Lift Every Voice

Sitthixay Ditthavong/AP

Rick Perlstein on the Chicago Teachers' Union strike (and in a Sam Seder/Majority Report interview). Perlstein finds the strike the third milestone in events that began with the Spring 2011 Wisconsin statehouse demonstrations, then followed by the Occupy actions starting last September 17. In the MR interview, Perlstein notes the CTU did important groundwork with parents before the strike, and has strong support for its stance against "reform" focused on standardized tests and eliminating "frills," like art, libraries, and physical ed.

Along with the "liberal" political establishment's endorsement of corporation-enriching "reform," there's the "greedy teachers" narrative, and digby notes the media's current promotion of this story line. But that's business as usual, just as most national coverage chose to make Wisconsin only about unions, and to present Occupy as a freak show.

The strike also raises a number of class issues, and digby included this essay from Corey Robin. He writes of his experience attending excellent schools in upper-class professional Chappaqua, NY, schools that introduced him to and encouraged him in the multiple interests that ultimately led to his academic career. Families relocated to the town for schools of this quality, writes Robin, yet many parents looked down on teachers as losers for accepting a low-paid career, and they communicated that attitude to their children. Robin finds in this class snobbery a source of current anti-teacher sentiment.

That may well be a factor prompting elite reaction, including that of the "liberal" elite. In the Majority Report segment, Perlstein notes CTU president Karen Lewis' claim that Mayor Emanuel told her privately that "25 percent of the students in this city are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and that he was never going to throw money at them." Why, after all, should 25 percent of children of people not Our Kind matter?

Along the same lines, MR followed the Perlstein interview with audio of this powerful appearance by Matt Farmer. It's natural for billionaire Penny Pritzker to think music and art are for mine but not thine, when thine need only be educated enough to become the help.

During the decades of war on public education since I was a kid, I've come to see that what I once thought of as middling schools were much closer to an elite education. Imperfect as they were, those schools sometimes suggested possibilities beyond training the young to become a suitably unquestioning drones. Sure, there were mediocre teachers, but there also were those who opened new horizons.

One of the latter was a U.S. history teacher who'd grown up in a coal mining town, worked construction jobs in the summers, and was a civil rights activist in the ongoing work in the '60s for the most basic legal protections. He introduced us to current struggles, and to labor history and the battles lost and hard-won: the history missing from or glossed over in textbooks.

There were other teachers who were influential, but something that's always stayed with me was my experience in H.S. choir—and with a teacher I wasn't all that crazy about. (He wasn't exactly sophisticated in non-musical matters; I remember his referring to a synagogue as "the Jewish church...)

But he gave us the ambitious assignment of learning the choruses of the J.S. Bach "Magnificat," for a concert with professional soloists. It was a revelation to learn our individual sections' choral parts, which were stunning in themselves, and then to hear how the parts transformed into something even greater, when all were combined.

While kids generally were listening to whatever was Top 40 c. 1967, everyone became pretty awed by this process. I remember walking past the gym after a rehearsal, when someone burst into a choral part, then others joined in as we strode (seemingly bounced!) through the empty hall. There was something important we all felt, regardless of musical background (which was limited, for most). It was the combination of a powerful esthetic experience along with the act of individual voices joining to form something greater than the parts, and we responded strongly. Well, there might also be a metaphor in that, about teachers, students, community...

At the very least, the impression this kind of experience made on me also makes it impossible to forget that kids respond to what they are exposed to. Limiting the "finer things" to those with moneyed parents is a form of child abuse that's been pushed to respectability, but needs to be seen for what it really is.

Focus

Without being able to watch it, I tried catching up with what I could of the Democratic Convention, over the days that followed.

While I approached this with much trepidation, it seems that some apt messages were there, as heard from Sister Simone Campbell, Elizabeth Warren, and others.

I don't know how much beyond the big name appearances was aired in network prime time. Much of what was effective was the bully pulpit stuff the administration should have been doing from the start. As Michael Shaw says, powerful as this family's story is, it "just as powerfully hits on how the administration has come up short in framing the debate, and now, defending the [Affordable Care] law itself, in more visceral terms."

One talking point was the unconvincing boast of "ending" the Iraq war. I certainly see the political logic there. I also see the logic of boasting about killing the boogeyman—no matter how unseemly snd short-sighted it may be. That's in the context of global perceptions, as well as making murder into this banal bit of cheerleading, in a country so desensitized to violence and disappearing civil liberties.

And this miserable attempt at pandering to "faith": high-profile appearance by a (tax-exempt) political enemy and mouthpiece of a certain pedophile-protecting institution.

Whatever degree of successful PR and politicking was achieved, there was also what Pierce called "The Thing Nobody Talked About at the Conventions"—

The Democrats are caught in a bind, because they have to play in the new universe of campaign finance, too, and because they're trying to keep up with a symphony of well-financed propaganda that seeks to make voter-suppression into a good-government initiative. John Lewis is not fooled. John Lewis has seen this before. And John Lewis told the convention what he's seeing rising in the country out of his own past.

Brothers and sisters, do you want to go back? Or do you want to keep America moving forward? My dear friends, your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union. Not too long ago, people stood in unmovable lines. They had to pass a so-called literacy test, pay a poll tax. On one occasion, a man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. On another occasion, one was asked to count the jelly beans in a jar-all to keep them from casting their ballots. Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House even bragged that his state's new voter ID law is "gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state." That's not right. That's not fair. That's not just. And similar efforts have been made in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina. I've seen this before. I've lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

And that is simply the way it is, and, if you don't like the truth there, you're welcome to get your brains nearly beaten out of you on the Edmund Pettus Bridge so you would begin to have the most basic qualifications to argue with John Lewis about it.

From Digby: the speech transcript.

Pierce concluded that—

If I were running the president's campaign, I'd shut the hell up about Simpson-fking-Bowles and put John Lewis on an airplane and let him tell his story in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and everywhere else this atavistic authoritarian nonsense is going down. There's more at risk here than anyone knows.

The next day, Pierce talked to North Carolina delegate Stella Adams—

Adams credited Lewis, who also addressed the entire convention Thursday night, for attempting to remain positive in the face of today's relentless assaults on civil liberties, especially voter rights. "Who would have thought this would happen in his lifetime?" she asked. "John Lewis, who was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, will see all of his work undone because we don't understand what's at stake."

"It's ancient times — we can't go back to that," she continued, her voice breaking. "How far back does Mitt Romney want to take us? To the back of the bus? To strange fruit in trees?"

On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Adams, who describes herself as a "Bible-toting, scripture-quoting, pro-choice, choose-life woman," will begin a fast that she plans to continue until Election Day. She may stave off hunger and join friends monitoring early voting places. She'll have plenty of opportunity. This past Tuesday, the Democrat-controlled North Carolina elections board used their advantage to buck the national trend and increase early voting opportunities for state residents.

"I've really been motivated... to protect my daughter’s future," Adams said, with a hint of new resolve in her voice. Her daughter, Danielle, a graduate student at Appalachian State University, is also a North Carolina delegate. "We will win this election, or we will lose our future."

Or, as Matt Taibbi lays out the economic terms of the 1-percenter's fast one Romney/Ryan are aiming to pull—

Obama ran on "change" in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

Back to School, 1944

Tri-State High School Yearbook, Tule Lake, California, 1944-45

Eighty pages, full of teacher portraits, school spirit and activities, along with the faces of students who, American as they were, did all they could to be positive and to on hold to belief in a better future.

Large view.

Which, of course, fills the book with irony.

It's in the breezy, period cartoons, like this map

Large view.

The same cartoonist did the three-page schedule of events; here, here, and here.

There's the dreamy "co-ed" in a romantic bit of the arid scenery—

And this—

My sister had sent links to this yearbook a while ago. While looking for it again, I happened upon this document: scrapbooks assembled by Emily Light, an elementary school teacher who chose to teach at Tule Lake, Jerome, and Topaz camps and record the internees' experience. Along with camp newsletters she clipped newspaper stories from the outside, including any voices that spoke out about the whole thing.

Service With A (Proper To Her Station) Smile

I've been reading Jan Whitaker's 2006 Service and Style: how the American department stores fashioned the middle class. It covers a lot of commercial and social history, from the nineteenth century to the stores' heyday in the Depression. Department stores expanded after World War II, but were soon forced to move from selling unique store brands to carrying the nationally advertised brands consumers demanded. National brands sold themselves through their marketing, so that stores no longer needed to provide a high level of service and were now forced to compete with discount retailers selling exactly the same brands. Ultimately, the customer exodus to the suburbs led to the demise of many stores; others survived mainly in malls, not city centers.

As it happens, pre-Labor Day I had just finished a chapter on stores' personnel, including founders and the masses of hired staff.

Women sales clerks made up most of the workforce by the 1890s, when most major stores had evolved from dry goods businesses staffed by men. Clerks' pay was poor, and hours abusively long—

... Sixty hours a week was commonplace even in better stores. Overtime pay was unheard of, and clerks were often expected to work Sundays and holidays to prepare for sales. If they were late, they could face fines for every minute of absence. Humiliation was routine. A guard searched them for stolen merchandise each day as they left the store.

Even worse, the public suspected clerks of accepting money for sexual favors from "mashers" who hung around their counters and employee entrances. According to popular lore, saleswomen were audacious flirts who used glances and smiles to sell goods—and who knew what else?—to male customers.

... In retrospect, the issue of sales clerk morality looks like a case of middle-class vexation over the invasion of public space by large numbers of working-class young women, many of whom refused to display the degree of deference and maidenly timidity demanded by polite society.

More sympathetic women believed that if young clerks sometimes went wrong, it was mainly because pay was too low for them to support themselves. Many middle-class women undertook reform efforts, working for stronger labor laws and threatening store boycotts. Especially decrying the long hours and lack of overtime pay before Christmas, reformers asked stores to reduce night hours, and the public to "shop early." Stores did respond by ordering merchandise early and moving the start of the shopping season to early December.

By the early 'teens, says Whitaker, pay increased (but very slightly), and "leading stores" began organizing clubs and leisure activities for employees, along with calling them "associates"—a euphemism I had assumed was quite recent.

Whitaker has interesting material on how stores worked to bridge the gap between middle-class patrons and poorly educated clerks with instruction in middle-class behavior and esthetic standards. She reproduces a lesson on proper speech, including such "Wrong–Right" contrasts as—

Lady, is this your package? – Madam/Mrs. Brown, is this your package?

The party who... – The person/woman who...

I have this in four sizes. – We have this in four sizes.

This is swell/grand/nifty. – This is smart.

Stores established

Dress codes, speech correction, and "lifestyle" training… The ideal clerk was efficient, knowledgeable, helpful, and pleasantly mannered, and she could answer questions and provide assistance without inserting her "self" into the transaction. She was supposed to maintain social distance. To the status-conscious customer, nothing could kill a sale faster than hearing the clerk say, "I wear that kind myself."
...

Emotional labor was at the heart of the sales clerk's role. She was supposed to avoid showing impatience or giving offense, since customers remembered affronts and avoided stores that had offended them in the smallest way. But she was also supposed to flatter the customer and create a pleasant association with the store. Flattery required a clerk to "read" the customer, to listen with minute attentiveness, and to recall her name and preferences on later occasions.

Though, Whitaker notes, class friction could work in many ways. Clerks had to address everyone as "madame'—

including washerwomen and immigrants speaking broken English. The low-status customer could be the most demanding, almost provoking a clerk to lose her temper. Frances Donovan, a sociologist who conducted research by working in department stores in the 1920s, noticed that customers employed as servants sometimes played out a role-reversal game, treating clerks as their servants. Interestingly, as a middle-class woman, Donovan could not bring herself to call them madame.

Employers' preferred "reforms" were to provide activities for workers. There were companies that provided summer camps, organized concerts by employee choirs and orchestras, summer camps, and published regular newsletters. I enjoyed the January 1925 Hess Brothers (Allentown, PA) newsletter, which was full of positive thinking exhortations to the store's "Co-Workers," along with this—

Co-Workers and Mr. Chas. Hess Exchange New Year Greetings.

On New Year's Eve, Wednesday, 31st, 1924, the following cablegram was sent to Mr. Charles Hess who from last reports was visiting Monte Carlo, France.

Continued Good Health for 1925

Co-Workers

On Friday, January 2nd, 1925, the co-workers received the following cablegram from Mr. Charles Hess, which was dated January 1, 2 p. m.

Wishing Everybody a Happy New Year.

Charles Hess

Stores often had a cult of The Founder, which was useful for advertising and "branding" purposes. Many stores also remained for generations under family control, but Whitaker says things changed when—

Scientific management entered department stores in the 1920s and transformed them from one-man shows and rule-of-thumb operations into businesses like all others.... With the adoption of modern methods, records were kept and statisticians hired to pore over anything that could be quantified. In the 1920s, the comptroller became the most influential person in a store. Executives were hired from outside the store, while family members had to prove their worth. Founders' sons had to take business courses just like anyone else aspiring to management. Buyers [a position that had become a means of advancement for women] lost their power as personnel departments took over hiring and merchandise managers supervised budgets and buying decisions. Each department was rated on its productivity, balancing its sales volume against the square footage it occupied and the number of clerks it employed. Many store functions were contracted to outside agencies....

It wasn't until the New Deal that minimum wage laws increased worker pay, and hours became restricted to a 40-hour 5-day week. Strikes intensified in the '30s, particularly by Teamsters. Employer reaction was predictable: lockouts, along with such PR efforts as the San Francisco Retailers Council advertising in 1938 for public support against "the attempt of arrogant union leaders to Sovietize our business." Union activity united retailers into city-wide groups to oppose it. Delivery driver strikes led stores to use common delivery services, a move that boosted the fortunes of United Parcel Service.

For all the controlling paternalism of stores toward employees, it's startling how Miss Kunesh of the alterations and tailoring department could not only retire, but be given "a three-week, 10-country tour of Europe." Maybe she managed the department, or maybe not; this store was considered a luxury goods dealer that may have been extra-generous.

Retirement party for Halle's employee, 1968.
"Off to Europe-- For completing 50 years of service with Halles, Miss Anna Kulesh, 7510 Pearl Rd., was honored with a reception at the downtown store yesterday and presented a three-week, 10-country tour of Europe. Miss Kunesh is in the alterations and tailoring department." -- photo verso. Text on verso contains two different spellings of honoree's last name. The presenter is Walter Halle.

Nearly another fifty years on, the still-employed—for a paycheck and little else—are mostly service workers, thanks to The Owners' successful arrangements. Those still serving do so under the demand for a never-ending process of outdoing oneself—without ever, ever exposing any of that troublesome self.

Well, Were Their Lips Moving?

August 29: Driftglass said it, and added the perfect graphics: why there's no surprise in seeing "a Republican candidate for Vice President who gets up on the biggest stage of his life and -- in front of tens of millions of his fellow citizens -- lies as easily and unself-consciously as a dog licking its ass"—

This is all they are now. And the reason it might very well work this time even though we can see it coming right down Michigan Avenue is that the Republican system of bald-faced, pathological lying requires only two moving parts: first, a Party that, top to bottom, has gone fully sociopathic and will lie about anything, any time without batting an eye, and second, a complicit, enabling Centrist media which categorically refuse to call them on their lying.

Charles Pierce weighed in on "The Backlash to the Backlash to the Paul Ryan Speech"—

I suspect that, within a week, the consensus among the elite political media will once again settle on Who Really Knows All The Facts Anyway, and that Paul Ryan's reputation as a genial policy wonk will be re-established, and the search for "common ground" on which we can all agree to starve granny will resume apace.

August 30: The Base knows no cognitive dissonance, which would imply a capacity for cognition. Therefore, those bootstrapping "Nyah!Nyah!We did it ourselves!" convention speakers like Chris Christie. As whetstone put it in alicublog comments—

It was a wonderful night for big gummit programs: the GI bill, public transportation, Rutgers, and Ann Romney namedropping her hubby's state scholarship program (merit-based dough for 18,200 moochers this year), which isn't just free money, it's only for kids who go to public universities.

Then—as Reagan stand-in?—an incoherent elderly actor took the stage.

Driftglass' take—

Upon reflection, I must admit that Mr. Eastwood summed up the GOP base flawlessly: a cranky old white man yelling at an imaginary President about fictional problems.

Pierce says what Romney's handlers "were shooting for on Thursday night was an extended exercise in Pinocchio, You're a Real Boy Now," and that—

... On Thursday night, Willard Romney may have come as close to humanity as he needs to come. The rest is all just waiting for him out there — 8-percent unemployment, and a Democratic Party that may well spend a week talking about how much they're willing to cut and how serious they are about The Deficit. I felt a pulse on Thursday night, and I saw a certain vigorous color come to his cheeks. I think Romney's alive now, and it bothers me, because I think he's a lot closer to becoming president than he was at the beginning of the night.

Matt Taibbi points to the "hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney": his running against "debt" when—

Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time.
In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps.

With so corrupt a political system and a media that looks the other way, we face an election that should in no way be so close, yet is.

One voice that spoke out about that corruption is terribly missed. Matt Sullivan quoted this on her birthday—

"Either we figure out how to keep corporate cash out of the political system, or we lose the democracy."
—Molly Ivins, August 30, 1944 - January 31, 2007

Barry Friedman adds—

... her greatest line: "I'd rather someone burn the flag and wrap himself in the constitution than burn the constitution and wrap himself in the flag."