2 posts tagged “evil”
It can be easy to forget, when reading the Inferno, just how tall an order it was to create a hell that exceeded the extremes of contemporary military and political violence on earth. The lovely Middle Ages of modern nostalgists aside (no names, but you people know who you are), it was hideous. I am reading a brief history of the Catalans— alongside desultory reading about Spanish history in general and 14th-century Florence and so forth— and, seriously, yuck. I'd never have the stomach to work on this period; I don't care how magnificent the troubadours were. Under the banner of a peculiar seafaring German, a nasty band of Catalan mercenaries, the Almogàvers, sailed to Constantinople in 1303 and briefly overpowered it; on the way back they captured Athens and much of the rest of Greece. Did you know about this, Catalan hegemony in Greece and Asia Minor? No? My source is Jan Read's The Catalans (Faber & Faber, 1978). It was a bloody, gory, gruesome messy mess, and no one misses the Catalans in Greece today. From there we move on to a chapter on the great era of Catalan preeminence in the Mediterranean, presided over by a king who made his enemies drink molten metal. This is all too obvious to be worth mentioning, but it isn't as though Dante was wandering around Bella Tuscany eating goat cheese and dreaming up nightmare scenarios with which to smite his enemies; he needed only to take notes and extrapolate.
It is far from clear what lessons one can derive from this. The idea of Necessity lurking in the past really does seem dangerous. Also, Jesús Moncada = good, although I don't know what's been translated etc. Also, expect me to be an utter sniveling wreck by the end of two weeks or so, when my papers come due. At least I am learning to conceive of worlds distant in time and space... even if "when the papers are due" is a misty one...
I'm on the bus to the BART station (also a major bus terminal) from campus. A small Latina girl is telling her friend a story. She's trying to get time off from her job to take a final, but her boss won't let her do it: he says she has to find a replacement, or show up for her shift. She calls everyone else to see if they can work for her that night, but no one can. She tells her boss: the final is at 1 p.m., it's three hours long, so it ends at four. After that, she gets on a bus and rides the bus for two hours home, so she gets home at six. It turns out the final is for a PE class, so she has to take a shower and get cleaned up to go to work, but, she tells him, she can show up at 7:30. Her shift ends at nine, but that's the best she can do. Her boss says, no, that doesn't satisfy him. She says, I can't show up any earlier than that. He asks her if she can't take a taxi. She says she can't afford to take a taxi. He asks her if she has to take the final. She says that school is her priority, it's her future, and yes, she does have to take the final. She says that, if he wants, she can go straight to work from the bus in a sweatshirt and sweatpants and sneakers; she's happy to do that. He gets angry and says that he'll have her written up. She says that's fine, she'll accept the writeup. He casts about for other ways to threaten and humiliate her, but he's running out of options. "No one even comes in on a Wednesday night!" she exclaims. "It's dead: I just stand around for four hours. I could sit down—" I know this is coming, and sigh involuntarily— "but it looks unprofessional." She furthermore points out that the stated policy on infractions is first a warning, then a writeup, then termination, so it's dishonest of him to threaten to write her up without giving her a warning.
I don't think it will help this girl in any way if I personally strangle her boss, rob him of his credit cards, stick his corpse in the trunk of a taxi and tell the taxi to drive through San Francisco from Fremont to Daly City. But that is what I want to do. This is the symbol of everything I fucking hate about elitist debates on education and "access" and how our students ain't learning and are always asking for special treatment. Particularly moving versions of this argument include the observation that if this girl were willing to work hard, she could qualify for any number of minority scholarships which would relieve her of the need to have a part-time job. But this is the choice she has: she can get a college degree, or she can work at this godless service job and be treated like dirt by irritable white professionals who ordered diet, not regular, thank you. There are plenty of those jobs, and plenty of those bosses.* At least their collective boot is not disguised as a soft, friendly, organic fair-trade alpaca wool slipper from a collective farm in the Andean highlands!
Actually, now that I think about it, I think this girl responded to her boss's suggestion that she take a taxi by saying, "You could come pick me up." So I am officially taking up a collection for a scholarship fund for her, even though I don't know who she is and I don't even know if I would recognize her again. I will call it the "service job relief fund" and any student who can demonstrate that he or she is working at some chain restaurant two hours from campus by bus for godawful wages will be relieved of this job and given either a scholarship in excess of the lost wages (not a burden for donors) or a quality paid student position in his or her area of study, on campus, with flexible hours. And if I can find out who this girl is, she'll get priority.
* It occurred to me that this might not be clear, and so the post might seem quixotic: I myself had plenty of those jobs and plenty of those bosses in my youth, and what she was describing was (to me) very familiar, very credible, and very unfair. (And I am white myself, which mitigates things.) People who can't imagine taking such a job probably can't imagine how intolerable it actually is to do, nor how basically sadistic the supervisors can be. They're not all bad, and the good ones are saints. But odds are that the girl wasn't even going to make the taxi fare on that shift, and the guy knew it perfectly well, and was trying to make her life hell out of a sense of duty to the firm. It makes my blood boil.
