Target+Contrast+Theory

Here's a question that stuck with me from last class: What is it about our accident/disaster that is seducing (some of) us? Framing the question in this (Baudriallard) way adds something, I think, to the instruction from our Contrast, which is "to use popular narratives as probes to locate the fundamental values (the common scenarios) motivating decision-making in individual and collective situations." That is to say, locating these fundamental values is a matter of tracing the characters' and the policymakers' fascination; their (fanatical) adherence to certain values probably has more to do with seduction and symbolic exchange (general/gift economy) than with rationality and utility (restricted economy), even when they justify their decisions with logical appeals to the common good. 

This is a glaring point of correspondence between my Contrast movie (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and my Target disaster (standardized testing & the policies that promote/enforce them). In my movie, for instance, Nurse Ratched uses a logical appeal to the common good to justify the most crucial policy decision of the film (the decision to keep McMurphy in the ward beyond his mandatory 90 day sentence). In spite of the psychologists' willingness to give McMurphy the benefit of the doubt (yes, he's a bit wild, but he's not clinically insane), Nurse Ratched urges them to retain McMurphy in the name of the institution's professional responsibility to society. She believes that "giving up" on McMurphy would be to "pass our problem onto somebody else." 

The scene (and obscenity) of this decision in the film corresponds rather clearly with current policy debates surrounding public education in Florida. Failing schools (teachers and students) are cast into the role of McMurphy, while the FL legislators sit at the table with Nurse Ratched and the psychologist (all bathing each other in their collective sense of personal responsibility). Of course, personal responsibility is not a bad thing/value in inself; it becomes problematic, however, when one's (ecstatic) sense of personal responsibility drives her/him to take responsibility away from others. At this point, what is called personal/professional/civic responsibility becomes a game of subject/object relations: 

*by appealing to my professional responsibility to the "common good," as a state legislator, I am indirectly extending the reach/power of my subjectivity at the dispense of those teachers and students who, as the statistics show, have failed their responsibility to the common good 

*the fact/proof of their failure affords me the power as legislator to impose a plan (my plan) upon them in the name of civic duty 

*my power as legislator (i.e., my capacity to impose my will upon others, rendering them into passive objects of my subjectivity--as FCAT literally does) is directly proportionate to my ability to exhibit the statistical failings of the teachers and students (FCAT data sheets have always excelled at this)

*my fascination with my professional responsibility to the common good is at once the image of my own power seducing me 

(I can give the people of the Florida education system a lobotomy--like Nurse Ratched eventually does to McMurphy--all the while believing that it's the correct course of action.) 

Hence, the fascination with values of "professional/civic responsibility" and "doing what's (morally and/or statistically) 'right' for the 'common good'" can, as McMurphy puts it, "rig the game" of policy formation.