labor unions in the United States has drastically declined in the private sector, and its last stronghold is in the public sector.  Once it is eliminated entirely, as seems to be the plan of some Republican leaders, American workers could find themselves in Jurgis's position.  That is a history we should not want to repeat.

The Other N-word

Of course, that word is Nazi.

It was directly or indirectly evoked last week in editorial cartoons about a new edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaced the word "nigger" with the word "slave."  There was much debate following announcement of that edition, and almost all of it negative.

Some of my friends may have been surprised when I posted "Goodbye, cruel word" and stated that the new edition didn't bother me much.  They may have been surprised because I teach American literature, and I have taught Huck Finn before.  As a literature professor, aren't I supposed to protect the importance of words and the sanctity of the artist's statement?

Yes and no.  Words are important.  But stories have lives of their own after publication, especially when they become as culturally significant as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have.

I understand what the cartoonists were doing.  When you communicate in a medium as highly compressed as an editorial cartoon, you need to communicate as quickly and efficiently as possible.  For instance, a lab coat on a person in a cartoon could communicate either a scientist or a medical doctor.  But if you put a stethoscope around the person's neck, the image immediately communicates "medical doctor."  That stethoscope has become iconic for that profession.  Sometimes these iconic images outlive their real-world predecessors.  Look through The New Yorker cartoons and you will see businessmen in fedoras and carrying briefcases.  Although you may have found those hats on the street in the 1950s and 1960s or in an episode of Mad Men, you won't see them on Madison Avenue today.  Briefcases, yes.  Fedoras, no.  Yet they remain in some of the cartoons.  Their iconic status remains.

So, if you are a cartoonist and you wish to communicate something quickly and powerfully about repression or excessive use of government power and/or some kind of intolerance, you might depict someone in your image as a Nazi.

That is what these cartoonists did.  Despite the fact that the analogy makes little sense.

www.news.yahoo.com

In his illustration, Pat Oliphant refers to those wishing to sanitize Twain's novels as the "political-correction Nazis."  In Michael Keefe's version, we do not have the word "Nazi," but we do see what we would call a German staff car flying flags that may or may not have swastikas on them and filled with dogs and men with tall caps.  These are all signs of Nazis that we have learned to identify from hundreds of World War II movies.

www.denverpost.com

The problem here is that the "Nazis" wishing to "correct" Twain's novels are not government officials.  It is a private concern, a company producing an edition to be used in a Big Read Event in Alabama.  It seems more like the National Socialist Party of Hitler's Germany to burn a book rather than replace one word with another.  Or if they did allow an offending book to be printed, they would require an extensive rewriting, and not such a cosmetic change.  Although he may be called a "slave" in this new edition of Huck Finn, Jim remains a human owned by other humans who attempts to escape this fate and who is still clearly the target of prejudice and hatred in the antebellum South.

(We should note that the Alabama Big Read will use Tom Sawyer and not Huck Finn, but the latter novel has dominated the recent discussions about censorship probably because Jim is more central and "nigger" appears in it more often.  Huck Finn could also be dominating the conversation because it is the book more often taught, since it speaks more powerfully to race and class issues in American history than does Tom Sawyer, which is perceived as "just" an adventurous book for young people.)

One could say that a government entity is behind the censorship, since the National Endowment for the Arts sponsors Big Read events.  But it is unclear to me that the NEA requested Twain scholar Alan Gribben to make the changes when he was tapped to edit the volume officially connected to the Big Read.  But there is no requirement that those who participate in the Big Read use the NewSouth edition.  I am sure that school districts that participate will most likely order the new edition, but again they may not. 

None of this so far sounds very coercive or violent or mean-spirited, which are qualities we associate with Nazis.  Just ask Indiana Jones.

Nor is the effort to create a "nigger"-free version of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn also an effort to supplant all other versions, as Keefe's cartoon imagines.  Gribben's edition will exist alongside the MILLIONS of other copies of the novels already in existence.  And his edition very self-consciously calls attention to the changes it has made.

My previous post considered not whether these changes were right or wrong, but whether they were effective.  For me, this is little different from editing a film for broadcast on network television or altering Cee-Lo's lyrics.  Everyone listening to his latest hit knows he isn't saying "forget you" to the woman who spurned him.  Everyone reading Gribben's edition will know "slave" has taken the place of "nigger."

The strangest thing about the Nazi imagery is that the most recent efforts to ban the novels from schools or libraries have been from African Americans.  For instance, in 1998 the U.S. Court of Appeals heard a case brought by an African American mother seeking to have her daughter and "all other similarly situated individuals" not be required to read Twain's work.

Black Nazis?  NWA meets the SS?  Kind of a strange idea, if you ask me.  And definitely not depicted that way in the cartoons.  Nazis are usually the victimizers, not the victims.


Would Oliphant and Keefe have been willing to draw their cartoons that way, with African Americans showing up at the library to remove Twain's novels?  I don't think so.

I was open to Gribben's edition because I have never had the word "nigger" thrown at me in anger.  I do not know that pain, but I can imagine it.  And I can imagine it could interfere with one's enjoyment or participation in the novels' reading.  And if someone who otherwise would not read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn WILL read them because he/she can avoid the pain of that word -- I don't have a problem with that.

As cultural institutions, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are large enough to withstand the change.

Oliphant and Keefe's cartoons also raise the issue of overusing powerful words rather than avoiding them.  We went through this in 1995, when Rush Limbaugh was criticized for talking about "feminazis."  If anyone with whom we disagree and whom we perceive as militant or extreme or repressive can then be equated with a military-political complex associated with killing millions of people and starting a world war that killed millions more, then "Nazi" has lost much of its meaning and much of its power.  And if we let it lose that, we might lose touch with the pain caused and injustices enacted by Nazis -- and if we do that, we might be more likely to think Nazis aren't that bad and allow them among us again.