A Tradition Of Americans

By now, lest ye be living under a rock, a major source of news/speculation swirls around the New York Times “Anonymous” op ed. One of the responses to this “news event” (the op ed as well as the NY Times running one anonymously) comes from the former White House press secretary during the W presidency. 9-7-18 Gannett’s USA Today ran a response op ed by Ari Fleischer entitled New York Times op-ed betrays Trump, voters. Staffers don’t get to steer US. It is the last line of the title that peaks an interest for Analysis. Both op eds (anonymous’s as well as Fleischer’s) are somewhat mundane, revealing nothing new. Unlike anonymous’s self appointed and self defining “patriotic” tone, Fleischer’s is a bit more jingoistic, even sanctimonious. Given what we all know historically, Analysis found Fleischer’s opinion to border on naïve – “That’s because if you’re going to work for the president, you need to believe in the president. Not just his policies, but the man (or one day the woman).” And what of working for a corporation, deemed to be a “person’ (neither man or woman) by the SCOTUS? Does a recent DU grad obtaining a job in IT for RJ Reynolds need to believe in smoking cigarettes? How about Pepsi? Or Disney? Not much is written about the “underground economy” yet it is an actuality in most larger cities, and to most it is totally oblivious in rural settings. “Underground” makes it sound nefarious like the dark web or bitcoin; more like flea markets, yard sales, unregistered building and maintenance work, dog sitting, trucking, car repair, etc. It is primarily a cash economy. People rely on it. Some even see it as being an originator, if not driver, of fashion and culture (think the history of rap or hip hop, muscle cars, tattoos, hoodies, food trucks, etc.). People employed as staff circulate in the same sort of grey area of oblivion, doing work for pay without having a say in the determination of the operational economy. Not actually in charge like a CEO, COO or President, they still actually run things – make them happen. Along with a slew of other things, French critical thinker Michel Foucault based a lot of his inquiry, research and ultimately conclusions on the workings of “the staff” in history and its influence on culture, politics and world events. One could say his approach is vaguely analogous to that of Howard Zinn (author of A People’s History Of The United States). In a work entitled Discipline And Punish Foucault elaborates how it is “the staff” that determines how things are interpreted and defined. He does this by tracing the history of mental institutions and prison systems from the age of enlightenment to the current era. Someone, after all, has to determine who is actually “acting out” and who is not, how tight restraints need to be and what is cruel and unusual punishment, etc. The administration may hand down policy statements and directives regarding the company or state but it is the staff that ultimately implements them. In today’s culture of information the staff is a kind of interface between the aspired reality and the lived reality or, in the case of the POTUS, the imagined reality and the manufactured imaginary one. After how many police killings of unarmed black men have we not heard “feared for their lives” in immediate conjunction with “not administration policy.” Foucault was definitely on to something. Fleischer sanctimoniously writes “But if staffers can no longer support the president, or as the case with the anonymous author, they doubt the president’s ability to do his job, they need to do the honorable thing and resign. At that point, they can go public and say what they want. There’s a tradition of Americans doing that and it can be a noble one.” (others have just as self righteously said pretty much the same). Yet, that is like saying to those in the underground economy that if you can’t make a living from a real job you should… “do the honorable thing and resign”? “There’s a tradition of Americans doing that and it can be a noble one.”