King was a holistic thinker and he said the problem is not just individuals, the problem is the system. The real evil is systematic. The three great evils are racism, militarism and materialism. Our country is under the control of those three evils and we have to change the whole setup of the country to change that. If you look at him in that way, he’s timely and timeless.
Michael K. Honey, All Labor Has Dignity
One of the more humane and reasonable, and not in the least bit sinister, proposals of health care reform has apparently been struck down by a combination of ignorance, fear, and cupidity. People who ought to know better, and people who didn’t know better and never bothered to learn, stoked the flames with their paranoid fantasy; they were aided and abetted by people whose interest is not in preventing “death panels” from killing innocent people who are “unproductive,” but in protecting the profits of a private industry.
The source of the wild fantasies of a Logan’s Run or Children of Men future, with a board of bureaucrats weighing the social utility of caring for the aged and infirm, was the innocuous proposal that Medicare cover
an explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to; an explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses; an explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.
Only the most creatively paranoid (or shamelessly partisan) could read this to say that health care reform
would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.
Part of the problem is the euphemism and bureaucratese of “advance directives, … living wills and durable powers of attorney.” Death is the great taboo of the modern West, so we have trouble finding words that usefully describe what these tools provide: death with dignity, death with peace, allowing our loved ones and ourselves to die when the time comes. If the debate were phrased in more humane terms, perhaps there wouldn’t be so much rancor.
Our medical technology has allowed us to push the borders of life out in both directions; our ethics have not kept up. Just as we now know so much more about the unborn than we did just fifty years ago, and so are forced to confront the million horrible things that can go wrong in the womb, so also we can push the mechanical sustenance of life far beyond reason. After the murder of Dr. George Tiller, Andrew Sullivan collected many heartbreaking and nuanced stories about late term abortion. We need a similar collection of stories about what happens at the other end, when people hover on the precipice of death in a shadowland which they cannot leave.
When my mother died seven years ago, of complications from leukemia, she had an advance directive, a living will, and a do-not-resuscitate order. She was a nurse, and had spent her professional life in the medical system; she knew from painful experience how the Hippocratic Oath and our advancing medical technology have led to a nightmare of shadow lives for so many families. And I’m glad she had these documents, and had made these decisions when she was still able to do so rationally, reasonably, and with her heart and mind intact. Because I didn’t want her to die, and if it had been up to me to make that decision in her last days I might have decided badly. But we had a chance to talk about it, we discussed it as a family, and we were able to respect her choices.
An “explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning” is not a session with Doctor Death. It’s a chance to discuss all the decisions that need to be made around a person’s death, a conversation about how far the doctors should go to prolong life as it comes to its inevitable close. Some people, like my mother, will choose to go easily at the end; some will choose to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” In either case, it’s a choice, based on that person’s deepest beliefs and convictions.
A recent Radio Lab short, a reading from Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, offers a beautiful, painful, sad, and hopeful vision of a loved one’s death, which stands in sharp contrast to Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night. Both visions of the end of life are legitimate; both are rooted deeply in the tragedy and mystery of mortality. Both should be options for us all. It’s perhaps the most private and personal of all our decisions, and so supremely sacred.
By eliminating the provision from the bill, though, we risk forcing that decision. Doctors are bound to sustain and extend life by whatever means are available, in the absence of a clear directive from the patient; when disagreements about the patient’s wishes arise because there’s no clear statement of their desires, the default position is to resuscitate and sustain. It’s from this sort of situation that the limbo life of Terri Schiavo emerges; it’s a recipe for tragedy.
People who already have good health insurance, or who are educated on the options they face at the end of their lives, can protect themselves and their families from this sort of tragedy. They can make their wishes known with binding documents, they can choose the level of care they desire, they can choose the quiet dignity of hospice or the long fight by any means necessary. The same opportunities should be extended to everyone, regardless of their means. And that’s all the “advance directive” provision was offering.
Sarah Palin, Betsy McCaughey, and Charles Grassley should be ashamed of themselves.
As a way out of the morass of hurt feelings, embarrassing outbursts, and grand posturing in the recent reviewer-writer donnybrooks, take a look at what John Updike had to say in his six rules for book reviews. “[S]haped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion,” they lay out a guide for civil, ethical, and useful criticism.
They insist first on fairness: “do not blame [the author] for not achieving what he did not attempt.” It would be unfair, for example, to criticize a pulp science fiction novel for failing to offer well-rounded characters, just as it would be unfair to criticize a literary short story for lacking tentacled aliens. Next, they insist on thoroughness and accuracy: let the book speak for itself, giving “enough direct quotation . . . of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” And finally, they demand that the reviewer exhibit humility: “[d]o not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind.”
These guidelines imply a contract between the reviewer and the writer, and between the reviewer and the reader (of the review, and potentially of the book). Between reviewer and writer, the contract stipulates a fair and accurate review, without an agenda that poisons the well. The book, not its author, should be the focus, and it should be assessed on its own terms. Between the reviewer and reader, the contract stipulates an accurate assessment of the book’s interest, and its success in its goals; by providing evidence in the form of direct quotation, the reader has the chance to sample the book, and to judge whether the review is accurate.
Things tend to break down when the review fails on one of Updike’s points. In the Alice Hoffman case, her legitimate complaint against Roberta Silman’s review is that Silman gives away too much of the story. This is a fair complaint in a review of a plot-driven novel, and it breaks the contract not only with the book but also with the reader.
As for Caleb Crain’s review of Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” the offense is subtler. On first glance, Crain appears to comply with Updike’s rules: he takes the book on its own terms, and provides ample quotation to make his points. And yet the review is scathing, and on occasion ad hominem: de Botton is accused of being superficial, mocking, and beset by class anxieties. It would appear that Crain has broken the fuzzy sixth rule that Updike proposes, “accept[ing] for review a book [he was] predisposed to dislike.” Crain appears to want a journalistic account with populist, or at least sympathetic, leanings, and that’s not what de Botton has delivered.
Updike’s rules offer very helpful guidelines for approaching the issue from the reviewer’s perspective. They are less helpful, though, for the writer faced with a negative review. When Updike published them in 1975, authors had fewer recourse to vent: no Twitter, no blogs, just the letters column in the offending publication, or space in a rival publication, and the postal service. (Unless, of course, you were Norman Mailer and could punch out your critics, or Proust and challenge them to a duel, but those seem well outside any guidelines for civil discourse.)
It is reasonable for writers to hold their critics to these rules; when a critic strays, the writer is well within her rights to say so. But it would be wise to keep that sixth rule in mind, which implies that all three parties have a contract with something larger than this review and this book: do nothing that will harm the “presumption of certain possible joys of reading,” and keep your vitriol aimed more at the review than the reviewer.
Hot on the heels of Alice Hoffman’s very public tantrum, another writer pops up to confront a reviewer. Is it time, perhaps, to mount the barricades? I hadn’t heard the call to revolution, but if I must dig up cobblestones, then so be it: Sous les pavés la plage!
This time, it’s Alain de Botton responding to Caleb Crain’s NY Times review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work over at Crain’s Steamboats Are Ruining Everything site.
In de Botton’s defense, Crain’s review really is negative (unlike Roberta Silman’s review of Alice Hoffman’s novel, which was much more mixed). Crain assesses de Botton’s tone as dismissive, petty, and pompous. The best praise he can muster is that ““The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” succeeds as entertainment, if not as analysis” in a few isolated sections; for the most part, he implies that the book doesn’t live up its billing.
De Botton, however, rises to the challenge and sinks to schoolyard taunts (if somewhat pompous taunts). After accusing Crain of “killing” the book (“two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review”), de Botton closes with:
I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
Goodness!
De Botton returns 30 minutes later (apparently not a sufficient cooling off period) with what amounts to a declaration of war:
. . . there’s a point at which a review becomes so angry, cruel and mean-spirited that perspective just disappears and one is into new and uncharted terrain. I’m responding to this review as a way of proposing that forgiveness is perhaps not always the only option when the provocation has been enormous.
Compared to the Hoffman affair, de Botton’s response to Crain is mild, almost gentlemanly. But I’m still uncomfortable with it. Perhaps it’s my Quaker heart that’s shocked by any declaration of war, even a literary one, but I don’t see how this pattern can bode well for writers, reviewers, or readers.
One of the pleasures of reading reviews is running into contrary and controversial opinions. Before I settle into a book (especially a biggish one: de Botton’s is over 300 pages, which has some heft), I like some warning: is this book something I’ll enjoy? Is it carrying baggage I should be prepared to heft? If the review is by someone whose opinion I trust, a positive or negative review can be very useful; and on the other hand, a review by someone with whom I’m not familiar, or whose opinions frequently clash with mine, gushing praise might keep me away. When a book is widely reviewed (which de Botton’s certainly has been), the range of responses starts to build a composite portrait, which will guide me deciding whether or not to add it to my stack.
But if the “enormous provocation” of a negative review is now going to be casus belli for writers (whether engaged as a gentlemanly duel like de Botton, or a sustained sniping campaign like Hoffman), there can only be a chilling effect on honest book journalism. The response will be either falsely positive reviews, bland and non-committal reviews, or no reviews at all. In any case, readers will have fewer resources on which to base their reading decisions, and that can only cause suffering among the innocent bystanders in the literary war zone.
I’m not convinced that a negative review really can “kill” a book like de Botton’s, which has significant publisher backing and has been positively reviewed elsewhere. I suppose that an especially savage review in the NY Times or Kirkus could kill a smaller book, but smaller books usually don’t make it into those venues. And even if a negative review really can do financial and even reputational damage to a book, I’m not convinced that responses from the author help matters.
So please, Ms. Hoffman, Mr. de Botton: come down off the barricades. You’re like Bakhunists hurling cobblestones at the Marxists while the Prussian army camps outside the gates. The real enemies aren’t in the review pages. Politely and cordially agree to disagree with the reviewers, and keep your rebuttals private; give your readers (who are also your critics’ readers) the respect they deserve. We can identify snark by ourselves, and balance the reviews we read.
The NYT Lens blog has a fascinating article today about the iconic photograph of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre of twenty years ago: the man in a white shirt who stopped a column of tanks. Four photographers who captured different versions of that moment of courage and dignity recall the events, and give some behind-the-scenes stories of how they made these images and got them out of Beijing.
My favorite is Stuart Franklin’s, the second image in the article. It captures the scale of the man’s courage with its wide framing, and the lighting is dramatic, with the top half in deep shadows and the man’s stand against the tanks brightly lit.
When the events of June 1989 occurred, I had just finished my junior year in college. I was at my parents’ home in Wisconsin, with my friend Alex, and we sat up late into the night watching the coverage on CNN. A few weeks before, I had finished a term paper for a classical sociological theory course (a critique of Marx and Lenin on the 1871 Paris Commune from an anarcho-syndicalist perspective), so the big issues of the Tiananmen protests were front and center in my young mind. The brutality with which the Chinese Army crushed the protest was shocking; it was what the Versailles government did in Paris 118 years before, but with killing machines Thiers could only have dreamed of owning.
1989 was a year of incredible danger, and incredible promise; a few months after the Tiananmen massacre, the Berlin Wall fell, the Eastern Bloc began its long struggle to rejoin Europe, and democracy seemed possible in Russia. Twenty years on, it’s hard not to feel disappointment and nostalgia for what seemed like a revolution in human freedom, largely squandered: the return of authoritarianism in Russia, imperfect (though still hopeful) reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and the continued thuggery of China’s oligarchy, not to mention the new dangers of religious extremism (with ironic roots in the resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and economic miscreance on a global scale. A bloody century came to an end in 1989, but the century following it seems little better.
But this image, this man in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks, still holds powerful hope. George Orwell may have been right when, in 1984, he wrote: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–for ever.” But that face is attached to a person who gets up again, and again, and again, to challenge that boot.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
March 12, 2009
What the culture of looming layoffs does to those who lose their jobs is obvious enough: abrupt financial turmoil, devastating loss of self-esteem, the feeling of having been cast out of society for no good reason. But what about those who are left behind after the tide rushes out?
I’ve survived quite a few down-sizings, right-sizings, smart-sizings, and other such euphemistic rounds of firings. They’re almost always conducted with a good amount of secrecy and uncomfortable silence, though there are always enough hints that they’re coming: the all-company meeting called abruptly with no published agenda, the closed-door meetings among managers, the not-so-cryptic hints from the corner office of “a change in direction” or “these difficult economic times” that call for “new thinking” and “unprecedented actions.” There’s more than a whiff of theater to it all: despite what management may think, workers aren’t so easily fooled, and are quite good at reading the corporate tea leaves.
We respond to these uncomfortable lulls between bloodlettings in a variety of ways. When I was going through a major merger, where overlapping functions and departments were being evaluated for their efficacy in the “new enterprise,” I was subjected to far more meetings than anyone should have to attend. The purpose of these meetings, always called by people who were most concerned about their place in the organization, was never to move a project along or get a problem solved. These meetings, which always resulted in more meetings, with ever-growing lists of attendees until, like a collapsing star, they were subsumed into black holes by their own density, were all about demonstrating the moderator’s importance to the company. The worst offenders sounded like that old BASIC program “Eliza,” the virtual therapist: they would say, in response to a technical answer to the real problem at hand, “I hear you saying …”; they would insist on recapping the sense of the meeting in detail no old Quaker scribe ever dreamed of providing, in e-mails strategically copied to the most important managers (but always excluding anyone who could challenge the content); and they inevitably called for a series of follow-up sessions so the topic could be further regurgitated. The strategy was clearly to present a vision of busyness: someone with a full calendar is clearly someone who is important to the organization, and important people must be retained.
These days, though, that kind of strategy is no guarantee of a job. It still happens–there are always people who need to be certain you’ve heard their voice so you know they’ve contributed something, being sure to get their cards punched–but it hasn’t proved to be a successful methodology. Today, the axe falls on the dead limb as swiftly as on the green, following its own inexorable logic of cost and benefit. It’s a more random universe than we’ve seen in a long time, and our cleverest magical thinking is no defense.
Before the axe landed on me, I saw a lot of gallows humor as the main coping mechanism. It was clear that cuts were coming–there had been cuts before, and all the right kinds of noises were flowing from the corner offices to expect more–and, what’s more, it wasn’t hard to predict when they would come. A glance at the fiscal calendar was a better predictor than all the cat entrails you could burn. The only thing that we couldn’t predict was who would feel the bit, or how many; we hoped our office would be spared, but knew that it wouldn’t. So we traded comments on the most unfortunate bits of news that Digg and del.icio.us could turn up, railed against the stupidity of the Wall Street wizards who got us in these straits, and joked about the growth opportunities in part-time service-sector jobs.
Under the joking, though, is an existential anxiety. We hope that we won’t be the one to go, but (at least in a functional work environment) we hope our co-workers will dodge the axe as well. We’d like to think we’d step up to the chopping block with aplomb, but hope that our sang froid won’t be tested. Every afternoon came with a certain relief, but with a knot at the pit of the stomach.
One of my former co-workers came by this afternoon to deliver the Girl Scout cookies I ordered back in Janunary; she had bought a Cub Scout wreath from me, so I had to take the Do-Si-Dos and Tagalongs. She told me that the morning after the cuts, in the all-company meeting I didn’t attend, they had been warned that more cuts were likely in the next quarter unless the economy changes significantly. Given the way we’ve chosen to respond to the recession, it’s doubtful that it will, at least for the better. And what does that do for morale and productivity in the office?
Obviously, it’s devastating. The certainty of cuts against the uncertainty of one’s own future is an impossible situation; the ambitious will spend their spare time checking Monster.com, and the fearful will spend their energies on occult prognostication. Excess energies will hardly go toward advancing the work that one should be doing. No better method of quashing productivity could possibly be devised.
Is there a way out of this conumdrum? Perhaps.
First, as one who speaks from the other side of the veil, I’d admonish not courage, but rather a cheerful resignation. Just as we cannot know the hour of our death, we can’t know the hour of our unemployment. And much like death, but really so much less traumatically, it’s the initial blow that hurts the most; once you’ve crossed over into the light, it isn’t so bad. A little dull, occasionally scary, but not so bad.
But most importantly, and seriously, I’d implore our corporate leaders to think seriously about how they handle these situations. The way they handle things now has all the earmarks of an untalented high school jazz band trying to improvise: they hesitate, fearful of making a misstep or showing their hand, then rush headlong into a wild flurry of notes before stopping short, absolutely clueless as to how to proceed. Perhaps there’s more method than madness in how layoffs are done, but from down here it isn’t clear.
If layoffs are absolutely necessary–if you really can’t see beyond short-sighted, penny-wise-but-pound-foolish tactics–then you at least owe it to your employees to treat them like adults. We know that layoffs are coming, and that these things require a certain amount of planning to pull off. Let us in on the plans, and on the outcome; rather than dropping the guillotine in the afternoon and expecting the beheaded to pack themselves out in half an hour, give them the same two-weeks notice they’d give you if they were switching jobs. Respect them enough not to scribble graffiti on the white board or infect the network with exotic worms; if they’re rational creatures (which they must be or you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place), they won’t be in a rush to burn bridges that might carry them over this gaping gorge.
Secrecy breeds fear and dissension; abrupt firings encourage fear and disrupt real work. We won’t soon dig ourselves out of this hole if we don’t treat each other with the decency we all deserve.
follow: RSS