Friday, January 11, 2013

The "Victors" and "Losers" of History

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the power of language, something you may have noticed if you have been keeping track of my posts. Whether we realize it or not, the words we think and speak become assimilated the recesses of our being, powerfully affecting the way we view and interact with the world. 

More specifically, since starting my history studies this week I have been thinking a great deal about the truism that history is written by the "victors," meaning that those with power enjoy the privilege of recording and, more often than not, distorting what gets passed down to the next generation as "truth." While the saying's essence is true, I think that it is in many ways misleading -- evenly nefariously so. Using the phrase "victors" implies that there is a competition or legitimate contest between two groups when, in reality, the majority of conflicts by which the "victor" emerges in recorded history are lop-sided impositions of power by the strong on the weak.

Accordingly, even though the notion that the "victors" pen history is instructive, the wording, even when ironic, can be unhelpful when the stakes are so high and the "victors" so eager to distort the words of those whose views clash with their cookie-cutter narratives. After all, if they are the ones who are fabricating history then what is to stop them from perverting the sayings of a few well-intended critics in the process?

The fact of the matter is that the phrase "victors" is a euphemism for the criminals, bullies, and bad-guys that get away with messing up everybody else; a bleak reality that is too important to intellectualize or water-down in cheeky aphorisms.

This self-evident fact would not need to be reiterated if it were not for the fact that the saying is perverted and shamelessly. I could go on and on about the America and its litany of one-sided wars, but this would be redundant in light of the several articles that I have already posted. 

More apposite to American society is the way in which the financiers and economic elite who drove the U.S. into its current state of economic malaise continue to reside in the halls of power.What is most disturbing, however, is the fact that society continues to cardinalize the money-changers who gambled the savings of millions of Americans away and has, indeed, reimbursed them for their chicanery. 

The recent fall of Hostess, the iconic snack foods manufacturer, exposes this truth in grim detail. After reneging on contractual agreements with the workers and misappropriating assets which were supposed to be deposited in employees' pension funds, the executives at Hostess drove the company into the ground. Instead of engaging in sound business practices, the heads had been padding their own salaries and (illegally) gambling with company dollars through the past decade. Eventually, the inevitable -- though totally avoidable -- caught up with them and the company crashed, destroying the jobs of the 1000s of employees who had been manufacturing and marketing Hostess' many iconic products for years (you know, actually working).

Instead of presenting the company's demise as what it was -- the result illegal maneuvers made by an irresponsible and antisocial executive elite -- the fall of Hostess was pinned on the obstinancy of an unthinking antediluvian monster, found in the convenient guise of -- oh, God helps us! -- the workers' union. To put it another way, the executives who had siphoned off the company's cash to pad their own bank accounts were depicted as a beleaguered set of technocrats who simply were not able to bend to the unreasonable wishes of the dirty, unthinking masses (aka longstanding contractual obligations between the employers and workers) .

The "victors" successfully kept the time-honored fiction afloat that somehow the super-rich are being victimized by, well, the people who made them rich. Those who lost their lives jobs, savings, and sense of security are not victims but merely "losers." They tried their best and failed, so what is the big deal? It is not like they did not have a chance, right?

The problem is, of course, that such people, the "losers" rarely (if ever) have a chance to "win." Even so, those who stripped them of their lives work are sympathetically handled by a cruel and unthinking media, treated as if they were not simple thieves but, we are assured, great thinkers whose sensible ideas (brilliant in fact) could not be digested by the grazing multitudes.

While Hostess' carpetbaggers can sleep tight knowing that they successfully carried out the ultimate heist in the house of Hostess, many of the workers cannot. If they do not find a job soon then the rest of their world will come crashing down on them.

And so it goes.

No comments:

Post a Comment