The preamble here is slim. While I've been trying to grade and while the sophomores took OGTs, somehow, the world kept moving. We'll have some updates periodically over break over what I've been wanting to talk about.
First, a retraction on the episode of This American Life that discussed Mike Daisey and his takedown of Apple's manufacturing/labor issues at the Foxconn plants in China. The New York Times offer a good summary and analysis of the fall out.
As the Times explains:
Mr. Daisey's story, originally broadcast on Jan. 6, was a 39-minute adaptation of his one-man theatrical show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." The show conveys and condemns the working conditions at Foxconn, and his storytelling helped to galvanize public concern about the production of popular products like the iPad and the iPhone.
The problem is that many of the encounters Daisey said he had with Foxcon were imagined. He never met a man who hand was supposedly mangled by chemicals used in iPad production, and he, according to his Chinese translator, never met underage children.
But what makes this more problematic is that while Daisey never witnessed these things personally, such incidents have been documented. The Times notes:
In a report for "Marketplace" on Friday, Mr. Schmitz acknowledged that other people actually had witnessed harsh conditions at the factories that supplied Apple. "What makes this a little complicated," he said, "is that the things Daisey lied about are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by hexane. Apple's own audits show the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple."
Daisey looks for a defense for his actions in an idea that reminds me of Tim O'Brien's discussion in
The Things They Carried.
of the way sometimes "absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."Daisey says, "I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity." The problem here is that Daisey sold his piece of theater as news.
I like David Carr's take on the incident:
Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one. No.
This American Life devoted a full episode to addressing the problems they found with Daisey's stories from China. It's worth listening too if only for the painful conversation the show's host, Ira Glass, has with Diasey:
But enough of all that. Here's what I really want to talk about:
For further proof that Sesame Street isn't just for children, and in honor of the Mad Men season premiere, we have a muppety take on Don Draper:
The show has always been on the cutting edge, as in an episode of Monsterpiece Theater, it also covered One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. The muppet version of the classic counter culture novel never received the acclaim garnered by the Milos Forman's film version (starring Jack Nicholson), but I think the people at Children's Television Workshop really nailed the essence of the novel:
