Layoff... Anybody Want To Play

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” ~ Kris Kristofferson

Yesterday I noticed that there’s been a lot of buzz about a new game called Layoff. So much so that it was numero uno on the Yahoo! Buzz chart.

If you aren’t familiar with it, it is evidently a variation of a number of similar video games where you try to line up circles or spheres of the same color, which then causes them to ignite and disappear. In this case, instead of random colors, the game pieces represent employees with varying responsibilities. Theoretically (and I have only read about it, not played because it took too long to download) you, the game player, are a person in management who is downsizing his or her company by eliminating duplicate positions.

Like the other games, when you line up three or four of the pieces of the same color, they disappear. Unlike the other game, each individual marker is a real person with a real set of financial and familial needs. You didn’t just make a game piece go poof. That was George, the financially strapped disabled vet.

Several thoughts come to mind simultaneously at this point, but I’ll elaborate on one.

Is it an educational experience or is it exploitation? If the people in the game are not “real” real people but only examples of people in different types of circumstances, that might soften the jaundiced edge here a bit. Still, there is something a bit perverse about a game in which “winning” means getting as many people laid off as possible so that you only have the bankers left.

Arundhati Roy, in her essay Public Power in the Age of Empire notes how Hollywood and the U.S. news media specialize in exploiting the suffering of others. For profit. From her vantage point in India, it seems to her that when tragedy strikes our news cameras are Johnny-on-the-spot to keep ratings up so they networks can sell those commercial spots that fuel these infosystems with dollars. And Hollywood is seldom far behind.

Two powerful films about horrors in Africa that have won awards in recent years include Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland. Both films were powerful. Both films gave Americans a brief glance at the hard realities of the suffering that has taken place in two places in our lifetimes. It would be very easy to defend these films as informational, but I can also see Ms. Roy’s point of view: exploitation for entertainment purposes, and profits.

On the other hand, if writers don’t tell their stories, who will hear? It takes money to publish books like The Last King of Scotland. The publisher spends money to promote it because it is a story worth telling, in fact, remarkable. Selling film rights to the book motivates others to tell their stories, which increases our understanding. Life is hard. There is much suffering in our world.

I myself don’t know what to think. I once knew a man who survived Idi Amin’s brutal slaughter by hiding under a pile of dead bodies that once was his family. What would he have thought of the Forrest Whitaker film based on these selfsame events? Where is the line between informing and exploiting?

If you think I’m being too serious here, feel free to send me a note: Ed, lighten up.

VACATION PICTURE OF THE DAY
Since last weekend I've been blogging while on vacation. We flew to a wedding in Dallas initially. Wednesday we rented a car and have been heading west toward the Grand Canyon. Yesterday we spent time in Old Town Albuquerque, where this shot was taken. Today, it will be Old Route 66 to Holbrook.

A Few Minutes with Roy

Having mentioned yesterday that some of Arundhati Roy’s ideas resonated with me, I should like to briefly comment on a few of the points she makes.

Ms. Roy’s book Public Power in the Age of Empire begins by noting that those who run our country claim to be on our side but in reality do not act in our best interests. Nor does our government care about what we think as long as we remain placid and keep re-electing those in power.

“Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's Al Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba, it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.

“This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S. government's Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.”

This stance of keeping the people manipulated into obeisance while the rich get richer is not uniquely American. I remember when oil was discovered off the coast of Mexico and it appeared that our neighbors south of the border were going to be rich, rich, rich. But while living there for a year in 1981 it was impossible not to notice the squalor the poor experienced in the big cities, the sprawling slums blanketing hillsides. Simultaneously, the presidents of the ruling PRI and their cronies suckled the golden teats of this oil flow so as to leave absolutely nothing changed except the size of their Swiss bank accounts. All democratically elected hoodlums.

When we were raising our children, my wife once read a book on parenting that noted that parents need to approach their children with an attitude that says, “I’m on your side.” The upshot of this is that the kids feel affirmed and listened to. The children are not always right, but there is a relationship that is healthy and which has ontological value.

Arundhati Roy’s premise is that government’s do not have this attitude when it comes to their poor. She cites dam projects which caused massive destruction and forced evacuations of the poor in India and elsewhere, of the massive destruction of homes in beautification projects for Olympic-sized entertainment complexes, and a whole catalogue of other indignities. And who is speaking on behalf of these people who have no voice in the modern world? These are part of our human family.

Even worse is the death and destruction wrought by war. The Bomb did not get dropped on troops. It leveled a city which was just like any city anywhere made up of people who went to work like you and I go to work, with schools, children, mothers, grandmothers… The destruction of the World Trade Center was not a military attack on a military target. The lobbing of bombs into Israel by Hamas and the incursion into Gaza, what happened there? Political powers made decisions, innocent people with no say in those decisions are killed, wounded, maimed.

But wars aren’t the only form of violence against the world’s poor. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions are writing economic policies and legislation that has no concern for the consequences wrought. According to Roy, “With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them.”

Because the situations are complex, Americans don’t understand what is really going on in the world. When people like Roy begin to raise their voices and get shrill enough to be heard, it frightens us... not the content of what these people say, but the megaphones they use to say it. As Roy says, the government uses this fear strengthen its power, like a mother hen drawing her little chicks up under her wing. “Yes, it is scary out there, little chickies," our leaders say, "so get up close to me here. I will protect you from the big bad wolves.”

This woman from India has done her homework. I am not sure what her prescriptions are for solution or if I line up with them entirely but I do believe she is speaking for a large contingent of humanity who at this point in time have no power, and no voice.

If interested in getting a taste of these challenging ideas, read Public Power in the Age of Empire here

The Evolution of Made in Japan: From Inferior Quality to Tokyo Wealth

A few weeks ago I received an interesting email from my son with links to a YouTube video by a woman named Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist whose book The God Of Small Things obtained for her international attention and awards. I'd never heard of Ms. Roy, so I was interested in hearing some of what she had to say.

I watched the video, and another, and was so impressed I bought the book. Well, impressed enough to want a copy of something she'd written so I could see more vividly where she was coming from. Her thought provoking ideas were resonating with a part of me, and evidently with others as well.

The world has changed, is changing and will continue to do so. Boomers experienced this first hand as we were growing up. There was a time when goods that had the words MADE IN JAPAN printed on them were of a fairly inferior quality. Yet when you watch a film like Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation starring Bill Murray, you can be sure that all that Tokyo wealth was not created on the backs of laborers who manufactured junk.

International trade has created wealth abroad, and made U.S. dependence on foreign sources of goods an imperative. We say we dislike what the big box retailers are doing in terms of importing foreign goods, yet we also dislike high prices. Hence on his Infidels album Dylan sings:

Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore

My flashlight's from Taiwan

My tablecloth's from Malaysia

My belt buckle's from the Amazon

You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines

And the car I drive is a Chevrolet

It was put together down in Argentina

By a guy making thirty cents a day.

~Union Sundown, Bob Dylan

This international trade of goods has been moving wealth around the world for a very long time. How did England gain its great wealth in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire? (Rhetorical)

But today, the changes coming may even be more significant as we see the Internet transferring ideas around the world, with unheard of speed. American citizens have been isolated by geography from most of the world's distress. But today, with the Internet, it's all out there, within view, if you wish to look and listen. These are, therefore, amazing times. Sensitive, thoughtful people have finally found a mechanism for being heard. Sensitive, thoughtful Americans are beginning to hear voices they had been shielded from by those who edit the evening news and those who feed us the pictures on our glass onions and flat panel screens.

On this topic there is much more to say.... but we'll get to that another day.