Clare McCullough

The Gaping Divide Towards the Globalized World in Our Post-Industrialized Society

Clare McCullough

There has always been a divide between the skilled workers and unskilled workers. Race is an important intersection to examine, for example, unlike the many examples of discrimination against African Americans, for unskilled white America, as it has been pointed out by Gest in his book The New Minority, there hasn’t been many obstacles put in their path other than the ones they lay themselves. The subtle changes to our rhetoric and economy have been mounting over the post-industrial period, creating a stark political division.

A division and cognitive dissidence that has been illustrated in the book, Strangers in Their Own Land, where preventable environmentally-caused fatal diseases and general community degradation is a moot moral point in voting compared to abortion. In dialogues, an “us” versus “them” rhetoric becomes apparent, as put by Kevin Williamson in his article, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction”,  in fact there is a “rhetorical need to invent moral debasement”. Lending itself to this growing resentment is the new hyper-mobile world in which fake and biased news has been a constant comfort and an accessible aid to those who only consume things that suit their current worldview, creating a self-reinforcing propaganda bubble. This mindset is exacerbated by a rapidly changing demographic and social ills such as the doubling divorce rate. According to Williamson, this mindset sees the concept of a traditional family as having been destroyed and “traditional avenues for achieving respect, status, and permanence” are no longer available.  This perception of the challenges of globalization has been filled in with promises of protectionism, anti-immigration, and national security with nationalistic flair. As the blue-collar jobs move overseas, those who would be qualified for no other work than unskilled labor are no longer able to contribute to the family the same way that their grandfathers did.

Lastly and most importantly are the economic changes in our post-industrial society. The single-industry towns in which there was plenty of jobs and opportunity from one business, but like many farms that rely on a mono-culture, when the industry left the town there was nothing there but empty warehouses and pollution. Resentment builds up against those who take what little they have left, the “those” meaning the government’s taxation and, everyone else seems to be cutting in line in front of the white blue-collar worker. These post-traumatic towns, as referred to in The New Minority, are the ruins of a society thriving before globalization. According to Williamson, we now make the capital goods, while more and cheaper consumer goods are created by poorer countries than the US. The white working class has not been victimized by outside forces, they have failed to adjust to a changing society that demands change.

We see this in the fiction book, The Age of Miracles. We see those who adjust their clocks to the earth’s slowing turn and try to get on with their lives and then the people grasping onto the past era; Clock timers vs real timers. These changes were subtle just like they are in real life, the minutes pooling into hours and slowing changing the composition of the day. The main character’s neighbor Sylvia was a real-timer. She stayed the longest out of all the real timers on the block, when the others all left and created their own new communities, and those left behind were subject to prejudice and aggression from neighbors. This resentment between the groups comes from a nostalgia much like what the white working class feel today.

“Empire State Building in the Bedroom”

Clare McCullough

Art has long been used to make a statement, or simply be an expression of the artist. Surrealist scenes have often permeated more modern works of art. But sometimes these modern artists incorporate old techniques with the new in order to express their ideas of the world. Such as Ablardo Morell’s photograph, “Empire State Building in Bedroom”, in which Morell uses light and framing to express the impact of his culture shock when he first arrived to the United States.
When you first walk into a city, you see the skyscrapers tower over you at impossible heights. Light filters through the giants that are made of steel and glass and cut shadows into the sky, defying the natural order of things. Intimidating, frightening, foreign, at least that’s how Ablardo Morell must’ve seen it when he immigrated to America at a young age with his parents from Havana, Cuba in 1948. He received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin college in 1977 and his love for art extended from there. In 1977, he obtained an MFA from the Yale University of Art (Morell). After the birth of his son, he started experimenting with the Camera Obscura in 1986, which is Latin for “dark room”.(SFMOMA)
A Camera Obscura is an ancient light trick and is considered one of the first proto-cameras . A Camera Obscura is something that, according to National Geographic, “receives images just like the human eye—through a small opening and upside down. Light from outside enters the hole at an angle, the rays reflected from tops of objects, like trees, coursing downward, and those from the lower plane, say flowers, traveling upward, the rays crossing inside the dark space and forming an inverted image.” When Morell was teaching a course on photography at an art college he turned his whole classroom into a Camera Obscura, he knew he had something. And so he started creating his works, turning darkened rooms into fantastic landscapes one of which was “Empire State Building in Bedroom” As a result.
The Empire State Building is draped over a bed missing from the city skyline, which is inverted in the background over the bed and nightstand, looking limp and tired looking, ”as if it had just come home from the hard work of skyscraping all day” (National Geographic). The building is shiny and casts a dark shadow over the white sheets. Above the inverted skyline, the sky is filled with clouds, making the skyline itself a little dim. The framing of the image is a bit disjointed, things that aren’t supposed to be in the photograph, are there. The skyline on the top and the shadow of the bed on the bottom leaves a large hole in the left-side of the painting. Although the physical wall of the room in which the camera obscura was created changes direction, it seems as if the skyline is almost unaffected by this, continuing on making a seemingly flat picture.
In this photograph, Morell was trying to convey the emotions of disorientation, and disbelief that he felt during the culture shock when first arriving to America. When Morell was 14, and he moved to the comparatively developed USA from Cuba, where he saw the towering buildings of New York. This changed his world forever. And so, he uses the Camera Obscura’s inversion to portray his absolute disorientation when first seeing the Empire State Building. By omitting the empire state building from the city’s horizon and portraying the sharp figure of the empire state through the use of shadow and light as limp, and silvery platinum he placates the imposing building and makes it seem even more strange. The use of a cloudy sky instead of a stark bright one emphasizes the ethereal feel of the photograph that he tried to convey.
Through light, he blurs the imagined lines between landscape and dreamscape, waking us up and almost jolting us back to more of an innocent time. His use of light makes the empire state building look almost liquid, the light seemingly coming in from the cloudy sky, his use of light is disorienting and adds to the simplistic irrational element of the photograph. The deep shadows of the piece put emphasis the bed in the middle, grounding the photograph. The only truly real thing in the room was the bed since it is the only thing that has clear lines caused by the lighting. The angled position of the familiar object is where the main emphasis is, leading your eye back to where the pillows are and ultimately, where the skyscraper is. Positioning is very important in this work as Morell uses framing to create more space in the sky by omitting the empire state building, and essentially taming it. Through that, he conveys what he would have dreamed of doing at that young age into an unlimited version of reality. By blending the famous building into a domestic scene, he gives himself more control over it making the skyscraper more unusual, conveying what he might have felt when undergoing this huge culture shock.
Camera Obscuras have been used throughout human history. Ablardo Morell brought this ancient technology back and so turned out our perception. He turns our dreams into landscapes through his use of framing and light in “Empire State Building in Bedroom”, Morrell expresses his reaction to the then foreign to him, USA.

Works Cited

“Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of the Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994.” SFMOMA. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.
“About Abelardo Morell.” Abelardo Morell. If Magazine, 9 Dec. 2013. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.
O’Neill, Tom. “Bravura Camera Obscura.” Camera Obscura. National Geographic, May 2011. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.

The Most Important Policy

Clare McCullough
A public policy issue that is extremely important is environmental regulation. This issue has what might be the largest impacts out of any other facing us today, and it will start truly affecting us around as soon as 2050; within my lifetime. A recent policy that has tried to tackle the issue of pollution and the warming climate is the Clean Power Plan, which aims to combat climate change by putting caps on CO2 emissions. Another big environmental step forward under Obama’s administration was The Paris Climate Agreements which occurred Winter of 2015. In the past policies, have tried to reduce carbon emissions and maintain environmental health through incentive and disincentive programs.
Conservation policies are important because its shown that if we continue living and consuming the way that we have; it will lead to extreme weather patterns. There will be long droughts in some places and flooding in others. Often, I believe, we forget how dependent we are on our natural resources. The necessity for a sustainable future is paramount, if we are going to raise quality of life as a planet. The point of progress is to grow and be happy, and if we cannot achieve at least the basic rights of clean air and water then what was the point? In the end, all we have is our health and our environment in which we live in.
Tackling climate change will require international action. The time for action was yesterday and we can’t afford to ignore the impacts of the fact of global warming. The unsustainable use of dirty energy will create a dramatic transformation that we are already seeing the beginning of the impacts. 2014 was the hottest year until 2015 was the hottest year. As the oceans rise, small island countries will start to disappear as well as low lying cities such as Dakka and Shanghai and will create thousands of millions of refugees, pushing the rapidly growing populations elsewhere and compounding food crises which are already fragile in a lot of countries. Crops will not grow the same in different climates, so there will be less food to put on the table, over the long-term food production will decrease and the poorest among us will be the most vulnerable to that, increasing the need for aid. Not to mention the loss of biodiversity caused by unsustainable development and use of energy. The coral reefs are already bleaching and bees are going extinct. Biodiversity is crucial for any ecological system to function properly.
But, I believe in a different future. We can move together to solve for the inherent problems that are facing us with climate change. First, we need to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, as well as decrease the use of dirty energy and increase investment in clean energy possibilities. For the energy challenge to be overcome, we need to have an inexpensive and reliable energy source, an energy that emits optimally no greenhouse gasses, and an energy source that doesn’t create local environmental and health problems. With the booming world population, it will be difficult to achieve all those goals, especially since coal and dirty energies are admittedly very cheap. However, fossil fuels create pollution that shortens lives and are causing climate change and the consequences that follow as I explained above are very complicated and severe. The Paris agreements are expected to help a little in this realm. The three key solutions to solve the energy problem, beside international cooperation, is that we need to start evaluating energy sources at their full social costs and not just looking at energy as an issue that stands apart. We need to invest in research and development in innovation to make sustainable energy cheaper and cleaner. By identifying effective policy tools to combat specific problems we can solve a lot of the issues, we can put the real price on energy emssions to foster innovation and research into alternative energy sources as well as putting caps on CO2 emissions.
According to The National Geographic, if we cut our emissions by two thirds by 2050, only then we can limit the rise of climate change to 2 percent. By switching where we get our energy from and investing in energies such as solar, nuclear, and wind among others we can achieve this goal. But to do that we need to educate people on the issue of climate change especially since there are so many climate change deniers out there and that’s the largest issue facing sustainable policy makers today. Because with this specific issue, it is up to the governments to move us into the right direction. By investing in cleaner transportation, agriculture, maintaining building codes, and better management of forests we can help combat the magnitude that is the problem of climate change
We must act together and we must act now. We need to survive with our planet and I want any future children of mine to know that I was looking out for them from the very beginning and that I did everything in my power to ensure that they will get to enjoy the same beautiful and natural world that I grew up knowing.

Critiques on the Wages of Whiteness

Clare McCullough

I believe that Roediger’s argument that the Irish “became white” is minimizing the advantages that they held in the mid-1800s. The Irish were always more accepted than free Black people because they were still white and got the benefit of the doubt. They got to choose how they acted and most importantly, they could vote and participate in society on a level that was absolutely inaccessible to African Americans. The Irish-Americans were hated because the influx of their immigration drove down the values of wages during this time, they were seen as violent, sexually promiscuous, and heavy drinkers; all qualities that were frowned upon in America at this time.
They viewed African Americans as competitors for jobs even though they were “a small part of the urban labor force.” (147) the fact is that African Americans were easy targets to exercise their frustration of being considered second class citizens. The Irish were discriminated against and often compared to the African American slaves, hence their being called “white niggers” quite frequently and were “used as substitutes for slaves within the South” (146) they cost less than slaves because if a “Paddy” was hurt on the job they wouldn’t have to pay for their bills. They had their own obstacles especially since they were poor and so did not have the opportunities afforded to other whites and in that regard they were like the African Americans. They came off the boat from farmland and were introduced to a completely different world filled with foreign machines and drudgery.
While, Irish folks were heavily discriminated against, denied jobs, respect, and opportunities that were afforded to their white peers, they were still seen as people. Irish people owned themselves. They would not be taken from their homes and sold as slaves or dragged from their houses and lynched. The Irish were on the same position socially and economically however, politically they had as much as a voice as any other white person in this time. They in fact were strong supporters of the Democratic Party in antebellum America. They embraced their whiteness and did everything they could to align themselves with the Anglo-Saxon “race” and to some extent, they were accepted. If you compare the Black experience to the White Irish, you’ll see that you’d delegitimize the real struggles that the African American population suffered through.

Roediger, David R. “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.” The Haymarket Series, 1991, caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/roediger-the-wages-of-whiteness-race-and-the-making-of-the-american-working-class.pdf.

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