Last Year #8: "But you ARE the man"

A few years ago Sprint ran a great commercial, satirizing certain generation's attachment to images of rebillion.  An executive in a tall building in a super modern, clean office with high windows talks about his Sprint plan that doesn't tell him what to do:  "I can talk when and how I want.  It's my little way of 'sticking it to the man.'" 

The younger man in his office (a helper?  junior exec?) says "But you ARE the man."
Older man in navy blue suit says, "I know."
Younger man in brown suit says, "So you're stickin' it to yourself."
"Maybe."

This is the plight of my generation of managers and leaders.  We want to keep our self images as rebels but really, if we hold any position of power, we are "the man."  In spite of my tattoos and love of whisky, (and no, Google, that isn't misspelled, not if one drinks single malt scotch) I'm still a rule setter and follower in my workplace.

I recognized my own position in the power system as soon as I arrived.  Here is another paragraph from my Bendnotes letter to friends at the U of U, 9/13/1988:

"At our department meeting on 9/12, Monday, I learned that last year the meeting had been attended by 7 people.  This year it was attended by 21.  (There's been a 20% increase in students since last year, which itself had showed {sic} a rather dramatic increase over two years previous.)  I also learned that I had kicked several people out of the office I am now imperialistically inhabiting.  People come by my office, look in, and say how nice it is.  They admire the many shelves and the oak desk.  Needless to say, this makes me more uncomfortable that happy, and I have apologized to people, a sort of 'forgive me for being an imperialist' soft of thing.  Most folks don't understand this attitude.  They look ahead, of course, to the day when I get booted."

I wrote this way because many of those teaching the in the UofU department of communication at that time (mid '80s) was left wing theoretically and committed to post-Marxism, post-structuralism, and the analysis of race, class, and gender.  I tried my best to put the principles of those beliefs to work in my classrooms, making sure that everyone knew the rules, enforcing the rules with fairness, and not requiring students to read my mind to figure out how to earn a good grade.  Nevertheless, I was and am still the one in charge of the economics of the classroom, and therefor "the man" in that circumstance.  I was also a mid-level bureaucrat for four years while I was the FA&C department chair.  I was charged with maintaining a system that is, in some ways -- the payment of part-timers and adjuncts, for example -- incredibly unfair.

Yet all the time there remains a part of me that believes in myself as anti-authoritarian.  This is probably the same part of me that wouldn't be surprised to see a unicorn in my garden.

Skipped a day

Friday sucked so bad that I skipped yesterday. But here I am, back on the horse of language saying that I will be so glad when I'm no longer an administrator.

I haven't been writing much media analysis lately but I do want to point out something I thought last year about the Visa Aquarium commercial . This is sooo intended for boomers who took psychoactive drugs when they were young and now have children to bring up. Look at the fire breathing sea horses, the kaleidoscope imagery, the sea rays arranging themselves into an M.C. Escher drawing. And, of course, there is the soundtrack by the Moody Blues. "Tuesday Afternoon," a song about an afternoon in a flowering field has spaced out lyrics which have nothing to do with an Aquarium though the analogy between fish and flowers seems apt. The commercial startled me when I first saw it because, as someone who lived in the sixties, its imagery and music was sooo similar to that in the hippie bookstores and head shops of my youth -- the high color visions of those who took 'shrooms and acid. And now those people are taking kids to the Aquarium on a workday. The message, "Yes, I used to be a stoner, but now I'm a responsible parent. But, you know, there was a magic to those old days and maybe I can recapture it through the mind of my child."

I remember my dad taking me to a movie in the middle of the day when I was eight years old. He was working night shift at the time and I was at home from school for some reason. Maybe we were both playing a kind of hooky. He took me over to San Jose (10 miles) to see "Sail a Crooked Ship." I loved watching a silly, grown-up movie with my dad. I've seen the movie since and it's really, really bad. All I remember is that it starred Ernie Kovacs and had an embarrassing moment when a woman's bra was used as a slingshot. Now I wonder if Dad was drunk at the time. It was such a strange thing for us to do.

So one wonders about the little girl in the ad and what she'll remember of the day out with Dad.