Wednesday Words: From this week’s episode of The Simpsons…

…in which Bart and Homer form a tween fiction writing team.

So many vampires, with the fangs and the capes and the medals – nobody knows how they earned them.

- Professor Frink (weird scientist guy), The Simpsons

Catching Fire and Collective Action

HUGE SPOILERS for THE HUNGER GAMES and CATCHING FIRE!!!

(note, this is the first of several semi-related posts on the Hunger Games trilogy – stay tuned for more!)

So, I love the whole trilogy, but CATCHING FIRE is my favorite, and here’s why – its about organizing.  And I’m an organizer and activist, and thus love and appreciate books (non-fiction or fiction alike) that actually show the organizing process – the how of how change comes about, which mainstream history and a lot of fiction tends to skip past.  CATCHING FIRE doesn’t get into as much detail as I personally might like, but I recognize I’m probably on one extreme of that preference spectrum in Collins’ overall readership, so I’ll cut her a little slack.  Because what she does quite well is thread in bits and pieces throughout the book that make two things clear: a mass rebellion does not occur “spontaneously;” and depending on your personal experience and context, you are going to see and understand (or not see and not understand) what is happening very differently.

We get a number of glimpses of organized resistance before Katniss re-enters the Games, which we see primarily through Katniss’ perspective, but which we also get important alternative interpretations of through other characters.

The changing of the head peacekeeper and general crackdown in District 12 bring to light the extent to which the underground economy centered around the Hob was in fact a set of organized survival mechanisms within an oppressive regime – ones that have not, in Katniss’ memory at least, been used to challenge that system and thus were permitted to exist, but which actually put in place the kind of networks of communication, mutual support, and solidarity upon which more overt resistance movements build.  Which is why it makes sense that the Capitol immediately does what it can to wipe out the whole underground world of District 12 upon the emergence of resistance elsewhere and small signs that at least a few individuals in District 12 might have similar thoughts.  Of course, burning the Hob to the ground and electrifying the fence doesn’t destroy deeper community networks.  In fact, Katniss’ mother makes it clear that the period of laxness has been relatively short (although apparently long enough that Katniss doesn’t clearly remember the last harsher time), and she and others seem to return pretty seamlessly to the roles they played previously.

Katniss interprets the crackdown as largely a personal retaliation by the Capitol against her.  She has no clear memory of previous similar situations, so unlike her mother and some other townspeople who seem to see the lax period as an exception and the crackdown as a more of a return to what came before, Katniss sees the opposite.  Furthermore, without context for understanding how collective action happens, how and why people respond to oppression in various ways at different times, Katniss sees both the acts of overt resistance that seem to her eyes to crop up out of nowhere, and the Capitol’s response, as direct consequences of her defiance with the poison berries.  President Snow, of course, encourages that line of thinking and its corollaries: that she is personally responsible for any and all actions that follow down the line, and that she has the capability to stop others’ resistance. (More on this in a later post).

Gale provides an important contrast here, because at the start of THE HUNGER GAMES his perspective is actually quite similar.  He’s portrayed as a more rebellious personality than Katniss – he sees the system as unjust and unfair, and it makes him angry, and more than anything else he comes off as frustrated.  Which makes sense because the only solution he’s able to present is for him and Katniss to run away and live in the woods.  Which they can’t do, because they’re each primarily responsible for feeding their families.  While Gale may be bolder than Katniss in stating his feelings towards the Capitol, he’s no more equipped to do anything about it than she is.  It’s after he leaves school and begins to work in the mines that his perspective shifts.  When Katniss tells him about seeing the District 8 uprising on the Mayor’s TV, his immediate reaction is completely different from hers:

“And it’s my fault Gale.  Because of what I did in the arena.  If I had just killed myself with those berries, none of this would’ve happened.  Peeta could have come home and lived, and everyone else would have been safe, too.”

“Safe to do what?” he says in a gentler tone. “Starve?  Work like slaves?  Send their kids to the reaping?  You haven’t hurt people–you’ve given them an opportunity.  They just have to be brave enough to take it.  There’s already been talk in the mines.  People who want to fight.  Don’t you see?  It’s happening!”

Whereas Gale proposes running away early in THE HUNGER GAMES, and is willing to try running away at Katniss’ suggestion moments before the conversation above, he’s able to see collective rebellion as a viable third option beyond the status quo and running away, at least under the right circumstances  For Katniss it doesn’t register that way, even after Gale presents it.  While there are many things that I think go into explaining Katniss’ reactions (which I will write about more fully in future posts on the series), what seems to me to explain the shift in Gale’s outlook is that he’s gone to work in the mines.  Presumably Gale is learning from others at his job who have been in that context longer and may have previous experiences acting collectively.  Katniss doesn’t get that education.

The other two examples of organized rebellion Katniss encounters are her glimpse of riots in District 8 on the Mayor’s TV, and the District 11 response to her and Peeta’s stop on the train tour.

In both cases, Collins made it clear to me as a reader that the people of those districts had chosen to organize against the Capitol.  Perhaps Katniss’ berry moment provided inspiration or created a moment in which people decided to take that step into defiance, but between that moment and the scenes Katniss witnessed they have clearly done significant collective organizing work to create and then attempt to carry out a plan for active rebellion against the capitol.  It’s that in between part that Katniss, unfortunately but also very realistically, doesn’t have the context to recognize.  When, after her speech honoring Rue and Thresh in District 11, the audience offers a salute, she realizes, “What happens next is not an accident.  It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison.”  But she doesn’t seem able to get deeper into what that means.

Likewise, when she sees the District 8 uprising on the mayor’s TV, her response is: “I’ve never seen anything like it, but I can only be witnessing one thing.  This is what President Snow calls an uprising.”  She doesn’t seem to have a sense of what must have happened to lead to the violent, frightening scene she’s seeing, nor, importantly, does she seem to latch onto what it might lead to, other than the immediate effect of people being hurt or killed, and the threat to her family and loved ones because of her conversation with President Snow.

Katniss evaluates what she sees based on what she knows – she doesn’t know any system other than the one she grew up with, and she doesn’t seem to have learned about or latched onto the idea of substantial change as a real-life possibility.  That makes sense because she doesn’t know collective action, she doesn’t understand organizing, and without some sense of that she has no context for thinking about how what seems like a complete fantasy (ie, overthrowing the Capitol) could occur.  Without some idea of how, its hard to imagine it as real.

Wednesday Word: The Important Questions

“Miss Binney, I want to know — how did Mike Mulligan go to the bathroom when he was digging the basement of the town hall?”

Miss Binney’s smile seemed to last longer than smiles usually last.  Ramona glanced uneasily around and saw that others were waiting with interest for the answer.  Everybody wanted to know how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom.

- Beverly Cleary, RAMONA THE PEST