Two from PBS ...
UNION (A-minus) - With ultimate insider access, this granular documentary provides classic fly-on-the-wall observations of the rag-tag group that heroically organized thousands of workers at an Amazon plant on New York's Staten Island, the first ever bargaining unit sanctioned at a warehouse of the e-tail giant.
In the shadows of COVID in 2021, Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer formed the unaffiliated Amazon Labor Union, following a worker protest that had led to the firing of Smalls, who channeled his fury into an Ahab-like determination to topple a giant. Shunning an affiliation with a major national union, the ALU focused on grass-roots organizing, zeroing in on individual sign-ups in a short period of time at a facility whose workforce turns over roughly every six months.
In all kinds of weather, a handful of diehards manned a tent at a bus stop outside the warehouse, offering food (and at one point weed) to win over the overworked crew members. We sit on on the leadership's Zoom meetings, where democracy gets messy (and prissy) at times (one of them will defect by the time the big vote arrives) but hope never dies. We trek with them to the offices of the National Labor Relations Board as they navigate the ancient bureaucracy, and hidden cameras take us inside the facility to lay bare the anti-union indoctrination sessions known as captive-audience meetings.
Smalls, on balance, is a hero you can root for. He is a single father who displays an interesting mix of empathy for the workers and vengefulness toward the behemoth that tried to crush his spirit. Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story are dogged in their pursuit of the story, their cameras often rolling in predawn hours as the huddled masses spill out of buses, steeling themselves for another 10-hour shift on their feet, with too-few breaks. As if we needed another reminder of the reality behind our blithe online shopping addictions.
HANNAH ARENDT: FACING TYRANNY (B) - This is another matter-of-fact installment of Philosophy for Dummies, meaning a Philosophy 101 class for people like me. We get a tick-tock through the life and career of Hanna Arendt, the foe of totalitarianism who rose to prominence when she coined the term "the banality of evil" while covering the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 (reporting for the New Yorker magazine.
A German Jew, Arendt fled the rising Nazi regime in 1933 after briefly being incarcerated, settling in Paris, working toward a Jewish state in Palestine, before a brief pilgrimage to her postwar homeland and then becoming an American citizen in 1950, the year before she published The Origins of Totalitarianism." This "American Masters" production is a bit obsessed with her love life -- she famously dated the legendary Martin Heidegger (who would fall in with the Third Reich) and later had an open marriage. But it gives full berth to her words -- through archival interviews and her writings, voiced by actress Nina Hoss.
The rise of the Nazis (later echoed in the Nixon-Vietnam era) should send chills down the spine of modern Americans, with a rhyme scheme readily apparent. We get this quote:
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.
The message from this surface-level analysis of one of the 20th century's big thinkers: Pay attention to the past; totalitarianism can take root anywhere and at any time.
