The Dream Research Job

I've always wondered how The Daily Show always managed to dig up such great clips, often showing political figures contradicting themselves. Who figured out that Cheney, who now says the polls on the public's views on Iraq don't matter, cited public opinion polls 3 years ago to support the war? It turns out that digging up these clips is a full-time job at the show.

The Washington Post profiled the show's researcher, Adam Chodikoff, in today's paper. One of the show's writers commented that Chodikoff "spots patterns, trends, the forces of history." Chodikoff just comes into work in the morning and starts pouring through news stories to pick out interesting bits. Sounds kind of like what I do...except the final product of his research is a whole lot funnier than mine.

Pennsylvania Holds a Primary

After working on the Kerry campaign, I swore I wouldn't work on another campaign again. Well, it's the next campaign cycle and I've already broken that promise to myself. Despite the e-mails piling up asking me to volunteer for Obama the past two months, I waited until yesterday to help out. So for this election day, at least, I didn't feel the emotional charge that builds up from investing so much of your time in a campaign.

What I did get to feel, though, was this amazing connection (in grad school speak, an "imagined community," perhaps?) with everybody I saw on the street who was also wearing Obama pins or shirts. Philly was overwhelmingly behind Obama, so everywhere I walked there were people behind the same cause I was fighting for. I didn't talk to most of these people; it was mostly just a smile of acknowledgement that passed between us.

Campaign headquarters in Philly the past two days were full of supporters from up and down the mid-Atlantic. People seem to have just driven in to Philly and come straight to the headquarters to see what they could do. I helped one of these people, a woman who had taken the day off of work in D.C., to navigate around Center City and drive elderly people to the polls. I also went door to door earlier in the day, which I must admit, I wouldn't offer to do again.

Even though Obama didn't win today--and really, I don't think anybody expected he would in PA--the day felt like a success for me in other ways. First, with all of the research I've done on politics in Early America, I appreciate the chance to see the process firsthand. Second, I felt in these past two days that, for the first time since I moved here, I actually live in Philly and that I'm part of a community here--one even larger than the campaign. That feeling was well worth losing my voice and getting behind on schoolwork.

Cooking like it's 1950

On Saturday, I shopped for food and cooked dinner in a way that probably resembles how my women shopped and cooked in the 1950s and long before. I walked to Reading Terminal Market and went from shop to shop to buy fresh ingredients. I picked up pasta, freshly cut to the width I requested, spices at the spice shop, fresh cheese at the cheese shop, and produce at the produce shop. On the way home, I stopped at a bakery to get a loaf of bread. This all took a lot longer than a typical grocery shopping trip--close to two hours--but then, it was an outing in itself. I stopped to gawk at the chocolate shop, grabbed a water ice to eat on my walk home, then sat in Rittenhouse Square for a bit.

I cooked without the t.v. on, using the ingredients I'd purchased earlier in the day. Somehow, as I was chopping vegetables, sauteing garlic, and sipping a drink, I felt a sense of relaxation slip over me. Something about how closely you have to attend to details--whether the garlic has gotten brown enough yet in the saute pan, or if the parsley is chopped finely enough--makes me feel the way I feel when I meditate. It occurred to me that cooking for women in past generations was a lot more work than it is now, and they had a lot more people to feed, but I wonder whether they might yet feel this sense of peace from the task.

Power in the Passive Voice

A number of random topics that had been swirling through my mind lately--the economic recession, Foucault, how power works, and good writing--came together when I read a post by Barbara Ehrenriech at the TPM Cafe blog. Ehrenreich is a writer made famous by her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In this recent post on the recession, she wrote:

We say, “There’s something wrong with the economy,” rather than, “I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer.” Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a “recession,” as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us and who are, for the most part, profiting still. Maybe, instead of talking about “the economy” and “the recession” we should be talking about the ongoing looting and concerted attack on our standard of living --which will likely end only when there’s nothing left to squeeze out of us.

This isn’t just semantics. If there’s something wrong with “the economy,” we call in the economists, we think about intervention by the Fed, and things on that level. But if someone is actually attacking us, we’re more likely to focus on how we can start working for change right now, with whatever tools are at hand.

Suddenly a couple of things clicked for me. I've been taking a class called "Culture, Power, Identities" in which we've been discussing how to define power and how it works. One author we read--and who I've read in almost every graduate seminar I have ever taken--is the late French theorist Michel Foucault. One of the many irritating things about Foucault, for me, is that he defines power in the passive voice. Power is imposed upon people, is embedded in society; people are constantly being surveyed and defined. But where, as another theorist has put it, is the doer behind the deed? For Foucault, "power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted 'above' society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of."

This is the sort of power relation Ehrenreich is talking about when she describes how we talk about being in a recession or the economy being bad. There is no doer behind the deed. But what Ehrenreich gets--and maybe Foucault didn't--was that there are people to blame. Particular people and corporations do have power over our aspects of our lives.

Just one example: Gas prices didn't just happen to explode to over $3/gallon because of lurking forces; the oil companies decide what to charge to maximize their profit. With millions of Americans having trouble affording gas and other commodities which cost more because of the high price of gas, Exxon's CEO roped in a $21.7 million dollar pay package this year and the company's profits hit record levels.

We try not to write in the passive voice because we need our readers to know who the actors are. We should do the same when we think about the country's economic problems. We may not be able to "radically efface" those in power, but hopefully we can at least bring them down to size.