by
Naomi Klein
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By some accident of fate, on February 25, 1997, the multiple layers of anti-corporate rage converged over the Mighty Ducks hockey arena in Anaheim, California. It was Disney’s annual meeting and about 10,000 shareholders crowded into the arena to rake Michael Eisner over the coals. They were upset that he had paid more than $100 million in a severance package to Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, who’d lasted only fourteen scandal-racked months at Disney as second in command. Eisner was further attacked for his own $400 million multiyear pay package, as well as for stacking the board with friends and paid Disney consultants. As if shareholders weren’t angry enough, the obscene amounts of money lavished on Ovitz and Eisner were thrown into harsh relief by an unrelated shareholders’ resolution chiding Disney for paying starvation wages to workers in its overseas factories, and calling for independent monitoring of these practices. Outside the arena, dozens of National Labor Committee supporters were shouting and waving placards about the plight of Disney’s Haitian workforce. Of course the monitoring resolution was trounced, but the way the issues of sweatshop labor and executive compensation played off one another must have been music to Charles Kernaghan’s ears.
Eisner, who apparently expected the gathering to be little more than a pep rally, was clearly caught off guard by this confluence of events. Wasn’t he simply playing by the rules—making his shareholders rich and himself richer? Weren’t profits up a healthy 16 percent from the year before? Wasn’t the entertainment industry, as Eisner himself reminded the restless gathering, “extremely competitive”? Ever the expert at speaking to children, Eisner ventured, “I don’t think people understand executive compensation.”21
Or maybe they understood it all too well. [...]
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.
Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??
the extra ? is maybe superfluous
Frightening, too, was her suggestibility. Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.
All along the roadside were signs reading KIDNEY FOR MELISSA. KIDNEY FOR RANDY. KIDNEY FOR JEANINE, with desperate phone numbers written underneath with magic marker. “Mom, what are those signs?” she finally asked.
“I’ve never seen them before,” her mother said, squinting through her drugstore glasses. “They must be a scam.”
“A scam to do what?”
Her mother was quiet for a very long time. “To get a kidney,” she said softly, finally, staring at her daughter like she was God’s own idiot.
Another thing he said: “They’ll do an abortion right up to the very last minute . . . you know, health of the mother,” putting the last phrase in finger quotes, even as his daughter sat before him in her wheelchair. When that sentence woke her in the purple part of night, she would tug her phone off the bedside table, post the words eat the police in the portal, wait for it to get sixty-nine likes, then delete it. This, in its childishness, calmed the thrash of helplessness in her stomach so muscular that it almost seemed to have its own heartbeat.
so sad in its helplessness
The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.
And something about the rawness of life with the baby was like the rawness of travel, the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You were the five senses pouring down an unknown street; you were the slap of your shoes and hot paper of your palms, streaming past statues of regional Madonnas. The indelibility of a certain thrift shop in Helsinki, the smell of foreign decades in the lining of one leather coat. The loop of “Desert Island Disk” in a certain coffee shop in Cleveland, where the owner warned her not to have a second detoxifying charcoal latte because it would “flush the pills out of her system and get her pregnant.” The bridges of other cities, where she would watch their drab green rivers buoy up their rainbow-necked ducks, where she would drink espresso until there was a free and frightening exchange between her and the day—she was open, flung open, anything could rush in.
Her hair had not been cut in months, and she knew the funeral might be any day, so she took an afternoon off and went to the salon. “I saw a meme the other day,” her hairstylist said, concentrating hard on the back of her head. “It was about how cowlicks are formed, and it showed a cow coming into a kid’s room at night and actually licking his hair, and that’s how it happens.”
A tear slipped from her eye in the mirror. She recalled the text thread she had going with her brother, where he just sent her minor variations of the “guess I’ll die” meme, which to be honest she had never fully understood. “Oh God, did I snip you?” her stylist asked, bending down under a curtain of benevolent hair.
“No, no,” she said, laying her hand on the stylist’s arm, feeling that new and unstoppable stream of care pour out of her palm. “I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”
Her face was luminous, as if someone had put flesh on the bone of the moon, and her beautiful blue eyes were larger than ever, as if coming to the end of what there was to see. This was called fluid shift, one of those accidental diamonds of hospital language that sometimes shone out from the dust. She thought of lava lamps and swallowing seas and flocks flying south, time-lapse footage of sunsets, ants clambering over molasses, the sweet spread of information, what had happened long ago, on earth and in our mouths, to the vowels. She thought of her sister in the creekbed with her body flung over her brother, protecting him from what wanted to swarm, the gold outside that wanted to swarm them till all their in was gone. Till they were only the movement, and the marching on.