I am going to write, despite the nagging sense that continuing to do so is futile. Is an indulgence. Is a habit to be shed, like my fondness for good Belgian beer. (They do not go together.)
I am going to write about writing, despite knowing that to be an errant, arrogant, demonstrably silly thing to do. But I am going to write about writing because I wish to use writing explicitly as a metaphor for the work we have all done, my generation of fifty-something unemployed folk, because writing is the work I have done in some form or fashion since I was ten years old and wrote (god help me) this piece of propaganda in verse form for my elementary school's clean-up campaign:
McAleer Creek
is a place for the week
to dump their garbage
every day, every week.
It felt like magic, writing that. It was intoxicating. Habit-forming. That somehow from that doggerel I somehow conceived the notion that I had talent, well, Mrs. Hester was a fine teacher.
But, again, I wish to write about work, not about writing. Please stay with me.
Remember that I use writing as a metaphor, simply because it is the work which I have chosen, the work which chose me. I chose to write knowing that doing so would lead to a less opulent lifestyle than had I chosen to go to law school, say. And, because I knew that writing was a dodgy proposition, I took on a skilled trade so as to support myself: I became a typesetter.
We all know how long it's been since one was employed in that fashion.
I diversified. I became an editor. Occasionally (in self defense) a photographer. Gradually, with the same stubbornness that led me to play basketball well into my late 30s, despite being of average height, and indifferent ability, despite (or because) I finally figured out the mechanics of a jumpshot when I was in my late 20s, I became an art director. A designer of printed things.
I rose to the middle of my profession. With two partners I published a music magazine called No Depression, the name chosen for its resonance through the Carter Family recording (it's a gospel song), to the New Lost City Ramblers' folk version, cut in the late 1950s, into its resurgence as debut title track for the punk-country band Uncle Tupelo (whose songwriters splintered into Wilco and Son Volt).
At this time last year, I knew that ND would cease to publish, as a magazine. It continues as a bookazine (the present edition features an essay from teacherken), and as a website (where I write, but in which I have no interest, financial or otherwise).
I find that when I type these things they seem plaintive. I do not mean it to be so. Life changes. I accept this. It is, in general, a good thing.
I can accept the loss of my magazine, though it saddens me to do so.
What I had not counted on was the destruction of the industry to which I had attached myself. Many of us had assumed that, at some point, if the going got really wretched, we could sell out. We could work for a daily paper, or a house organ, or a publicity firm. We could work.
I will turn 50 in a few weeks. I should be at the peak of my earning capacity. Instead, I am piecing together an income doing things which are both pleasant and not what I am meant to do.
This is not about me.
It is about us. All of us.
My last entry here prompted a note from an old colleague. He, too, wrote about music. Unlike me, he went to New York to write fiction, but that was not his gift, and so he (to borrow a Southernism) zoned his artistic properties commercial and became a tech writer in Silicon Valley. His perspective is different from mine (we used to have grand arguments about gun control, for example), and I suspect he would still describe himself as a libertarian. He's also a smart guy, a man I respect.
Here is the relevant paragraph, a paragraph which has kept me up several nights, and I apologize in advance to my correspondent for not having asked his permission to excerpt:
If this were a just world, enhancements in productivity would be spread around a little. The economic benefit (efficiency) created when a hydraulic digger replaces 12 guys with shovels might well be spent on making the guys with shovels lives better, but instead all the benefit goes to the guy with the capital or the ability to assume risk that makes the digger happen. This process will repeat itself (is repeating itself) to the point that we can build and manufacture crap with considerably less manpower than we used to, and the bottom of the pyramid will spread upward until there's nobody left who can afford the crap we (or the Chinese or whoever) make. At that point, we face a real problem. As computers and robots become increasingly competent, labor will be worth less and less. Labor-saving technologies are making each of us worth less. Worth less...worthless. Efforts to reverse this tide by increasing the value (and dignity) of labor will only accelerate the pressure to eliminate it altogether.
"Labor will be worth less and less."
We live in a democracy driven by its consumer economy, in a country whose collective myth -- the American Dream -- argues that anybody can rise to the top, or at least to the middle.
What does it mean when that economy fails? When that compact is broken?
As I recall from my high school econ teacher, the hardest thing about graphing the economy is knowing where you stand on the curve at the moment you place your point. And so I do not wish to be seen as giving up, because I have not.
But I have spent 30 years (or 40, depending on when one wishes to begin counting) perfecting my commercial art. I have compromised my dreams so as to make myself marketable, to feed my family. I have been tolerably successful, by my peculiar standards.
And I have had a year to imagine what I might do next.
I still don't know.
I have been very good at sensing future trends: long-distance running, the tennis boom, cigars, grunge, alt.country...and, even, the return to growing things and eating locally which presently occupies some of my time and creative energy.
But I cannot see a future inviting to my entrepreneurial spirit. We are on the cusp of too may simultaneous transitions: technology has made the written word far less financially viable than it was two or three years ago; the economy has rendered many of our choices moot. When we're done shedding jobs, when the markets have finally found their bottom, when the unemployment rate has stabilized at (to make a public guess:) 15 percent, with another 10 percent of us scrambling off the rolls to piece an income together...what will be left?
My daughter is about to be six. What shall I tell her of the American Dream?
Or would it be kinder to inoculate her, to make her a cynic early, to give her a t-shirt that reads "Don't Believe The Hype."
And what shall we tell my generation, so many of whom I read here and elsewhere -- talented, smart, hard-working people -- are out of work. Have been kicked loose from industries which will never ask them back. Have come to the peak earning years of their lives to find that their experience now renders them unemployable because the salary they command will not be paid?
This really is not about me. I'll be fine. I will write something, somewhere, for as long as my fingers work. Possibly after. Even if nobody else cares.
But we are in danger of breaking the spirit of an entire nation.
And, though I've had a lot of theoretically free time on my hands to ponder the problem, I can see no way forward that makes sense.