LETTERS to the Editor.

Perverse Justice

James K. Galbraith is quite right to point out that the skills gap" is a poor theory to account for income inequality ("The Fallacy of the Skills Gap," March issue).

Galbraith's brief article, though, needs to be read in the larger context of the subtitle to Harry Braverman's 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. The "degradation of work" definitely includes the deskilling of the workforce by replacing sophisticated workers with sophisticated machines. The "smarter" the machine, the less skill required of the operator. With that reading, what we've seen since the 1980s is the industrialization of the office, with computers the latest of the "smart" machines.

I'd add one other point. Galbraith says that computers have "reduced the value of older educations relative to newer ones, and made certain short and casual educations (in particular, knowledge of software packages) into reasonable substitutes for long and arduous ones."

In the editorial business, where I work, productivity can be most grossly defined in the words of a former provost of my university, who said "the university's mission was to process the maximum number of students in the most cost-efficient manner." What they learn is economically irrelevant so long as their degree is a valuable piece of "social currency," the provost said.

Reducing "the value of older educations relative to newer ones" is necessary in order to give young workers aid in competing against older workers. Such reduction of the value of old knowledge is also useful for elite groups of older workers with time and training to pick up or even create the new knowledge.

The usefulness of new knowledge or skills is not very relevant. They must be new and fashionable; that's all. Possessing the new skills gets rewarded; not possessing them gets punished.

There is a perverse sort of justice here. If knowledge fashions didn't change, the on-the-job experience of older but still energetic workers would make them nearly unbeatable by new workers who want their jobs. If fashions change and the new workers have the fashionable skills and knowledge, the new kids can be fierce competitors, especially since they can usually be hired for less money.

Reducing "the value of older educations relative to newer ones" aids some people in the economy and hurts others, and understanding that explains a fair amount of economic and political behavior.

Richard D. Erlich Oxford, Ohio

A Question for Claybrook

I read with interest the interview with Joan Claybrook (Ruth Conniff, March issue). Unfortunately, one of the questions not asked was how she felt about all the people she killed.

While she was the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, she pushed through a law requiring anti-lock brakes on heavy-duty tractor-trailer rigs (eighteen-wheelers). I was hired with a lot of other engineers to try to develop something that worked. Mechanical antilock systems (scaled up from luxury cars) were a failure in the field. Everybody hoped that electronics would work better. They didn't. We failed, along with the rest of the entire industry. The law was reversed a few years later when it was proven that eighteen-wheelers with anti-lock brakes had three to four times the rate of fatal accidents when compared with those without anti-lock brakes.

Anti-lock brakes have just recently made a comeback. More than half of the eighteen-wheelers sold today have anti-lock brakes. The difference is that today's anti-lock system is controlled by a computer chip that is more powerful than the mainframe computer that my company owned in the 1970s.

A lot of people died because Claybrook pushed through a law twenty years before technology existed that could make it work. I know this because I was deposed in a few of the resulting wrongful-death lawsuits. Invariably, the opposing lawyer would show me some 8 x 10 glossy photographs of the deceased, all mangled and bloody, and ask me how I felt about killing them.

I have seen or read Claybrook's interviews several times since then and nobody has asked her that question. So, I would like to ask her the same question that was asked of me and everybody else who tried to make her mandate work, "How do you feel about all the people you killed?"

Harry Owen Omaha, Nebraska

Joan Claybrook replies:

Mr. Owen is incorrect on several counts.

First, the federal regulation requiring anti-lock brakes was first issued in the early 1970s by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, at least five years before I became the agency's administrator in 1977. The regulation took effect on January 1, 1976.

Second, the trucking industry vehemently opposed this standard in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. Cost and resentment against federal safety standards, not computer capacity or technological feasibility, were the issues. Congress in 1991 finally mandated that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiate rulemaking on the standard because of the endless delays in its implementation. The standard finally took effect about five years ago.

Third, in 1975, the manufacturers and the trucking industry were convinced the Ford Administration would be sympathetic to their opposition and revoke the standard. Thus, some companies did not do the research and development required for these new brake systems and were caught off guard when the standard, in fact, took effect in 1976. As a result, they rushed badly designed systems into the marketplace and many of them were defective. There were a number of recalls of unsafe systems, some voluntary and some required by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during my tenure there.

I defended the standard not only because that was my job, but because Delco, Wagner Electric, and other companies were making large investments in manufacturing good systems that were coming on the market in 1978, and that would prevent tractor-trailer trucks from jackknifing and get them to stop in shorter distances in their lane during emergency braking. This safety standard is important because the public rightly fears large trucks. In most fatal car/truck crashes, it is the car occupants who are killed.

It is critical to prevent truck crashes whenever possible, and anti-lock brakes make a large contribution to achieving that goal.

In Defense of Postmodernism

I was disappointed to see Barbara Ehrenreich ("Farewell to a Fad," March issue) join ranks with those whose new fad is to scapegoat "postmodernism," a term which seems basically to mean French poststructuralist philosophy. But for Ehrenreich, it also signifies people who wear "menacing all-black garments, accessorized with a knowing smirk." What we have here is a classic case of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, the spirit of revenge turned moral, a spirit often shared by both conservative and liberal radicals. Where to now, Robespierre? Shall we begin purging intellectuals?

As Ehrenreich says, "It's the job of the paid thinker ... to puncture myths, challenge prejudices, and expose the emperor's unclothed state." But not one of the articles I have read that hail Alan Sokal as the new emperor of antipostmodernism (and there have been many over the past two years) tries to assess editor Andrew Ross's explanation for why Sokal's article was accepted by Social Text, and certainly none have shown even the slightest understanding of the theorists they claim to be debunking.

Like all other forms of scapegoating, postmodernist-bashing reduces a whole range of complex and differentiated phenomena to a single equation. The phrase gleaned from Derrida that "there is nothing but the text" is taken literally and generalized by those whose moral duty is now to remind us, as Ehrenreich does, that the real world does too exist! (How could those postmodernists have been so stupid?) Once you've thus constructed your straw-filled postmodernist, you can then proceed to bash him/her with impunity, because these days even liberals will look the other way (or like Ehrenreich, join in).

If you want to understand theorists like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard, however, you may need to spend a good many years studying the history of philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud--some of postmodernism's greatest influences. Theory is difficult, ponderous, sometimes even poetic, but the arrogant assumption of the anti-postmodernists is that if they can't understand something it must be stupid.

Ehrenreich's remark about her child's "$25,000 a year" college lowering grades for using the word "reality" without quotation marks is cheap and ridiculous, but it also testifies that we live in an age where the student qua consumer (backed by the angry parents who pay the bills) feels righteously indignant when confronted with concepts he or she wasn't taught at home. Are universities to turn English departments into family values departments to please their customers? If the anti-postmodernist tirade were translated into its equivalent reality, it would be one where professors who don't prove themselves "useful" would find themselves working in the rice fields.

The fact is that people who study postmodern theory, as well as intellectuals in general, are a relatively small minority these days, and certainly pose no threat to the status quo. So we admit, Barbara, we lost, if it makes you feel any better. The critique of metaphysical prejudice and the forces of dumbness (which is what deconstruction was really always about) has been beaten by the new anti-intellectual fundamentalism, which seeks to bring us back to the Dark Ages, save that no one will be allowed to wear black!

Bradley Butterfield
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse,
English Department
La Crosse, Wisconsin

Hey, We Have Fun

I read with great interest and enjoyment your ninetieth anniversary issue (January). The breadth was truly impressive.

But I was more than a little disturbed by Barbara Ehrenreich's article "Was It Good for You?" She decried the lack of fun and joy in movement work and activism. Ehrenreich is a great writer and thinker, but in this matter she just doesn't know what she's talking about.

Halfway through the article it occurred to me that her narrowness of view and experience is shared by most of those who speak and write for the American left and by the periodicals that purport to report on today's movements for justice.

There is very little connection between the close-to-the-ground work of today's activists who are trying to build organization, foster movement, and push a progressive agenda and the intellectuals and writers who represent that work to the rest of the world.

The evidence is everywhere. Just look in Atlanta:

If you don't think there's fun or joy in movement work, you've never been to a UNITE Southern Region Conference. You've never partied after a successful union election. You've never been to Manuel's Tavern with the Atlanta Jobs With Justice Committee after the takeover of the office of some bigshot trying to stop workers from organizing. Hell, you've probably never been to any Jobs With Justice event. You've never knocked on doors with Congressman John Lewis or ridden on the back of a sound truck rhyming raps for Get Out the Vote. You've never been to a planning meeting of the Atlanta Martin Luther King Holiday March Committee. You've never been to downtown Atlanta on Dr. King's holiday.

The left press continues to publish these silly columns as if they were important.

Stewart Acuff, President
Atlanta, Georgia Labor Council,
AFL-CIO, Atlanta, Georgia

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