Russell posted recently on surrogate motherhood, and on the general class issues relating to outsourcing one’s parenting. I have no children so I’ve generally avoided these “Mommy wars” debates. But watching over the decline and death of my grandmother has highlighted the fact that these issues aren’t restricted to parenthood.

A few days after my grandmother died, the weekday aide visited me and my aunt to pay her respects. My aunt expressed her gratitude and admiration to the aide for all her hard work, and got to talking about the fact that where my grandmother grew up, on a farm in rural Oregon, women were expected to look after their elderly and infirm relatives. An aunt, for instance, spent ten years caring for a female relation rendered bedridden and insensible by a stroke. So my grandmother had sworn that her own children wouldn’t have to do that.

“And that’s why we hired you,” my aunt said cheerfully to the aide.

I cringed on so many levels. It’s true my aunt didn’t actually say, “Hey, isn’t it great that my mother made sure we’d never have to do your shitty job?” But boy, it sure sounded like that. Since the aide didn’t act offended I didn’t argue about that, but I did point out that my grandmother, in her last months of life, kept asking where her family was, especially her children. She was too demented to remember where they’d gone, and felt abandoned. I guess she reaped what she sowed, but it was still very sad to see.

Actually, feeling embarrassed around the aides was already a familiar experience to me. When I arrived, my entire experience of caring for another living being was having had a cat for a few years. I’ve never even baby-sat. And I couldn’t help wondering if the aides, coming from African cultures where this sort of thing was a core female competency, saw this as a defect in me, or in the culture that produced me. My grandmother’s determination to get off the farm and get a law degree (though she never practiced law, as it turned out) opened up a new world for her female descendants. But it also closed the old one off. I was brought up to be a professional, to have a job suitable to my social class. At no point do I recall my family discussing the possibility that I might become a farmer, or a nurse to my elders. The whole idea of moving in with my grandmother I came up with on my own, and my aunts were awfully surprised when I suggested it.

Although I’m describing this in gender terms here, I think Russell’s right that there’s a basic inequality issue here that affects both sexes. The world is full of crummy jobs that nonetheless need doing. I guess in the industrial age there’s been this dream that we’d invent machines to do all that stuff. Or that supply and demand would ensure that the crumminess of the job would be compensated for with better pay. Or that if everyone were free to follow his or her passion, somehow those passions would line up with society’s needs.

All of those things have happened to some extent. But the crummy jobs are still in overabundance, so they keep getting kicked downstairs. And unlike Russell, I’m not sure this problem would go away if these things were drawn out of the realm of commerce and into the personal sphere. In fact, one thing that strikes a reader of premodern literature, from the Bible on up to the present day in other lands, is that while business was once a lot more familial, family was also a lot more businesslike. Marriages were financial arrangements as much as personal, which is not surprising because “husband” and “wife” were usually job descriptions as well as relational ones. And hierarchy, which most of us accept in our workplaces however egalitarian our ideals, was pretty much a given in the household.

In my last post, I homed in on a certain Bible quote because it seemed to expose this hierarchical element in role division. The conservative position on gender nowadays is generally that men and women have different roles, they’re complementary and both necessary as part of a greater whole, so women shouldn’t take this as meaning they’re inferior. But humans being the rank-orderers that we are, we can never seem to avoid thinking that the one doing the crummier job — even if it’s a wholly necessary job — is the lower one. In my aunt’s comments to the aide I felt I could hear an echo of that old Jewish men’s prayer: “Thank God I am not a woman.”

I spent Thanksgiving weekend at my mother’s house in the small town of Selinsgrove, Pa. On Friday the local paper’s unsigned editorial urged shoppers to remember their sense of decorum — no shoving, grabbing or cursing, please.

I smiled an indulgent big-city smile over the fact that the newspaper would devote an entire editorial to this. But I haven’t been laughing since I heard a man was trampled to death by a crowd of Black Friday shoppers.

Richard Beck did a sharp analysis of the situation using principles of social psychology. But still, he’s left feeling that doesn’t quite explain enough. Certainly, this is the sort of thing that reminds us of the near proximity of evil. I recall another article on the topic quoting an employee who realized that any of the customers he was talking to could have been one of the ones who stomped over his colleague.

As I said to Richard, I don’t really understand why someone would camp out all night — after a dinner party! in November! — to get a cheap computer. But this did make me think about how common, in my lifetime, is the experience of waiting in a long line for something to open. This seemed to get rolling with the Star Wars movies, which created such a venerable tradition of line-waiting that some fans revived it for the prequels, even though in the days of Internet ticket ordering it is not really necessary. And actually, queuing up for things like that can even be fun. I remember waiting outside of San Francisco’s mammoth Coronet theater on the opening night of Independence Day in 1996, chatting with friends, eating takeout pizza. When we got inside, the crowd lustily cheered and booed the action, and a good time was had by all, in spite of the fact that the movie was really pretty dumb. Treating a movie like it was good almost made it good by sheer force of will.

Unfortunately, marketers seem to have taken to heart the lesson that, basically, if you can build up that much excitement over Independence Day, you can build it up over anything. Marketers know their social psychology — in fact, many social psychologists go into marketing, as my professor on that subject ruefully pointed out. That’s why I think the company deserves some of the blame here; the creation of Black Friday, with its “doorbuster” sales, deliberately uses the phenomenon of mob frenzy.

But it’s also true that in many cases this psychology is benevolent. It was harmless enough in Independence Day, and Star Wars; indeed, my experience with sci-fi movies and conventions is that their crowds are exceptionally well-behaved, drawn together by their shared enthusiasm. Maybe Black Friday can be fun that way too. But what was different about the Wal-Mart in Long Island?

Actually, the first thing that may be different is the very fact that it’s a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is one of the few retailers to be doing well these days, thanks to what the industry argot calls “trading down.” That is, when people are short of funds due to a recession, some will, say, buy a television at Wal-Mart who used to buy televisions at Best Buy or Circuit City (which, not coincidentally, recently went bankrupt). Materially speaking, trade-down shoppers aren’t that badly off; after all, a cheaper TV is still a new TV. But one well-known aspect of human psychology is that people feel more keenly the absence of things they once had, than that they never had. And so the mental state of the trade-down shopper will likely be at least a little bitter. Add to that the fact that today’s trade-down shopper is more likely than others to have recently been through a humiliating experience, like losing a job, defaulting on a mortgage, or being denied credit.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying this is an excuse. These people were fighting for flat-screen TVs, not bread and water. But what I mean is, I can imagine this crowd’s mentality becoming the reverse of your typical sci-fi convention crowd. Rather than coming together out of their common love, they are brought together by their common lack, even shame. Although sometimes this can occasion solidarity, more often than not this can turn to mutual contempt. And then you plug in the factors that Richard describes, the vast numbers forming, the realization of scarcity … and so it goes.

By the way, am I the only one who remembers that there was a scene that was alarmingly similar to this incident in the movie Jingle All the Way? I never saw the film, but I remember it from the trailer. The thing was, it was played for laughs. I wonder if that could have been another factor in people’s neglect of the fallen man — it just seemed too absurd to be true.