Watching
There Will Be Blood now. Crazy. It's based around Upton Sinclair's
Oil - I don't see the influence, except in very broad strokes. The only Sinclair novel I've finished was
The Jungle, which is a pretty gritty naturalist depiction of Chicago's meatpacking industry. The release of the novel led to a lot of laws which still affect foodservices today.
Strangely, I'm watching this Sinclair influenced movie the same week that our modern meat industry's been scandalized. I'm a bit too drunk to be searching for the link, but animal rights activists videotaped horrific practices in a few California meatpacking/processing warehouses.
I don't think it's very surprising. Any sort of automated activity performed by humans eventually leads to widespread abuse in order to make the humans' task easier.
We see it in America's treatment of "terror-suspects"
Our prison/court systems
And, tonight, in my job:
I've spent the last few evenings raising money for Oglethorpe at the school's call-center. We're rated based on the percentage of alumni/parents we call, the amount of money we convince them to donate, and our success rate in speaking with alumni/parents. If we call a person and they ask us not to call them again, we are supposed to put them on the "do not call" list. However, doing so negatively affects our call success rates. Therefore, I, and all the other veteran callers, usually just mark the person as "not home," which means they'll get another call later that night, or the next day. A person who asks not to be called by Oglethorpe might receive as many as twenty calls that week, while a person who donates any amount to Oglethorpe only receives one call.
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Speaking of systems: I was driving around with Elizabeth over the weekend, and she mentioned her friend referring to me as "the guy who looks like an anarchist." I lol'ed.
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Other Abu Ghraib images.
