WILLING SERFS OF AMERICA

WILLING SERFS OF AMERICA
"Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War" by Joe Bageant (2007)

In "Deer Hunting With Jesus", Joe Bageant takes on the great question American politics: why do the white working poor America vote Republican, given that the party demonstrably works against their self-interest? And who better to answer that question than Bageant himself, a son of the working class who returns to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia in middle age.
"Deer Hunting" is a series of essays about working-class life - a life Bageant reveals to be in crisis. In the 1960s, he writes, a man could walk into the Rubbermaid factory in town, earn $1.65 an hour full-time, and comfortably support himself and his family. In 2007, his old friend was still working at the factory, but struggling to make ends meet while pulling overtime. Company-funded health insurance was gone; the tidy hospital that gave basic medical services to the community had largely been converted to an old folk's home, while those people that were sick had to eke out their Medicare benefits to get service from a hospital in the next town. Meanwhile many are being crushed by the debt on their subprime mortgages and car loans. In short, the dignity of labour has been torn away. Where once a man could do unskilled or semi-skilled labour and live decently on it, or at least know that his children would enjoy a better life, now men are struggling to stay solvent, destroying their health with long hours while competing with each other for overtime. Marx would have recognized it as the atomized proletariat.
Bageant argues that there is a simmering class war: the workers are silently enraged at their poverty, their constant economic oppression. The Republican party has simply taken advantage of this rage (and also stoked it not a little) by presenting it with a target: the champagne-sniffing, fine-art-appreciating, Volvo-driving "liberal elites" who, along with their improbable stooges the unions, are the reason the poor remain poor, taxing the working man and giving the money to homosexual-run art galleries and crack whores in the cities. By contrast, the Republicans are ordinary folk just like them. The shots of George W. Bush clearing away brush in his ranch resonated greatly in Winchester, especially when contrasted to shots of John Kerry windsurfing.
The eight essays in the book are hit-and-miss. American Serfs and "Republicans by Default" which examine working-class rage and its co-opting by Republicans are (I think, at least) the best. "The Deep-Fried, Double-Wide Lifestyle" and An Authorized Place to Die, discussing commercialism-as-solace and the health care system, also make for interesting reads. "Valley of the Gun" starts out with a tantalizing discussion of working-class gun culture and then veers into a predictable defence of Second Amendment rights. "The Ballad of Lynndie England", about the villain of the Abu Ghraib prison, somehow manages to paint her, unconvincingly, as a victim. (In fact, "The Ballad" could have been taken much further if it had become a fuller discussion of the role of women in the working-class crisis. The book is all about rage, remember, and rage is almost entirely the monopoly of men). Despite the ups and downs, the book is a quick and easy, not to mention illuminating, read, and I recommend it to all liberal elites.
We live in interesting times. I wonder what will happen now that housing bubble has well and truly burst, now that many Republicans, finally disgusted with its liberal-baiting tactics, seem to be abandoning their party, now that a liberal, elite black man with tremendous charisma is going, in person, to the white working class to promise them change. Somehow I do not think much change will take place - the poor will remain poor, and will be forgotten - and their rage will simmer on.

By

Jan De Bakker

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

TIKKUN O'LAM IN MANHATTAN
"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist"

What is it about romances that draws us back to movie theatres over and over again? I mean, it's the same story every time, isn't it? My literature humanities instructor in undergrad would probably have said that it is an expression of the Universal Human Experience. Whatever. I just like seeing people in love with each other*.
"Nick and Norah" is one such romance. Michael Cera as Nick plays essentially the same character as he did in "Juno": an awkward, kind and irrepressably geeky high school senior. Norah (Kat Dennings) is a moody, "stone-cold Jap" stuggling to come out from the shadow of her rich father. Both are huge music geeks in tune with the underground hipster scene. The movie takes place over a single night in Manhattan, as Nick and Norah, along with a motley assortment of friends, try to find the secret location of a surprise concert to be given by "Where's Fluffy". Hints to the concert's venue are only given by rabbits drawn in improbable places, and indeed as the group of teenagers meet, disperse, and meet again in various misadventures in the nighttime world of Manhattan, it is in fact as if they have gone through the looking glass. In the course of this midsummer night, Nick and Norah fall in love, fall out of love, and fall back into love in the inevitable sonata of the love story. And through it all, of course, there's a great and nearly constant soundtrack. Now I am not myself a huge music geek in touch with the underground hipster scene, so don't recognize the songs or the bands, but I definitely appreciated the music.
"Nick and Norah" is really a reflection of American Graffiti. Both are movies about a group of teenagers spending a night on the town and coming of age in twelve hours. For Nick and Norah, this happens in the hipster music scene in New York, while American Graffiti takes place in the car-racing scene in Modesto, California. But there is a fundamental difference. American Graffiti is about what those who lived in the Swinging Seventies would be pleased to call "self-realization": each of the characters in the movie come of age, but they do so individually, as separate entities. The entire movie takes place on the night before college begins, and while they all grow up overnight, they also know that they must part ways in the morning and seek their own way as adults. "Nick and Norah" by contrast is all about coming together: the main characters do so, of course, but so does everyone who, after patient searching and red herrings, is finally unified by the ethereal music of Fluffy. And while American Graffiti takes place on the Anytown, California strip, Nick and Norah pointedly takes place in Manhattan, devoting several shots to its cityscape and celebrating it as the great crossroads.
Near the end of the film Norah says that her favourite part of Jewish philosophy is Tikkun O'lam, the "repair of the world", because it brings broken pieces of this world back together again. And that's what this movie is all about. It's a charming morality tale in which the self-centred, those who are only in it for the money or the sex, are cast into the outer darkness, while the just seek, lose their way, persevere, and finally find each other and the concert at the end of the night.

*except on public transportation.

by

Jan de Bakker

Abba is the Greatest Band in the Entire Universe, Ever

What I liked the most about "Mamma Mia" is its deft characterizations and the way in which the score draws from a wide palette of emotions to evoke a subtext for each scene....Ha ha, just kidding. The plot is transparent, character development is pretty much nonexistent and the movie is all about the singing and dancing. Which is what's so great about it.

"Mamma Mia," based on the stage play of the same name, is basically a giant revue of Abba songs. The plot centers around Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who is getting married at her mother's hole-in-the-wall hotel on a Greek island. The problem: she wants to be given away by her father, but she doesn't know who her father is. It turns out she was conceived in a one-night stand sometime in the swinging days of 1988 (hey, I'm only following the movie's chronology) and there are no less than three possible fathers: Stellan Starsgard, Pierce Brosnan, and Harry Firth. Undaunted, Sophie invites all three to the wedding. Hilarity ensues, and so does music, as the characters sing (and generally also dance) an Abba number in each scene.

The musical numbers were all good, and several were great. Meryl Streep (as Sophie's mom Donna) writhing in sexual frustration on a rooftop while singing "Mamma Mia" is hilarious. So is the sight of a singing, dancing chorus of men clad in swimsuits and flippers. Some of the actors, ahem, sing better than others, and some of the dance numbers were more crisply performed than others, but nobody seemed to mind, on the screen or in the theatre. The acting is exactly what the movie needed: hammy, with a lot of slapstick.

The best aspect of the movie was definitely the chemistry the actors seemed to have with each other. Everybody looked like they were having fun, and Meryl Streep was having the most fun of them all. So even though the plot isn't much and some of the singing and dancing isn't exactly spot-on, I was carried away by the sheer ebullience coming off the screen. It's a bunch of people doing Abba songs. What's not to like?
REVIEW BY JAN DE BAKKER