If You Called Your Dad, He Could Stop it All
Yes, it's always difficult to stand in someone else's shoes, an iconic song reminds us. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
OCTOBER WILL MARK the 20th anniversary of one of the strangest, most wonderful albums in pop music. On 2004's Has Been, Canadian actor William Shatner and American singer Ben Folds teamed up on a series of interesting stories. The tales are told -- quite literally, as the Star Trek star spends the album speak-singing in his distinctive and halting style -- directly by Folds and Shatner, who wrote most of the songs, but also through the lenses of a few covered artists, from Brad Paisley to Nick Hornby. A cover of the British band Pulp's "Common People," though, delivers perhaps the strongest message on the album, a message that, while funny and enjoyable to hear, is at least partially wrong.
The song describes a young woman who wants to see what life is like for the poor. She also wants to sleep with them, which is fair game for some criticism by the Pulp writers, and in the repeated bridge, we hear about how no matter which details a rich person pays attention to in trying to emulate the life of a person on a lower economic rung, they "never get it right," because when they're in bed, "watching roaches climb the wall," there's always the knowledge that "if you called your dad he could stop it all."
While there's some merit in the performers' critique of the naive idea “that poor is cool," this line about calling Dad has always rubbed me the wrong way. It stinks of the belief that nobody should ever try to learn about the lives of people in another situation, because the material will never be perfectly understood.
Thankfully, that's not how things work.
It's true that poverty tourism, if misinterpreted as being fully representative of actual poverty, is a flawed undertaking, but it's also true that for the somewhat clueless upper crust, getting even a small taste of how much it drains a person to be poor can at least help those with power make less demented decisions the next time they're weighing the merits of, say, paying their taxes vs. burning a few billion dead trees to send some other plutocrats to short-lived space hotels.
The ultra-wealthy, unfortunately, are rarely willing to take part in the introspection necessary to treat their workers and customers fairly, partially because of the cynical emotional shielding that cultural assets like "Common People" (inadvertently?) provide.
So what can be done?
Well, collective bargaining is a good start. For all the many problems unions have, they're probably the best tools that working people have against their would-be overlords. A fever chart showing a line for American union membership compared with the amount of wealth going to the top 10 percent gives a look at this. From 1917, when the graph starts, until about 1943, union membership as a population percentage rises while inequality falls.
Then, from 1943 through 1958, a time widely lauded as a prosperous period for America, union membership stays near its peak, about 35 percent, while inequality stays low.
Unfortunately, the rest of the graph shows a country going off the rails, with union membership tanking and inequality skyrocketing.
So again: What can be done about this?
Well, if there's no other takeaway you get from this piece, get involved in labor organizing! There are many ways to help other workers, from licking stamps to setting up meetings. Getting into contact with a group like the wobblies could be a good starting point.
But in addition, it's good to clean our cultural reading glasses every now and then. I'm not going to tell others to stop listening to things like "common people," as it's a really fun, well crafted song, with some significant nods to poverty. But it pays to take at least some parts with a little skepticism.
If an heir or heiress to a lithium mining fortune wants to spend a year trying to work in a mine -- or at a grocery store checkout counter, for that matter -- it may be incredibly annoying for the people working with the inept newcomer. But if the experience allows a newly minted billionaire to make better, more understanding, more human choices in the future, it's probably worth every moment, so long as the simulation is not mistaken for the real thing. Perhaps such a journey of discovery should even be required.
=====
Highlighted links:
Common People
(YouTube)
Selected additional links from this piece:
Rich people actually do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor
(Salon)Tim Guest on being a part of 'Filthy Rich and Homeless'
(SBS)Delivery Drivers Sue Amazon For Being Forced To Pee In Bottles
(Forbes)Should Wells Fargo execs responsible for bilking customers be forced to return their pay?
(The Conversation)Get Unionized!
(IWW)
=====
Image in the public domain.