Not to put too fine a point on it, but are you fucking kidding me? We have to consider this as being at least as offensive as misplaced Nazi or Stalin analogies. Should we really have to explain to someone the difference between slave life on a plantation in the Old South and conditions as a worker for Wal Mart? In particular, should we really have to explain that difference to someone contributing to a scholarly listserv of African American studies? A couple of years back I had a student in my Modern Africa class who was grappling with the Rwandan genocide, and she blurted out "that's exactly like what is going on in West odessa." I had to correct her and point out howe monumentally offensive an assertion hers was, and how it lacked any sense of perspective. But that was a student who had never been exposed to African atrocities on that level. In this case, we are talking about someone aware enough to participate on a scholarly listserv, probably a professor or a graduate student.
Wal Mart has significant problems with how it treats its workers and a whole host of other issues. I am not about to defend the company, its ethos, or anything else. But can we not take its shortcomings on its own terms? Are we that intellectually bankrupt that something can not be just bad, or bad on its own terms, but rather it must be "slave plantation" bad? One would think that this analogy would be especially offensive to people who are descended from slaves. I will be curious to see if this person gets a free pass. Given that we inhabit an academic climate where in some circles inane hyperbole is not only the fashion, but is seen as legitimate, reasoned argument, I'm afraid I do not hold out much hope.
5 comments:
1. Not all of us are that intellectually bankrupt, but enough are to make a difference - even in fields where one would expect more intellectual proficiency. I wonder if the extension of such uphill battles there has something to do with what I read that Wood wrote, about how the elevation of the image of the common man in America came with the often added expense of relegating so many forms of elitism to suspicion - including that of not only the intellectual, but unfortunately mere intellectual rigor itself, as well.
2. It's a damn good point that most people are nowhere near a position to have the kind of first- or even second-hand knowledge of the depths of atrocities in many places around the world necessary to elicit meaningful comment on them. This "don't know much to know how to care" attitude might have something to do with point #1, as curiosity is a good starting point for formulating intellectually legitimate viewpoints.
3. What Walmart does has absolutely nothing to do with slavery in this country, and as a strong proponent for a greater appreciation of the meaning of free-will, I would never imply as much. But I would say that there are such heavily ingrained and drudgingly mind-numbing aspects of what is expected of immense swaths of labor in our industrialized service-sector economy as to make much hope of ever being more than a robot a pipe dream to so many in the U.S. Of course, not fully appreciating the distinction of free will might also have as much to do with point #1, but so might the the predictable nature of a political system that so lovingly welcomes operations like Walmart to flourish as one of not so many other employment options across its landscape... along with shopping malls, parking lots, amusement parks and other points of general disinterest to the curiosity of your average intellectual.
Make that "predictably institutionalized nature of a political system..." in the third paragraph. Many aspects of American politics tend to be predictably instutionalized, and have always been even if in a different way pending the major upheavals that effectively put an end to the pre-Civil War era, pre-Civil rights era, what have you.
MUL --
Very well made points. Thank you. I think you are right -- if I am taking your comments in the way you intend them, there are aspects of apathy and intellectual laziness at work, coupled with what you (quoting Wood) call the suspicion of the elite.
One of the problems in the case I am citing is people who want to have it both ways -- they want to purport to speak for the, dare I say, subaltern (and in some ways they may well be -- black Americans certainly fit that category) while at the same time getting all of the advantages of being within the elite -- the professoriate, or what have you. Thew cliched way to ay it would be that they want to have their cake and eat it too. But of course people do where different hats.
I have more than my share of problems with Wal Mart. But where I live, we have just a big enough population base (between the two cities (250,000 or so) to have every chain you could want -- Barnes & Noble to Best Buy to all of the samey-chain restaurants) but we have almost no unique, local, non chain places, or at least far too few. So Wal Mart is not knowcking out Mom and Pop,it just outcompetes other big box stores. This was the case in Athens when several of us were there -- there was lots of sturm and drang over a huge Wal Mart emerging, but in Athens, Wal Mart simply knocked out a dingy, poorly run, half-assed Ames. I am sorry if I do not weep when one big box is lesser than another and folds.
And of course Wal Mart ha snothing to do with slavery, George Bush has nothing to do with fascism, Ted Kennedy nothing to do with communism, and so forth. These screeds roll so easily off the tongue (and we have ALL done it at one point or another) but are damaging beyond belief to any constructive dialogue across ideological, political, socioeconomic, racial and any other lines that exist or that we have constructed.
dcat
Yes, hypocrisy is never attractive.
I find it odd that a location that size and in that area wouldn't have more local operations. These trends are wider than anyone can do much about and broader than people realize. I remember how charming ma and pa operations in smaller downtown areas of economically prosperous suburbs in the 1980's were replaced by trendier clothing and furniture chains - and not necessarily without broader unintended consequences.
I in no way believe that the business practices or drudgery of working in places like WalMart will produce some massive political movement to make it a more attractive place to work in, for or with; and hence the likely limited utility of making appeals to movements of that scale that came before, or the incomparable evils they sought to overcome.
Calls of revolution have reached a point of diminishing returns in the current version of the Matrix. (Unfortunately on Darfur as well - although I at least saw Tavis Smiley pick up on it in a conversation with Kristoff). An insight, if you will: the acuity of actual problems that we deal with regularly at home have become so mundane as to cause a loss of much of any perspective on the scale and moral dimension of the real tragedies of murder, torture and slavery abroad or historically removed. We've now dumbed down the former use of semi-legitimate warnings against becoming like those we loathe into a fun way to poke insult at fill-in-the-blank's pet peeve.
What I draw from your last paragraph is an element of warning against Chicken Littlism: If everything is dire, if all wrongs are tantamount to slavery or Nazism or Stalinism, then after not too many go rounds, people are simply going to ignore you, to the point where even if the sky really is falling, no one will pay heed. After all, if you tell me that Wal Mart equals slavery, ,and I know better, why would I listen to you on Darfur, even if I do not? How does that professor write something like that on the listserv, ago in with a straight face and teach about slavery or Rwanda's genocide or other real evils?
dcat
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