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Why did I quit my job now, during this recession?
I have a B.S. in Applied Physics from UC Davis with good research credentials. I decided to forego graduate education, which was a misstep that I will likely correct in the future. The job market stinks, and after unsuccessful attempts to even find something I was even qualified for and a series of unsuccessful interviews, I landed a high-tech sales job.
The product was printed circuit boards, those green Sim-City look-alikes populating all of your electronic devices. Naturally, I was concerned about a few things when I took the job, but my interviewer did her best to assuage my doubts.
But then…
Don’t give me my salary, tell me about my pay on a per-hour basis assuming a standard forty-hour workweek and then have me sign a document on the first day informing me to expect fifty hours per week. That is a twenty-five percent pay decrease.
Two people quit during the first week. Your hiring decisions were poor. But of course, you expected people to quit during the first week, which is why you hired more than you needed.
What do you do when the long-promised long list of ‘warm leads’ is actually a list of people who registered on our website ten years ago and have since disappeared? Cold call them! No amount of side-stepping was able to convince any of my teammates that we were not telemarketers for engineers.
Speaking of telemarketing, everyone knows the term ‘call-center’. When you are trying as hard as possible as a manager to convince your team of telemarketers that they are not in fact telemarketers, take care not to refer to their workspace as the ‘call-center’, even if it is just an internal term.
Speaking of telemarketing, don’t deride the ideas of scripts and then ask us to write our own scripts.
If you want to teach me to sell, do not make me feel like a manipulator. Do not use words like ‘rapport’ to mean ‘friends who buy my wares’; do not make me feel like the prowler at the bar looking for an evening’s fuck armed with false pretense and friendly idle chatter about the local weather report.
Don’t bash other businesses for borderline unethical practices when your own principles are nothing to envy. When I am learning of new DBAs on a daily basis and shocking the management by my keen research abilities to type a few words in Google and find my answers something is amiss.
Do not hide the fact that you have a false competitor in a building next door that offers identical services for slightly lower prices.
Do not hide the fact that you have several operations throughout the country and internationally that operate under the front of independent manufacturing houses when they really just send all their work to us.
Do not call brokers, also known as middlemen, the ’sluts of the industry’ and then reveal that we in fact own a few brokerage houses in a different part of the country.
Do not bash shops that work with overseas vendors when the reality is that you in fact offer overseas pricing to the cheapest customers. By the way, how much of your ‘in-house’ work is actually manufactured across the ocean?
Speaking of out-sourcing, don’t teach us to sell ‘in-house processes’ that we in fact out-source. Don’t take me to the assembly shop and not address the haunted gloom that falls over the group when a factory full of young Vietnamese women armed with soldering guns sit silently in what seems to be a local sweatshop. Don’t tell us it is in fact the smallest one we use and brag about the size of the other two.
Do not hide the fact that your president is a ruthless person hated by many in the industry. Your non-sales employees filled me in on the fact. Do not hide that frivolous lawsuit filed against a new business headed by a former employee a couple years back. Even if you were right in filing it, it feels like justice from the divine that you lost.
Don’t pump me full of half-truths about integrity and let me hear other employees and managers praising the heavens for the success of their lies.
Today is the day – I will be married by 6 PM this evening. It is surreal to think that this is happening within twenty-four hours. It was three weeks ago that I realized that the wedding was in three weeks. From six months ago until then I upheld my belief that it was in six months. Now the planning is almost through – it never ends until we drive away from the reception! After the wedding, the honeymoon, and finally the marital bliss should start setting in soon.
Oh, and yes, I did manage to sneak some Barth into the wedding. On the program I have printed:
‘Love does not question; it gives an answer. Love does not think; it knows. Love does not hesitate; it acts. Love does not fall into raptures; it is ready to undertake responsibilities. Love puts behind it all the Ifs and Buts, all the conditions, reservations, obscurities and uncertainties that may arise between a man and a woman. Love is not only affinity and attraction; it is union. Love makes these two persons indispensable to each other. Love compels them to be with each other’. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4
Wish us luck! I’ll write in a week. Cheers.
A professor of mine made the controversial remark that our reading is what defines us as human beings. Whether or not I agree with the sentiment, I realized that something what drastically absent from my intellectual growth about two years ago and have since been reading voraciously. It started out with some more popular books on philosophy and religion and quickly has become a heavier habit (perhaps to the point of a vice!). Regardless, I thought, for all of my interested readers, that I should go ahead and post my reading list in the form of a widget in my “Books” page.
“A new poll released Thursday (11 September 2008) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.
“The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified.
“But when asked if they agree that “the U.S. government should not use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers,” the percentage who said torture was rarely or never justified rose to 52 percent.” (Source)
Have we forgotten the crucified God?
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine continues with a brief history of the development of modern “special interrogation techniques.” I will provide a few quotes and allow the reader to think about them for herself.
“‘There is not online a loss of the space-time image but the loss of all feeling that it should be present. During this stage the patient may show a variety of other phenomena, such as loss of a second language or all knowledge of his marital status. In more advanced forms, he may be unable to walk without support, to feed himself, and he may show double incontinence.’” (38, quote from a 1962 paper by Dr. Ewen Cameron describing the state to which patients were reduced under his treatment)
“Dr. Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill University … paid a group of sixty-three McGill students $20 a day to be isolated in a room wearing dark goggles, headphones playing white noise and cardboard tubes covering their arms and hands so as to interfere with their sense of touch…. To see whether this deprivation made them more susceptible to ‘brainwashing,’ Hebb then began playing recordings of voices talking about the existence of ghosts or the dishonesty of science-ideas the students had said they found objectionable before the experiment began….Indeed several developed an interest in the occult that lasted weeks after the experiment had come to an end.” (41)
“Cameron used the [CIA] grant money [funded from 1957 until 1961] to convert the old horse stables behind the hospital into isolation boxes. He also elaborately renovated the basement so that it contained a room he called the Isolation Chamber. He soundproofed the room, piped in white noise, turned off the lights and put dark goggles and ‘rubber eardrums’ on each patient, as well as cardboard tubing on the hands and arms … Cameron kept his patients in for weeks, with one of them trapped in the isolation box for thirty-five days.” (43)
“Cameron reported that ’some patients have been treated up to 65 days of continuous sleep’” (43)
“Cameron gave one group of patients small doses of the drug Curare, which induces paralysis…” (43)
“Florencio Caballero, an interrogator with Honduras’s notoriously brutal Battalion 3-16, told [The New York Times] that … ‘They taught us psychological methods-to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.’ There was one technique he failed to mention: electroshock.” (46)
“‘Inés Murillo, a twenty-four-year-old prisoner who was interrogated by Caballero … told the Times that she was electrocuted so many times that she ’screamed and fell down from the shock. The screams just escape you,” she said. “I smelled smoke and realized I was burning from the singes of the shocks. They said they would torture me until I went mad. I didn’t believe them. But then they spread my legs and stuck the wires on my genitals.’ Murillo also added that there was someone else in the room: an American passing questions to her interrogators whom the others called ‘Mr. Mike.’ … The CIA’s deputy director, Richard Stolz, confirmed that ‘Caballero did indeed attend a CIA human resources exploitation or interrogation course.’” (46)
“Dianna Ortiz, and American nun who was abducted and jailed in Guatemala in 1989, has tetified that the men who raped and burned her with cigarettes deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent, whom they referred to as their ‘boss.’ Jennifer Harbury, whose husband was tortured and killed by a Guatemalan officer on the CIA payroll, has documented many of these cases in her important book, Truth, Torture and the American Way.’” (50)
“Donald Rumsfeld, empowered by George W. Bush, decreed that prisoners captured in Afghanistan were not covered by the Geneva Conventions because they were ‘enemy combatants,’ not POW’s, a view confirmed by the White House legal counsel at the time, Alberto Gonzales.” (52)
“One of the first people to come face-to-face with the new order was the U.S. citizen and former gang member José Padilla. Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Rather than being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all rights…. Padilla says he was injected with a drug he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.” (53)
“Many languish in Guantánamo. Mamdouh Habib, an Australian who was incacerated there, has said that ‘Guantanamo Bay is an experiment … and what they experiment in is brainwashing.’ … When first detained, prisoners are … left in isolation cells for months, taken out only to have their senses bombarded with barking dogs, strobe lights and endless tape loops of babies crying, music blaring and cats meowing.” (54)
“One released prisoner, a British citizen, told his lawyers that there is now an entire section of the prison, Delta Block, reserved for ‘at least fifty’ detainees who are in permanently delusional states.” (54)
“The situation worsened markedly in January 2007, when 165 prisoners were moved into a new wing of the prison, known as Camp Six, where the steel isolation cells allowed for no human contact.” (54)
“The Italian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was kidnapped off the streets of Milan by a group of CIA agents and Italian secret police. ‘I didn’t understand anything about what was going on,’ he later wrote. ‘They began to punch me in the stomach and all over my body. They wrapped my entire head and face with wide tape, and cut holes over my nose and face so I could breathe’. … According to the Washington Post account, he was ’strapped to an iron rack nicknamed “the bride” and zapped with electric stun guns’ as well as ‘tied to a wet mattress on the floor. While one interrogator sat on a wooden chair perched on the prisoner’s shoulders, another interrogator would flip a switch, sending jolts of electricity into the mattress coils.’ He also had electroshock applied to his testicles, according to to Amnesty International.” (55)
“Jumah al-Dossari, a Guantanamo prisoner who has tried to commit suicide more than a dozen times, gave written testimony to his lawyer that while he was in U.S. custody in Kandahar, ‘the investigator brought a small device like a mobile phone but it was an electric shock device. He started shocking my face, my back, my limbs and my genitals.’” (55)
The opening of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine describes the plight of Louisiana residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans area was considered a “blank slate” for entrepreneurs; Milton Friedman’s last campaign before his death one year later was to convert nearly all of the public schools in the New Orleans area to private charter schools and provide state subsidized educational vouchers to parents to enroll their children in the private school of their choice.
Within nineteen months of the disaster that the citizens have still not fully recovered from, the one-hundred twenty-three previously existing public schools decreased to just four while the number of charter school went from seven to thirty-one. The teachers union contract was shredded, the union disbanded, and forty-seven hundred (4700) teachers were fired, some rehired but most not.
What did the American Enterprise Institute say in response?
“Hurricane Katrina accomplished in a day … what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying.”
And so let them be caught in the schemes they have devised, says the Psalmist.
Psalm 10
Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor—
let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.
For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart,
those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord.
In the pride of their countenance the wicked say, ‘God will not seek it out’;
all their thoughts are, ‘There is no God.’
Their ways prosper at all times;
your judgements are on high, out of their sight;
as for their foes, they scoff at them.
They think in their heart, ‘We shall not be moved;
throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity.’
Their mouths are filled with cursing and deceit and oppression;
under their tongues are mischief and iniquity.
They sit in ambush in the villages;
in hiding-places they murder the innocent.
Their eyes stealthily watch for the helpless;
they lurk in secret like a lion in its covert;
they lurk that they may seize the poor;
they seize the poor and drag them off in their net.
They stoop, they crouch,
and the helpless fall by their might.
They think in their heart, ‘God has forgotten,
he has hidden his face, he will never see it.’
Rise up, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand;
do not forget the oppressed.
Why do the wicked renounce God,
and say in their hearts, ‘You will not call us to account’?
But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief,
that you may take it into your hands;
the helpless commit themselves to you;
you have been the helper of the orphan.
Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers;
seek out their wickedness until you find none.
The Lord is king for ever and ever;
the nations shall perish from his land.
O Lord, you will hear the desire of the meek;
you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear
to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed,
so that those from earth may strike terror no more.
Now in case some of you are still reading Slavoj Zizek’s latest tome In Defense of Lost Causes, I will just warn you that this post has lots of bits from the last chapter, so I might ruin the dramatic conclusion for you. The final chapter, Unbehagen in der Natur, is (to my naïve sensibilities) a departure for Zizek in the sense that he starts moving the reader towards a concrete answer to the question he poses at the beginning of this section: “What is to be done?”
“Although individual acts can, in a direct short-circuit of levels, affect the “higher”-level social constellation, the way they affect it is unpredictable. The constellation is properly frustrating: although we (individual or collective agents) know that it all depends on us, we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts-we are not impotent, but, quite the contrary, omnipotent, without being able to determine the scope of our powers.” (453)
Omnipotent? One might wonder what he means by this. Now, the initiated reader knows that Zizek uses the Hegelian dialectic, I might add that I am not quite fully initiated but fairly intrigued, to motivate his critique of ideology. Common knowledge says, “You are only human, you make mistakes, no one is perfect, you can’t do anything about it.” In other words, humans are more or less impotent to act. The Hegelian dialectic requires the reversal of this “thesis” into its “antithesis,” which is precisely what Zizek does here.
Common knowledge is properly turned on its head: Is it not possible that a single person could have the capacity to change the course of history forever, that a single decision could lead to a seemingly infinite change? The Cuban missile crisis is an example of exactly this in his argument. He records that the Russian submarine was in possession of a nuclear weapon and if three of the commanding officers on the ship could agree to launch it it would be done. Two agreed, one did not. The course of history at that point in time was changed by a single man. Who could imagine the consequences had all three said yes? Perhaps the end of large Western populations. In my reading, this is the sort of omnipotence, or all encompassing power, that humanity is capable of.
Zizek spends the final portions chapter of this book speculating on the looming ecological catastrophe. Here we see that his discussion of human in/action can become embedded in concrete terms:
“Take global warming, as already noted: with all the data regarding its nature, the problem is not the uncertainty about facts (as those who caution us against panic claim), but our inability to believe that it can really happen: look through the window, the green grass and blue sky are still there, life carries on, nature follows its rhythm.” (454)
So what then should be done? Zizek is not known for his positive political contributions, but here he notes that “either we take this threat seriously and decide today to do things which, if the catastrophe does not occur, will appear ridiculous, or we do nothing and lose everything in the case of a catastrophe” (456). And what is the social landscape we must navigate?
The properly political thing that happens in our global capitalist “flat earth” runs between nothing and moderate change. One can buy carbon offsets so as to allow for a continued wasteful and polluting life, we can buy food from Whole Foods (Zizek notes that this corporation has several anti-union measures in place), drive hybrid cars, and so forth; each solution surrounds the transfer of capital. One can become quite rich from this probable catastrophe and appear to be doing their part to save the world, but we must always ask what the systemic troubles were that led us to such a place. This moderate change is for what Zizek reserves his harshest scorn, noting that there is a third option between doing nothing and doing something risky: “the worst choice being that of taking a middle position, taking a limited number of measures- in which case, we fail whatever should happen (that is to say, there is no middle ground when it comes to an ecological catastrophe: either it will happen or it won’t)” (456).
Now, I will not quote him directly here, for if do I will ruin the conclusion of this chapter (and therefore the book). Zizek proposes a solution to the ecological crisis that requires four things: (1) strict egalitarian justice in the sense that no one gets away with more while placing the blame on the developing world while the largest polluters are all well developed, (2) terror for those who break the rules, in the sense of severe limitations of freedoms including technological control of lawbreakers, (3) voluntarism, or large scale collective decisions (see his discussion of the “violence of subtraction”), and (4) trust in the people so that the people will see these revolutionary measures as their own and be will to both support and enforce them, including the reactivation of the so-called “informer” that will blow the whistle on practices not in compliance with these radical measures. In this sense, the collective can oppose the wild fluctuations that are obvious in the organic movement of capitalism- this is a slow moving but strictly radical society. In my reading, it seems like Zizek is suggesting that the solution to humanity’s blind omnipotence is a collective return to impotence.
How could these things be fleshed out? It is hard for someone as inexperienced as I am to say, but I am hoping we will have more positive engagement from Zizek in his upcoming works. (To translate, I am too nervous that I have already totally misunderstood this section of the book, and I might even propose something completely opposed and thus incur wrath from any other bloggers reading along… are there any of you out there?)
My old blog is dead. It was filled with fashionably/embarassingly obscure prose designed to awe people into quoting me and reading my blog. I had a Kierkegaard quote in the corner about subjectivizing my strange religious experiences that I happily allowed to bother me for so long. Hopefully anyone (and I doubt there are any) subscribed to my feed will find the new blog title changing automatically.
I spent my summer in a place I will write about in a future post when I get around to it and I have learned a few important things about my life over the last few months. I will try and find the time to discuss some interesting and humorous bits and just write in a hopefully straightforward manner about my life and limited experiences. Let me know if I am being opaque. I do a lot of reading in my free time, so when I find something provocative I will post reflections or just replicate short quotes if I think they do a proper job explaining themselves or provoking discussion.
To paraphrase a bit of reading from Slavoj Zizek’s “In Defense of Lost Causes”, a true repetition does not seek to replicate the past in its entirety; on the contrary, it attempts to pick up the past at the points of failure and try again, to further exploit these unexploited avenues (in Zizek’s case, to fully exhaust the emancipatory potential of a given cause). Or to quote Samuel Beckett, once again as I lift from Zizek: “Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.”
