Call Me Cynical

Autocritiquing Occupy Wall Street: The Difference Between Broke and Poor

ows-autocritique:

The Wall Street Journal has a fun little interactive feature that tells you what “percent” you are based on income, i.e whether you should be dragged through the streets by your silk pantaloons or feast on the champagne-infused flesh of the rich. A friend of mine posted the link on Facebook with the comment: “I’m in the bottom 1%. I <3 grad school.”

I clicked through and was reminded why the “we are the 99%” rhetoric bothers me so much. The feature ostensibly seeks to highlight the very real class differences that exist within Occupy Wall Street’s 99% movement, but does so using the same flawed methodology by which that opaque number was reached in the first place. Users are asked to simply plug in their income, and their “percent” is calculated with no consideration for the other variables that contribute to class such as education, health, housing, type of work, and degree of self determination. 

As a result, someone like myself, a single, white, college-educated woman with a supportive family and a passport who chooses to work in a creative field, can be classified in the bottom 10%, while a single parent with several dependents, no health insurance and making slightly more is considered middle class. Moreover, the data used in these calculations is based on tax filings and excludes the poorest sections of society, including illegal immigrants, who, if they were taken into account, would make us all richer by comparison. Despite the current economic downturn, being white, healthy and educated means upward mobility is within your reach, and automatically places you on top, regardless of your actual income. If you are white, healthy, educated and don’t have money, you are broke, not poor.

I brought up my issues with the “99%” to my friend who had posted the link, and she readily agreed, although she is (and should be) still angry about being thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that will probably never pay itself off. She also pointed out that the Occupy spokesman on the recent cover of New York Magazine went to Oberlin.

It’s not that overqualified, underemployed people don’t have a right to be pissed off, or that the majority shouldn’t be united by outrage against a system that is rigged to favor a superwealthy minority, but white college grads claiming to speak for the disenfranchised masses isn’t solidarity–it’s appropriation. — ML

(via dische)

Having recently begun to see a therapist for the first time, I have started to  question everyday reflexive behavior that my therapist may later point out— and I am projecting wildly into the future here, since we are still in session four covering the seemingly endless expanse of my childhood — amounts to  negative compulsive behavior. Now I don’t think the particular annoyance that I am about to describe, or even my ritual response to it, is indicative of a larger problem. But I happen to carry high hopes that the qualifications and experience of my professional interlocutor will eventually provide greater insight into the minutiae of my everyday struggles.

Which brings me to that immutable presence in many people’s lives known as Starbucks. Now I am not a classic— I like to think— Starbucks hater. I readily admit to liking the taste of their more extravagant beverages. Their coffee is unreasonably priced, surely, and they do other bad things.  I am almost too swept up in my own personal reasons for hating them to remember the details. But I am occasionally willing, particular  in New York City, to spend $6 on conveniently maintaining my needed caffeine intake.

Since beginning therapy, however, i have started to question if the reliable aggravation  I experience is what keeps me going back. Like I am addicted to small-scale, inconsequential battles.

What I can’t stand about Starbucks— apart from the obvious franchise decor and the uncalled for expansion into coffee shop sub-industries, such as offering inane musical compilations for sale — is the unforgivable, pretentious language they have created to displace basic, totally sufficient and universally understood terms such as Small, Medium and Large. I refuse to employ the counter-instinctive terminology of Grande/Venti/Tall that they have invented. In fact, after all these years, I still don’t know which of these terms refers to the size that I most frequently want to order: Large. That may seem perfectly inconsequential,  except that the following exchange always, without fail, ensues:

- One iced caramel Latte.

- What size?

- … Large.

- You mean Grande/Tall/Venti?

- … whichever [fucking] one is [fucking] large.

- Okay. That’s Grande/Tall/Venti.

They always— these baristas, as they are called, which is also a misappropriated loan word for someone who grinds coffee and foams milk— insist on instructing me of the correct term.

Like I’m fucking lucky they knew what I meant when I said ‘Large’.

Of course, I don’t feel personally affronted by the employees wielding these terms against me. I understand that the company introduced these terms to make its customers feel that the experience is unique, as if Starbucks reinvented the fucking wheel on espresso beverages rather than  driving the price of coffee up and the competition out. But I’ll admit to entertaining a lingering desire that I will eventually meet the barista who doesn’t insist on parroting corporate neologisms back at me. Which is why I keep going back for more of the same aggravating exchange.

Some day, a barista will smile knowingly when I say “Large” and it will be like an unspoken act of solidarity, of shared resistance, in the battle against Starbucks’ soullessness.

While expressly keen to have grandchildren, this is an excerpt from an e-mail I received from my mother on the occasion of the anniversary when I nearly killed her some 29 years ago (with the help of some sadistic, wickedly incompetent German doctors):

“29 years ago, it was very hot and humid and you were three weeks overdue and i felt like a bus fully loaded with passengers stuck in midtown traffic on a summer afternoon.

 […]

They gave me oxytocin, a drug that induces violent labor pains that rip open the cervix. it is a brutal idea, the germans love it […] but the oxytocin makes labor pains come at maximum strength[…]feels like your torso is in a vise that is inexorably screwed shut […] i begged for pain killers and they wouldn’t give me any so i begged for a subdural and finally after two hours, they gave me one. at this point, i had complete relief but you, propelled downwards by the relaxation of the uterus that the subdural causes, suddenly dropped, sufficiently to choke on the umbilical chord that was holding you high up, — your heart beat stopped entirely.

[…]

but then it was fine,  because  you and me,  we had the evening to ourselves, and i got to know you and it made the ardors of the past hours so entirely worth it.  you were not so different from now.  stubborn, funny,  alert. Happy Birthday!”

I caved and had a sip of coffee, after the following conversation with my friend A. Afterwards, I felt so grateful that I spontaneously embraced the cult of maternity and bought my colleague flowers for Mother’s Day.

[Chat edited for LOLs and other inanities.]

A: the reason I couldn’t adopt a raw food diet in lebanon (and in syria its even worse)  

 is that produce is watered with sewage water in the Beqaa […] 

i just think i would starve and be in a constant low grade panic even worse than the one i’m in now 

me: thats how i feel

panic = feeling like a small balding man

i now think of my PRE-DETOX self as a vivacious beast of a woman 

eating steak with her fingers

washing that down with mugs of coffee

i miss coffee

the only conciliation is the clearness of my pipi 

i could go look at it every 20 minutes

i’ve clearly lost any sense of whats appropriate to share with my colleagues

i already told them about my clear pipi

while they were eating SANDWICHES

for lunch

PPS. I am reminded of a conversation with my friend D. upon entering the “Mother Earth” health food store in Kingston, NY some time last year.

Me: I hate the smell of these places.

D: Yeah, it’s the smell of self-righteousness.

Some observations:

The paradox at the heart of detoxing is that it is a fundamentally self-righteous act; and yet, you are doomed to fail unless you quietly suffer through the endeavor. Nobody in the office cares that you’ve gone for three hours without coffee. Nobody admires your pre-peeled, pre-cut ziplock bag of raw vegetables.

I dislike my un-caffeinated self. Serenity is at odds with my basic character; I feel dispassionate about everything. I keep telling myself that the youthful glow that will soon return to my skin will eclipse the dull expression in my eyes.

Detoxing is like fighting with your colon over the remote control; if I suffer through my colon’s choice of programming— water, ruffage, and herbal tea— I will soon retaliate with black coffee, White Russians and processed cheese.

Water tastes like saliva.

I feel like opening fire on a health food store. Or verbally assaulting people in a raw foods online chat forum.

——

We thought no-fly zone was like ‘ride your bike to work’ day! 

The logic of disaster capitalism on steroids: The UK and France supply Qaddhafi with weapons, then bomb him when he uses them, destroying his purchases. This could work for other industries as well: Produce an album; sell it to people; then go destroy their CD collections. Rinse, repeat.