The world according to the blue collar migrant

The words "migrant" and "workers" evoke in our minds, berry pickers and meat packers who cross America's south western borders by legal or illegal means, to make seasonal living in minimum wage conditions.

However, when we use "blue collar" and "migrant worker" together, we come up with a near-empty canvas, because in the history of American labor, blue collar workers have typically been members of a settled community of residents, a local, stable pool of high-school graduates, from whom a Ford, GM or 3M type corporations draw to employ in their factories.

But in a economy that has been affected by globalization, many blue collar workers find themselves migrating from their home states to find jobs elsewhere, to another state, where they live like migrants, i.e. as overnighters with no stable housing or communities available to provide a supportive structure.

Blue collar migrant workers are the subject matter of a new riveting film called The Overnighters. It's a Fast Food Nation gone native.

The overnighters in this case are workers who flock to North Dakota which has been experiencing an oil boom for the last few years, if only because oil is fossil fuel and is not a fungible goods. But as news report after news report has documented, the oil-boon is proving to be a short and long term curse for North Dakota. 

Workers have migrated from all over the country to earn a livelihood and they have been single males with broken families, very little education and some, appallingly, have criminal backgrounds. Furthermore, cities in North Dakota have not planned ahead of time to provide secure housing for the migrant workers, and as the film tells us, many of them end up experiencing homelessness.

The central character of The Overnighters is a local padre who provides shelter to the migrants and earn the locals' displeasure in the process.

Capital in the 19th century

I had a hunch that slavery was central to the United States' economic development in the early days of capitalism, and that the U.S. became a powerful economic force in the world because so much was produced--cotton and tobacco--on the back of free labor.

We can't imagine the idea of free labor anymore, neither can we imagine the conception of a fellow human as property owned by another as just another institutionalized way of being.

Edward Baptist's new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, reminds American readers of the unpleasant truth of the history of the rise of American capitalism.

"The idea", writes Baptist, a native of North Carolina, a state whose past is rife with the brutality of the plantation economy, "that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the U.S. powerful and rich is not an idea that people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

Regarding the general perception that African Americans passively accepted their status as slaves and didn't actively resist the condition of enslavement, Baptist says:

Historians have spent a lot of time talking about whether African Americans resisted. Resistance acquires a different look in forced migrations, where survival is a kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to write stories about themselves to say: This is crime.

O Shakespeare! My Shakespeare!

Just as Karl Marx's political philosophy has been adapted by diverse nations across the world, and Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice has been translated into innumerable languages (including Oriya, a language spoken in the East Coast of India), so there is hardly a language into which Shakespeare's plays hasn't been wrought.

Shakespeare has been embraced by Americans, not simply because America was a British colony once upon a time, but also because the plays of Shakespeare lends themselves to adaptation as there is an unsurpassable universality in their kernel. A Shakespearean contemporary had said that Shakespeare is "nature itself."

James Shapiro has edited an anthology of essays on Shakespeare by famous Americans from all fields, including politics and sports, and Shakespeare in America is said to be a terrific read.

I was struck by Bill Clinton's name as the provider of the volume's foreword. Maybe he consorted with the Merry Wives of Windsor!

The only just war (in my eyes)

Is the war on poverty.

America celebrates the 50th anniversary of what I consider to be its one and only just war--the war on poverty. One of the many points of inception of America's war on poverty was the passing of the food stamp act in 1964.

Food stamps, along with Medicaid and Head Start, among others, were foremost among the anti-poverty programs primarily conceptualized during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

The first recipients of the food stamps program were residents of McDowell County, the poorest county in West Virginia. 

LBJ took a poverty tour of West Virginia in 1964 and was appalled to see first hand the desolation of the Appalachian region.

The Times has an interesting look at McDowell County fifty years later.

Blaming Mexicans mex (me) sic

Something in this particular narrative of heroin overdose-related deaths in American small towns (and I believe there is a narrative pattern), disturbed me.

The story presents a black and white picture of an innocent (the catch word is "unsuspecting") small, "tightly-knit" community in, all white and all cute, invaded by the dark forces of evil, embodied by Mexican drug dealers, who easily cross borders and through an informal global supply chain, and sell poison to little children at prices below the market rate (cheap).

The borderlessness, the easy access to outsiders, the contact between evil marauders and innocent white cherubs, puts a dampener on globalization. A fundamental tenet of globalization is the opening up of borders, literally and metaphorically and even metaphysically. But, as stories like these, evidence, with goods and capital, bad things too will flow as a result of the world gradually but surely integrates. 

When globalization benefits a community, then the credit goes to it and by default almost to the American faith in the beauty of the free-market economy. However, when globalization hurts a community, especially an American community, then the blame falls, not on the impersonal forces of globalization, but on the Mexico's, the China's and the Africa's. Many of the disease-producing agents are said to arrive because of more facile contact with Africa. The fish we consume, injects mercury into our blood stream because they come from China's highly polluted rivers. 

When American lives are destabilized by globalization, then globalization remains not so impersonal, but acquires specific names, faces and identities, calculated to produce, it seems the kind of xenophobia that we saw in the reaction to the Superbowl Coca Cola ad.

The reaction to the Coca Cola ad did not take place in a vacuum, but in the context of a shrill, jingoism-laden discourse that is churning at this moment in this nation, the most ardent of the champions of globalization when it happens elsewhere.

Regarding the death due to heroine overdose in the small towns of America: Shouldn't we first check out the correlation between the cultures and opportunities in these locales and the deaths? A vast majority of the victims of heroin overdose are young and white. Instead of correlating the heroin with the lives of those who are compelled to consume them, a neat correlation is made between heroin and its Mexican suppliers.

Why?

In connection with the death of 21 year old Alysa Ivy in Hudson, Wisconsin, it's said:

In the wake of the prescription painkiller epidemic, heroin, much of it Mexican, has wormed its way into unsuspecting communities far from the Southwestern border as a cheaper and often more easily obtained alternative.

"Unsuspecting communities"? Were the unsuspecting and innocent of the world folks of these communities deceived into taking heroin when they thought they were consuming kale?

The East is a career

I first came upon the statement, "The East is a career," in an epigraph to one of the chapters in Edward Said's Orientalism. 

It's a quote from the 1847 novel, Tancred, by then British premier and writer of novels of social realism, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was presiding over the British Empire, that had reached a dizzying height in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a complex quote, and as unraveled by Said, it suggests that the East at that time in the Western imperial imagination existed as a springboard from which a promising young English lad could launch his career in the Imperial civil or military services, or could launch his career as an entrepreneur as well.

The East, in short, was a passive market to be exploited by and for the benefit of the imperial West.

The East is still a career, I think, and I articulate this position in response to an online discussion on the subject matter of the Study Abroad Program, a program that is becoming a silent imperative for American high schoolers and College students today.

The East is a career for many in the contemporary American military-Industrial complex, especially in two of its more obliquely occupied territories like Iraq and Afghanistan (though I can't imagine a career being launched in the terrains of Afghanistan known for hosting missile launches). 

In Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram For The King, a failed American entrepreneur migrates to the land of an Arab despot somewhere in Jeddah, to reignite his economic dreams. 

The Study Abroad Program was conceived to reignite, not the economic, but the cultural part of a young American's being in the world. 

The Program is premised on the ideal that to adapt and adjust to an increasingly globalizing world (though I can't for the world of me fathom how the world can globalize), young Americans need to experience that world first hand, and the best way to achieve that is to live for a brief period of time in a foreign country.

I think the ideal is an empty one; in real terms it's pure balderdash. Young Americans who do the Study Abroad Program do it as a stepping stone toward a fruitful career. In a global economy everything, including culture, is translatable into money if one knows how to.

How many of the sons and daughters of America's underserved can afford to partake in this most expensive of acculturation programs? The mantle of "global citizenship" can be worn, as it were, only by the children of America's privileged class.

A stint in a foreign country is good for the resume, just as a stint with the Peace Core is. Also, an "immersion" in a foreign culture and language (add to that the value system), sits well with prospective employers in American multinationals who prize multilingual employees anyway. But not all multilingualism is equally valued; Mandarin, for instance, is valued over Hindi, in the corporate corridors of transnational corporations. 

China is a career for many young Americans today as a large number of transnational corporations (they are really American in one form or the other) eye China as a magical market in the way Aladin eyed the magic carpet.

Das Kapital

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story.

America adrift

Two films, A Sandra Bullock-George Clooney starrer and a Robert Redford acted (Redford is put off by the word "star" in connection with actors), Gravity and All is Lost, respectively, are about men and women who are adrift, one in space and the other at sea.

The films seems to reflect, as Maureen Dowd says in her profile on Robert Redford, the national mood, which is that of a nation unmoored.

I am a fan of Hollywood, and an ardent critic of its Indian counterpart, Bollywood. Hollywood has its high and low moments and defects; but from time to time one can hark back on films coming out of this entertainment goliath and claim that in some ways some films manage to mirror the American soul (if there is such a national soul). 

I rarely see a Bollywood movie that deals with the Indian soul in the sense that it catches the national mood in a particular state of anger, melancholia, elation or depression. What Bollywood does is take on an event by the neck, convert it into a crude story, and fling it at the audience with song and dance sequences.

How else does one account for the birth of a movie like Raanjhanaa, which glorifies male obsession for a female object of love? In these times when stalking, brutalizing and raping of women in India are disturbing the national conscience, a movie celebrates a cause of that disturbance.

And, the surprising part is that Raanjhanaa is a big hit in India.

Anyhow, India has been adrift for a long time. Care to make a movie reflecting this, Bollywood?

War and the peace of baked beans

The writer here manages to embed his mother's baked beans recipe in a subtle vitriol against the American tradition of violence.

And in these days of multi-platform storytelling, the curious piece is incomplete without a more-curious mini-comic strip:

Gaining visibility

The short video tells the story of the son of African American and Haitian American parents growing up black in New York City, and attending Dalton, the nation's most competitive Preparatory School.

Dalton is also a white school where students are predominantly white and hail from privileged backgrounds.

In a moment in the film the class gathers around a discussion of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man which, among other things, address the thorny issue of a white denial of the black presence in America.

Our little protagonist, inserts himself into the white presence, but as the film shows, gaining full-fledged visibility is not easy.

Twenty-first century Teepees

A native American tent like the one above is being sold on Etsy for $160. You could go camping in one of these to "de-stress".

But for many tent-living is not simply a recreational interlude; it's a necessity as the video on Fresno's "tent city" shows.

I watched this video on the heels of reading Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities, a ethnographic study of the world's "squatter cities."

There aren't any squatters in the U.S. as codified property/ownership rights prohibit the building of homes on land that one doesn't own and have a title deed for. But on account of the recession combined with high cost of renting and foreclosures, many mow-income Americans have been forced to live inside tents on land that is in a liminal zone between being owned and not owned.

What emerges from the video is a spirit--of positivity and responsibility. Just as squatter city residents demonstrate a high degree of self-reliance, so do the residents of tent cities: they have a history, they have lives and they even double up as sanitation workers.

The woman in the video speaks of Mark Twain, who had to leave home in rural Mississippi because his parents couldn't afford to feed their children, became great in a milieu akin to that of a tent city. The woman has hopes for her son, whom she calls "brilliant," and perhaps imagines a Twain-like greatness for him.

English Majors

I am an English major, so I should take the debate about the relevance of this particular major seriously.

In an age of technological hegemony, the relevance of much that doesn't have a direct bearing on technology, or isn't deemed useful/productive in crudely quantitative terms, is questioned.

The relevance of the English Department is under scrutiny, and ex-English majors occupying plum posts within the universities, The NY Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic and other institutions of elite occupancies are coming out of the woodwork, as it were, to chime in in defense of the English major, or more broadly, the Humanities.

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker won't be left behind. The illustrious writer who weighs in on every issue ranging from books to poverty and the state of the American prison, makes a point that an English major's preoccupation is books. The English professor teaches students how to read books in a structured and authoritative ways. Gopnik implies that as long as texts, written, visual or oral, are important in our culture, so will be the English major, or the Bachelor's degree in English. Since we can't do without books, we should never dispense with the relevance of the English major.

But is the study of English in institutions of higher education, a mere study of books?

I think that's just one aspect of the immensely rangy spectrum of what is "English" studies in the 21st century American University. The old world English departments used to teach folks how to "read" and have meaningful discussions about books. But would the Gopniks and the Verlyn Klinkenborgs please look at the complex changes and morphings the newer, more zeitgeist-friendly English departments have undergone? English is no longer English in the sense that the discipline focuses on cultivating taste and a sense of critical aesthetics.

English is more interdisciplinary than it ever has been. So a study of Dickens, is not just a study of Dickens, but a study of Dickens in the context of urban poverty and public policy. Dickens can be taught in conjunction with govermentalism, as much as poetry can be taught in intersection with physics.

Those who are defending the relevance of the English departments are not doing a good job of it, as I feel they are themselves out of touch with the transformations that the discipline itself has undergone.

Indeed, one of the major transformations is manifested in the emergence of the field of the Digital Humanities. It could be argued that the hegemony of technology has coerced this transformation into being, but then English being a minority discipline since the 80s, has to adapt and adjust to the demands of the majority disciplines which are business and technology.

There is so much that the debate on the relevance of the English major is neglecting to rope in.

"He could have been me"

Repeatedly, President Barak Obama has proven that words matter, especially when spoken in the liminal zone between the professorial and the poetic.

He is one President who has managed to stay in power and enter people's heads via the power of words. That's a refreshing fact, like a cooling rain shower, in an era of arid technology.

In his poignant statement, delivered in the wake of a brewing protest movements that take a stand against the George Zimmerman verdict, the President succeeded in making the occasion of Trayvon Martin's tragedy, as his own. 

Some highlights from the speech are:

When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son, [...] Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, thirty-five years ago.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.

We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help, who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them, and values them, and is willing to invest in them?

The text of Obama's statement is to be found here.

Novel race

The Long Division is a timely novel.

The novel, by Derek Nikitas, explores the messy complexity of race relations in America.

Then again, if one uses the word "race" in the same breath as America, "timely" can't be an apt descriptor of the novel.

Americans are known to have little or no historical consciousness, meaning that everything that happens is more often than not taken to be happening for the first time.

Yet much of what's happening today is happening along a historical continuum.

The messy complexity of race relations has had a messy, bloody, violent and long history. Seen from this angle the novel (with its telling title) isn't simply timely, but timeless.

A review of the novel is here.

The six tepid women of Florida

I love Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, a tale of 12 jurors deciding the fate of a young black ghetto boy who was on trial for the alleged murder of his step father.

The jurors are shown deliberating on a sweltering summer afternoon in a courthouse in New York City. A majority want to go home so they have no problem saying they believe the boy to be guilty; he is after all black, poor and thus criminally inclined.

One juror dissents and puts a spanner in the work of a quick, unanimous verdict. And then begins the arduous process of the dissenting juror slowly and patiently planting the seeds of reasonable doubt--about the boy's guilt--in the minds of the "angry" (and white) males.

That was then--in the pre civil rights era (1957) when the film took a bold turn toward suggesting the racially deeply biased nature of the American judicial system.

This is now--The jurors in the trial of Florida's George Zimmerman are mostly white females, barring one woman who is black/hispanic (juror number B-29). Incidentally, the latter is the sole juror with an arrest record, and she has said she doesn't have the foggiest clue as to why she was arrested. The woman is a transplant from Chicago.

The 5 white and the 1 non-white women found Zimmerman to be non-guilty this evening. The verdict came after a 14 hour deliberation. Apparently, it's okay to hunt down and kill black males like game in the state of Florida (or so some say).

I was surprised to find that on May 11 of this year yet another Florida resident, of Jacksonville, was arrested on charges similar to George Zimmerman's. But the black woman hadn't shot and killed anyone. She had merely fired a gun in order to "scare off" her abusive husband. The state attorney general's office that   prosecuted Zimmerman, also prosecuted the woman. They won this case and the jury took a mere 14 minutes to reach the verdict.

Miss Utah's brain-fart

Hard as it is to give impromptu responses to tough social questions at beauty pageants, this particular question would understandably sound like the Sphinx's riddle to Ms. Utah.

In the 2013 Miss U.S.A. contest, Ms Utah wasn't able to solve the puzzle of why women get paid less than men for the same job, though statistically, women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of all American families today.

One reasonable answer: because those primary breadwinners are under-educated, mostly poor (white, black and Hispanic) single mothers from broken homes, who work minimum wage jobs. They are "invisible," i.e. they don't count as "people."

How would folks like Ms. Utah have the key to such national secrets?

So, please, we shouldn't be laughing at Ms. Utah; she's a contestant for a beauty pageant and can't be blamed for the silly quest to find a perfect amalgamation of beauty, brains and social conscience on the part of the pageant organizers. 

A better question would have been: Why do Black women have blonde hair? What does THAT tell about our society?

The beauty pageant contestants aren't quite in the league of Hollywood actresses, like Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman, who are very educated and highly informed and interested in the world around them.

Sad, that Ms. Utah won't win the crown simply because she said, "Make, education, better."

P.s. In real, psychological terms, what Miss Utah experienced was a "blank." Under a pressure to say the right thing, contestants in highly competitive contexts like the Miss U.S.A. Beauty Pageant, draw a blank in their brains, and what's released as a result is a "brain fart."

It happens to drones in the national Spelling Bee contest as well.

Hermit or thief

Today everybody is asking a question of the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, "Is he a hero/saint or a villain/narcissist?"

I ask a similarly polarizing question of Maine's "North Pond Hermit," Christopher Knight: "Is he a hermit or a thief?"

A bit of a background on Knight: He is a 49 year old resident of Maine and has spent 27 years living in the woods as a hermit. 

He sustains himself by stealing from other people's pantries. Over the last few years, Knight is said to have committed about a 1000 burglaries.

But, as the trooper in the video says, Knight isn't the traditional hermit in that he doesn't live hermetically sealed off from the world. He keeps up with the latest on the Kadarshians and reads People Magazine (how he is able to access these isn't explained).

Residents of North Pond are polarized about Knight's characterization. A portly elderly man calls him a thief because he has stolen other people's property. Knight, he says, steals selectively; peanut butter is his favorite, as are batteries and propane gas tanks. He leaves behind meat that he doesn't like. 

He has never stolen big items or money.

Others hail him as a hermit, who lives a life away from the stink of technology and the industrial bustle. He lives in the midst of nature, though one look at his abode and I could tell he is contaminating nature by bringing in the industrial junk.

A "hermit" is an anomalous label in contemporary America today, as is a "saint". The conditions for the production of hermeticism and saintliness simply don't exist in our society. Besides, what is Mr. Knight doing anyway? He has merely negated an established norm of living and is living off other people's stuff. He should've been a mendicant and instead of stealing, he could've lived off the generosity of other people's spirits. 

I have read of hermits in some of the Indian epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata: They weren't necessarily nice people, but had a disciplined body and mind and throve on the ability of other people to gift food to them. But those were radically different times, before the economy of buying and selling via currencies came into being. The gift of food was given to hermits/mendicants and hermits reciprocated with the gift of good will/blessings. Sometimes, a gift of food was given to a particularly powerful hermit out of a fear of upsetting him and earning a curse. 

The Maine hermit, isn't quite a hermit; he's just a delayed gratification-seeking narcissist who wants publicity, as the portly guy and victim of the hermit's peanut-butter-stealing-spree says.

O networks with Harvard and the result is below average rating

Or so I thought.

Oprah Winfrey's commencement speech at Harvard University's convocation for the class of 2013 disappointed me. 

She had a chance to be irreverent and unconventional as is her way to approach authors on her book club show.

Throughout her speech, Oprah displayed an obsequiousness toward Harvard that made me squirm. It seemed like she was gratified at being asked to serve as a commencement speech-maker at Harvard, and described the invitation as a morale booster after a year of being in the rating doldrums with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).

I thought a turning point in her speech was when she said "Why me? Why choose somebody who hadn't succeeded to address those who are guaranteed to succeed (a.k.a. Harvardies)?" I don't see how she could label herself as "unsuccessful" on the basis of just one flop venture, in an otherwise successful career that made her into a media mogul with billions of dollars in net worth. 

Anyhow, so the turning point in her speech turned out to be a damp squib; instead of expressing silly gratitude to President Drew Faust, Oprah could have gone on to re define what "success" is. Success shouldn't mean getting, as Oprah indicated, a Harvard U "calling card" with which you could make infinite calls into the gateways of the biggest and the best in the world.

What Oprah--naively so--assumes, as I gather from her speech, is that once you study at Harvard, you get to know "everything." Thus her humility in saying "What can tell those who already know it all," sounds affected. This attribution of omniscience to the Harvard tribe ran like a refrain in Oprah's speech.

I feel like the opposite is true: Harvardies and other fellow Ivy Leaguers, at least those from the 90s onwards, know as much or as little of the real world. I recall, NYT columnist (himself a Harvard alumni) Frank Bruni writing that those who typically enter the Ivy League consortium are born into privilege and continue to live through the narrow corridors of privilege till they enter their graves. They ought to, Bruni said, yank themselves out of their comfort zones if becoming more "real" was their goal in life. This means that an Ivy Leaguer essentially learns nothing new, but more and more of the same that have been conferred on them since their birth. Their life experiences remain pretty homogenous till they fall into heterogeneity. 

Oprah should've told the class of 2013 at Harvard that they know nothing and their life of learning commences after the commencement. But who am I kidding? Oprah Winfrey is no Socrates.

Harvard's decision to bring in Ms. Winfrey is a good one as far as it gives Harvard a more popular, lightened-up image, and Ms. Winfrey did deliver some motivating (I wouldn't say inspiring) moments. She even modernized the phrase "moral compass" into "internal GPS" in keeping with our technological zeitgeist.

But, if you ask me, they should have asked Oprah to share the podium with Khadijah Williams, the astonishing graduate in Harvard's class of 2013, the black Los Angelina who hopped from shelter to shelter, school to school, public lavatory to public lavatory, trash can to trash can, along with her mother, and by sheer dint of persistence and merit got into Harvard through a Pre-College for gifted but indigent students program.

Now, she would have had a story to tell. Oprah mentioned Williams in passing, but only as an evidence of her own theory of how hard work pays off. Ms. Winfrey's own story was the piece de resistance of her performance at the commencement. Her story, however, is passe and the "the poor girl from rural Mississippi" doesn't quite touch the hearts of millennials, is my belief.

America has changed drastically from its post-segregation days, since the time she "made it" through hard work. In today's America the poor have not only become poorer and the elite ossified in their inability to relate to anything outside of their own sub culture, but institutions like Harvard are becoming the gatekeepers of privilege and prosperity.

I disliked Oprah's statement that whenever, as the CEO of her own network, she sees a resume with the Harvard credential in it, she thinks, "ah, since she is from Harvard, she must be good." It smacked of servility.

Oprah makes for a poor 21st century O (Othello) in this particular case.

The watches and the shirts that are at the center of the universe of capitalism

It's the Rolex.

Few can possess it, but almost everybody ought to desire one in her lifetime.

The Rolex featured recently in an episode (I watched a rerun) of the television serial The Big Bang Theory.

Bernadette, having got a job finding the magic pill for yeast infection, in the R & D department of a big pharmaceutical company, gifts a Rolex to her fiance, Howie. Howie is wonderstruck with the object yet a feeling of envy sneaks in. 

The Rolex corrupts his relation with "Bernie" momentarily with a power complex: Will Bernie now become the "man" of the family?

Switching to reality, two of the bank robbers (a pair of Dominicans from Yonkers, New York) who were involved in the biggest bank heist in human history (it was a cyber-heist), photographed themselves with piles of Rolexes after they stole their share and went on a luxury goods buying-spree in New York City.

These two under-enlightened loafers were merely using the commodity as a thing possessed, something akin in their minds to the classy female "pussy," is my guess.

When the commodity is fetishized by those who have no previous context to attach the commodity to, then it's all vulgarly phallic. But fetishized, it is.

Rolex, as I understand, is more than a watch; according to Karl Marx, it's a commodity, that transcends its use-value and acquires magical, near-theological value.

When inanimate things acquire godly powers, then they become commodities, and just as primitive societies worshipped or fetishized objects, so we, dwellers of modern, scientific, times, fetishize commodities. Yet, the act of fetishizing doesn't regress us into the status of "primitives." The more we worship objects, provided these objects are not mere barks of enchanted trees, or the aroma of monkey-brains, preserved in a jar, the more modern and properly civilized we are regarded as.

That is the precise point of Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, as film critic A.O. Scott, so finely tells us in his discussion of the rising tide of commodity fetishizm in contemporary American movies.

In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the erotic life of objects, which is a foundation of materialism, excess and greed. That's why Fitzgerald's Gatsby, though he had a life of material excess, is punished with an unattended funeral. Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, the salesman who pined for making it better and bigger every single day of his life, was similarly punished with a thinly attended funeral.

When nobody shows up when you're dead, then it's a sign that nobody cared for you when you were alive.

However, the ambivalence toward the material life is removed from the latest film version of Gatsby.

The Rolex-centered universe is in full panoply through the 3D machinery in Luhrmann's movie. Additionally, and more fascinatingly, the aura of the rolex spreads to shirts. Gatsby enchants both Nick Carraway and Daisy with his collection of the world's "most beautiful" shirts, so beautiful that Daisy cries upon beholding and touching and feeling them.

Sometimes, it's said that Daisy is sexually aroused by the beauty of Gatsby's shirts, and the emotions transfer over onto the collector of those shirts.

I decided to take a look at the famous "shirt scene" from an earlier Great Gatsby (starring Robert Redford as Jay), since the new Gatsby has this scene in 3D and the idea is to enable the audience "feel" the shirts as well, in full, three-dimensional splendor.

Here is the scene:

Daisy is caressing the shirts; in the new Gatsby, she bursts into tears, sobbing into the thick folds of the clothing and saying, "It makes me sad, because I haven't seen such, such beautiful shirts."

A.O. Scott writes that in the novel perhaps the reader could attribute Daisy's tears to other causes as well. And they would be right in their attribution. But in Baz Luhrmann's film, one has no reason not to take Daisy at her word:

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that "beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann's wildly extravagant adaptation of Gatsby."

Commodity fetishizm, in other words, is at the center of the film.

On the bus?

I've heard that in cities like, Oregon, Seattle, and San francisco, people are likely to look funnily at you, if you're not on a bike or on foot and are always in your car, behind the wheels.

All three cities have superb mass-transit as alternative to driving, giving people the option to not drive when they don't want to. 

According to a study published by U.S. Pirg, a non-profit advocacy group, this culture, marked by a preference for biking, walking and availing of mass transit if available, is spreading from out of the ecology-minded Pacific Northwest to other places like Charlotte, North Carolina, among others.

The downshifting in American driving patterns--fewer Millennials, or the "Internet"-generation, care to be enchanted by the prospects of being "in control" behind their wheels, or care to wait impatiently for their licences--is interestingly enough, noticeable most prominently among the highly-educated, affluent youth of America. 

But this tiny demographic also has an outsized pocket, i.e. is a demographic with the cultural and economic power to induce larger shifts in ways of living. So, the projection is that local governments will be pressured into investing more and more money in the building of infrastructure like mass transit and spend less on highways.

Does this mean that America has to produce a suitable epic to match a growing disenchantment with the "road?" 

Remember Jack Kerouac's epic that was symbolical of a traditional American craving--the desire for unbounded freedom experienced on the highways of the nation, inside a car, behind the wheels?

Perhaps, it's time for something like "On the Bus?"

For a fuller appraisal of the phenomenon see here.