A BLOG – Page 87

Little Miss Trouble, part II

When I first started watching this cartoon version of Little Miss Trouble, I thought it was going to be the same as the book. But a few subtle differences and a well placed comment on youtube make the cartoon worthy of its own entry.

I started to think more about this story when I saw the following comment about the cartoon on the youtube clip by Hoktak: “Haha, serve that little troublemaker right for being a gossipmonger! Mr. Small, Mr. Bump, and Mr.Tickle got her back good!”

Then it started to click. Here is another reason why I don’t like this story. Little Miss Trouble makes her trouble through gossip. Typically, gossip is understood to be something that is done by mean girls who like to spread nasty rumors. Gossip is also considered to be a particularly insidious and pointless activity that women-with-nothing-better-to-do engage in. It has no real or productive purpose other than to humiliate or anger the object of its talk. By using gossip as the way that Little Miss Trouble makes trouble, Hargreaves reinforces both the link between girls and gossip and the idea that girl(y) troublemaking is not real action but just mean, vicious talk.

Word count: 199 words

Little Miss Trouble

When I showed my sister MLP the picture of RJP on this blog (with her troublemaker t-shirt on) she said, “Hey, that’s Little Miss Trouble!” I guess I should have known that, but I didn’t. I decided that I better read this kid’s book. It must be cool, right? A book about someone named Little Miss Trouble, how great is that, right? Well, hmmm…not really.

Here is a recap of the story: Little Miss Trouble likes to make trouble in order to get others in trouble. One day she decides to get Mr. Small in trouble. First she tells Mr. Uppity that Mr. Small calls him fatty behind his back (which is a lie). Mr. Uppity punches Mr. Small and gives him a black eye. Next she tells Mr. Clever that Mr. Small calls him Big Nose (which is another lie). Mr. Clever punches Mr. Small and gives him a second black eye. Feeling rather upset and suffering from two black eyes, Mr. Small visits Dr. Makeyouwell. Dr. Makeyouwell gives him some advice on how to handle Little Miss Trouble. So, Mr. Small tells Mr. Tickle that Little Miss Trouble calls him Pudding Face behind his back (which is a lie). Then, Mr. Small tells Mr. Bump that Little Miss Trouble calls him Mr. Nitwit behind his back (which is another lie). Uh oh. Now Little Miss Trouble is in trouble. Both Mr. Tickle and Mr. Nitwit are so mad that they decide to punish Little Miss Trouble by ticklebumping her for a full 10 minutes. This upsets her a lot. The story ends with Dr. Makeyouwell telling her that she should cheer up because she got a taste of her own medicine.

Little Miss Trouble is part of a series of Little Miss (and Mr. Men) books by Roger Hargreaves. Apparently this series is a big deal…very popular in certain areas–Since MLP lives in Australia I imagine it is big there. I never remember reading them as a kid and I can’t find many of the little books in the local library. After (very briefly) doing some research online, I found this wikipedia site about Roger Hargreaves and Cartoon’s Network’s official Mr. Men site.

Anyway, back to the story. So, how does trouble (and troublemaking) function in this story? Little Miss Trouble is trouble because she does bad, naughty, disruptive things. She is trouble because she gets other people in trouble…and for no particular reason. It seems as if she is, by nature, trouble. It is just who she is. Mr. Small isn’t trouble but, because of Little Miss Trouble’s actions, he is in trouble with Mr. Uppity and Mr. Clever. And, when Little Miss Trouble gets a taste of her own medicine, she winds up in trouble too. So, trouble works two ways: (1) trouble is a description of what someone is…here comes trouble, she’s nothing but trouble, etc. and (2) in trouble is a state of being or a consequence of actions (yours when you do something bad or other’s when they do something bad to you). Either way, trouble is something you don’t want to be or be in. If you are trouble, it means that you are bad and naughty and do mean and hurtful things to others. If you are IN trouble it means that you get big black eyes or suffer through 10 minutes of ticklebumping by others who are really mad at you. Again, I have to ask: Is the only way we should understand trouble and how it works? Can’t we imagine trouble differently, as something we might want to do? As something that has some redeeming value?

Now, I don’t know how to redeem Little Miss Trouble as a good troublemaker (although maybe there is more to the story that we don’t know. Maybe Mr. Small was a really big jerk and liked to say awful things about how Little Miss Trouble was just a stupid, weak girl or liked to harass her by whistling at her as she walked down the street or told all of his friends about how she put out on the first date). Instead, I want to ask: why couldn’t the troublemaker or the act of being in trouble be represented differently here? Why couldn’t Little Miss Trouble be trouble because she kept asking too many interesting questions or because she refused to follow rules that she felt were unfair?

The story about Little Miss Trouble (and my description of it in this entry) reminds me of the first part of my favorite passage by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. Here is the entire passage with the first part highlighted in italics and bold:

To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it (xxix).

What does this passage from Butler suggest for Little Miss Trouble and how we (as parents and children) should read this *cute* kid’s story? Well, according to the story, by making trouble (for Mr. Small) Little Miss Trouble gets into a lot of trouble (10 minutes of ticklebumping!). Maybe the moral of the story–because isn’t there always some sort of moral lesson in these kid’s books?–is that we should never make trouble because it will always lead to us getting into trouble. Now, this is fine (or is it?) when we are trying to teach our kids not to lie about others and deliberately be mean and hurtful to them. But, when Little Miss Trouble’s specific troublemaking stands in for (signifies) all Trouble as what one is or the state one is in, isn’t the moral lesson that trouble–which not only is playing dirty tricks on others but is also stirring up the waters, disturbing the peace, challenging the status quo, rebelling against standard practices, rejecting the rules–is always bad and will always lead to no good (and to being in trouble)?

By the way, I just found a youtube clip of the Little Miss Trouble show. More on that in a future entry…

Are troublemakers truth-tellers or bullshit detectors or both?

Whenever I listen to the song “Cavern” off of Phish’s album, A Picture of Nectar, I add the following line which seems so fitting to me that I am incredulous every time I realize that it is my own invention and not in the song (the lyrics in bold caps are mine):

In summing up, the moral seems
A little bit obscure…

Give the director a serpent deflector
a BULLSHIT detector, a ribbon reflector
a cushion convector, a pitcher of nectar
a virile dissector, a hormone collector

So, what does this little anecdote have to do with troublemaking and truth-telling? Not much except for being my way of (not so) cleverly introducing the topic of this entry: Harry G. Frankfurt’s pithy treatise On Bullshit. This book came out in 2005 and I got it for my birthday shortly thereafter. Every year I sit down to read it and then, in the midst of Frankfurt’s philoso-speak, my brain starts to melt, so I move onto something else. Well, today was the day–I finally finished the whole thing–all 67 extremely small pages of it! And, you know what? I liked it.

In addition to the fact that Frankfurt does a philosophical analysis of a *fun* term like bullshit, this book is great for a couple of reasons. First, Frankfurt’s main aim is to give serious critical and intellectual attention to a term (and a phenomenon) that pervades our lives–one might say we are often knee-deep in it–but that we don’t know much about. He writes:

We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit…(1-2).

Frankfurt’s description here reminds me of my own thinking about troublemaking. It is a term that gets bandied about all of the time, but we don’t spend enough time on what it exactly means or how it is actually done. Giving serious attention to troublemaking (much like Frankfurt’s serious attention to bullshit) is what I am aiming to do in this blog.

Second, one of Frankfurt’s key arguments in this book involves distinguishing lying from bullshitting. According to him, liars are aware of and pay attention to the truth, they just don’t want to tell it. In contrast, bullshitters, who seem to be far worse than liars who at least demonstrate some engagement with the truth, aren’t concerned with what is true or false. They are indifferent to all of it.

Bullshitting is not about deliberately eschewing truth and embracing falsity; it is about fakery (“For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony,” 47.) And it is about not CARING. Ah ha! A connection to my own thinking about taking care as being a form of staying in trouble (see here or here for more). Consider the following statements by Frankfurt:

For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not CARE whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose (57).

So, the bullshitter is more concerned with his own self-interest than the truth…

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it all. By virtue of this, bullshit is the greater enemy of the truth than lies are (61).

The bullshitter doesn’t play by our rules and is therefore free to not follow them. Is it true? False? Who cares is her answer.

The greater enemy of truth (we will have to leave an exploration of what truth means for another entry) is bullshit not lying because not caring about the truth is far worse than merely distorting it in order to reject it. Frankfurt is arguing for the importance of caring about ideas/things by being attentive to them. Hmmm….that sounds like the goal of troublemaking: to care by giving serious attention and by critically engaging. So, does that mean that one of the important tasks of the troublemaker/troublestayer and of making trouble/staying in trouble is identifying and challenging bullshit? That’s right–the troublemaker is a BULLSHIT DETECTOR.

Now that doesn’t mean making trouble isn’t also about truth-telling. But, it indicates that troublemakers/troublestayers are more concerned with bullshit than lies. What is truth? What is a lie? How do we determine these and on what basis of “fact” do we authenticate ideas/stories/events? Much more to come on this topic…

Whistleblowers as Troublemakers?

The other day, I came across the following article online: Whistleblowers: Troublemakers or Virtuous Nurses? My first thought was, can’t they be both? If you have been following my blog, you already know my answer to this question. Yes! Troublemaking is a virtue. My second thought was, what exactly is whistleblowing? Are whistleblowers troublemakers? If so, what kind of troublemakers? How and why do they make trouble? And what is it about their practice of making/being in/staying in trouble that is virtuous or not virtuous?

Here is how the author of the above article defines whistleblowing:

Whistleblowing is an attempt by a member or former member of an organization to issue a warning to the public about a serious wrongdoing or danger created or concealed by the organization.

So whistleblowing is truth-telling; telling people truths that they don’t want to hear. Whistle-blowing is about holding people and organizations accountable to the larger ethical principles that the society espouses and demonstrating how organizations are failing to honor those principles or are claiming to honor those principles but are secretly (or not so secretly) violating them for their own gain. In this way, whistleblowing is not about disrespecting the status quo, but trying to make sure that everyone follows the rules that have been established. Far from violating rules, the whistleblower wants to honor them. Is that what distinguishes a whistleblower from a troublemaker? Can a troublemaker make trouble by honoring the rules? Hmm….was Socrates-as-gadfly an early whisteblower (let me think about that one some more…)?

Addendum as of 6.27.09: I just found the following passage in “Whistleblowers: Moral Principles in Action” from The Art of Moral Protest which reinforces my idea about whistleblowers honoring the rules:

Scholars have found that employees are more likely to go public with damaging information if they “are committed to the formal goals of their organization or to the successful completion of their project; identify with the organization; and have a strong sense of professional responsibility. In other words, they are more committed to the rules than others (138).

The whistleblower is not merely an appointed or self-proclaimed enforcer of the rules/principles (like a hall monitor or a tattle-telling kid). Her truth-telling is aimed at those who benefit most from the system-as-it-is (this is called the hegemony in academese): large scale organizations, institutions, or privileged public figures. Not those who benefit less (that is, those with less privilege and less access to that mythical norm).

I found several articles online about the virtue of whistleblowing. I hope to read them in the next few days and write more about the specific ways that whistleblowing could be considered a form of virtuous troublemaking. In thinking more about the whistleblower, I will NOT be watching The Insider, however. The movie is fine. I saw it when it first came out. But, sorry, Russell-who-throws-phones-at-hotel-clerks-Crowe is not my kind of troublemaker.

Addendum as of 6.26.09: Reading through another essay on whistleblowing (Whistleblowers: Saints of Secular Culture by Colin Grant), I came across a reference to Silkwood with Cher and Meryl Streep. I definitely want to re-watch this movie–I saw it about 15 years ago. Must put this on Netflix queue! Too bad I can’t watch it instantly.

What is your image of a troublemaker?

Here’s to the Crazy Ones, the Misfits, the Rebels, the Troublemakers, the Round Pegs in the square holes, the Ones who see things Differently.

So, when STA told me about the Think Different commercial (which I just wrote about in this entry, he pointed out something curious (and troubling): the different descriptions of “think different” correspond with particular images of individuals who embody them. For example, the Crazy One is Einstein while the Rebel is Bob Dylan. Now, here comes the troubling part: when Richard Dreyfuss says “Troublemaker” this is the image that we get:
Martin Luther King, Jr. (at 10 seconds).

Now, they could have easily used his image when Dreyfuss says: the Ones who See Things Differently or, even, the Rebels. So, why use this image with that word? Reflecting on this question, I was reminded of a kid’s book that I discussed at length earlier this summer (here and here and here): The Book of Timeouts. In this book, the author offers 14 different examples of troublemakers who behaved improperly and were punished with a timeout. In my earlier entries, I argued that these examples are meant to serve as moral lessons for kids on how not to behave and why they should try to stay out of trouble. As I was doing a close reading of the author’s examples, I remember being troubled by the one about Louis Armstrong.

Entitled, “The Horn Player That Nearly Blew It,” Lucke describes Louis Armstrong’s stint as a troublemaker:

One upon a time Louis Armstrong was just a poor boy looking for trouble. It found him, on New Year’s Even in 1912 in the city of New Orleans. A short while after that, the police showed up. He was hauled away in a paddy wagon and put in a ‘home’ for wayward children [juvenile hall aka prison for minors]. He thought it was the end of the world. But it turned out it wasn’t. His time out changed everything. While he was there he learned how to play the cornet.

Among all of the examples, which I have listed here, this story about Louis Armstrong is the only one about an African American man (And, why is it the only one? What about Martin Luther King Jr or Malcom X, for example?). The only one about a juvenile delinquent/criminal/street thug–who by nature (at least according to the author) seems to up to no good. And the only one that doesn’t offer any specifics about what exactly Armstrong did wrong. Instead, the description, “a poor boy looking for trouble” seems to be all that is needed (along with the illustration of a black boy) for the reader to understand that Armstrong was a troublemaker and criminal who really deserved a time out. Why didn’t the author provide any more specifics as to why Armstrong was in trouble? What exactly did he do that made him deserve a time out? In all of the other examples the author offers some witty connection between the behavior of the troublemaker and the misbehavior of a child (Cleopatra couldn’t share, Richard the Lionhearted cut through people’s yards, Napoleon took other people’s things). As I mentioned above, these connections are meant to reinforce moral lessons: Don’t be like Cleopatra, learn to share with others. Then you won’t get a time out. What moral lesson are we meant to learn from Armstrong? Don’t be born black or poor because then the police will find you and put you in jail?

The author’s (perhaps unwitting) linkage of poor, Black and young with criminal, deserving of prison, and troublemaker is very disturbing. It invokes a very problematic equation that influences a lot of thinking about and visualizing of troublemaker as someone who disobeys/breaks the rules: troublemaker = criminal/delinquent = black male. For more on this equation and why it is a big problem, see here or here.

This equation is also present in the Think Different ad when the image of MLK Jr pops up on the screen as Dreyfuss is saying, “troublemaker.” The image of Martin Luther King, Jr. as troublemaker should be empowering and inspiring and another example of the virtue of troublemaking. But it could also be seen as just one more image reinforcing the ideas (1) that troublemaking is bad, (2) that it is a form of criminal activity, and (3) that black male troublemakers are all criminals.

Thinking about this problematic link between black men, criminal activity and troublemaking reminds me that any revaluing of troublemaking, as something good and virtuous, also requires a deracializing of the troublemaker and a decriminalizing of the troublemaking activities of breaking the rules and disrespecting the status quo.