On Being a Suit

A while back I wrote a piece about buying a formal business suit and the language of suits. I may have just experienced the consequences of that language barrier.

Periodically I have lunch with my friend the Broker. He is always dressed well, in the uniform of a financial advisor; a conservatively cut grey suit, white shirt and tie. (I should note that the only conservative thing about him is his suit.) I am dressed for whatever I happen to be doing that day. This often means jeans, a flannel shirt, a Johnson Wool work jacket, and work boots.

We often go to a good Chinese restaurant in Burlington, where the food is miles above your usual American/Chinese industrial fare. I never really consciously registered it before this, but the waitstaff have always been friendly and personable. I have worked in a restaurant kitchen myself, so I do my best to treat restaurant staff with respect and friendliness, and it comes back to me.

The other day I decided to dress the part for our lunch, since we would actually be discussing financial issues. I donned a Brooks Brothers suit (charcoal pinstripe), shined my formal black shoes, and put a neat knot in my tie. The Broker and I strode into the restaurant looking like serious financiers. The hostess approached us and – how to put it – ice crystals formed in the air in front of her. She was unfailingly polite, but it was as if we were wearing Klan robes. She never hinted at a smile in any of our interactions. Our waiter was solemn and deferential, and seemed nervous, as if we were about to attack him. The Broker and I were our usual cheerful selves, but all the good will hit a glass wall and slid to the floor. I had never experienced this kind of reaction at this restaurant, or any restaurant, for that matter.

I mentioned my impressions to the Broker later in an email and got this response:

Yeah, I felt the cold glare from that hostess. The Russian waiter seemed more like he was miscast in the wrong movie. After years of people sure they've got my number because of the suit, I get a certain sort of secret pleasure in brandishing it. I've found, ironically, that it can get the most negative reaction from those who most vehemently profess their liberal open-mindedness. Try it sometime, now that you are an initiate.

I guess we did look like bankers at a lunch meeting, cheerfully engineering the next financial collapse and how to extract our outrageous bonuses from it. Usually we look like a successful businessman and his not-so well off brother-in-law.

I related the story to a friend who is a manager at a non-profit. He told me about a workshop he had just attended which was about giving good presentations. The instructor noted that researchers had found that 60% of an audience’s impression of the speaker came from clothing and general appearance. Maybe 15% came from the actual content of the presentation. Bloviate how you will, but wear the right costume for the crowd.

Of course, this makes me wonder how many snap judgments I have inflicted on people based on clothing. Perhaps fewer than most people, given my own performance as a clothing chameleon. But still, most of our judgments happen before we have a chance to consciously register them. People who research these things find that we make emotional snap judgments and then quickly construct intellectual justifications for them post hoc.

I also wonder whether the clothes really did make the man. That is, did I subtly change my behavior because of the clothes I was wearing? Did I come across as arrogant or distant because I was unconsciously “brandishing” my suit?

Get dressed at your own risk.

Letting it Hang Out

I have just witnessed a few things that have struck me as hubris. In this case, it’s the hubris of the moneyed class that enjoys a parasitic relationship with the corporate species.

Here’s an article (There Goes the Fig Leaf) by Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, noting that the VP of the American Petroleum Institute has announced a new initiative of direct campaign donations to candidates. The key line: "At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate." The fig leaf in question was the near-transparent fiction that campaign contributions were designed to influence voters, not the decisions of members of congress. It was supposed to be about promoting a particular candidate, not particular results. So much for that. The executives of API are now willing to advertise that they are engaged in deliberate, continual, strategic bribery.

The attack on unions in Wisconsin is another lost fig leaf. Governor Walker has been justifying his anti-union bill on the grounds that there is a 130 million dollar state budget deficit. This, directly after promoting and passing legislation giving corporations various tax breaks totaling 140 million dollars. Wisconsin municipalities also lose $700 million a year in special-interest property tax exemptions, money that has to be made up out of state funds. You do the math. Done?

Add to that the not-quite-secret surprise in the bill: A provision would allow the state to sell off its heating plants to private companies without competitive bidding or any of the usual oversight. The probable beneficiaries would be the Koch brothers, billionaire supporters of far-right causes and major donors to Governor Walker’s reelection campaign. Did Walker and his crew think that nobody would read through the bill? Or was it just that they didn’t care if somebody read that part?

Look back at my last post, which was a brief about ditching that 100 billion dollar spending cut in favor of actually enforcing tax laws on millionaires. Enforcing the law to get $100 billion, as opposed to cutting heating assistance and the like, is a no-brainer. The problem is that it would force those big campaign donors to obey the law.

The final straw is a petulant little act by House Republicans – the return of plastic tableware in the House cafeteria. When the Democrats were in control of the House they switched the disposable cups, plates, and other utensils to biodegradeable materials. Not a huge deal, but a nice gesture. The GOP, under Boehner, has changed the rules and gone back to Styrofoam and other plastics. Really? It is a miniature version of Reagan stripping a perfectly functional solar hot water system off the White House back in 1980 – a petty mix of spite and symbolism.

The key to success for the corporate conservatives is to distract the voting public from the structural changes they are making while selling them a bucketful of irrelevant emotional narrative. They also get a lot of mileage out of personal attacks. It works because humans are naturally focused on personalities, tribal membership, and emotional stories.

Now imagine a magician so contemptuous of his audience and so convinced of his own powers that he stops trying to distract them from his semi-hidden moves. Imagine that he goes so far as to narrate the truth of his tricks: “Now I’ll slide the coin down my sleeve, and presto, it seems as if it appeared out of nowhere. Now you applaud.” That is roughly where we are right now. The corporate conservatives are walking around with the fronts of their trousers open, saying “What are ya gonna do about it?”

My hope is that, as in ancient Greek drama, hubris is followed by nemesis. I have some small amount of hope, because deception is the conservative movement’s only real armor. Back in the time of the old Soviet Union, Soviet citizens all knew that the official line was a lie, but they kept quiet to avoid a train ride to Siberia. Our present system is much more sophisticated. We are allowed to debate vigorously in public – within corporate-defined boundaries, or else on subjects that don’t concern the economic powers. We have all the window dressing and symbolism appropriate to a functional democracy. However, if the general public gets corporate naughty bits waved in their faces too often they might actually notice that they’ve been distracted. Witness the uprising in Wisconsin. And hope that it spreads. And help it spread. 

$100 billion, found

This one is going to be short.

The GOP controlled house just passed a budget (soon to be voted down by the Senate, if not vetoed by the White House) that cuts $60 billion in spending. The cuts include programs such as heating assistance for the poor. These cuts are down from the intended $100 billion.

Here's the alternative: Give the IRS the funding and the special mandate to go after millionaires who are hiding their assets in secret foreign accounts. These millionaire tax cheats are costing us - you guessed it - roughly $100 billion a year in lost tax revenue. That's billion with a b.

It won't be a tax hike, just the prosecution of criminals and collection of taxes due under present law.

You're welcome. Glad to be of service, Mr. Boehner.

Mubarak Reaches Sell-by Date

Being an aging dictator is a high risk proposition. Just look at the numbers.

Augusto Pinochet ruled  Chile 17 years till he reached age 74.

Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Phillipines 21 years till age 69.

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi ruled Iran 26 years till age 60.

Francisco Franco ruled Spain 36 years till age 83. (And he’s still dead)

If you look at Wikipedia’s list of longest ruling non-hereditary leaders you’ll find  that Fidel Castro tops the list at 49 years, followed by Chiang Kai-shek and Kim Il Sung at 47 and 45 years, respectively. After that the list quickly drops into the 30s, with most presidents-for-life not making it past 35.

Hosni Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 30 years and he is 83. That by itself puts the odds against him.

Damn. You get to your golden years, the Swiss bank accounts are brimming, you’re ready to hand the kleptocracy over to Junior, and a bunch of tweeting, instant-messaging, street-protesting Tunisians goes and sets a bad example for your own poverty-stricken serfs.

In case you have been living in a cave or have been on your honeymoon, the streets of Cairo are full of protesters, Mubarak’s national party headquarters building has been set on fire, police have disappeared from most of Cairo, and Mubarak has just fired his entire cabinet and appointed a vice president for the first time in 30 years. The Obama administration is making non-committal noises about peace, love, and reform, which must strike Mubarak as a betrayal. There is even a rumor going around that the U.S. government has been aware for a year that things were about to go pear-shaped for our ally.

The capper is that the Egyptian army seems to be slipping from Mubarak’s grasp. The protesters have been cheering the army as their comrades, and the army, in turn, hasn’t been shooting at the protesters. I found a telling piece of raw footage online that shows a three-way confrontation between police, protesters and a trio of armored personnel carriers. When the police fire their shotguns over the heads of the protesters the armored vehicles form a cordon between the two groups. Soldiers then gently herd the protesters behind the vehicles, apparently to protect them. There was a report of a tank officer telling the crowds that the army’s job is to protect Egypt and Egyptians, not a particular administration. That kind of behavior should put a twist in Mubarak’s guts. Mubarak and most of his ministers came from the army, and have been maintained by army support for the past three decades.

The question now is whether the upper level military officers are both able and willing to turn this around. I’m doubtful on both counts. The rank and file seem too chummy with the protestors. I’ll bet that Mubarak gets the word from the brass inside of a week, two at most. The military leadership will then say “We meant to do that all along” and see what they can salvage with a new government.

This is significant for several reasons. With Mubarak gone, Egypt is in play in terms of both government and allies. Will it be secular or theocratic? Probably secular, because that is what Egyptians are used to, but it’s not 100% certain. What is certain is that Egypt’s position towards Israel and the U.S. will shift. The average person in the streets of Cairo does not love Israel, despite long standing policy. As usual, the U.S. supported the cooperative dictator to the end. This will not endear us to the new government. And then there is the fact of an incident becoming a trend. First Tunisia, then Egypt, then perhaps Yemen? Ali Abdullah Saleh is 65 and has ruled Yemen for 32 years. He is seeing some Tunisia-inspired protests as well. King Abdullah of Jordan is responding to protests (inspired by Egypt) by subsidizing basic commodities and giving pay raises to the army and civil servants. There again, Israel must be getting nervous. Jordan borders Israel and is the only country in the region aside from Egypt that has normal relations with them. Algeria’s military-appointed government is seeing unrest, and if that succeeds we’ll be seeing another Islamic state.

Tunisia has done it and Egypt is probable. Yemeni’s are dirt poor and fed up, without much to lose at the moment. The protests in Jordan and Algeria are small so far, but when Mubarak goes they could get inspired. At the very least we are going to see some frantic appeasement by nervous Middle Eastern governments. I’ll be interested to see how far this will go.

Shootings

Once, back in my college days, I found a sheet of paper on the doorstep of my apartment. It was a photocopy of a hand written document, the lines of childish print sloping down and to the right. The author accused his neighbors (on both sides) of being CIA agents, and of disturbing his sleep and thoughts by beaming lasers at his head. He also had some complaints about voodoo, demonic possession, and the Catholic Church.  On the back side of the sheet he had an account of the numbers of these documents he had distributed, with succeeding totals crossed out and replaced. I think the last number was 35,000.

We can all agree that what this unfortunate individual needed was some serious mental health intervention. And yet, his outlet for his illness was essentially harmless.

Mass shootings have become an unsurprising social phenomenon over the past 20 years. The concept of a disturbed, angry individual either already owning or going out and buying a firearm and spraying a crowd of people with bullets is no longer novel to us. The recent shootings in Tucson have been followed in the past few days by an attack on a Detroit police station and a gun battle in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Port Orchard, Washington. This kind of incident has become a low level epidemic.

While the annual death toll due to multiple-victim shootings is relatively small compared to that of car accidents, it has a much more corrosive effect on society. Given the horror it evokes and the media coverage it gets it is a kind of unorganized terrorism. It degrades the mutual trust that is necessary for a functional society, strengthens the hand of the security-industrial complex, and reinforces the paranoia of those already tending in that direction. I’m going to look at it as I have looked at terrorism, through the old criminal justice formula of proving a murder: Means, Motive, and Opportunity.

I’ll dispense with opportunity first. We live in an open society. We should have access, within reason, to our political leaders and to each other. None of us wants to live in a locked down world. There will always be opportunity.

Here’s what I wrote about the means back in 2008, in an essay called “Ducks in a Row.”

Human society is, of course, imperfect. People get drunk, get angry, get abused, get addicted, and go temporarily or permanently insane. People lash out, and they lash out with whatever comes to hand. Some people go into a state of merciless cold anger and plan their killings. When they do so, they choose the most effective weapon they can obtain.

Whatever your interpretation of the second amendment to the constitution, you have to admit that our country is awash in firearms. One way or another, they are remarkably easy to obtain, especially for those of us with no felony convictions. There are over 200 million firearms in the United States, and firearms of even moderate quality tend to last decades, so at least this supply will be around for generations. Half the households in our country contain firearms. You may applaud or deplore this ease of access, but accept this consequence:

Mass shootings on campuses will keep happening. Mass shootings at workplaces will keep happening. Shootings of all kinds will keep happening.

They will keep happening even if you lock doors, hire armed guards, stick a pistol in every pocket, run stricter background checks for mental instability, or whatever policy you can dream up. A certain small percentage of the population will choose to injure their fellow human beings, and they will use the tools at hand. They will use their human ingenuity, their obsessive persistence, and the freedoms of an open society to gain access to firearms and access to their intended victims. We are up to our knees in blued steel. We have created a shooting gallery and we are the little cartoonish duck targets going back and forth. We are going back and forth to work, to classes, to restaurants, stores, and friend's houses, a little bullseye painted on each of us.

I do think that we can do a better (if not perfect) job of keeping firearms out of the hands of mentally unstable people such as Jared Loughner, the Tucson shooter. I’d assume that a person who was officially judged too mentally ill to safely attend community college would be too mentally ill to buy a Glock 19 and some 33-round magazines. The background check database for firearms purchases should include information about that kind of restraining order. For that matter, I’d like private individuals to have a limited access to that database. If I were to sell a firearm privately, I’d like to be able to call a number and say, “I’ve got John Smith, Vermont driver’s license number such-and-so in front of me. Is there any reason I shouldn’t sell him a gun?” A yes/no answer would suffice, and might prevent the next Jared Loughner from shooting 20 people.

As usual, I find the most compelling ideas in the subject of motivation. I found an interview with Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, on the subject of mass shooters. Dr. Welner differentiated between the workplace shooter, who over-identifies with his work and feels emasculated and hopeless after being fired, and a community shooter, who is more likely to be psychotic and paranoid, the shooting sparked by even a minor incident.

What carries across Dr. Welner’s (and other) descriptions of these killers are the concepts of grievance, humiliation, alienation, and hopelessness. The shooters feel (rightly or wrongly) that they have been injured, and that their dignity has been impaired. They have lost emotional connection with the people around them. Perhaps most importantly, they feel (again, rightly or wrongly) that they have no access to a just process that will solve their problems. The prospect of due process is what keeps people from each other’s throats.

One of our problems is that we live in a society where a large portion of the population feels thwarted. They work hard and can’t seem to get ahead, although this is promised by our national myth of meritocracy. Given our corporate-friendly labor laws they feel like serfs at work. They live in communities that aren’t communities in the old sense of a shared set of values and an idea of mutual responsibility. That old-style community teaches empathy and the idea of mutual sacrifice.

Those concepts of mutual sacrifice and empathy are important. It means that we each give up something to live in a functional society. It means that we see that those who disagree with us aren’t aberrations, but products of an upbringing and a set of experiences different from our own, but related to our own. Those concepts are missing in the eliminationist rhetoric being promulgated by many conservative commentators, and also in the mindset of aggrieved shooters.

The concept of due process is also important. The most dangerous person is the person without hope. Dr. Welner points out that community mass shooters don’t plan past the point at which they begin shooting. They have no hope of survival, no interest in it.

The idea and actuality that each of us can obtain justice from our government and our society is what keeps us engaged. We need to focus on both the actuality and the perception of justice. Reform of the judicial process is an ongoing necessity, as is a reform of our labor laws in favor of the ordinary worker. As this actual reform goes on, we need to educate people about the opportunities for obtaining justice and the realities of justice. The more people know about legitimate means the less they will stray towards violence. Also, people need to understand more about the process of law. Most people’s idea of legal process comes from those neatly wrapped crime dramas on TV. Life doesn’t work out that way. The hero (you) doesn’t always win.

I remember asking my father, a retired judge, about whether he was worried when he had a murderer in his courtroom. His answer was no, that these people had done their killing. Ex-husbands in contested divorces, however, were another matter. These were guys who had come to the end of due process and hadn’t gotten what they wanted.

This brings me back to the eliminationist rhetoric. The concept being promoted is, “If we don’t get everything we want, then the process is illegitimate and we get to discard it.”

One last point about mass shooters: They are almost exclusively men, white, and working class to middle class. Dr. Welner directly addresses the concept of masculinity:

Q:Is that why we don't see female mass killers?

Welner: Absolutely. There is nothing in our society that would elevate a woman's identity or her femininity through her ability to destroy. This truth reinforces my opinion of how important it is for us as a society to repudiate the connection between destruction and masculinity in order to develop the values we want our young people to carry with them even in times of emptiness and despair.

A good thought, especially in a society that glorifies our military might and fetishizes firearms. However, a person’s emotional structure, like nature, abhors a vacuum. What do we put in there in place of destruction?

Something that I have seen over the past few decades is the loss of the heroic nature of work. Employment in small farming has shrunk, and we have exported the production of real, physical things to Asia. It used to be that much of our workforce either brought crops from the earth or built things. However difficult the work, whatever injustices were prevalent in the workplace, a worker could point to something physical at the end of the day. A man could define himself as part of a community of builders. If masculinity is to be culturally defined by something, at least it should be defined by creating rather than destroying. Sadly, for both our economy and our zeitgeist, that has been mostly taken from us.