Straitjacket

For a change of pace, I’m blaming everything on Harry Houdini today. He was the king of escape acts, disentangling himself from (among other things) straitjackets, a Siberian prison van, packing crates, an underground burial, and a glass tank filled with water. What a smart ass. His act, and the shows of other magicians who’ve followed, have always seemed like the equivalent of a gold-plated middle finger to me: shiny, but in the end, a big, condescending Screw You. My wonder and awe are quickly followed by a complete feeling of inferiority. If he can hang upside down in a tank filled with water while wearing a straitjacket, why can’t I?

I could use some magical escape in my life right now. I’m still reading the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” which really should be subtitled “They’re Out To Systemically Get Us.” The book reeks of conspiracy theory, but what really gets me is that professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theories kind of make sense.

The shadow state [the nonprofit sector], then, is real but without significant political clout, forbidden by law to advocate for systemic change, and bound by public rules and non-profit charters to stick to its mission or get out of business and suffer legal consequences if it strays along the way.

Let me translate. She’s saying the very nonprofit structure we are told to work within also binds us in a way that makes it impossible to do the entirety of what needs to be done. Wanna solve poverty? Too bad, advocacy will mess with your nonprofit status. Wanna experiment with holistic ways of treating homelessness? Good luck quantifying that for the grant report. The straitjacket of regulation keeps us workers nitpicking at details even when we know it’s not enough.

I wonder how Houdini would get us out of this one. You know, he used to dislocate his shoulders for his straitjacket act. I wonder what’s going to have to give to end ours. 

 

Kool Aid Talk

I’ve been slowly sipping the off-brand all-natural Kool Aid offered by the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” It’s made up of leftist scholarly essays that remind me of two things: that I hate the pretention of academia and that to some people I look like a friggin’ neo-con. Point in case? I don’t think the Ford Foundation is evil.  

But I found myself compelled by professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of the funding straight-jackets that confine nonprofits:

And generally the issues they [nonprofits] are paid to address have been narrowed to program-specific categories and remedies which make staff – who often have a great understanding of the scale and scope of both individual clients’ and the needs of society at large – become in their everyday practice technocrats through imposed specialization.

I’ve never thought of technocrat as a dirty word until now. Time for a good scrub...