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The chicken hangers

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President Bush has proposed an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that could provide broad new rights to millions of undocumented workers. But how are they faring now? A look at how immigrant workers from Mexico are changing the face of the poultry industry in the South.


 

Chicken processing is a dirty business, but no job in a poultry plant is more dreaded than “live hang.” Here, workers known as “chicken hangers” grab birds by their feet and sling them onto fast-moving metal hooks. This is the first — and dirtiest — stage of poultry processing. The birds, weighing approximately five pounds each, fight back by pecking, biting, and scratching the hangers, who wear plastic cones around their forearms to shield off chicken attacks. Then, as workers finally hoist the birds onto the hooks, the chickens urinate and defecate out of desperation, often hitting the workers below.

The next stage — the “kill room” — may be bloodier, but most of the work there is done by laser-sharpened buzz-saws; only rarely does a chicken slip past the saw with its throat intact. Although no one has figured out how to sanitize the nasty job of hanging chickens, poultry managers pride themselves on the efficiency of their plants.  One plant manager in Laurel, Mississippi, described his plant to me as “an automobile factory in reverse: They put cars together, we take chickens apart.”

Like many immigrant workers in the poultry industry, Esteban — a Veracruz, Mexico, native in his early twenties — agreed to work in “live hang” where he would colgar pollos only because it paid slightly better than other positions at the Peco Foods plant in Bay Springs, Mississippi. Nestled in the rolling hills of southern Mississippi’s “Pine Belt,” Bay Springs feels like a twenty-first century company town: Peco employs approximately 800 workers, while the total population of Bay Springs is around 2,000.  At $8 an hour, chicken hangers at the Bay Springs plant make $1 to $1.50 more than other workers who debone, package, eviscerate, or kill chickens in other parts of the plant. In an industry with some of the highest turnover rates and lowest wages in the nation, chicken hanging has the highest turnover of any position. According to one manager I spoke to, workers in “live hang” rarely last a week before they ask to be transferred to another position. Others simply disappear, never to return to the chicken plant.  

“You think you’d last a week here?” the manager asked me as he opened a door to the plant’s live hang room. For about five seconds, I watched men in a dark, sweltering room, (the darkness supposedly calms the chickens) struggle with a blur of feathers, dirt, and blood. A conveyor belt dumped chickens on the ground and about five men wrestled to get them on the hooks before the next load arrived.

“I probably wouldn’t last an hour,” I responded.

Despite the bleak conditions, Esteban flourished in his new job. With closely cropped hair, a slight build, and a collection of NBA T-shirts, Esteban had the air of a bright-eyed teenager. As an undocumented worker who spoke no English, he made the most of his limited opportunities in Mississippi; he got along well with his line supervisor and claims to have been able to hang over forty five-pound chickens per minute, an incredible feat considering the hazards of the job.

Then, after a year on the job, Julio Gordo, a manager at Peco Foods, called Esteban into his office. (To protect his identity, Julio Gordo is a pseudonym.)  According to Esteban, Gordo told him that the Social Security Administration had notified Peco Foods that Esteban’s Social Security Number had repeated as a number for another worker.

At first, Esteban feared he would be fired by the plant and deported for document fraud — a fate not uncommon among undocumented workers.  “Gordo told me he could have the cops here in five minutes if I didn’t cooperate with him,” Esteban confided to me later.

 

 

The no-match crisis: threats in the guise of favors

When I first met Esteban during the hottest days of last summer, he was reluctant to talk about hanging chickens, Peco Foods, Social Security Numbers, or anything else other than the new car he had bought with Peco wages. Like many immigrant workers in chicken plants, Esteban initially shrugged off my questions about hardships in the plant by saying, “I came here to work and I don’t want any problems.”

At the time, I was working as a translator for the local union, Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 693, while gathering research for an academic paper focusing on the changing face of the South vis-à-vis the poultry industry. The management of Peco Foods decided to let me in the plant on one condition: that I work exclusively as a translator — and not as a recruiter — for the union.

I quickly learned that workers at Peco Foods had two mutually exclusive opinions about the plant: Inside the plant, they had no complaints about the work or their bosses; outside the plant, the workers despaired about what they saw as deplorable conditions and incessant harassment by managers. Many wondered why they had risked their lives to come to Mississippi only to slave away in a chicken plant. They longed for jobs picking fruit, cutting timber, or doing construction — anything besides hanging poultry.

Outside the plant, they accused managers of not paying overtime, charging workers money to keep their jobs, and denying workers bathroom breaks; inside the plant, however, they couldn’t be happier about Peco Foods. In the end, a job at the chicken plant represented a ticket to a new life for immigrant workers and few were willing to quit over perceived injustices. Esteban was no exception.

After Gordo allegedly threatened to deport Esteban, he reassured him that he could stay on at the plant if he could get a new ID and Social Security Number. Esteban knew this would be difficult; fake documents cost hundreds of dollars and were sold by only a handful of people in southern Mississippi on the black market. Furthermore, Esteban knew he would run the risk of being fired or deported if he bought a new Social Security Number, since he would be admitting his old one was false. Even with a new I.D., his seniority — including the two raises he had received for a year’s work — would be revoked. Esteban would be starting over from scratch.

Then, according to Esteban, Gordo told him he was willing to do him a “favor”: Esteban could buy a new Social Security Card from Gordo for $700. This was a favor Gordo had done for many other Mexicans in the same situation, he claimed. Still, the news came at a bad time: Esteban was trying to pay off traffic tickets and send money back to his family in Veracruz. He simply didn’t have the cash to pay off his supervisor.  When Gordo also demanded that Esteban arrange a date for him with Esteban’s female cousin after work as a return “favor,” Esteban decided he had had enough. (In a conversation with a union representative, Gordo vehemently denied that he ever offered to “sell” documents to employees).

Esteban asked the plant’s union representative, Charles Carney, for advice. Although it was rare for an immigrant worker to talk to a union rep in the plant, Esteban felt he had no other choice than to turn to the union, since Gordo had threatened to terminate him if he didn’t accept the deal.

Carney listened in shock to Esteban’s story as I translated. “Tell him we need to talk to him at home,” Carney told me. “We can’t talk in here.”

Home, as we found out, was a run-down trailer park on the outskirts of Laurel, Mississippi, where many chicken workers lived. Tucked away behind the town’s Wal-Mart on an unpaved road, the unnamed trailer park looked more like a refugee camp than a subdivision; rotting garbage and abandoned pick-up trucks were the only landmarks.  The day we visited, workers came out of their trailers to tell similar stories about Gordo first charging them to obtain jobs and then, after informing them of a Social Security “no-match” letter, demanding additional payment for providing new documents.

After a day of interviews, it became clear that the Social Security Administration (SSA) had sent a letter to Peco Foods with the names of workers whose Social Security Numbers did not match its records. Peco Foods then told these workers individually that they must “correct” the error or be fired within two weeks.

Although Peco officials are no longer officially commenting on the “no-match” situation, Steve Conley, the company’s human resources manager, told the Associated Press in August, “We didn’t realize there was a problem with these folks or we wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. At that point, we just told them, get it straight with Social Security or we’ll terminate you.” (Peco Foods did not respond to phone and email inquiries for this story.)

Carney, a former poultry plant worker himself, was incredulous when he heard that company officials claimed they were ignorant of the immigrants’ status. In fact, he was convinced that the company knew it stood to gain from employing workers who could be easily sacked because of questions about their papers and took advantage of their precarious legal status.

Carney’s union, LIUNA Local 693, had recently succeeded in ousting one manager accused of charging immigrants to obtain jobs, and his replacement — Gordo — was turning out to be even more problematic. Carney began to wonder if Gordo’s purported strategy of selling counterfeit documents to immigrants who had shown up as “no-matches” in the SSA’s database extended to higher-level managers in the company, and perhaps outside the plant.

After Esteban was fired weeks later, Carney called Peco Foods’ plant manager and threatened to file a grievance for a breach of the union contract unless the worker was reinstated and Gordo was fired. Carney claimed the worker was fired without just cause since, as far as he could tell, the “no-match” letter did not imply the worker was illegal, but rather that there had been some sort of error in his paperwork. The plant manager was surprised to hear a union representative — especially an African American — taking an interest in the plight of an immigrant worker.  

“I thought you wanted [the immigrants] out of the plant, because they were stealing your jobs,” the manager said to Carney over the phone.

“If I’ve learned one thing over the past ten years,” Carney responded, “it’s, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

“He didn’t take that too well,” Carney told me later. “I think I heard him throwing a chair around his office.”

 

 

Learning to “speak Mexican” in the rural South

Carney, a stout Baptist deacon and veteran of the Vietnam War and many years in Mississippi chicken plants, is an unlikely convert to the immigrants’ cause.  When he came back from the war, Carney found a job in the deep freeze section of a Sanderson Farms plant in Collins, Mississippi. He quickly gained a reputation as the only African American worker willing to stand up to a notoriously racist plant manager and helped to unionize three poultry plants in southern Mississippi. After nearly a decade of fighting to keep immigrants out of the local poultry plants, only to see their numbers increase steadily, Carney underwent a Pauline conversion in his attitude toward immigrant rights a few years ago.

Although he doesn’t “speak Mexican,” as he puts it, he believes immigrant workers and African Americans share many of the same problems in Mississippi poultry plants: Both are stuck in low-wage jobs with few chances to get ahead in a highly segregated society. They work in an industry that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has designated as one of the most hazardous and that ranks near the bottom in Labor Department statistics for median wages. And as bad as conditions can be for African American workers on the processing line, Carney believes the immigrants’ situation is worse; in fact, he often compares it to slavery.  

But while Carney equates “Big Poultry” with the plantation system, industry experts cite the huge economic impact of chicken on the state economy and its ever-expanding global market as Mississippi’s ticket out of its seemingly perpetual status as the nation’s poorest state. According to Mississippi State University poultry science reports, poultry contributes $2 billion to the state economy and nearly 70,000 jobs, making it the most important “agricultural” industry in the state. Since 1987, the number of Mississippi chickens sold has more than doubled to over 700 million per year, and poultry companies are increasingly looking abroad for new consumers. In 1990, the U.S. exported 500,000 metric tons of chicken overseas, while in the year 2000 that figure increased five-fold to 2,500,000, as China and Russia became the two largest consumers of U.S. chicken. Peco Food’s website proudly boasts company exports of “jumbo wings” and “jumbo legs” to Indonesia, China, Spain, and Romania, among other countries.

Like the plantation system, however, Big Poultry is largely a Southern phenomenon: The top six broiler-producing states are located in the South, with Georgia and Arkansas constantly battling for number one. And even though it is currently ranked as the fifth-largest broiler producer, Mississippi boasts the single largest processing plant in the U.S. — an ultra-modern Choctaw Maid plant built in 2000 in Carthage, capable of processing over 2 million chickens per week. It is this massive boom in poultry that is largely responsible for changing the rural South from a biracial, agricultural culture to a globalized entrepôt.

Despite the boom in poultry production, the industry has a notorious reputation with labor, environmental, and immigrants’ rights groups. Tyson, the world’s largest chicken processor, was labeled by Multinational Monitor magazine as one of the world’s “Ten Worst Corporations” in 1999 for its use of child labor. Then, Tyson became the subject of a thirty-six-count Justice Department indictment for human trafficking in 2001. Ever since three top-level Tyson managers were acquitted by a federal grand jury for smuggling immigrants to the South from Central America last year, the industry has faced increasing scrutiny on its recruiting and hiring tactics. The media spotlight on Tyson’s alleged trafficking in immigrant labor, combined with the economic downturn and security concerns in recent years, has made many locals — whites and African Americans alike — wary of embracing undocumented workers.

In another Peco Foods plant in Canton, Mississippi, a similar “no-match” crisis set off a crusade led by the town’s sheriff against Canton’s entire population of undocumented workers. After approximately 200 workers were fired by Peco because of the “no-match” letter, Sheriff Toby Trowbridge told the Clarion-Ledger — the daily paper in Jackson — that he would “round up” all “illegals” and “deport them.” Although many workers were finally reinstated after the plant’s union filed a grievance and national media started to take notice of the sheriff’s campaign to deport an entire trailer park populated by immigrants, the damage had already been done.

As Anita Grabowski of the Equal Justice Center, an Austin, Texas-based legal aid group that focuses on immigration, told me: “Most of the workers live paycheck to paycheck…. They had to find other work.” Grabowski worked on a campaign to get the workers reinstated and found the union in Canton — a local of the United Food and Commercial Workers — less enthusiastic than Carney’s local when it came to the plight of immigrant workers. Grabowski says that in the Canton case, union representatives were more interested in recruiting dues-paying members. At a July meeting for union members, Carney tried to convert other African American workers to his newfound cause. “They treat these Hispanics like they treated black folk back in slavery days,” he said. “Y’all got to stick together with the Latinos.”

 

 

The “Latinization” of the South

In a state still wrestling with ghosts of the Civil Rights struggle, Carney’s message gets a mixed reception in the black community. In towns throughout the South where poultry is king, working-class African Americans view the influx of Latino workers with suspicion. Although the South is famous for its insularity and chauvinism, the refrain “they’re stealing our jobs” is actually heard more in the black community than the white community, since few whites work processing-line jobs such as “live hang” and evisceration.  

As Mike Cockrell, the chief financial officer of Mississippi’s largest poultry company, Sanderson Farms, told me during a tour of the company’s Laurel plant: “Jobs in chicken processing have been traditionally filled by black women. Many of these women are single mothers without much education. You can imagine it’s got to be a hard life trying to raise children and work fulltime at a chicken plant.”

Cockrell went on to argue that Hispanic immigrants — many of them indigenous people from southern Mexico and Central America — have a completely different conception of what constitutes a decent standard of living than Americans, but that Sanderson was committed to improving conditions in the plants. “Normal incentives to keep employees — health care, retirement, pensions — don’t work with immigrants,” he said. “They come here to work and send money back home.” Nevertheless, Cockrell maintained that Sanderson Farms was a “family-friendly” company; he cited Sanderson’s child-care facility in Collins, Mississippi, as an industry first. “We have people who work almost their whole lives here, and love it,” he said. “The guy in the kill room, he loves killing chickens. It’s hard to get him out of there.”

“He can say what he wants,” Carney later told me. “But the fact is, they care more about those chickens than they care about their people.” This is a truism repeated by processing-line workers everywhere. In an industry with annual turnover rates approaching 100 percent, the only constant in a chicken plant seems to be the endless line of upside-down birds whirling past the plant floor.

Because of increasing competition for these low-wage jobs, racial tension among Hispanic immigrants and African Americans runs high and occasionally boils over into a shouting match in the break room or parking lot. Carney fields calls daily from African American job seekers who claim to have been turned away from plants even as more immigrants are brought on. Poultry managers, for their part, maintain they simply can’t hire enough native workers to supply the booming demand for chicken, which Americans increasingly view as a healthier and safer alternative to red meat.  

Even if immigrants are not, in fact, taking poultry jobs away from locals (Grabowski claims they are not), the negative reaction is as understandable as it is misconceived. Against the odds — Mississippi is notoriously anti-union — Carney helped organize three Mississippi poultry plants in the early 1990s: two Sanderson Farms plants and one run by Peco Foods in Bay Springs. About five years ago, after tough union certification drives and harassment by plant managers, things started to look up for the union and its members. The poultry industry was booming and the union had fought for and received wage hikes and other benefits.

Then, the immigrants began arriving. Native Mississippians working on the line were at first perplexed, then angry, as line-speeds increased and new jobs were filled by workers from parts of Mexico they had never heard of, like Oaxaca and Chiapas. The immigrants worked harder, faster, and never complained. Labor contractors brought in groups of immigrants and paid them separately from other workers, often deducting a cut for their “services.” Seemingly overnight, immigrants became the majority on the line at Peco Foods and a significant part of the Sanderson Farms plant.

Under the union contract, new workers aren’t allowed to join until after a ninety-day probationary period. When Carney tried to recruit immigrant workers for his union, he found that the labor contractor fired workers after exactly ninety days, only to rehire them the same day under a new name and Social Security number. He discovered that workers who complained about not receiving overtime were fired on the spot. Even after massive firings, the poultry plants were able to bring in new immigrant workers without missing production quotas.

The situation is not unique to southern Mississippi. Throughout the South, immigrants have started taking jobs in poultry and meatpacking plants in towns that, until recently, remained largely untouched by the great waves of immigration to the United States throughout the twentieth century. The impact of Latino immigration on the economy and culture of the South has been overwhelming, yet rarely examined. When the Census Bureau reported that the Latino population of the Southern states had tripled from 1990 to 2000, many people who follow immigration patterns thought that the Census had actually underreported the number of Latinos in the South. In Laurel, for example, the mayor and police officials consistently estimated the Hispanic population to be around 10 percent, while the census reported only 2 percent. Laurel residents say ten years ago, there was not one Mexican restaurant in town, whereas now there are at least four, plus three Mexican grocery stores.

This unprecedented immigration to the South represents a curious twist in the logic of global capitalism. “What’s unique about poultry,” Grabowski says, “is that unlike other sectors — like manufacturing — where companies have moved abroad in search of cheaper labor, poultry companies have, in effect, brought the cheap labor here. Poultry has combined the worst labor practices in agriculture with the worst practices in meatpacking.”

Immigrants to small Southern towns also struggle with life outside the plant. Although Mississippi has one of the lowest costs of living in the country, immigrants often pay over $1,000 a month for a rundown two-bedroom house or trailer. Rental markets in small towns in Mississippi are often controlled by a handful of landlords who gouge immigrants by charging rent per person, not per property. Under this scheme, half a dozen workers can be housed in small trailers, some without heat or running water. According to Laurel’s mayor, some poultry workers have even lived in tents by the town’s only shopping mall.

Responding to the “no-match” crisis

As Carney contemplated his options for responding to the situation at Peco Foods, he quickly learned more about the SSA’s “no-match letter”— the reason Peco had fired Esteban. Shortly after Esteban was fired, other workers started approaching Carney telling him that they, too, had been notified that they had shown up as a “no-match” in the SSA database and would be fired within two weeks if they did nothing to correct the problem.

Carney called other LIUNA locals and an immigrants’ rights group in Jackson. The “no-match” letter was not even on their radar; no one knew how to respond to the threat of mass firings other than to wish the immigrants luck in the next chicken plant. He arranged an ad hoc meeting at the Catholic church in Laurel with some bilingual immigrants’ rights advocates and asked workers to come. With less than twenty-four hours advance notice, approximately eighty workers showed up for the meeting.

After consulting with a team of lawyers and researchers from the Equal Justice Center and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Carney and his colleagues were finally able to get some background on the “no-match” letter. Both organizations are legal aid nonprofits that represent immigrant workers with immigration and labor issues. After every tax season, Carney learned, the SSA sends letters to employees whose Social Security Numbers do not match the name reported to the SSA through the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the SSA, the original purpose of these letters was to reduce the astounding $374 billion in the SSA’s “Earnings Suspense File” (ESF), an account that holds money paid into Social Security that cannot be linked to individual workers. However benevolent SSA’s intentions, the result of the government’s “no-match” campaign has been a disaster for immigrant workers, a group disproportionately affected by these letters. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) estimates that tens of thousands of workers have been fired solely on the basis of the “no-match” letter.

What makes these mass firings particularly troublesome, according to Bill Beardall, director of the Equal Justice Center, is that the SSA has no law enforcement powers and does not “share” information with government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the agency formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service).

Although employers are supposed to submit a copy of the letter to the employee and allow him or her to handle the issue without interference by the company, the company often fires the employee on the basis of the letter alone. In the Peco Foods case, for example, the company created its own letter, which it required employees to submit and sign, in effect forcing them to admit that they are working illegally. Once they admit to having submitted counterfeit documents to the company, they must be fired under the terms of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which prohibits employers from “knowingly” hiring undocumented workers.

None of this, of course, is explained to the immigrant, and companies such as Peco appear determined to keep immigrant workers in the dark about the “no-match” process; Peco sent out approximately sixty no-match letters last summer to immigrant workers and did not provide a Spanish translation until workers began to demand one. None of the workers were allowed to see the SSA’s original letter, which clearly states in boldface type (in English and Spanish) that the letter does not constitute grounds for any adverse action against the employee.

Furthermore, the letter states that if the employer does, in fact, take action against the employee, the company “may” (a key word whose ambivalence remains unresolved even by legal experts at NILC and the Equal Justice Center) be violating the employee’s rights under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The workers were simply told — and sometimes urged on the spot — to sign the company’s letter and return it to Gordo as soon as possible.

The workers at the meeting in Laurel, however, appeared determined to fight for their jobs. With some emergency training and support from Beardall, the group of immigrants’ rights advocates gathered at Laurel’s Catholic church — including a freelance English teacher/translator and a Catholic seminarian — were able to explain to the workers that it would be illegal for the company to fire them without a just cause and that the “no-match letter” did not, in itself, constitute a just cause for termination.

Nevertheless, many of the immigrant workers doubted that the company would respect their legal rights as workers. After hours of discussion in Spanish and English, it became clear that the workers held a fundamental mistrust not only of their employer — Peco Foods — but also of the governmental institutions that regulate companies’ labor and safety practices. The immigrants simply could not believe that their rights would be respected by either the company or the government.

 

Foul-smelling victories  

In a sense, immigrants are rightly skeptical of such institutions: Undocumented workers are often arrested for minor crimes such as public intoxication or excessive traffic tickets and then deported. If an undocumented immigrant chooses to testify in court against an abusive employer, he or she will almost certainly be asked about his or her employment eligibility and the source of his or her documents, which are often counterfeit. This means potentially exposing the coyote who brought him or her into the country, as well as family and friends. Also, a recent decision by the Supreme Court in Hoffman Plastic v. NLRB makes it even harder for undocumented workers to win remuneration after being fired. Even when undocumented immigrants are “unjustly terminated,” the court ruled, they do not have a right to sue their employer for back pay. Grabowski cites the Hoffman decision as a major factor in the Canton workers’ inability to win back pay after being unjustly fired. In sum, the cards are stacked against the worker and only those with nothing to lose — such as Esteban — are willing to come forward and tell their stories.

Ultimately, the group of workers assembled at the church in Laurel decided to hand in letters to the company stating that they were aware of the no-match problem and would look into it on their own; they would not admit to having submitted a false Social Security Number, as the company had asked them to. Workers reported that when Gordo learned of the meeting, he became furious and told them they “would pay a price” and that “the union couldn’t help them.”

Many of the workers — and Carney — feared that Peco Foods would fire them, regardless. Surprisingly, days, then weeks went by, and Gordo took no action. The chicken hangers kept hanging chickens and the debone line kept removing bones from meat. For the immigrants and their unlikely advocate, it was a small, quiet victory over a powerful industry, an industry whose influence has done more to change the face of Mississippi than anything since the civil rights struggle.

Weeks after the “no-match” crisis had passed, I found myself back in the Peco Foods break room gazing through a window onto the plant floor. A conveyor belt with metal hooks wound around an immense room from “live hang” to “cut up,” where a group of mostly Latina workers furiously separated chicken breasts from bones. The floor was like an ice-rink of chicken slime and water. The air was putrid as the smell from “further processing” — where the birds’ bones, guts, and waste are boiled into animal feed — hung in the humid Mississippi air.

A group of chicken hangers came through the door for a fifteen-minute rest. Most of their break is spent doffing and donning their uniforms, which are caked in chicken excrement and chicken guts, and the time left is usually spent smoking cigarettes and eating snacks from the vending machines. Two weeks after receiving their “no-match” letter, they weren’t basking in their victory over Peco Foods, but contemplating other jobs in Mississippi, anywhere but in a chicken plant.

“So you don’t want to stay here in Bay Springs now that you can keep your job?”

“I hear the timber industry is hiring,” one said. “Mejor que colgar pollos.”

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
(order from Powells.com and a portion of each sale goes to InTheFray)

Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America
Edited by Donald D. Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith. University Press of Kansas. 1995.
An anthology of articles by anthropologists and sociologists tracing the transformation of small-town America through low-wage meatpacking jobs.
Purchase this book from Amazon or Powells

The Jungle
By Upton Sinclair. 1906.
The classic Upton Sinclair novel that forced the government to drastically reform working conditions in meatpacking plants in the early twentieth century.
Purchase this book from Amazon or Powells

ORGANIZATIONS >

Equal Justice Center
An Austin, Texas-based legal aid nonprofit that has been monitoring abuses in the poultry industry throughout the South.
URL: http://www.equaljusticecenter.org/PoultryWorker.htm

Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA)
The governmental agency charged with maintaining safe working conditions in U.S. workplaces.
URL: http://www.osha.gov

National Immigration Law Center
A "national support center whose mission is to protect and promote the rights and opportunities of low-income immigrants and their family members."
URL: http://www.nilc.org

Laborers International Union of North America
One of the unions — along with the United Food and Commercial Workers — attempting to organize undocumented workers in poultry plants.
URL: http://www.liuna.org

TOPICS >

President Bush’s proposed immigration reforms
URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040107-1.html

 

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Beyond ‘Tokyo Story’

Ozu’s classic films illuminate the human experience.


The traveling retrospective celebrating the late Yasurijo Ozu’s one-hundredth birthday and showing his thirty-six extant films has already passed through New York and San Francisco. But if you are lucky enough to live within driving distance of Vancouver, Canada, Toronto, Detroit, or Washington, D.C., you still have a chance to see some of this extraordinary filmmaker’s works projected on the luminous white, before they recede again into whatever hole great films vanish for lack of an interested public.

An Ozu film can be a disconcerting experience for filmgoers accustomed to the fast-paced cuts, copious camera movements, and tightly-honed narrative arcs of the average modern film. Ozu’s camera sits three feet off the ground and rests there for almost every shot. He never changes the lens, the same locations come up again and again, and the plots are loose and seem to repeat themselves — in other words, an Ozu film can seem static and frustrating.

But if you can embrace the slowly developing drama in its archetypal scenes of nostalgia, love, defiance, and familial conflict, and if you are able to let the films open themselves to you so that you can see their shots and cuts as a succession of pure cinematic images — not merely as devices to further the plot, but as the play of projected light and shadow — then the world of Ozu will begin to reveal its sublime vision.

Many regard the well-known Tokyo Story (1953) as Ozu’s masterpiece, but, in my opinion, it does not begin to match the perfection of Late Spring (1949), or even There Was a Father (1942), The Only Son (1936), or The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952).

Late Spring and The Only Son

In Late Spring, everything comes together: Ozu’s penetrating understanding of intricate family intimacies; his and editor Yoshiyasu Hamamura’s beautifully-sharp editing; crystalline shots of trains, stones, and daffodils; and wonderful performances by Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu. The film’s narrative follows the iconic Ozu themes of familial change, generational conflict, and resigned acceptance of a new beginning.

Noriko (Hara), a daughter devoted to her aging father (Ryu), cannot bring herself to separate from him, even though it is time she gets married and start her own life. Played masterfully by Hara (known in Japan as the “eternal virgin” for the innocent happiness she exudes), the daughter’s filial devotion and perennial radiant smile descend almost shockingly into defiant anger and jealousy, and then resigned sadness, as her father regretfully forces their lives to change.

In the final sequence the film cuts from the white and drooping gray of a peeled apple framed by the darkness of the father’s hand and study to the wider shot of the father’s lowered head, and then to the much wider and brighter shot of the timeless ocean. Through its brightness and expanse, the light of the sky and breaking waves in that final shot cleanses and opens the mind to the characters’ tender rebirth on the heels of the sad darkness of the father’s study and unraveled life. Here we can sense the power of Ozu’s shots and cuts as light on the wall — as pure cinema.

The Only Son is another beautifully subtle rendering of the sorrows and disappointments of the parent-child relationship. We are no longer in the familiar Ozu terrain of agonizing marriage machinations, arrangements, and decisions. This time, the anguish comes from the mother’s and son’s disappointment at the son’s failure to amount to anything despite the mother’s great sacrifices for his education. At times, the montage itself manifests their resigned sadness. In a wrenching scene on a forlorn hilltop, as industrial smokestacks billow in the background, mother and son confide in each other their disappointment in life.

“Self-symbol” in Ozu

As Nathaniel Dorsky discusses in his Devotional Cinema, the smokestacks in The Only Son are not just a surface symbol of contamination or failure. Rather, the open quality of the hilltop shot and the cuts from hill, smokestacks and the quiet pair to the expansive and empty sky, and back again to the hilltop, are “the poetic mystery and resonance of self-symbol” — things presented for what they are. We, as viewers, are then “awed into appreciation.”

This quality of openness in shots, cuts, and story, and the feeling that we are not being manipulated by meaning, that we are being presented with a world that rests in itself, that lets us receive and discover it for ourselves — what Dorsky refers to as “self-symbol” — belongs to only a handful of filmmakers. In Ozu, we are constantly confronted with shots that exude self-symbol and offer themselves to the viewer as themselves, free of the violence of egotistical imposition.

Of course, Ozu is not perfect, and one encounters failed Ozu montage. But for every unsuccessful sequence like the painfully forced montage of the erect phallus-tower and vaginal-like tree towards the end of the magnificent and disarming The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, we are treated to many more breathtaking sequences: the rusting sewer pipes and commuters hurrying to work in Early Spring; the husband’s speech at a friend’s wedding about his bad luck to have had an arranged marriage and the matchless ambiguity of his wife’s awkward expression in Equinox Flower; or the stunning rock garden montage towards the end of Late Spring, where from the dark outline of a vase in a play of dancing bamboo shadows we cut to the bright white of the rock garden’s sand and lonely black stones.

The variety of these examples illustrate how the revelatory quality of Ozu’s films plumb at the same time the human world and existence itself. In Ozu we are immersed in timeless human conflicts and age-old generational dramas, revealed with the utmost economy and precision: a Setsuko Hara smile, an innocuous comment about some daily trifle, a well-timed grunt by Chishu Ryu. But next to this human world, Ozu also presents us with magnificent shots and cuts of objects (hats, trains, girders, rocks, tea pots, shoji screens) that, in the way a wall reflects a shimmering pond or a wind-blown tree canopy flits in patches of revealed sky, seem to hover on the surface of consciousness, revealing something, even if we aren’t quite sure what.

A friend of mine, with whom I went to many of the films, spoke one night, after our tenth Ozu screening, of what we came to call the Ozu Holy Triad: power-line insulators and girders; trains; and clothes on clotheslines. One could do well in summarizing most any Ozu film by taking the triad as a base: an opening shot of power lines, trains passing power lines and telephone poles, insulators gleaming in the sunlight. The trains snake through the frame, fill the frame. People are departing, people are arriving, families are splitting up. Lonely laundry seems to call out nostalgically for the way lives were, but now there must be a new start. A new start and a new horizon, pierced by the lone power pole in the opening shot — this horizon is bound: iron-bound, custom-bound, and ego-bound, but nevertheless new, new despite the intransigence of thoughts and life.

Discovering Ozu

Many of these films are rarely shown in theaters, and most are not even available on video or DVD; of my recommendations, only Tokyo Story, Equinox Flower, Late Spring, and Early Summer are currently available. Now is possibly your only chance to experience Ozu’s films as they are meant to be experienced, the only way their shots and cuts can manifest their full power: as projected light, large and on a white screen. My must-see list includes: There Was a Father, Late Spring, The Only Son, A Hen in the Wind, and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. But close behind are: Tokyo Story, Equinox Flower, Early Spring, Early Summer, Woman of Tokyo, What Did the Lady Forget? , and Late Autumn.

STORY INDEX

EXHIBITIONS >

Toronto
Cinematheque Ontario
January 16 to March 13
URL: http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/cinematheque/home.asp

Vancouver
Pacific Cinematheque
January 23 to March 20
URL: http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/JanFeb04/ozu.html

Washington D.C.
National Gallery of Art
March 6 to April 10
URL: http://www.nga.gov/programs/film.htm

Detroit
Detroit Film Theater
March 22 to May 24
URL: http://www.dia.org/dft/

PEOPLE > OZU, YASURIJO >

Biography
URL: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/ozu.html

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This prison has become my monastery.’


The events of Sept. 11, 2001, were a devastating tragedy, and the tangled web of security measures that were subsequently implemented have created their share of havoc, heartbreak and frustration. The case of Sonam, a thirty-year old Buddhist nun, was recently documented in The Washington Post.

Seeking asylum from religious persecution, Sonam fled China and entered the United States in August after her friends and family were subjected to torture for their adherence to Buddhist beliefs. Sonam entered the United States and was promptly incarcerated in Virginia. In November, Sonam was granted asylum by a federal immigration judge. The Department of Homeland Security immediately announced that it was appealing the case; instead of tasting religious and political freedom, Sonam shuffled back to her cell, shackled, where she awaits her next court date. While no date has yet been set, it is unlikely that she will be ushered into court again before the fall.

Tibetan Buddhists have been subject to religious persecution for more than half a century. In 1950, the forces of newly communist China invaded and occupied the Tibetan territories, and since the 1959 National Uprising, the Dalai Lama has been living in exile in India. In recent years, the plight of the Tibetan people has received increasing attention from the American public.

Clearly, there have been some gaping holes in the immigration process, as evidenced by recent reports suggesting that among the 9/11 hijackers were individuals who should have been denied entry or the right to remain in the United States. However, this process of denying parole to immigrants such as Sonam results in indefinite periods of incarceration. Coupled with the staggering amount of bureaucratic inefficiency, asylum seekers are forced into a miserable Bardo where they are neither here nor there. Sonam does not know when or if she will be freed.

Although she is unable to speak to anyone in prison — since Sonam does not speak English —, she maintains: ”This prison has become my monastery.“

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Quote of note


Speaking of queer lives for the straight eye, I found the following commentary, relayed by Patrick Letellier, to be both funny and disturbing at the same time:

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning … recently said to the press, ”I don’t hate gay people.“

Bruning uttered that reassurance as he backpedaled, er, clarified an earlier statement he had made. When he learned that a Massachusetts court had green-lighted gay marriage, Bruning said to an Associated Press reporter, ”Does that mean you have to allow a man to marry his pet or a man to marry his chair?“

Uh, yes, Mr. Attorney General, that’s exactly what it means. I’d like to introduce you to my Sealey Posturepedic husband — he’s the dark green recliner in the corner. And that basset hound next to the chair? That’s my ex.

Houston, we have a problem: It looks like some people still have an awfully long way to go before they come to grips with the fact that queers are people, too …

—Laura Nathan

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Queer lives for the straight eye


For many years, sexual minorities struggled with the lack of representation of their communities on television. Sure, there were Will and Jack, the two gay characters on NBC’s Will & Grace. But many queers were frustrated with the fact that Will was played by a straight guy (and hence didn’t seem all that convincing on the screen) while Jack epitomized every imaginable stereotype of gay men. And there have been shows such as Six Feet Under, which have featured queer characters. But up until recently, there have not been any mainstream shows that have represented and spoken to GLBT communities. In fact, it is questionable whether much has changed even with the arrival of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and more recently, The L Word.

But is the onset of such shows really empowering for these previously underrepresented communities? Yes and no. While the presence of shows revolving around the queer community is a positive step in disrupting an otherwise homogenous television culture, these shows fall back on old stereotypes, perhaps in order to win the viewership of straight men and women.

Queer Eye for instance, tells the story of five gay guys who are — surprise — into fashion and decorating. This seems to suggest that being a gay male is synonymous with being effeminate, which is something we’ve been hearing since the late 1940s. Sure, one could argue the fact that the gay guys on the show use their effeminacy to help make straight guys a little queerer, or a little more effeminate, by giving their lives a makeover. But the reality is that generally, this is done for straight men, not by straight men, to woo women. In other words, the show ends up bolstering stereotypes of both gay and straight men, where the former are cast as effeminate while the latter are cast as masculine, messy, and not all that in tune with their feminine side or the women in their lives — in order to preserve heterosexual relationships and heterosexuality more generally.

Somewhat similarly, The L Word, Showtime’s new series about lesbians, cast as the other side of HBO’s Sex and the City, also plays up femininity with several extremely attractive, skinny female characters. As Melissa Silverstein points out:

You’d think they had discovered something new. They tried to make these women seem like rock stars. I heard they even sent the stars on a lesbian cruise during premiere week. I couldn’t believe the press materials that I was sent by Showtime. So glossy. So expensive. So unlesbian. The pink materials with the actresses posed was ringed with many different L words – lush, lashes, lyrical, lofty, looking, loose, latent. One word that was very hard to find was the word ’lesbian.‘ It seemed as though they were trying to make The L Word stand for just about everything except lesbian.

Given that the majority of sex scenes on the show involve heterosexuals, the show seems to ensure that straight men and women don’t have to find themselves in an uncomfortable position. If the responses to the premiere of The L Word shared by Silverstein and her friends are any indication, the only audience that this show might appease consists primarily of heterosexuals.

However, it is important to note that The L Word is written and produced by two lesbians, which is an important step in ensuring that the queer community gains representation on-screen.  While Silverstein and others are skeptical of the way they have chosen to represent this community, it seems likely that they may have had to represent the lesbian community in rather homogenous — and heterosexual — terms in order to get their show airtime on a major network like Showtime. But the fact that these shows are the first of their kind is noteworthy, even if they don’t adequately represent the lives, interests and diversity of these communities. Perhaps future shows seeking to represent these communities will learn from the shortcomings of their predecessors and better speak to the complexities of GLBT communities without falling back on the terms defined by heterosexuality.

—Laura Nathan

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The ace of race


It’s no secret that the winner of the 2004 Presidential Election will be decided largely on the basis of identity politics. Everything from the corporate vote to the working-class vote to the female vote to the Jewish vote to the Latino vote to the Arab vote to the black vote is a concern of the candidates. Whether the candidates continue to pander to the interests of these contingencies once the election is over, of course, is open to debate.

But for now, it appears that even the Democrats are playing the race card to win votes — not from President Bush, but from each other. Alluding to comments Senator Kerry made in 1992, General Clark told two sets of predominately black audiences today that Kerry opposes affirmative action and has characterized it as creating ”a culture of dependency.“

Now standing on the defensive, Kerry insists that his comments have been mischaracterized and that he merely suggested that affirmative action needs to be mended. Kerry and his supporters have also argued that Kerry has consistently voted in favor of affirmative action in the Senate.

How much validity there is to either side’s story is certainly questionable. But even more disturbing is the way that the candidates are using the race question to further their own political aspirations rather than committing themselves as individuals to fostering a more genuine notion of humanity. But, unfortunately, when a mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue commonly referred to as the White House is at stake, people get a little power hungry. The bashing of one’s opponents that ensues is quite unfortunate since this tactic so often relies upon insulting the humanity of others. Is it any wonder why a host of ”isms“ persist today as we continue to struggle to forge a more inclusive, genuine notion of humanity?

—Laura Nathan

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Overconsumption: Mmm … good


During the past few years, there has been plenty of talk about the increasing prevalence of obesity in this country. Not surprisingly, dozens of industries are trying to capitalize on this epidemic. It seems like every other week, a new ”miracle drug“ is put on the market to help consumers lose dozens of pounds in a matter of days. Gyms, yoga studios, and people who produce workout videos are making a fortune off of this phenomenon as well. And, of course, there’s Jared the Subway guy, who has taught us all that if we just eat Subway sandwiches every day, we too can drop a significant amount of weight.  

Given these developments, you’d probably guess that Americans were buying into a new cult of thinness rather than one of obesity. Given the number of people suffering from anorexia and bulemia, there is no doubt that there is some validity to this statement. But as Americans continue to buy into new weight-loss fads, the statistics seem to suggest that high rates of obesity and obesity-related health problems (and deaths) continue to skyrocket. Part of this can be explained by the fact that these fads rarely keep weight off long-term, if at all.

But there are other questions that need to be asked. Why is it that despite an obsession with thinness, we can’t seem to keep the obesity statistics down? Do we just eat too much? Do Americans lack the willpower to just say ”no“ to spending more money and eating more food than necessary for sustenance? There’s certainly no question that, on the whole, people in the U.S. tend to consumer considerably more than people in other countries do.

But consider the way in which the Bush administration is providing life-support for the obesity epidemic. As Jonathan Rowe and Gary Ruskin point out, the Bush administration, which has talked quite a bit about personal responsibility and staying in shape, has rejected the World Health Organization’s plan to combat obesity, diabetes, and other related illnesses.

One of the Bush administration’s primary justifications for rejecting this plan is that individuals should take responsibility for their own actions and for their food and diet. For most opponents of government regulation of our bodies, there is quite a bit of validity to this argument. But there is another side to this story that the government isn’t articulating. As Rowe and Ruskin explain:

Note that the Bush Administration is not demanding some personal responsibility from
junk food bigwigs such as sugar magnate Jose ’Pepe‘ Fanjul, Safeway CEO Steven Burd, and Richard F. Hohlt, a lobbyist for Altria (formerly Philip Morris), which is majority owner of Kraft. It is not asking them to take responsibility for the billions of dollars they and other junk food marketers spend seducing our kids with saturation ads, nor for the obvious and predictable consequences of these actions — i.e. the diseases
associated with the consumption of junk food.

Each of these fat cats has purchased an indulgence in the form of bundled $200,000 contributions to the 2004 Bush campaign. So the Administration points the finger instead at parents and their children …

The sugar industry has wanted to hobble WHO since the organization said that free sugars should comprise less than 10% of total daily calories. Last April, the Sugar Association actually threatened WHO that it would sic its allies in Congress on the U.S.’s annual $406 million contributions.

Now, we agree that people do need to take more responsibility for the junk they put into their mouths, and for their failure to get off their behinds. But the global obesity lobby has to take some responsibility too, for its nonstop propaganda campaign, especially when it is aimed at children. That includes Henry Kravis, founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which is majority owner of Channel One, an in-school meeting service that bombards schoolchildren with ads for soda pop and junk food. True, Mr. Kravis has bundled $100,000 to the Bush 2004 campaign. But surely President Bush understands that sometimes, we just have to say “No.”

Executives such as Mr. Kravis seem to have a hard time grasping another Administration nostrum – that parents are the proper guides to their children’s behavior. They persist in injecting themselves into the relationship between parents and children. They seduce kids with ads crafted by psychologists to turn the kids into relentless nags for junk food that many parents do not want their kids to have. These executives have got to take some responsibility for the way they disrupt the home …

Forgotten in the daily barrage of junk food ads is the way the government actually encourages these very corporations. Under U.S. tax law, for example, most corporate advertising is tax deductible. So next time your kid throws a tantrum because you don’t want to buy her another Big Mac, you might recall that your tax dollars are helping
to pay for the ads that induced your child’s snit …

Eighteen months ago, President Bush himself said ”when I talk about personal responsibility in America, I expect there to be corporate responsibility as well, and we will hold those to account who do not uphold those high standards in  
America.“

Such corporate responsibility remains to be seen, of course. And something tells me that Bush won’t be asking much of corporations like Altria before next November. Until then, millions of lives will be at stake as a result of overconsumption. The problem doesn’t merely have repercussions in the U.S. either. Many of those lives will be at stake because someone else — often in the U.S. — was consuming too much, leaving them a dearth of food to consume.

—Laura Nathan

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Religious rebels


Cultural practices and social mores often color — or depending on your perspective, intrude upon — religious practice, leaving some Buddhist nuns in Sri Lanka in a bind.

One such nun, Bhikuni Kusuma, has taken on the title of “Bhikuni,” which is the appellation accorded to an ordained Buddhist nun. While Buddhist nuns abound in the world, the controversy in Sri Lanka is that the dominant form of Buddhist thought in the country is Theravada Buddhism. These nuns were ordained in the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism. The two schools diverge on matters of both belief and practice, and the fact that the nuns have been ordained in the Mahayana tradition has resulted in friction and outright criticism.

The nuns find themselves in a catch-22: To be ordained as a nun in the Theravada tradition, a woman must be ordained by ten senior nuns. However, there are currently no nuns in the Theravada tradition.

Personal piety is clearly not the central issue in this controversy. It seems doubtful that the approximately 400 ordained nuns in Sri Lanka could pose a threat to the established clerical hierarchy, yet the moneyed religious establishment is wary of conferring legitimacy to a movement that has any potential of destabilizing its monopoly on religious authority. Unlike the Catholic tradition, Buddhism has no living individual, like the Pope, who wields ultimate religious authority. Given the inherent fragmentation of authority and the diversity of schools and modes of thought within the Buddhist tradition, to deny these women the right to ordination is to stunt the growth of a dynamic religious movement.    

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Force-feeding girls to obesity


In stark contrast to America’s concern with anorexia, some young girls in Mauritania are goaded, cajoled, and sometimes even beaten into obesity. It may seem striking that in Mauritania, where the average annual income is $360 U.S. dollars, girls are better fed than boys. But in the white Moor Arab culture of Mauritania, female obesity has traditionally been valued as a sign of wealth. Fat girls are considered desirable, and an obese wife has a husband that treats her well. Some girls are sent to fat farms,” where, at the parents’ behest, their young daughters are fed to splendid corpulence. As Fatematou, a woman who runs such a feeding instutition in the desert town Atar, stated to the BBC: “Of course they cry—they scream … We grab them and we force them to eat. If they cry a lot, we leave them sometimes for a day or two and then we come back to start again.” The Mauritanian government has cautioned that the young girls’ weight—sometimes reaching 60 to 100 kilograms, or 132 to 220 pounds—is “life threatening.”

While some aspects of Mauritanian culture have been slow to change—the country only banned slavery in 1981—, the culture of obesity has been undergoing transformation. One-third of Mauritania women were force-fed as children a generation ago, and that number has now shrunk to 11%. It is the countryside that retains the strongest affinity with the culture of female obesity. In its delightfully British voice, the BBC notes that in the Mauritanian countryside, the women “walk slowly, dainty hands on the end of dimpled arms, pinching multicoloured swathes of fabric together to keep the biting sand from their faces.”

Through an understandable ethnocentrism and western-centered prism, many American critics focus on and lament the havoc that the media has played with the body images of young women. While this concern is certainly not misplaced, it is certainly productive to also consider the issue of the young girls in Mauritania who are bullied into obesity.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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The face of modern slavery


During the past few days, the newswires have been busily documenting the sordid business of modern day slavery. The BBC today carries the story of Mende Nazer, a young Sudanese woman who was adbucted by slave raiders at the age of twelve and spent eight years as a slave before she escaped. Nazer was eventually given by her mistress to her mistress’s sister who lived in London. The rationale for the human gift, as the wife of a slave trader explained to Nazer’s mistress, was that “‘it’s easy for us to get you another abda [slave]…whereas I understand it’s impossible for people to find one in London.’” Nazer escaped while she was held captive in London and has recently published her book, Slave.

On a related subject, an aritcle in The New York Times documents the barbaric and lucractive U.S. sex slave industry. Sex slave are distinct from prostitutes: They are unwillingly forced into prostitution, receive no financial renumeration for their services, and are held captive by their traffickers or owners. The numbers are staggering. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves, America’s largest anti-slavery organization, estimates that the number of sex slaves in America amounts to 30,000 to 50,000 slaves.

The United States only recently enacted legislation that speaks to the crime of trafficking in humans.  The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 enables the United States to impose economic sanctions on nations that the it believes are not making sufficient efforts to stem the human trafficking within their borders. The Protect Act, established in 2003, criminalizes travel abroad or into the United States for the purposes of sex tourism that involves children.

That commerce in sex slavery and human bondage exists is shameful but perhaps not entirely shocking. What is without a doubt shameful is that it is only in the past few years that America has enacted legislation to criminalize it.

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Political Prose

Beware ‘Chinamen’ who make furniture

Blogger Josh Marshall was in New Hampshire at a Kerry rally when he overheard some choice racial epithets (served with a dash of Southern…


Blogger Josh Marshall was in New Hampshire at a Kerry rally when he overheard some choice racial epithets (served with a dash of Southern folksiness, of course) from Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, the octogenarian Democrat and former presidential candidate:

When Hollings was getting underway on the jobs theme he said that half of the furniture in the United States (or some such stat) was now made in China. At just that moment a startling, crashing pop! came out of one of the loudspeakers. Not missing a beat, Hollings said that there must be some “chinamen” over there who didn’t like that.

A few minutes later he was talking about “ole Suskind’s book” and how, as reported in Ron Suskind’s book about Paul O’Neil, the president had blanched at the idea of giving yet another tax cut to the rich, only to have Dick Cheney pipe in to steady his course.

In Hollings’ retelling …

“‘Haven’t we already given the rich a tax cut?’ the president said. And then ole’ Cheney said, ‘No, we want more.’ He’s the Jesse Jackson of the Republican Party! He wants it all!’”

The Jesse Jackson of the Republican party?

You’d have to say that’s a bit off message for the contemporary Democratic party. But you could see the collective will of the audience for a moment awkwardly, and then decisively, opting to give the old guy a pass.

A while later when Kerry was giving his talk, and the speaker barked up again, he brought things back to the 21st century. “It’s that Chinese guy again …”

Well, you have to give the good old boy some credit: at least he didn’t use the n-word. Progressives have been progressing. Maybe someday — if we all keep our fingers crossed — there might even be such a thing as political correctness. Wouldn’t that be something?

Since we’re on the topic of speaking from the gut, check out this delightful conversation with President Bush, who is truly a man who needs to have his ribs.

—Victor Tan Chen

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

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