I had placed the documentary “Murder by Proxy: How America
Went Postal “ in my Netflix instant queue about a week before the tragedies in
Oregon and then Connecticut. The 2010
film (73 minutes), by Emil Chiaberi, from Key Element Films and Aldamisa Releasing, turns out to be
all too relevant. I had to wait a few
days, though, just to deal with this.
The film starts out by defining the phrase “going postal”,
in reference to the workplace violence (usually perpetrated by recently fired employees) that had become associated with the
United States Postal Service because of a few incidents in the 1980s and 90s,
particularly at Royal Oak, MI and Edmond, OK.
About half of the film deals with the problems in US post offices or
sorting centers as workplaces. Some former employers talk about the brutal
management culture, and the tendency of the automation and machinery to
overwhelm the workers, and even cause them to be injured (as with carpal
tunnel). I almost had a job as a letter
carrier (at age 61) in 2004, and would have gone through with it if it were not
for a last minute medical concern about a hip injury in 1998. My own history, after my career-ending layoff
at age 58, post 9/11, at the end of 2001, had become a matter of “paying my
dues”.
The film moves on to other workplaces, including a printing company
near Louisville, KY and then the 1999 incident at Xerox in Hawaii. The film then takes the position that the
workplace violence has been setting an “example” that encourages outbursts in
schools (especially Columbine in 1999) and other civilian settings by
disgruntled and sometimes psychopathic people. Given recent history, this is a
chilling interpretation.
The film mentions Ronald Reagan’s firing of air traffic
controllers in 1982, as a sign of a new kind of belligerence against “ordinary”
workers and union –busting that increased in Reagan’s “trickle down”,
“supply-side” world. (As Ross Perot used
to say, “Trickle down didn’t trickle”.)
The film presents “management” as treating workers as pawns
in some sort of Darwinian (or Spencerian) process (not exactly chess). Management tends to look at lower paid
workers as those who “didn’t make it” competitively and are where they deserve
to be. Totalitarian societies and
sometimes religious communities try to rationalize this sort of thing by saying
that everyone should take his turn with rites of passage experiencing peasantry
(in extreme forms, that’s Maoism). In
theory, if everyone took his turn with dirty work, those who survived deserve to
be elevated and there could be no worker resentment, and no crime. In some smaller totalitarian societies, this
sort of thing seems to work.
The danger, then, is that when an individual “fails” in this
competition (or rites of passage), he might see no value to society’s norms and
lash out, believing he is making a final statement. “It’s
your fault that I failed.” It may not be
so different from what motivate the 9/11 hijackers – if you understand the idea
of collective shame (even religious) as an unacceptable emotion. The film takes us through some of the more
recent horrors, including schools, with this interpretation. It’s scary nihilism. The film compares the
victims in an incident to ants that we step on – we either don’t see them at
all or we don’t see them as people or as valued. It then defines the word “proxy” in that
context.
Underlying all of this presentation is an even more
disturbing idea, that we have to demand that people “make it” somehow as
individuals, and then don’t see them as inherently personally valuable as
people when they just can’t. There is
only the “hidden resource” of compassion left.
The film makes a particularly disturbing point about homeland security, that the greatest danger (to utilities and energy companies particularly) could come from disgruntled workers from within, rather than from overseas enemies.
There is one other valuable point in the film that should not be glossed over. It is indeed all too easy for management in an employer to create a hostile workplace environment. Even comments made on the Web in public can show contempt for certain kinds of people and create a workplace issue -- an observation (in the conflict of interest area) that has long concerned me.
The official site is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment