05/14/04

LC040514

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Letting undocumented workers come out of the shadows. We'll
meet a factory owner who says it's about time.

Dov Charney>> The entire industrial area of Los Angeles is
generally populated with blue collar workers that are falsely
documented.

Val>> And then, she revolutionized the world of photography.
We'll explore the dark genius of Diane Arbus.

All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> The law says one thing, but no one seems to be listening.
Illegal immigrants are part of Southern California's way of
life. They're doing jobs almost everywhere you look despite the
law. That's one reason the President has now proposed an
official guest worker program. Tonight we head to a Los Angeles
factory that has a lot riding on that plan and, as Philip Bruce
tells us, the man in charge is not your typical button-down
executive.

[Film Clip]

Philip Bruce>> If you didn't know better, you'd think the man
in the t-shirt was some male equivalent of Norma Rae, a
cheerleader and organizer trying to rally his fellow factory
workers and, in some ways, that's exactly what Dov Charney is.
But he also happens to be the owner of this factory, a force
behind American Apparel, California's largest manufacturer of
clothing and a place that employs more than fifteen hundred
people.

Los Angeles's garment industry may be famous for sweat shops,
but Charney's company seems to be anything but. There is no
union, yet workers at American Apparel make a decent wage. He
says the average is $12 bucks an hour and, for a few dollars a
month, they can also get health insurance. But are they here
legally? Look around and it's easy to figure out that the
workforce consists almost entirely of immigrant labor, mostly
Latinos and a few Asians. The law says Charney can't knowingly
hire someone who's an illegal immigrant, but he says just try to
figure out who's legal and who isn't.

Dov Charney>> There is a fear that, if you talk too much,
certain conservative forces within law enforcement, namely the
INS, could come and raid you, you know? But the fact of it is,
and I'll speak in general terms so no one gets in trouble, but
the entire industrial area of Los Angeles is generally populated
with blue collar workers that are falsely documented and, if the
three of us wanted to go get some green cards, we could have
them in two hours at Macarthur Park.

Philip Bruce>> That's why Charney is so enthusiastic about
President Bush's new immigration plan. It would legalize
millions of undocumented immigrants now working in California
and elsewhere in the United States. Charney calls these people
the backbone of America's economy and he bristles at the notion
that his employees are stealing jobs from true-blue citizens.

Dov Charney>> To me, they create jobs because there are
multiple layers. For instance, if you have a company that's
manufacturing something here in Los Angeles, okay, and instead
of it going offshore, it gets manufactured here, let's say, for
$10 or $15 bucks an hour, and let's say American people don't
really want to take those jobs because they've moved beyond
that. You know, they've had a certain level of education where
they don't want to be involved in something as monotonous, for
example. They choose another career. They want to be, say,
more creative or more artistic. But the existence of that
company, that manufacturing base in the community, brings
accounting jobs, it brings supervising jobs.

Philip Bruce>> You've probably figured it out by now that Dov
Charney says things that most Southern California businessmen
don't, like admitting how his industry and lots of others
couldn't run without undocumented immigrants to do the jobs most
Americans don't want.

Dov Charney>> The INS knows what's going on. You understand?
The IRS knows what's going on. The President knows what's going
on. I venture to say with the utmost confidence that the
President of the United States probably had some falsely
documented or undocumented workers working at some of his
ranches during the last twenty-five years. Clearly, if he said
otherwise, that would be worse than Bill Clinton saying he
didn't inhale, okay? (Laughter)

Philip Bruce>> But critics of America's current immigration
policy say giving undocumented workers a free pass to stay here
even for a limited period of time as the White House has
proposed is a huge mistake.

Ira Mehlman>> Well, the President's immigration plan is really
a dagger in the heart of the middle class in the United States.

Philip Bruce>> Ira Mehlman speaks for that part of George
Bush's conservative base who are outraged at the new White House
plan. He says the President is putting politics ahead of common
sense and is giving American businesses a green light to hire
the cheapest workers they can find.

Ira Mehlman>> We can turn any job in America into a job an
American won't do. If you do great wages and working conditions
and Americans don't show up, then you create a self-fulfilling
prophecy and employers can then turn around and say, you see, no
American wants this job.

Construction is a perfect example. Up until fairly recently,
construction used to be a solid middle-class job. It was
considered a step up the ladder. Now if you look in many major
cities in this country, you can't find an American doing
construction because employers have gone out and hired, in many
cases, illegal immigrants who are willing to work for a fraction
of what the American workers were willing to work for. It's not
that Americans suddenly don't want to do construction. They
want to do construction, but they want to be paid a decent
living wage.

Philip Bruce>> Caught in the middle are the immigrant workers
who still aren't sure what to make of the President's new plan.
For one thing, it's unclear how many will be willing to step out
of the shadows with no promise that they won't be deported after
three to six years. Here at American Apparel, one employee who
is a U.S. citizen says many workers are tired of living in fear,
but don't know who to trust.

>> The other day when I saw the news, they were saying that
it's probably not going to be good for a lot of people that have
been here for a lot of years because they're probably only going
to give them just three years and maybe, from there, I don't
know if they'll probably throw them out or I don't know what's
going to happen.

Philip Bruce>> So you think that's a problem? People who have
been here a long time would be reluctant to step forward?

>> Yes, I think so.

Philip Bruce>> Dov Charney says immigrant workers are now much
more than a source of cheap labor. He says his factory is
filled with veteran craftspeople who have skills that most
Americans don't. He says that's borne out in the quality of his
products.

Dov Charney>> I mean, what would the cities be without
immigrants, you know? You need them around, not just to clean
the toilets, but that too. Oh, clean the toilets. But also
maybe that toilet cleaner is going to start a company or start
buying real estate or maybe his hunger is what drives this
country.

Philip Bruce>> But has he created an environment that no
American would want to work in? It's no denying it can be a
tough job, yet the mood in American Apparel is anything but grim
and Charney says the wages are solid not just for factory work,
but for any job. Still, Americans rarely apply. There's also
the fact that all of Charney's workers pay income taxes and
social security even if they'll never benefit from either.

Dov Charney>> Tom Ridge said in his statement that they
contribute to social security. Why did he mention social
security? Because that's where a lot of the money is going.
And a lot of these immigrants are in their twenties and the
people that are receiving the social security money are older
Americans, so they're helping the elderly. They're paying
Medicare, but none of them receive Medicare, so they're helping
like elderly retirees in Florida get by.

Philip Bruce>> When Ira Mehlman sees a thriving business like
this, he says that's exactly what's wrong with America. But
don't blame the workers, he says. Blame the lawmakers who've
created an immigration policy that he claims is undermining the
very fabric of the United States.

Ira Mehlman>> Clearly, the President's main interest here is,
number one, trying to attract a few more Hispanic voters next
November, and also trying to appease the business interests who
are a large part of his constituency and a large part of the
funding for his campaign in 2004. What you do is you create
conditions that encourage people to go home or not to come in
the first place. You do that by cracking down on the employers.
If illegal aliens can't find jobs, if they can't get access to
non-emergency benefits from the government, eventually many will
get discouraged and go home. Not all of them, but enough.

Val>> If Dov Charney is enthusiastic about immigrant causes,
maybe it's because he is one. He came here from Canada and his
first real job was selling t-shirts. These days, Charney says
he considers his most valuable possession to be his green card.

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Val>> For as long as humans can remember, we've been arguing
about moral issues and human history is replete with altruistic
and horrific human behavior. But where do our morals come from?
Well, science historian Michael Shermer says that, if you dig
deep enough, you'll find that they are rooted, surprisingly, in
our biology and culture more than religion and God. He has put
his controversial theory in a book, "The Science of Good &
Evil". I spoke with Michael Shermer at his office in Altadena.

Michael Shermer>> I'm claiming that people are good and bad,
moral and immoral, competitive and cooperative, virtuous and
with vice, and we're selfish and selfless, that we have all
these motives inside of us.

Val>> That's right. Now we do know that, but the question is,
where does it come from? Are you saying that our sense of
morality or immorality is genetic?

Michael Shermer>> I'm saying it's an evolved emotional trait.
It's like asking, well, why should you be moral would be like
asking why should you be hungry or why should you fall in love?
These are evolved emotions that are part of ourselves as a
social primate species. In order to resolve social conflicts
and for people to get along, that we have to have some means of
being cooperative. If we were all just brutally selfish and
competitive, society would break down.

Val>> So morality has evolved along with our culture and
society, so it's progressed.

Michael Shermer>> I think so. I think, in many ways, we
evolved in these small hunter-gatherer groups of a couple
hundred people where everybody knew each other. So for the most
part, all the informal means of behavior control, like shunning,
embarrassment, guilt, you feel bad or you feel good, pride in
having done the right thing in helping somebody, these are all
things that naturally occur as a way of keeping people in check
and reinforcing positive things and keeping in check too much
aggressiveness and too much competitiveness.

What happens when societies get to be in the thousands and tens
of thousands, those informal means don't work anymore, so you
need societies. You need religions. You need systems of
morality that are codified and written down that says these are
the rules we're going to live by.

Val>> Institutions, strong institutions.

Michael Shermer>> Institutions, right. And it just so happens,
by chance, religion was the first one on the scene. So this
whole thing we think of as a secular society with a
constitution, these are the rules and we're going to live by
these rules regardless of your religion and so on, that's very
new. That's within the last two hundred years. For the last
ten thousand years, we've had to live under these other systems.

Val>> But you definitely seem to have divorced or separated
morality from God and religion per se. You're saying religion
and God kind of came along, went with the flow, but morality was
a part of human society anyway.

Michael Shermer>> That's right. Mine is a scientific approach.
I'm looking at just what's the natural explanation for this
phenomenon.

Val>> You're going to get a lot of resistance from people who
say, wait a minute, God is where morality comes from, religion
is where morality comes from.

Michael Shermer>> I'm used to that. It's okay. It's just
saying, look, we have all these other things that science
studies and, in psychology and social sciences, we study a lot
of different human characteristics. Why not morality? It's one
of the most important things we do. We are the moral animal.
We're also an immoral animal, which is why we have to deal with
terrorists in a certain way. We can't just say that most people
are good and these handful of people are evil and, if we could
just get rid of them, then we'll be safe. That's the wrong
approach. That's the myth of evil. All of us have this heart
of darkness, this potential to do bad.

Val>> I see. Because it's engrained evolution early in us, we
all have it to a degree or less and it's just a matter of -- and
here's another phrase you use -- provisional ethics?

Michael Shermer>> Yes. My provisional morality system is
claiming that there are provisional moral principles that are
true for most people most of the time in most circumstances. So
it's not absolute morality where there are certain rules that
everybody has all the time that applies to everybody. Neither
is it just this relativistic, deconstruction, post-modern
anything goes. That's not true either. There are certain moral
principles.

We begin with the Golden Rule that is "do unto others as you
would have them do unto you." The problem with that is that,
what if you're not like me. What if I think, well, maybe I'll
do this to Val. How would I feel? Well, I'd feel pretty good
about that. Well, maybe you wouldn't. You know, I'm a guy,
you're a girl, maybe there are other differences. That's not
enough. We need more than that. So I'm saying that the ethical
moral systems developed over the thousands of years by religion
are good, but we can do better.

Val>> And what will be the trigger that continues this
evolution of morality?

Michael Shermer>> I think free societies, free democratic
societies, like we live in. I think the long-term trend is to
have more freedoms, more liberty for more people in more places,
more tolerance.

Val>> But there are people who say, oh, my God, look at these
free societies. That's how we get, you know, the moral decay
that we're seeing all around us today.

Michael Shermer>> But in fact if we do it slowly and gradually
over time. So I'm not saying like the last ten years has been
great. I'm saying over the last five hundred years, it's gotten
much better. Better for women, better for minorities. This
whole business about gay marriages, the people that are siding
with our President about banning gay marriages or not giving
them the same rights, they're on the losing battle. In the long
run, this will just be the short embarrassing moment in our
history. Of course, gays should have the same rights as
straights. Of course.

Val>> How about abortion? The abortion battle has been going
on for a long time.

Michael Shermer>> It has. I wrestled with that one. I think,
again, how can we apply sciences? Well, look, we have a choice
between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother.
Given that choice, we have to side on the side of the person who
already has full rights, which is an adult woman, versus a
fetus, which is a potential human, a potential rights holder.
So I come down on the side of pro choice. In other words, we
don't have to be in favor of abortion. You can be against
abortion personally, but in favor of you being able to select
instead of me telling you what you can do.

Val>> And you're saying that's where the evolution of morality
is heading?

Michael Shermer>> I think so. That's pretty much culture and
we have to fight for that. We have to be tenacious about those
kinds of freedoms because there are people that don't
necessarily share those. Those are often fundamental religious
societies that don't like that kind of tolerance and freedom, so
we do have to fight for that. That's not genetic.

Val>> Now President Bush often says, you know, we're going to
go after the evil-doers and he uses "evil" probably more than
any other President has used that word in a long time. When you
see him, what is his concept of evil and how does it square with
what you write?

Michael Shermer>> I think when Bush uses the word evil, and
Tony Blair as well, they're using it in a theological sense,
that there is this humongous demon, Satan kind of creature,
inside Osama Bin Laden's head and, if we can just get rid of
him, then the demon will be gone. This is a myth of evil. If
you ask why do you hate us, they're not going to say, well, we
hate freedom and liberty and democracy. That's not why. They
have very human reasons why they do those things that they do.
We don't like what they do. It's evil what they do.

Val>> Why do you think they hate us?

Michael Shermer>> I think they hate us because of politics.
Middle East politics, I think, is primarily it. Also whoever is
the dominant force in culture is always the one that gets blamed
and attacked by the subverted group. So at the moment, Islam is
not as strong worldwide, say, politically as Christianity. And
also Israel. We support Israel in Middle East politics, oil --

Val>> -- so it has to do with straightforward politics, not
with some evil --

Michael Shermer>> -- I think the more that our administration
says it's just evil because they hate freedom and democracy, the
longer it's going to take to resolve the problem and prevent it
from happening because you're mythologizing it in a theological
sense. That's not going to lead to understanding.

Val>> Now this would be a pretty scary concept because you're
really saying morality exists despite or whether or not there is
a God, whether or not there's a heaven or a hell, whether or not
there's religion. It's really up to us as human beings and some
people say, oh, that's a scary thought. You're much better off
implanting morality in a firm belief in God. That's where
you're going to get it.

Michael Shermer>> I think it's a more uplifting, more
foundational basis, because it means that we can't count on
justice being done in a next life. We have to do it now. It's
up to us.

Val>> So it puts more responsibility on us.

Michael Shermer>> Yep.

Val>> Michael Shermer, thank you very much. Very interesting
book. Always a pleasure to talk with you, as usual.

Michael Shermer>> Thank you.

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Val>> Diane Arbus committed suicide before she became a true
legend, but her unique photographs live on. She turned her
camera on people who often lived along the edges of society.
Now, thirty years after her death, much of her work is still
regarded as controversial, even shocking to some. A collection
of Arbus's work is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art. LACMA's Curator of Photography gives Philip Bruce a
glimpse of the images and creative genius behind them.

[Film Clip]

Robert Sobieszek>> This woman revolutionized photography. She
revolutionized the way we look at photography. She showed us
through her work, her work of about fifteen years, she showed us
part of us that we never saw before. She brought forward things
that were hidden, things that were ignored, things that were
forgotten or purposely just not dealt with.

[Film Clip]

Philip Bruce>> The fact that she was taking photographs of
giants and dwarfs and people with mental handicaps, some people
might say she was exploiting those individuals.

Robert Sobieszek>> Yes, some people have said that, but I think
considering how she photographed and what kind of camera she
used, for the most part, from 1962 until her death in 1971, she
used a twin lens Reflex which is a huge camera. She cannot take
pictures that the subject doesn't know they're being
photographed. So there was a complicity between the subject and
the photographer. She asked them, can I take your picture? She
had a very sweet voice. She seduced them into, you know, just
posing for her for twelve shots and she usually came away with a
very good one.

Philip Bruce>> In fact, when you look at most of these
photographs, you don't get the sense that she was a voyeur, that
she did have some sort of relationship with the person that she
was photographing.

Robert Sobieszek>> Oh, absolutely. These are not surreptitious
pictures. These aren't snapshots or grab shots. These are
carefully posed. Now she did have an art of getting you to let
down your guard often and picturing you in that 1/25th of a
second which shows you to be, you know, maybe something you
didn't want to present, but her artistry was in being able to do
that.

[Film Clip]

Philip Bruce>> A less sensitive person may call some of these
people freaks. She never regarded them as freaks?

Robert Sobieszek>> She called them freaks. She called them
eccentrics. She had a whole list of synonyms for the people
that she photographed. But while she went to the freak shows
and did the albino sword-swallower, she also did the normal
woman walking down the street in a veil. She did both sides,
both polarities, and the normal woman on the street in Manhattan
with the veil on and a fur collar on her coat looks a little
edgy. Whereas, the albino sword-swallower looks pretty normal
to me. She saw that duality.

This is one of Diane Arbus's more famous pictures, a young
eleven year old boy that she met up with in Central Park. He's
holding a hand grenade, but look at the expression of his mouth
and the tenseness of his hands. I mean, he looks positively
demented. He looks positively deranged, maybe. As I mentioned
to somebody else, almost a poster child for Columbine. But when
you look at her contact sheets, the other eleven pictures she
shot of this young boy at the same time just before and just
after, he appears to be the most normal, playful, lovely young
kid that you'd love to have as your own.

One of Arbus's gifts, if you will, was the ability to watch for
that little crack in the façade, to bring out something that she
saw in him that he may not have even seen, but she saw it as a
picture of humanity. It was true, it happened, the boy did look
like this for that 1/25th of a second. Was it the truth about
him? No. It was her vision about him and her vision of what
she was doing in her big project of photographing eccentrics.

Philip Bruce>> And then we have an image of Diane Arbus
herself. What do we know about her?

Robert Sobieszek>> A very gifted woman, went to Fieldstone High
School which was a very special school, a very wealthy school
and a very rigorous school. From the time she was in high
school, her writings and her notebook notations are some of the
most literate, some of the most intelligent and thoughtful prose
I've ever read. She was a gifted photographer, but she was also
very, very smart.

[Film Clip]

Robert Sobieszek>> The exhibition took over nine years for the
curators to put this thing together because they went through
all of her negatives, all of her contact sheets, all of her
diaries. The quantity of material they had to sift through was
phenomenal.

[Film Clip]

Philip Bruce>> What's been the reaction so far in Los Angeles
as this exhibit comes to town?

Robert Sobieszek>> The buzz on the street is utterly
phenomenal. People are coming in every day. There are greater
crowds coming in, so we're very happy. We're very, very happy.
I mean, we knew that this was going to be a popular show because
that first catalogue, the 1972 Retrospective Catalogue, is still
in print. It's gone through eighteen or nineteen printings in
the last thirty years. That says something about an artist's
popularity if one book can stay in print that long.

I think the significance of this particular exhibition is that
we have not had a chance to re-examine Diane Arbus's work for
more than thirty years. There was one show in 1972, a
retrospective of her work, which showed eighty pictures, eighty-
five pictures maybe. This show has 186 pictures in it, plus 179
pieces of ephemera. Notebooks, diaries, appointment books,
letters, postcards, contact sheets. I mean, this is a far
richer view of this artist than we've ever had since she passed
away.

[Film Clip]

Val>> During her lifetime, Diane Arbus was aware of the
criticism that she was obsessed with the bizarre and the
abnormal, but she refused to conform to what others saw as
normal. Her photos will be on display at LACMA through the end
of May. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for
watching and we'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, Hollywood has made a lot of
money on pirate movies, but some modern-day pirates are costing
the studios a bundle.

>> Piracy connotes something kind of swashbuckling and cool and
anti-establishment when, in fact, it's theft. It should be
called shoplifting.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.