Word: workers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...complains to a caseworker that he can't get his welfare check cashed. No I.D. "I'm an Indian people," he slurs. His eyes are bulging out of deep-set sockets, his forehead protrudes and he seems perplexed, yet somehow he's managing the best he can. The social worker tells him there's nothing she can do, and he shouts at her as she walks away: "So what...
...this country's welfare system: not in terms of hard-core issues but in conveying the experience of administering state assistance and of getting it (or trying to.) And the experience is an important subject in itself: because it's difficult, almost impossible, for even the best social worker to make judgments about a person's eligibility, and for a man or woman who needs the money, the entire process is painful and humiliating. At the same time, Welfare is a much larger world, where characters are not simply opaque subjects, but fleshed out individuals. Their own lives become...
AFTER A couple more scenes--one where a thin old woman approaches a desk, peers through her thick glasses at the case worker and says in a wispy little voice, "I'm going to drop dead."--the camera finally focuses on welfare workers behind the scenes. A crewcut man with a thin tapering voice while looking at the same couple's folder, is telling a secretary, "...apparently extenuating social conditions exist." He falters and adds, "could just be a case of lousy conditions...
...when the social worker discusses the case he seems to be injecting extra verbiage into his speech. "Extenuating social conditions" comes out of his mouth like a cue card line in a mediocre soap opera. And that's part of Wiseman's style. The bias is there, the observers are aware that by their act of watching they are affecting what happens on camera and the distortions this causes aren't edited out; they too are a subject for investigation...
...congressional My Lai investigation, but an eight-man majority felt that his defense was not really hurt and reinstated his conviction. The case, with its important publicity v. fair-trial question, will now be appealed to the Supreme Court, but for Calley himself, working as a construction worker in Columbus, Ga., the outcome will have no practical significance. After serving 39 months of a ten-year sentence (reduced from life), he was released last November after the Elliott ruling; but even if his conviction is finally upheld, the Army has already okayed his parole...