The Boss

by WonderBred

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took is when I hit the ground

I am eight years old, and my blond hair lies in a cool coil on my sunburned shoulders. The music in my Uncle Jimmy's van is deafening, and I am frozen, overwhelmed by these drums and guitars and cigarette smells. New York City wavers outside the fishbowl windows above where we are sitting--my sister, my cousins and I. The City is almost more than I, used to looking at rich leafy trees and thick brown mud, can stand.

It is the mid-eighties, and my Uncle Jimmy loves Bruce Springsteen's anthem with a zeal I won't understand for nearly twenty years. This is the only song we listen to in the van as he gives my parents a driving tour of the city. The tape plays and rewinds, plays and rewinds, the huge speakers vibrating next to us as my sister and I cower into the shag carpet in the back of the van.

If we stand up and look out the window, we can see endless stretches of concrete and stone, everything gray but for the angry interjections of grafitti. There are punks everywhere, it seems, their mohawks and spikes bristling at the city. We stop and ask if we can take a picture of a group, and the tallest guy charge us five dollars. Jimmy tells us we're lucky he didn't kick us in the stomach and take our camera. I look at Cousin Peter for confirmation and he nods authoritatively. This City is dangerous and dirty, and I don't understand why these relatives of mine would prefer it to the cool green woods at my house.

You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Jimmy and Caj, my mother's sister and brother-in-law, are exotic creatures to our rustic eyes. Jimmy is a Puerto Rican Hell's Angel whose voice is torn with cigarettes, and who keeps a tarantula for a pet in their three-room apartment in the projects of Alphabet City. Aunt Caj is as pale as Jimmy is dark, her hair and eyebrows the same color as her white, white skin. Caj and Peter and Stacy, my cousins, look to me like bread dough, like the grass that grows under a rock. I am tortured by sleep deprivation from the sounds of sirens screeching through the streets and the horror of the cockroaches in the kitchen. I think they're joking. I think people cannot live like this. Not really.

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.

The filth is unbelievable. The playground my Aunt took us to earlier had broken glass all over it. My mother's nervousness didn't allow us to play. We just stood in awe of the grafitti-scarred cement-the hostile world my pale cousins inhabited.

Born in the USA

My mother's worries about her sister and brother-in-law, her niece and nephew growing up in a place where someone machine-gunned their mailboxes, were real. The woods didn't protect me, though, just as the ghetto didn't protect my cousins, although they were better prepared than me for the unsympathic economics of our adulthood. Nobody in our family has lived out the American Dream. In New York City and in Central Maine, on busy avenues and dirt roads and everywhere in between, the meaning of success has changed. Success means working at a job with benefits. Paid vacation! my jealous friends exclaim. Health insurance!

Nobody in my generation of cousins owns a house or property, and while there are grandchildren-lots of them-few of them have two parents. The whatever-happened-to list reads like some statistic of failed welfare reform.

I was born in the USA

My mother disappeared into Crack-Land after two failed marriages, uncountable flirtations with sobriety, and a series of abusive boyfriends; my sister lives-barely-in a dying mill town in Central Maine; my Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Caj, after years of drugging with my mom, moved Jimmy and his cancer to Florida with their daughter's oldest son, whom they are raising along with numerous Rottweilers. Content in their trailer park, they seem to have found Jesus. Last I heard Cousin Stacy had three children but was not able to care for any of them, and Cousin Peter had joined the Marines. And me-I'm a single mom feeling rich on my $23,000 salary.

At my ten year high school reunion, most of my classmates were working the same crappy retail jobs they'd had right out of high school, though now some were managing the store.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

The man is no longer yellow-these days he is brown, with a cloth on his head-but the story is the same. The most successful ones from my high school class are in the military, raising their families in base housing, looking forward to going to college when they get out. If they get out, if they come back the same, or at all.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says, "Son if it was up to me."
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said, "Son, don't you understand now."

My parents always told me that I could be anything I wanted to be-doctor, ballerina, lawyer, president of the united states. So what happened to us all-us bicentennial kids with our red-white-and-blue dreams? “Free to be you and me” was the refrain of those early years, and I believed it. I could blame my cousins' hopelessness on the violence and poverty that bloomed around them in New York, but can I find fault in my family's gentle, back-to-the-land nurturance? I did not know how to succeed in this new world. Our parents' rules do not apply, and we are “free to be you and me” as long as you and me like to be underpaid and underemployed, or to make tons of money from stealing from others.

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

Bruce Springsteen sang to me about my life before I was ever aware of the term blue-collar or working-class. In the eighties it was becoming clear that the gap between those with money and those without it was growing, and my Uncle Jimmy knew it. Those without were going to keep going without as steady factory jobs moved to other countries. Unions got their teeth pulled out by de-industrialization and the rise of the service industry. Textile mills, the center of my hometown, slowly closed, as did the downtown itself.

Without the presence of my father, my mother gave up our precarious position at the border of the middle class, not even pretending to want to climb up any more. My family, the town, the state, the country-we all broke apart and slid into poverty.

Born in the U.S.A.

But poverty isn't a necessarily a bad place to be. That's the most important lesson of this new economy, and one that can change the world. Poverty can be a comfortable place if you know how to live there.

Giving up that wish to climb to the middle class has let me save the money I would have spent on trying to look like I'm climbing-new cheap clothing for every season, rickety furniture in the latest style, plastic toys from this week's blockbuster, all the brittle stuff that fills up trash bags and landfills every week. My apartment doesn't look so dingy if I stop comparing it to McMansions. My food is better once I stop buying the expensive prepared stuff. Once I gave up the wish to climb, the rest was easy.

I was born in the U.S.A.

I have been forced to create a community I can depend on for my very survival-swapping babysitting with friends; helping out with political events that keep my life meaningful; trading food for telephone repair and car rides; making friends with my neighbors so I can feel safe in my apartment-and this community makes me feel far richer than anything I can buy in a big box store. My friends and family are far more dependable than any bank or stock market, and I invest in them. Uncle Jimmy, who depended on his biker brothers for safety and companionship and livelihood, would have understood.

Born in the U. S. A.

Somehow, I think Bruce would approve.

I'm a hard-rockin daddy in the U.S.A. now

Class, Masculinity and the Capitalist Blues

by mamaspitfire

So I've spent almost four years in the institutions of higher learning in a women's studies program. I've been proud to call myself a feminist scholar, and sweep under the rug the fact that I never finished the tenth grade, and that I spent most of my formative years swilling cheap beer with the working class boys of my white trash factory town. As my studies expand and grow over the landscape of gender, I trip over my old life again and again, and the ideas I've gotten out of books concerning women's studies and the realities of my working class background crash and burn into each other like a junker on its last ride. You see, I've been learning and exploring the ways in which gender norms fuck women over, and seeing how in this society, women get short shrifted to the point that most women spend their lives significantly poorer than their male counterparts. Now this may be true--as a single welfare mom I am well aware of the hurdles women face--but I've never had the opportunity in my field to look at the ways in which gender norms hurt men. Learned knowledge and life experience clash in a battle of wills every time I hear privileged middle class women talk about gender oppression. I see their nice cars and nice clothes, and I scratch my head and wonder to myself, are these women more oppressed than the boys I grew up with just because they're women? I never saw my friends, lovers or male relatives driving cars without big bondo patches over the fender, and nice clothes for them were the jeans that didn't have holes in them. Now, I don't want to turn traitor to my feminist scholarship-after all, this society is a patriarchy, no doubt about that--but I feel that a hard look at class makes clear the ways in which gender roles have been used to destroy whole classes of men, to keep them submissive or self -destructive in ways which are different than the ways that women have been kept down, but no less oppressive. The working class men in my life have wound up in jail, for drugs, for assault, theft, in the hospital with no insurance for work related injury after injury, men who at thirty look forty and feel fifty, and their world of mind numbing monotonous and grueling labor is on the other side of the rainbow from the clean classrooms and well stocked libraries in which I have spent my time learning about feminist ideas. In this essay, I'm going to examine the way that the masculine ideal of the economic bread winner has been used to exploit working class men in the capitalist marketplace.

How about a brief and informal history of labor in capitalist america, just to show how far back these ideals of the male bread winner go. In the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an uprising of labor unions and organizers, fighting against the obvious and unbearable cruelty of the industrial workplace. After much hard battle, and considerable human cost, the New Deal Roosevelt years came, and in order to appease the radical labor movement, some concessions were made, including the length of the work day, the forty hour week and child labor laws. Next, World War Two landed on our shores and proved an immense distraction from the labor fights of the previous decades. Then we have the “rosie the riveter” period that followed, which was women taking over industrial jobs, making bullets, etc, while the men went off to war. Guess what happened to these women's jobs when they came back? Here the gender ideals of lady in the house and man on the job were born (or at least resurrected) This was the deal in the face of all these men needing jobs and the concessions that the bosses of Industry made to the forces of Labor: Industry was like, “ok you can have the jobs back and we'll pay you what we'll dub 'the family wage,' which means that you, as the man, will be able to earn enough to support your families on your one paycheck, we'll make sure you have your 40 hours and your eight hour workday, and in exchange for your labor and your complacency, we get to keep those pesky little ladies in the house and out of your jobs.” Sounds like a good deal for the boys, right?

Well, Industry figured out, as america was biggering and biggering itself (like Dr Seuss would say) that it was way cheaper to export all that industrial labor overseas, and what it couldn't ship off, it could replace with fancy machines to eliminate the need for human labor. So that whole family wage thing and that agreement between men and industry, known by fancy academics as the “labor capital accord” gave way to what they call “deindustrialization,” which is just a big word for all the jobs leaving for Mexico and other developing poor countries, whose labor force was now being hired and exploited for far less than the american minimum wage.

Now getting back to working class masculinity. In the past, and present, being a man has been measured against the ability to earn that family wage; being able to be that sole provider for the wife and kids. If you couldn't do that, than you weren't a real man. In this culture, having enough resources to provide for oneself and a family is a pillar of what counts as masculinity. I mean, you see lots of fancy guys in suits with powerful jobs on TV and commercials, but not so many men at the unemployment line. And for example, what's the first thing a dad asks a daughter about a new boyfriend--”what does he do, has he got a job?” Furthermore, ideals of working class masculinity, as they have stood in our recent past and present, serve to undermine, rather than promote labor organization, which means that these ideals of the economic provider have been used to promote competition between groups of workers through racial or ethnic lines, and that ideals of toughness associated with men have been used to encourage self-destructive behavior in working class men. Here's an example. We all know the stereotype of the hard had (usually white) working class tough guy, right? (Think, Dan Connors on Roseanne) Like being an economic provider, being tough, being strong, are all ideals that are associated with maleness, in the same way that, let's say, fashion models and baby dolls are used to create ideals of what it means to be female. Are you with me? Now, here's where this gets even sneakier in the absolute fuck over of working class men. So imagine we're on a job site, and you got this crew, and maybe the job is really dangerous, like the staging isn't built right to go up to the top of the building, or no one's got knee pads to lay in tile. Are you gonna be the guy who says, “I'm too scared to climb to the top, is that safe? or, my knees are going to feel tender and sore without knee pads?” Fuck no you're not, because the first thing you might hear is, “what are you a fucking pussy?!” And not from the boss, but from your fellow workers. To complain about safety or comfort is in direct violation of that tough guy norm. Men are supposed to be tough, to work hard, to feel no pain, right? And furthermore, using that safety equipment or taking the time to do things safely might even slow you down a little, which means the job doesn't get done as fast, which means you lose money, or slow down your crew, not to mention piss off your boss. I remember boys daring each other as to who could go the highest, or the fastest, and fuck safety in the face of daring. Who do these masculine ideals of the tough guy benefit? Not the workers, that's for sure, but the bosses, who benefit from not having to shell out money for safety equipment or pay the crews for the time it might take to do the job safely. So these masculine ideals of resilience, strength, and economic prowess all team up to further exploit the working joe, without a boss even having to be directly oppressive, because the workers themselves have internalized these norms to the point where they enforce them on each other in a way that directly benefits capital, which means, that the ideals of the tough guy are so a part of the worker's identity, that he might risk life and limb in a way that both saves and makes his boss money, at the cost of his safety and health.

So, in the face of these gender ideals of masculinity, let's look back at deindustrialization and our current economy. Those tough guy jobs-whether they be factory or construction--are all but gone. The kinds of jobs and fields that unions are typically identified with--way gone. They're all over seas, or have disappeared altogether. Sure, unions are still around, and I'm all for organized labor, but today's working class male has about as much of a shot at a unioned industrial job as I have as becoming the next president. The fastest growing jobs now are all in the service economy--you know, fast food, grocery stores, retail box stores, convenience stores (remember the movie Clerks?) But the bitch is, that idea of manhood as dependent on being able to be a provider and to be tough, are still fucking here and endorsed by our culture! How tough and manly are you gonna feel behind a cash register? And as far as providing for a family at the family wage? What a joke! Service jobs usually pay minimum wage, are part time, temporary, with no benefits, and here's the real bitch--the hours are so irregular, that for men who have identified with the more modern “new man” ideal--you know, the guy who can be nurturing and loving to his kids, devoted to wife and family emotionally, rather than being tough and committed to work all the time--have schedules so irregular, that they can't have dinner with their wives or pick up their kids from school, or hang out with them on weekends. So we have young working class men who can't meet up to any of the traditional ideals of masculinity this society has offered to them, can't live up to the newer nurturing ideals that feminism had made possible, in a society that has barely even begun to put out a critique of the way capitalism exploits and uses american citizens as if they were only as useful as the profit they can produce.

So what do I think about this? I'm absolutely fucking furious. I spent most of my time with men from my teens to mid twenties, all of us poor and working class. I watched them migrate from temp jobs and meat trucks, maintenance crews, shitty short order restaurants and crappy retail stores. I watched their dads howl at them, “when are you gonna get a real job and be a man?” when the fact is, there are no “real jobs” left. One of my ex-boyfriends watches TV all day and deals drugs all night. My father doesn't make any more an hour than he did twenty years ago. I watched many men turn to their female partners in rage and violence, taking out their feelings of powerlessness onto the female body in the most despicable ways. One of my old friends is doing life in jail for shooting another man in the head. My ex-partner could never reconcile with himself that he never made enough to support our family, no matter how many hours he worked and it--literally--drove him crazy. We not only need to rethink what it means to be a man in this society, but we need to actually realize that this economic system is literally killing off its citizens, who have been deprived of hope and the basic means of subsistence, not overtly, but silently, as we kill each other off in hopelessness and in rage, as the profits grow higher, and some asshole on TV rants about how our gross national product is the highest its been in years. Fuck the numbers--our culture is waging war on its own people, and watching the men that I have loved so dearly in my life one by one fall victim to this senseless system makes it so obvious to me that change can't come too soon. I am grateful for the feminist scholarship that has made it possible for me to examine these intersections of class and gender, but I frankly don't give a shit about how impossible it is for women to become CEO's or break that glass ceiling that has never been in reach of any of my brothers or sisters. We need to look at how gender and class have been used to divide us, and bridge that gap. We need to strike words like CEO and corporate ceiling and gross national product from our vocabulary altogether, and any gender critique that doesn't include a thorough examination of class and gender isn't working. No pun intended.

Papa

by treason

seasons

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