Unavailable Status Quotes

The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim. The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…

Consider this sobering statistic: Shortly before the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, CIDRAP undertook a national survey of hospital pharmacists and intensive care and emergency department doctors, as we detailed in chapter 18. The update of that survey identified more than 150 critical lifesaving drugs for all types of diseases frequently used in the United States, without which many patients would die within hours. All of them are generic and many, or their active pharmaceutical ingredients, are manufactured primarily in China or India. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, sixty-three were already unavailable to pharmacies on short notice or on shortage status under normal conditions—just one example of how vulnerable we are.

No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall.

The man of the house has very politely informed guests who have come to see the baby that I am unavailable, as I am ‘milking’, and thereby sealed my status from cool chick to mooing cow. 10.

In Blaming Mode, you might say, “We broke up because I was angry with him for letting me down and not turning up. Maybe if I hadn’t been so upset, we’d still be together.” In Accountability Mode, you’d instead say, “We did break up when I expressed how upset I was about him disappointing me by failing to turn up, however, it was a culmination of repeated poor behaviour. The truth is, if I’m willing to be with someone who hasn’t actually properly left his wife, is inconsistent, disappears, calls me ‘needy’, and continuously devalues me with his behaviour, I’m contributing by setting the status quo and accepting it. I need to look at why I’m willing to accept this behaviour and the first thing I recognise is that I end up in relationships like this because I don’t believe I’m good enough.” That, ladies, is acknowledgement and accountability.

In addition to everything else working in Bedlow’s favor, there was his status as “citizen,” an identity that was unavailable to Lanah Sawyer and all women in early national New York. At the opening of the trial, one of the defense attorneys referred to him as a “fellow citizen.” Raising the specter of a false accusation, he warned the jury that rape “is an offense … so easily charged by the woman … putting the life of a citizen in the hands of a woman, to be disposed of almost at her will and pleasure.” This statement transformed the case “into a dispute between a citizen and an outsider,” which Arnold notes was “potent rhetoric in a post-revolutionary climate in which the glories of citizenship had been so recently hardwon.”45

In the case of the airport, code both facilitates and coproduces the environment. Prior to visiting an airport, passengers engage with an electronic booking system – such as SABRE – that registers their data, identifies them, and makes them visible to other systems, such as check-in desks and passport control. If, when they find themselves at the airport, the system becomes unavailable, it is not a mere inconvenience. Modern security procedures have removed the possibility of paper identification or processing: software is the only accepted arbiter of the process. Nothing can be done; nobody can move. As a result, a software crash revokes the building’s status as an airport, transforming it into a huge shed filled with angry people. This is how largely invisible computation coproduces our environment – its critical necessity revealed only in moments of failure, like a kind of brain injury.