Political Prose

Carrier takes off

Life on an aircraft carrier is surprisingly mundane — except for the explosives.


I just saw the first episode of Carrier, a documentary series that looks at life on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. I was struck by how mundane most of the work is aboard the carrier: wiping windows, cooking food, wheeling around pallets. Except that the windows are at the top of a control tower, the food amounts to ten crates of chicken a day, and the pallets hold high-explosive weaponry. There are 5,000 people who make up the "city" of the carrier, and most of them aren’t zipping around in multimillion dollar jets, yet they work 16-hour shifts to keep the planes flying.

Most of the people who serve on the carrier are people from middle -class, lower middle-class, or poor families — as an officer points out, the graduates of Exeter Academy tend to have better options. These men and women tend to be in their late teens or early twenties, and so life on the carrier is akin to high school: with gossiping, hooking up, illicit booze, and occasional temper tantrums. But the appeal of carrier life also comes across clearly in the camaraderie among the crew and the opportunities that the military provides for discipline, responsibility, and a decent career. That’s what draws two women profiled in the documentary: one the daughter of a "pimp" and drug addict and the other who has lived all her life in a small town of only 3,000 people. In America, the WPA has been replaced by the military, a government-funded jobs program that both political parties support and that works for many young men and women, provided they don’t get killed.

This jobs program is all about waging war, which brings both a sense of urgency and importance and some moral qualms to the equation. A woman whose job is to load ordnance on fighter planes thinks about the fact that the bombs kill people, but she points out that her role is a small one and she’s just doing what people tell her. (It’s amazing how little the rank and file know about what the overall mission is.) A pilot says that no one who pulls a trigger can not think about whether this war is worth it. What comes across in the documentary is the crew’s range of political beliefs, which aren’t necessarily in lockstep with those of their president or superiors. It’s another way that this remarkable series pulls apart the civilian world’s myths about the military and helps us understand the men and women who choose to serve.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

In the subway


The subway car was jammed with riders. Everywhere I looked, I saw riders anxious to leave the subway. One rider was tuned into his iPod and started bobbing his head along with the music. Another rider, a tall man wearing a pale blue shirt, tended to his son. 

Without warning, the subway car came to a halt. A voice came over the loudspeaker.

"Please do not panic. We are experiencing mechanical difficulties."

A man in his late fifties began to protest: "I have a place I have to be," he said. The woman sitting next to him responded.

"We all have a place we have to be," she said.

I watched all of this exchange as a silent observer. A toddler in the back of the car started to cry. 

Over an hour later, the subway car began to move. People started to gather their belongings in order to exit the car.

Later, as I reflected on the subway mishap, I realized how crazy my fellow riders had acted. Despite being in the subway car for over an hour, not one person in the car had made any effort to befriend their fellow passengers. Rather, the only words being exchanged were complaints—complaints about Septa, which runs the public transit system in Philadelphia.

No one bothered to thank the subway car conductors who had tirelessly worked to bring the subway car back to life.

I give those workers so much credit. While we had been trapped underground, they worked frantically to free us. One worker even went as far as to wedge himself between the car and the track in an attempt to get us back on schedule.

Septa subway conductors are reminders to all of us that heroes exist in all kinds of different forms.

Thank you, Septa, for getting me to my Sunday destination as safely as possible.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

The in crowd


This is an issue that has puzzled me for quite some time, and I never really took a good moment to think about it until it sprang up on another blog. I’ve always wondered: can sex workers be feminists? Simple question, indeed, but no easy answer. Feminism has done quite the job of making "choice" an essential part of female living—so much so that a new subset of feminism has spawned: choice feminism. Essentially, choice feminists argue that no matter what a woman does—whether she becomes president or a stripper—her choice is always a legitimate one as long as she wasn’t coerced or goaded into it by some extraneous discriminatory circumstances (i.e., sexism, force, etc.). The logical extension of that argument, however, is that even women who willingly become prostitutes, strippers, porn stars, or any other profession normally considered oppressive or mysogynistic can call themselves feminists. See the tension here?

One of my favorite blogs, feministing.com, initiated this discussion on its site and sparked a flurry of angry responses and page-long diatribes, while others simply took their opinions to similar blogs (http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/03/03/do-migrant-sex-workers-need-saving/). Honestly, I am a feminist, yet I am not too quick to believe that any choice a woman makes, no matter what it entails, typifies a feminist action. Just look at the structure of that argument: A) Feminism is about choice. B) Sex work is (sometimes) a choice. C) Therefore, sex work can be considered feminist (assuming that the woman isn’t forced into it, however). But who decided part A? I’ve never believed that feminism is only about choice. Yes, that’s part of it, and I’m sure that the second wave of the women’s movement championed the rights of women to choose their own career (as opposed to settling with the only ones available to them as women). Yet, such a definition is way too broad, and often ends up leading to actions that are more regressive than subversive. Feminism is more so about ending gender oppression. We don’t just want women to be able to choose their career; we also hope to see more women in traditionally male fields (politics, technology, upper-level management), subverting widespread and all too often innaccurate stereotypes. This doesn’t mean that women who choose to strip or work in escort agencies aren’t making legitimate choices. But "feminist" choices? I’m not so sure. 

The issue got even more complicated as I was sitting in lecture for my "Images of Women in French Cinema" class. We were discussing one possible interpretation of the film, Belle de Jour (1966), in which an upperclass Parisian woman, unbeknownst to her husband, joins a brothel and becomes involved with a local gangster. She had been sexually abused as a young child and frequently had masochistic hallucinatory fantasies (like getting gang raped, being verbally insulted and beaten, etc.). My professor argued that in eventually taking pleasure in prostitution, Belle de Jour (the psuedonym of the main character), was using her sexuality to defeat masculine power (from the sexual abuse and being unable to copulate with her husband due to his impotence). This is a similar argument to what some "sex-positive" feminists opine: that female power is sexual power and in choosing to handle it as you so please, you’re essentially refusing cultural expectations of women and sexual double standards.

You see? It’s complicated. Just writing about two different viewpoints confuses me even more; I’m not going to lie. Truth be told, I’m tempted to say that sex work is not feminist (what is so socially progressive about identifying yourself only in terms of your body or sexual capabilities?), but I’m also quite swayed by the counter-argument. l’m never one to stay stuck somewhere in the middle, though. I’ll definitely be thinking about this one for a while.  

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

I beat anorexia!


Like everything else on the interweb, this is probably old news to all of you. But I saw the "I Beat Anorexia" t-shirt for the first time last week.

Well, first I saw the slogan on a banner on a website, next to the story about France’s new law (making pro-ana anything illegal, from blogs to runways) and thought, I must have that. I’m a survivor and damn proud of it. Five minutes later, after a simple Google images search, I wasn’t cheering; I was crying.

This is what I get? Aside from an obese medical file, a lifelong medical condition which, without medication, would leave me paralyzed after three months and dead after six (the $200 co-pay stings a bit, too), and the possibility that I’ll never be able to have a child, this really adds insult to injury. Thanks a lot.

I’m not easily offended, but this one hurt, deeply. My years of pain and the permanent damage I’ve done to my body are not a joke. I survived, but so many others won’t.

Anorexia has the highest death rate of any psychiatric disorder (and the lowest health insurance coverage). While every other mental illness can drive a person to suicide, no other can kill a person on its own. The heart won’t stop, the organs won’t fail, infertility does not set in. So many more people (both women and men) struggle with it for years, the walking dead. There’s life, death, and the purgatory of living with an eating disorder.

Even though a person can never be "cured," it is possible to survive, to live healthier and happier than before. If I can do it, there must be others. There aren’t too many to be found online. On the one hand, this troubles me because maybe I’m that rare. But then I hope, however many of us there are, we’re too busy living our lives to go online and talk about our weight.

What I did find will have to be enough, for me and others looking for the same. "Life After Anorexia" yields the most results, mostly of memoirs and personal stories and websites. The story of Hayley Wilde from the U.K. stands out for me. The 20-year-old Wilde just gave birth to a son, three years after her skeletal frame hovered near death. Wilde, now so happy, so alive, should give everyone hope that they can recover too. She gives me the hope that motherhood is still possible.

If you are a survivor and you do want something with the slogan on it (in a triumphant, not cruel way), I found that too, on CaféPress.com. The only problem is, a few vaguely pro-ana products are mixed in with the others. You can boycott the site because of it, but then you’d also have to boycott Amazon and every other online retailer.

So many people walk around with clothing proclaiming that they survived cancer or even had abortions. Why not tell the world this?

As for the law in France, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. The same would be done to an advertisement or site advocating drug use, suicide, or murder. It’s no different — it’s still promoting the destruction of human lives.

Personally, I don’t believe the media and fashion industry alone are responsible. Too many anorexics and bulimics attack their bodies to cope with abuse, traumatic experiences, or other emotional problems, not to mention genetic predispositions. But the industries have to take some responsibility. Fashion, throughout history, has not just sold clothing but an image. Whether it’s a cinched waste, a hairstyle, tanned skin, or a hairless crotch, we model ourselves on the images they sell us. They take pride in their ability to make us want the hair, the makeup, the bag, the sunglasses, the dress, the shoes, and the nails, yet deny having any influence on how small we are willing to make ourselves to completely achieve the "look." The size of the model is specifically chosen by the agency, the casting people, photographers, clothing designers, editors, publishers, and advertisers. The consumer does not just want the dress or the shoes — they want thighs that don’t touch and ribs you can count.

I can’t tell anyone how to get past anorexia — I’m not a doctor, and my story is, of course, different from every one else’s. But I can tell you this: to get past it, you have to want to live more than you want to be thin.

I hope you all have the support, the professional help, and the will to live. I promise you — feeling alive beats feeling thin.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Political Prose

A middle way to solve America’s healthcare mess

This week's edition of Frontline covered a topic that you'd think we'd be hearing more about, in this election year: what the United States could learn from other countries that are able to provide health coverage for all while respecting the power of markets.


This week’s edition of Frontline covered a topic that you’d think we’d be hearing more about, in this election year: what the United States could learn from other countries that are able to provide health coverage for all while respecting the power of markets. (You can watch the documentary here. Below is an interview with Frontline correspondent T.R. Reid.)

 

 

In our book The Missing Class, Katherine Newman and I talk about the financial hardships that families face when they don’t have health insurance — or their insurance offers substandard coverage. Hundreds of thousands (some say millions) of Americans go bankrupt every year at least in part because of medical bills. Whenever we talk about the need to reform the health care system in this country, the typical response is that Americans don’t want "socialized medicine." To critics of reform, it’s a sad, but inevitable, fact that a free-market healthcare system like America’s will leave some people out in the cold.

Yet in four of the five countries examined in the Frontline report, the private sector plays a major role in health care — which might come as a surprise to some Americans who have been told that the only options are our current Wild West free-market system and the bureaucratic nightmare of socialized medicine (which is actually not so much of a nightmare, according to the report). In fact, in Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, there are private insurers akin to the HMOs in our country.

The difference is that private insurers in these countries cannot, by law, make a profit — any profits they make have to be plowed back into the firm or used to lower healthcare premiums. Also, the insurers cannot reject anyone for already being sick, and they have to pay their members’ bills in full — behavior that goes hand in hand with their not-for-profit status, since for-profit HMOs inevitably face pressures to weed out unhealthy members and deny payment. 

Another good idea from abroad is allowing people to choose their insurer from among all HMOs. Germany, for example, gives people the option of more than 200 private insurers. This creates competition that drives down healthcare costs. Allowing people to choose the government as their insurer — for example, changing Medicare from an exclusive program for the elderly into an insurance option, alongside private HMOs, for all Americans — would immediately drive down costs as private firms slash their prices to compete with the government. (Surprisingly, even when private insurers can’t make profits, there is still a healthy competition between them, though the rivalry is over membership growth and company survival rather than shareholder dividends.)

Rampant malpractice lawsuits exact huge insurance fees from doctors practicing in the United States, while they are almost unheard of in many countries with comparable or superior healthcare systems. Reform is needed here, too, or else those exorbitant insurance costs will continue to pad the cost of care.

Finally, making insurance mandatory for all is crucial. Government can help the poor to pay premiums, but the important thing is making sure that everyone is covered, so that the insurance mechanism — which relies on having a large pool of healthy people to balance out the costs of the unhealthy — can work. In Britain, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and Taiwan — in virtually all advanced industrialized nations except the U.S., for that matter — insurance is mandatory or health care for all is paid through taxes. (In America, people without coverage turn to emergency rooms, the costliest kind of care possible.)

The results of these policies are healthcare systems abroad that cost their countries much less — as little as six percent of Taiwan’s economy, compared to 16 percent of America’s — and insurers with administrative overheads in the range of 17 percent, rather than the 25 percent common among U.S. HMOs. Meanwhile, the quality of care is just as good, according to national surveys, and surgical procedures in some of these countries actually happen faster than they do in America — contrary to the myth of long lines at the socialized clinic. Bankruptcy because of medical bills is virtually unheard of.

One defense of America’s unfettered free-market system is that it promotes innovation. The belief is that pharmaceutical companies, for example, won’t invest in research without hefty profits to be made. But the large pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland did no such thing in spite of healthcare overhaul in the 1990s: They cut their marketing budgets and maintained their levels of R&D. (The irony is that America is in effect subsidizing innovation in other countries: Swiss pharmaceutical firms make a third of their profits in the less regulated U.S. market. Swiss patients benefit from the same state-of-the-art drugs, while American patients carry the financial burdens of coverage that the drug companies would rather not take on.)

According to Frontline, none of the three major party candidates for U.S. president have offered policies that wholeheartedly embrace the good ideas already tried and tested in our fellow capitalist democracies. John McCain has talked about allowing people to buy insurance across state lines. Hillary Clinton has called for making insurance mandatory for all, while Barack Obama wants a mandate that covers children. But overall their plans are tepid, says Reid, and won’t do much to dent rising healthcare costs or help the hundreds of thousands of Americans who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills.

It is baffling to our counterparts overseas that our citizens without jobs — the people most likely to get sick — go without health care, or that we provide education and legal counsel to all but not the right to see your own doctor. Surely we can learn something from what has worked elsewhere in the world. The recent experience of Switzerland, which had a healthcare system much like America’s until it underwent dramatic reform in 1994, is especially instructive. Today, both conservatives and liberals there support the reforms. With enough political will and imagination, we could fix our broken system, too.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

On a scale of 1 to 5


My HR department sent a company-wide email reminding all employees that annual performance reviews are lurking. We would be concerned if these reviews actually meant something.

If they were used, for example, as a basis for salary increases or promotions, we might take a more hearty interest. They are not. Why, you’d like to know? Having even asked such a question shows that you are thinking along a certain logical path which is clearly at odds with the inner workings of a multi-national, multi-billion-dollar corporation.

So we employees treat the performance reviews with something approaching apathetic carelessness. The paperwork involves listing your professional goals for the coming year, and then, as if HR knows you’re just copying your answers from a website you found, they also require you to list how you’re planning to achieve said goals. Last year I can recall I gave my goals and strategies serious thought while riding the B train on the way in to the office. An advertisement for a local commuter college offered some ideas: “Enroll today and in less than 18 months, you could go from dead-end to high-end.”

Meanwhile, your boss also completes a review of how well you performed in the past year. On a scale of 1 to 5, you are ranked in several categories, including attendance and initiative. Ya-wn. No wonder no one cares. Want the staff to take an interest? Let’s liven things up by selecting more exciting ways to judge the employees’ progress or lack thereof and hand out awards as such.

We might borrow the Straphangers Campaign’s list of categories which they use to rate the bus and train lines. For example, instead of giving the Pokey Award to the slowest bus route (the M23 bus route, by the way, clocked in at a blistering average pace of four mph in 2007), the employee who arrives at his or her desk the latest each morning gets recognized. The prize, an alarm clock, of course. Or the Shleppie Award, given to the bus route plagued with bunching/gaps in service, meaning that two buses might arrive within 30 seconds of each other, then no bus would arrive for about five hours. (The M1 takes home this prize.) At the office, the employee who whiles away the day trolling the Internet, chatting on the phone relaying the same story to everyone she knows, and making twelve trips an hour for coffee before finally settling down to business at 4:36 p.m., and then frantically declaring how frantic she is, wins this prize, which I think would be a swift kick in the ass at 9:01 a.m.

I’m submitting my proposal for a change to the performance review system first thing in the morning. Well, after I get my coffee, make a few phone calls, and surf the Internet a bit.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

personal stories. global issues.