I had the rare opportunity to attend the shoot of the second season of ABC’s Shark Tank. I created “AfterShark” for the first season of the show, and for that, I interviewed the business owners after they had appeared on the show, so for the second season, I was invited to come to the set itself for the taping and do live interviews. Among the many people I was lucky enough to meet: all of the Sharks and the entrepreneurs who were slated to pitch their businesses to them on those days. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting some videos that came out of that fantastic experience.
I’ll start with the king. This is Mark Burnett. Burnett, if you don’t know, is the most powerful force in reality TV in the world. His shows include Survivor and The Apprentice, and of course, Shark Tank. We sat down in the Sharks’ chairs (he sat in Kevin O’Leary’s, I was in Daymond John’s) and talked about the show, the recession, and whether he would ever consider joining the Sharks himself one day.
Something is very wrong on Broadway: There’s a standing ovation for every performance.
Last year, I went to see the new musicalThe Addams Family at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. A day later, the New York Timesproclaimed it “genuinely ghastly” and a “collapsing tomb.” Reuters said its “artistic inspiration pretty much ended with the pitch meeting.” The Washington Post deadpanned that it was “this year’s answer to the question How many talented people does it take to screw up a concept?”
It was torpedoed by pretty much everyone. Yet just a few hours before, the audience I was part of rose to its feet. What’s going on here?
Simple: devaluation of praise.
Two decades ago, standing ovations were awarded mostly on merit. Only the upper echelon of performances earned them. Almost all performances, even superior ones, were congratulated by a hearty, but seated, round of applause. That modulated sign of respect was enough to please even a veteran performer, and if an actor was fortunate enough to see a crowd driven to its feet, a career could be instantly made.
Now, though, audiences rise as if compelled by the same machinery that makes the curtains fall. All it takes is a few people in the front rows to get it going. Once that eager vanguard — many of whom are diehards who won those seats in discount ticket lotteries — pops up, the people behind them must do it, too, in order to maintain their view of the movie star they paid top dollar to see. Most modern standing ovations are carried out without gusto and without cheering. Just clapping and standing.
“It’s an ‘occasion’ now – whatever the hot ticket is for the middle-aged and rich,” legendary Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim is quoted as saying about our audience ovations. “They want to remind themselves that it’s an occasion. They’re applauding themselves.”
The price of modern entertainment
A single orchestra ticket to The Addams Family on a Saturday night will cost you $178.16, including fees, if it’s bought using Broadway.com. “Premium” tickets, which don’t come with foot rubs, cost $360.60. Usurious rates like that are what promoted the Wall Street Journal, in its own Addamspan, to say, “tickets are so expensive that you can buy an iPad for less than the price of four orchestra seats.” It was being charitable: new iPads start at $499.
With prices like that, no one wants to be the first to admit the show stinks. Many audiences give perfunctory standing ovations out of pure, stubborn unwillingness to admit they just blew a wad of cash. These reluctant standees usually make up the majority of the ovation. They’re not leaping to their feet because they’re overcome with uncontainable jubilation and praise. No, they take their time to put their Playbills down first.
“The pro forma Broadway standing ovation now springs from duty not desire,” wrote Brendan Lemon in the Financial Times in 2003.
Sondheim observed another aspect of the worthless standing O: “Every show now gets a standing ovation, but I think if you’re really moved, you don’t stand.”
He’s right. The standing ovation has become so inconsequential that now, the only true way to gauge a performance’s quality has inverted: A standing O won’t tell you anything, but if the audience resolutely refuses to get up, you know the show’s been terrible. Tell your actor friends that the musical you saw got a standing O, and they probably won’t be impressed, but talk about how an audience remained seated during the bows for John Stamos and Gina Gershon’s Bye Bye Birdie, and you’ll see them wince knowingly.
I think that long ago, bowing actors searched the house for people who were leaping to their feet. That sight was enough to set them abuzz with gratitude. Now, they probably zero in on the people who refuse to get up. If an actor notices a bunch of people who are only sedentarily pleased, it must really scotch a good mood. Was I that bad?
Standing ovations do still happen when there are stellar performances to reward. But rising is so common, no actor can be sure anymore. They must wonder: Did they really like me, or were they just standing like usual?
An interaction with celebrities
Audiences also tend to make a point of standing for stars, the way subjects respectfully rise for royalty. It’s hard to keep a Broadway show running nowadays without a plugging into star power, and the audiences are beginning to behave the way pilgrims do, by paying respects obviously. The hard-working ensemble may be applauded from the seat, but the star’s praise is from the feet.
For every truly gifted star performance, such as Scarlett Johansson in A View from the Bridge, there are six Quentin Tarantinos in Wait Until Dark, Katie Holmeses in All My Sons, or Nicole Kidmans in The Blue Room. All took forgettable or regrettable stage turns, and all routinely received standing ovations.
The presence of a star often signifies a higher production budget, too. To make it worth that big name’s time to dally on Broadway, producers often guarantee sizable weekly paychecks. That contributes to the high price of tickets.
Broadway producers increasingly feel comfortable mounting awful written-by-committee shows as long as they can lasso a big star to headline it — or base it on a movie the masses already know and trust, which is a form of star power.
I’m not saying that you should defiantly sit on your hands the next time the crowd around you rises from its seats. Giving a standing ovation is the new standard, and bucking the new standard will only make you look petulant. You’ll also usually find it impossible to see the bows if you’re the only one sitting down.
But the next time you’re reluctantly swept into rising for a performance that was just so-so, ask yourself why you feel compelled to do it. The social and financial pressure to join in means you’re probably putting on a little performance of your own.
They rose for that
Update: All right. I just saw Jerusalem and War Horse in one weekend. I freely admit I some performances are unquestionably worth standing ovations. I only wish more shows were like those.
“America’s Greatest Mass Grave”: Looking southeast at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn
We obsess over the deaths of individuals. When one notable person dies, or when one person dies notably, we imbue that person with our fears, with idealizations of our better nature, or with a rueful but unspoken gratitude of “there but for the grace of God go I.”
But when we die in batches, we gradually forget. “Remember the Maine!” we shouted, taking up guns, and we killed people over it — and then we forgot. Just what the hell is the Maine, most people would ask today. Was it near the Alamo? Once inspiration for violence and war, some of the Maine‘s 274 dead lie forgotten and unvisited in a cemetery in Key West, Florida, and New Yorkers eat lunch daily on the rim of the stone Maine memorial in Columbus Circle as if it was only a fancy park bench, which of course it now essentially is.
You might remember the Maine, or at least a little — I’d advise having a dim awareness that we now know it was probably a simple accident that caused the sinking and not a hidden mine, but Hearst, who spearheaded the Columbus Circle monument, wanted a war. But 122 years before that, some 11,500 people died in one episode, and we barely remember it at all.
Back during the colonial days, the British didn’t bother much with prisons. It tossed petty thieves and undesirables into hulks, which were usually disused ships festering somewhere in a backwater of the local port. Britain used to ship those inmates, after a long torturous stay, to other lands, where they would drop them off — a life sentence, more or less, since few could afford to buy their way back — and forget about them forever.
When the American colonies rebelled, Britain had to find a new dump for its human trash, and Australia was chosen. But during the Revolutionary War, the Crown couldn’t retire its prison ship fun. Any naughty colonist or mercenary who was caught rebelling was usually packed into a irreparably damaged ship somewhere. For a while, the British held New York City as the Revolutionary War raged elsewhere, and that was when it became particularly aggressive at stuffing human beings into their prison ships and subsequently ignore their basic needs. The hulks were a deterrent to crime back home, the Redcoats reasoned, so they’re sure to scare those colonists straight, too.
Bet Teacher didn’t tell you this: More people died on these moored prison ships than died on the battlefields of the war. That’s right: America was born out of concentration camps.
Roosting again after 45 years in an undisclosed location
(It would not be the last concentration camp to devour so many lives in America, either. But I’ll leave that story for another time soon.)
Every day, British soliders would tell the luckless and momentary survivors to toss out the day’s dead. Over the course of the war, some 11,500 corpses were accumulated this way. The British, who are otherwise good about the soil and farming, ordered them quickly buried in shallow graves on the waterside. We wouldn’t even know how many people ended up there if it weren’t for the Dutch man and his daughter who looked out at the water from Remsen’s Mill and made a little note every time another corpse was dumped there.
Despite horrific conditions that created a daily orgy of death, not one person recanted their allegiance to the colonies and joined the British. One word would have freed them from the infection and stench that surrounded them. They died instead.
At one point, the prisoners banded together to write a desperate letter to George Washington, begging him to rescue them through a prisoner exchange. But Washington ignored them. He was afraid they would spread the smallpox they contracted on the ships, and what’s more, he didn’t want to release able-bodied Redcoats back into service. He let the prisoners die.
Take care not to forget me this time, eh?
Of course, early Americans knew all about the willful mass slaughter, just as they gave the French their due for ultimately getting us out of our jam with the English. One of the survivors wrote a gruesome tell-all about it. You would have had a hard time forgetting, too: When you least expected it, corpses would resurface with uncivilized regularity. You can’t run a booming port with rotting body parts popping up all over the place, so the locals poked around the shoreline for all the human remains they could scrounge up and re-dumped them, with just enough solemnity to make it seem less sacrilegious, in a new mass grave and got on with the business of making money.
I’d like to say that in the mid-1970s, they built a luxurious suburban subdivision on top of that, neglecting to inform buyers that their tract homes were located on sacred burial ground, and that one day the corpses were found bobbing in the swimming pool with Carol Ann. That would be fun, and we’d probably remember them more… but it didn’t end that way.
But by the middle 1800s, without those pesky arms and skulls resurfacing to inconveniently remind new Americans of their conveniently buried savage past, there was a sense that we were forgetting about what happened. Americans are good at many things, but expeditious forgetting is a forte, especially if the thing not worth retaining has to do with being wrong or defeated.
Walt Whitman, bless him, was one of the ones who refused to forget. In what may have been the last instance of an American political movement inspired by verse (that is, until Clinton’s impeachment stemming from a gift version of Whitman’s own Leaves of Grass), he worked to inspire construction of a proper memorial to the so-called Martyrs by writing wrote an ode to the prison ships. It was to be sung to the tune of the national anthem in a march at the newly created Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 1846. Quoted in an old New York Times story:
…How priceless the worth of the sanctified earth
We are standing on now! Lo! The slope of its girth
Where the martyrs were buried; nor prayers, tears or stones
Marked their crumbled-in coffins, their white holy bones.
But he envisioned a proper memorial for those forgotten, rotten dead:
Ah, yes! be the answer. In memory still
We have placed in our hearts and embalmed there forever
The battle, the prison ship martyrs and hill;
Oh, may it be preserved till those hearts death shall sever,
For how priceless the worth, &c.
The “&c”, appears to be Walt’s. I have no idea how you’d sing it to the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and frankly it’s a lazy way to finish a stanza since he clearly had more to say but ran out of space for it. But he was Walt Whitman and it was for charity, so I have to let him have it.
Anyway, Walt died, too, before he got his dream, but it finally came true in 1908. Designed by world-famous philanderer Stanford White (also dead by then, shot in the face) and attended by the considerable aspect of President Taft, a 149 foot tall column fitted with an eternal flame was christened on the hill in Fort Greene Park. At the time, it was the tallest freestanding Doric column in the world. (“Honey! Pack the kids into the carriage! We’re going to the tallest freestanding Doric column!”) Beneath that, a crypt was set in the middle of a flight of imposing stairs 100 feet wide, and inside were placed all the corpse pieces that they could scrounge up at that late date. If you added up all the body parts, you’d almost certainly total less than 11,500 martyrs — more like 8,000 — but it’s the sentiment that counts.
The Prison Ship Martyrs Crypt: We piece together what we can, but we’ve lost a lot already
Or at least, should count. By the late century, Fort Greene Park was its own horror show, half-lined with dilapidated and crime-ridden projects. The “eternal flame” atop the column was dead. An elevator was installed in 1937 but removed after just 11 years of inadvisable service. The four bronze eagles on the columnar flanks had been removed to storage units unknown until such a time New Yorkers decided they knew how to have nice things again — “removed for their safety in 1962 by the Parks Department” as my 2002 Blue Guide put it.
And yet a nearby historical plaque, also mostly forgotten, calls it “America’s Greatest Mass Grave.” Can you think of any that are bigger?
Fort Greene Park is next to downtown Brooklyn, though, and so it wasn’t destined to molder for long. In 2008, a refurbishment was completed. It looks terrific, and to my delight, there’s even a staffed information center on weekends. The park ranger told me the eternal flame is now only illuminated at night. She also says that visitors are not permitted to ascend, nor may they enter the tomb unless they come with written proof they’re related to someone who is consecrated there. That seems fair; New Yorkers have only just begun to prove they know how to take care of bronze eagles, so I am not personally prepared to entrust them with access to the earthly remains of the Prison Ship Martyrs.
The projects in New York City, meanwhile, have become desirable real estate, and now instead of junkies, Fort Greene Park is patronized by children and joggers who achieve their cardio goals by stampeding up and down the stairs over the white holy bones of the 11,500.
There may be few things more annoying than reading the results of yet another study in the press. The only thing more dispiriting, I guess, would be one more self-serving article about Twitter. Enough already!
Yet here’s one that dares to be exponentially more pretentious by being both at once. Don’t worry. I’ll boil it down to the essential fact: HarvardBusiness.org reports that on Twitter, only 10% of its users account for 90% of the activity. That means only a few people are saying much at all, and everyone else is just watching.
It only confirms my big theory about social networking. Participation, in social networking terms, is not about what people put into the system. It’s measured by what people take out of it. Here we have the statistical proof that people are indeed sponging up the benefits of these new systems. We’re created a kingdom of lurkers.
I am one of them. Facebook has given me a new way to connect with the people from my past. Its gift to me is passive affection.
Like passive aggression, passive affection lets me share an emotion without actually showing it. I can simply imply it by being your Facebook friend. Using Facebook, I can keep all my old friends and semi-acquaintances in a basket, pleasantly at arm’s length, and I need only pluck one out for closer inspection when I feel moved to do so. They don’t need to know about it when I’ve checked in on them. To use Twitter parlance, I follow them, meaning I stay out of their way.
I have a college friend named Millicent. (OK, you got me. That’s not her real name.) I have always adored Millicent, but I’m not in great touch with her. In fact, if I were to pick up the phone and call her, the conversation would probably be a little awkward. She’d probably wonder what I wanted all of a sudden, and neither of us would be exactly sure of the proper time to politely end it. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about Millicent and don’t want to keep up with her; it just means that she’s not reach-out-and-touch-someone close anymore.
But because I can read her status updates on Facebook, I still know the big stuff that’s happening in her life. I feel closer to her than ever. I love her new haircut, and I’m moderately pleased her kid has graduated from her car seat (and, better yet, I don’t have to feign rapt interest if she told me about it for 10 minutes in person). Yet Millicent doesn’t even know I’ve got my eye on her. That’s passive affection.
A normal person, meaning one living in 2004, might have spent a lot of money calling all the people he liked. That throwback might also have invested lots of time writing e-mails to fondly remembered acquaintances that, although appreciated on the receiving end, might accidentally have gone unanswered for months. Rather than putting any of my old friends in such an odd position, and risking the chance of being inadvertently insulted by a non-answer, I turn to Facebook. It’s a little like stalking, except my friends have generously planted the bushes for me to hide in.
In 2004, to register my affection with the constellation of people in my life, I had to spend money on cards, gifts, and phone calls.
But now, it’s considered socially acceptable to simply honor personal milestones by pig-piling quick greetings on a Wall. A little tweet or a comment is all it takes to let people know I’m thinking about them, so there’s no need to interrupt their dinner hour for a 20-minute phone call. The effect is the same.
Social networking allows me to observe from afar with a sort of benign regard. I imagine it’s a little like God must feel: brimming with symbolic detachment.
So thank you, Facebook, for being mainstream enough for even former teachers and elderly relatives to understand.
You permit me to take a step back from the people I secretly love but that I’m afraid to tell. You have allowed me to set up camp in the demilitarized zone between weirdly officious inquiries and abject indifference. You have enabled a WASPish disconnect.
I joined a dating site, OKCupid, early last week. (Stop chuckling. That’s not the disgusting part.) I’m not a big dating site fan, but a friend said it was fun, so I figured I’d give it a try. I’m a explorer by nature. I try stuff. Anyway, OkCupid allows users to rate profiles they see on a five-star scale.
On Sunday, this message appeared in my Inbox signed by “OkCupid! Interns”. The subject line read, “We have data on your attractiveness”.
I’ll let you read it for yourself:
I am kind of floored that people have such low self-esteem that they respond positively to this kind of arrogance.
I’m not going to let popular opinion dictate what I might find attractive. After all, I’ve been known to have a taste for the eclectic. And I hate associating myself with any organization that professes such an elitist, shallow worldview. But to openly have this sort of structured vanity as part of your programming model? To assume that physical beauty is the only measure worth sorting by? It’s revolting.
When I received this message, I happened to be out to dinner with friends. “Go ask an ugly friend and see,” I read aloud. Everyone around me gasped in disgust. Then one friend said, not a little wistfully, that he’s on OkCupid but he hasn’t received that message. I felt simultaneously slimy and shallow.
Segregating the “ugly” people from the “most attractive” ones?
What are they thinking? This made me want to hurl my iPhone across the room.
A good friend of mine quit OKCupid.com the minute he got this message last year. And he’s hot! So much hotter than all those other hideous people.
Now he’s mad at me because I haven’t quit right away, too. I tell him that I’m having trouble penalizing all the nice people who use the site just because the site administrators have a crumbling value system. This makes me feel like a bad person.
So, well done, OKCupid. You’ve insulted my friends and diminished their respect for me. If there’s any consolation, it’s that all those real, substantive people in my life will be replaced by apparently prettier ones.
Crappy job postings: Ernest Shackleton's ad solicited some 5,000 responses anyway
You’re going to think I’m nuts. But I’m growing convinced: The Web has trashed the American economy.
Back in the ’20s, mass production transformed the way we made and bought things. Henry Ford and his magnate brethren learned how to make vast quantities of consumer items quickly, and to sell those consumer items, they had to advertise to the masses. A symbiotic relationship was born and, in tandem, production and advertising became the twin cylinders of our economic engine. By the 1950s, our consumer society reached its apogee. Today, the capitalist formula is so perfect that many Americans would rather live deep in debt than within their means. Gotta have the latest stuff, or at least die pretending you do!
And then the Web came in. Online shopping mushroomed and today, it’s taking over. Last Cyber Monday, online shopping hit a new high of $1 billion in sales on single day. While we were busy chattering about what a novelty digital commerce was, it was sticking daggers in Mom and Pop’s backs.
Observers like to claim that newspapers and magazines are dying because Web journalism and social media are making them irrelevant. But I think they’re wrong about the true nature of what’s happening. They’re distracted by the shiny new baubles of Twitter and Facebook, and mistaking demolition for revolution.
Yes, the Web has impacted print media. Of course it has. But I think it’s because the Web eliminated advertising as a crucial medium. Why would a wicket manufacturer want to spend tens of thousands for display advertising when it could spend nearly nothing and simply appear at the top of the heap in a Google search? The great ad man, once an archetype of American business, is now something of a hobbyist. Advertising positions are skewing more toward marketing ones in which companies learn not how to master the art of the ad, but how to manipulate free social media gossip to work in their favor.
The end result: Far less money is now changing hands in everyday commerce.
Without advertising, one of the legs has been kicked out from under our economic dinner table. Without advertising, too, millions of Americans will suffer from lost work: journalists, writers, actors, producers. Without big-ticket advertising, the few surviving media outlets that remain must hack budgets so far to the bone that previously professional positions will be filled by people getting bony wages. More businesses expect to be able to do things for free, and that includes staffing.
All the advertising a business needs these days
If you think that’s a scary prophesy, I hate to tell you it’s already true: An editor of one of the nation’s biggest travel magazines got up in front of the Society of American Travel writers conference last spring and said he’s getting away with paying writers 50¢ a word when a few years ago they got $2 a word. They’re lucky. One of the biggest “news” sites in the world doesn’t pay most of its contributors a cent. In a masterstroke of mining low self-esteem for profit, it tells writers that their payment is the opportunity to see their name on their website for free. All this is now reality because advertising is becoming a memory.
About six months ago, a friend of mine, who has worked in TV, newspapers, and in digital media, said something ominous to me: “I think the dirty little secret of Internet journalism is that no one really knows how to make money from it.”
Six months later, she was laid off by the troubled media corporation that employed her to save it. She was replaced by a kid right out of school whose chief skill is the mastery of SEO. In a downshift analogous to American commerce as a whole, another high-level position became a cottage-industry job, and standards descended with it.
First we were hit by outsourcing. Now we’re being slammed by downsourcing.
Even when I go to brick-and-mortar stores, I find the retail clerks have capitulated to the Web. So often these days, when I look for something that’s not in stock, I’m answered with a passive shrug. “You can find it online,” they tell me, absolving themselves of making a sale despite the fact I have cash in hand.
I would like to know if anyone has ever done a study to see how much money American businesses lose each year because customers refuse to return home, order the item online, pay the shipping, and wait.
The reason no one knows how to make much money off Internet journalism so far is that there are few advertising dollars behind it. Readers and businesses alike are finally used to getting everything for free. In a world where consumers can find what they’re looking for without outside assistance, they’re just not as necessary as they used to be.
Half the engine of our economy was removed even as we’re rocketing down the highway at 95 miles per hour.
I am beginning to think that Twitter appeals to the lazy guy in me. Instead of posting something here, I tweet it (@bastable) because that’s quicker and shorter. But so many of my activities are not being properly preserved except at the Library of Congress.
Last night, for example. I went to the opening party for the Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Plaza Hotel. I was helping my friend Ken Kleiber (of the beloved New York City cable show “That’s Kentertainment“) shoot red carpet interviews with the cast and creatives. One journalist acquaintance spotted me and asked who I was interviewing people for. No, no, I said. This time, I’m behind the camera.
And because I was behind the camera, I captured this moment which, for some reason, I find endearing and hilarious: Daniel Radcliffe, Mr. Harry Potter himself, meeting Liza Minnelli for the very first time. Since everyone else was embroiled in their own interviews with other cast members, I managed to capture the hug and the expression of absolute rapture on this kid’s face when he met her. The kid had just opened his own Broadway musical as an above-the-title lead, he’s facing an adoring squad of flashbulb-popping, ass-kissing entertainment journalists — and yet he nearly bites his tongue off with excitement at meeting Liza.
Here are some screen grabs of his delirious moment:
There were some other standout moments. Like when Neil Simon, for some reason, got onto the red carpet to give interviews (he didn’t write the show). To get him chatting, Ken asked if they had seen the show, and his wife sarcastically pipes in, “No, we were all dressed up and walking past the Plaza and saw there was a party, so we wandered in. What do you think?” Then, to my surprise, Neil told Ken that the show wasn’t the greatest thing he’d ever seen. Guys, if you’re going to crash the red carpet, at least play the media game nice.
It just confirms my theory: Like postage stamps, theatres should not be named after the living. With all due respect.
And then there was the moment that Michele Lee, who was the ingenue in the 1967 movie version, put down her glass of red wine to do an interview by the light of an iPad. (Strangely, the guys next to us in the line had no proper lights — they used an iPad set to a blank screen.) She snatched it up and said it was all part of her best advice for staying in show business: “Bring your own light!”
I shot this while I was shooting Daniel. Damn, he’s English. Having also covered the red carpet at the opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, I can attest that he gives more attention to the journalists on the red carpet than anyone else I’ve ever seen. He was there for more than an hour and I don’t think he even went to the party it was supposed to be a part of. He’s just an all-around mensch.
Here are Ken and me after the professional camera hogs left:
Sometimes New York is such a kick that I hate myself for the times I curse it.
Somewhere right about now, Daniel Radcliffe is probably playing Liza with a Z and agreeing with me.
It happened on March 25, but there had been warnings for years. Factory owners across America amassed fortunes by exploiting what was, at the time, a seemingly inexhaustible resource: immigrants. Newly arrived Europeans were expendable. They had a weak political voice, so crossing them had little negative impact for politicians and none for businessmen, since few laws existed to protect them.
So children labored alongside mothers. Women labored all a day, sometimes as much as 75 hours a week, with no days off, forbidden to so much as speak. They frequently lugged their own machines to work. Girls of 15 made $3.50 a week. Factory doors were locked so they would not waste time gossiping, or stretching their legs, or breathing fresh air. And when they went home, hunched and raw after spending all the daylight hours doing piecework, they often slept in rooms with seven or eight family members, none of them able to earn enough money to reverse their plight.
Demands for protections surfaced but rarely took hold. Child labor protests were the cause célebre, and momentarily. In 1909, a fifth of Triangle’s workers took to the streets with some 20,000 other degraded women, all of them too desperately poor to take a passenger train let alone lose their jobs, in a strike. These weary, foreign-tongued women in threadbare clothes made a rare appearance in Union Square during the daylight to open eyes. Some people clucked their tongues and said, “Yes, yes. Something really ought to be done” — and did nothing except express momentary dismay. But to many others, these protestors were considered anti-American agitators — unclean ghetto scum whose laziness was an affront to the American Dream. Many were arrested, and some sent to work camps. Even though those as American as Mark Twain were emphatic supporters of labor movements, booming industry (backed by police) retook focus and power, and the girls’ warnings faded from novelty and the public eye.
The building on March 25, 1911
But on March 25, 1911, in a factory on the upper floors of a building on the east side of Washington Square Park in New York City, time ran out. A fire began. With no rules in place to keep the floor clear of loose rags, it spread with breathtaking speed. Women scrambled for the doors, but they were locked. They rushed for the windows, but they were too high to be reached by fire truck ladders. They began flinging themselves out of windows, smashing on the sidewalks below, crashing through the pavement, and, skirts still aflame, impaling themselves on fencing. Some desperate girls found a fire escape, but it hadn’t been inspected, and it came loose, dashing more of them to the ground. Bystanders gathered, unable to assist the trapped women, while the streets piled with bodies. The gore filled the gutters, and the smell of blood caused the horses pulling the fire trucks to rear back in fear. The warnings were made horrifically real.
By dinnertime on March 25, 146 had been murdered by something that could have been avoided: the callousness of commerce. It was more than just an accident. If the image of people leaping to their deaths reminds us of 9/11, that’s apropos, because like the 9/11 of its day, the Triangle fire was a source of paralyzing horror and a bellwether of change. Public opinion turned. How could a prosperous, civilized country have allowed the conditions that killed these women — and, even on March 26, threatened countless more across the country? Hastily, with an acknowledged shame, the system changed. Labor and safety laws, weak at first, were ushered into place.
The same view today, scrubbed of meaning
The real changes were deeper. No longer would most Americans trust industry to police itself, without oversight by law or a government interested in the greater good of society. Unions surged in popularity.
Back to how it was: Demonize the employee
Here we are. It’s a mournful irony indeed that on the 100th anniversary of such a milestone in the humane execution of our national business, the right wing, and heedless windsock politicians such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rep. Tom Niehaus of Ohio, are taking a sledgehammer to unions. Their ire is currently directed at public sector unions. As if high school teachers are fatcats who wickedly milk the system. As if being able to stand up for yourself is something you should only be allowed to do if you don’t work for the state.
It’s shameful ignorance of who we are, a modern crime against our history, that the sacrifice and idealism of our ancestors 100 years ago could be so summarily discarded at the very moment they should be commemorated.
In March 2011, there ought to be parades to honor the centenary of the day our industry civilized. Instead, conservative partisans are attacking unions, seizing a political moment to demonize a largely productive entity and feed their own wealth, and disrespecting the process that made America an industrial power that was admired by the rest of the world.
Throughout the majority of our history, American industry was a free-for-all, with no rules to look after the greater good. Look at slavery, for goodness’ sake! Left to its own devices, American business trampled people. And it would have remained so if people hadn’t taken control of their own conditions and created the industry they wanted to have.
It’s no accident that unions took hold in this country at the very moment our consumer culture added rocket fuel to our national economy and propelled us to the very stars in the 20th century.
Yes, there are corrupt unions — but it’s also true that there are corrupt politicians and CEOs, so any argument of moral superiority over organized labor quickly collapses upon itself. I also believe that all-powerful employers can do a hell of a lot more societal damage than all-powerful employees. And I do not believe that history bears out the oft-repeated saw that unfettered capitalism is naturally for the best. Even Adam Smith did not advocate the abuse of workers or the elimination of government involvement.
We created unions because we needed them. Business was abusing the people because it could get away with it. Unions were designed, at their purest form, to protect the lives of the workers who provide the engine of any business. Opponents lazily call them communist, but it can be argued that if an employer cannot run a business in a humane manner and still make a profit, it has no place in a civilized country. Besides, why shouldn’t workers have as much of a voice as businessmen have?
Collective bargaining is one of the few defenses Americans have against the all-powerful corporation. We can thank the 146 Triangle victims for kicking that off in a real way.
Products of an anti-union shop on March 25, 1911
Unions can also protect industry itself. In Germany, where trade unions are far more powerful than they are here, they have helped prop up flagging businesses at moments when they were weakest. When an American enterprise might have shut up shop, Germany’s indomitable guilds repelled change. That may frustrate entrepreneurs, but it nonetheless it helped create an economy that is just as productive as ours despite the fact the average German takes about four times as much vacation as the average American.
In the final analysis, American businesses exist to make money for their owners. Innovation is not necessarily at the top of the list of things that are produced in much quantity by that mandate. Cutting corners, or refusing to modernize, or pressuring workers to give up more and more of themselves (including personal health), are just three destructive things businesses do yet still generate profits. And let’s not forget that there is no economic system that is impervious to greed. Without a force that resists potential abuses, greed wins.
I work three blocks from from the building where the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire happened, in a building that was, at the time, Wanamaker’s. It was a mammoth department store taking up two city blocks where those women’s handiwork, created from despair, was almost certainly offered for sale.
The old Triangle space now belongs to New York University, where I attended graduate school. The streets that once ran with gore are now lined with coffee bars and student hangouts. The fire escapes are now secure and regulated. So is my office, and so is every workplace in the country. I have never been a member of a union in my life, but I can thank unions for forcing men of profit to do the correct thing by their fellow man — a Christian principle, after all.
We all assume a level of safety where we work because of what happened on March 25, 1911. We take the fruit of collective bargaining for granted. Visit a sweatshop in Indonesia or China or Bangladesh and you may begin to grasp how things could be, and how they once were.
Of course it’s easy for a Tea Party reactionary to paint all unions as wasteful when they have no true understanding of what they actually contributed to our quality of life. It’s easy to dismantle America if you don’t understand why it was built the way it was. If you want to know the value of what you own, know your history.
The Republicans have spent the past few years vigorously demonizing unions. Let’s not fool ourselves. They’re desecrating the overwhelmingly positive influence of unions because their members contribute mostly to Democrats. The right wing wants to decimate Democratic funding. So they claim unions are guilty of bleeding the American businessman of his profits, that commerce cannot continue if they exist, and that we cannot afford them.
This March 25, I remind them that those was the same arguments that employers gave on March 24, 1911.
Child labor strikers, 1909: Dishonored this month for the sake of partisanship
Since mid-December, I’ve been appearing on CBS’s The Early Show more or less weekly. Strangely, I find it easier than my weekly segment on Fox Philly partly because at CBS, I can actually have a conversation with the person sitting across from me. Part of the reason is because the staff is truly nice, and I’m always at ease there. But it’s also because for the other kinds of interviews I do, which are satellite interviews, I stare into a camera and listen intently to the voice in my ear, so all the action is in my brain. For these live on-set interviews, I can read the face of the person talking to me — even if they’re lucky enough to have a script, IFB, and TelePrompTer. It’s more of an interaction, which brings out the best in me.
Here’s a weird thing that’s come out of my appearances: Two weeks ago, my brother, who lives in Florida, called me early in the morning. He was totally wigged out. He’d been filling up his car at a Shell station after dawn that morning, when, unexpectedly he heard his brother’s voice coming from the gas pump. “All of a sudden, I heard my brother’s voice talking to me!” he told me. It was like I was a ghost or something. Well, that’ll wake you up in a hurry!
He looked up, and there I was, on a little TV screen, giving him a few minutes of consumer advice while he filled his tank. Since then, reports have been filing in. I was last seen by a colleague dispensing consumer advice at Mobil station in Virginia, too.
Vaudeville may be dead, but I found an unexpected new venue: I’m a big star at gas stations nationwide.
Anyway, here are a few of my recent segments.
If you sit through this next one (you can do it– I had to walk through it and navigate a lawn mower while I was at it), you’ll hear the host call me “John” at the very end. She must have been thinking of the esteemed former NBC reporter, John Cochran. I’ll take it.
New light bulbs are coming! But not even the fanciest new TV could have picked up the fact that for this one, I was wearing cuff links shaped like little light bulbs. A web site that purports to be dedicated to combating media bias took me to task for, um, not complaining that the government was forcing people to adopt new bulb technology. Yes, criticized by an anti-bias site for not showing a bias. America!:
I was kinda proud of this next one, as silly as the topic is (“tree-mendous deals”??). That’s not only because it was the first time I appeared on The Early Show, but also because I was lucky enough to be one of the last people that Harry Smith interviewed in his final weeks on the show.
I’ll get some more up later. I don’t like doing it because it means I have to watch myself here and there.
No one likes listening to the answering machine and realizing what they sound like. So can you imagine facing yourself on national TV?
I interviewed Anthony Bourdain for *********. He was driving his car somewhere, so he put on his car speaker and I chatted with him as he owned the highway, like William Daniels and the Hoff, if the Hoff was a genius writer and not a clown.
His response to my last question was so good, but so potty-mouthed, that I had no choice but to cut it from the story.
Can you imagine the following paragraph running on *********?
I’ve always wanted to know this: If you know the Travel Channel is going to bleep the expletives out of your narration, why do you put them in?
It’s the way I talk to my friends, I talk that way to my loved ones. It’s the way I talk, period. So I’m not gonna change. I’m incapable of it. I don’t feel that proprietary about my writing. Besides, you never know what slips in. They don’t know what I’m talking about half the time. I’ve gotten a lot of shit in under the wire. I think I’ve gotten in bukkake, facials, fisting, felcherific, reach-around. So I think I’m doing pretty well. Every time I slip one in, Ted Allen — we used to be on Top Chef together — he’ll send me an e-mail within 20 minutes saying, “Good one!” He’s keeping track.
For the genteel clickers at ********, I ended the answer at “a lot of shit in under the wire,” and I turned “shit” to “sh*t.”
I shared it here, just for you and me, where no one needs to know about it.
He’d make a sailor blush, but gay guys love that sh*t
