What is it going to take to get serious about this coordinated assault on America by rich perverted sadists ? The paradigm that has us chasing our tails is the world of work. We can't think outside of it, we can't let it go, we can't dream beyond it, we can't reason without it, we can't believe in ourselves outside of its trappings--we simply can't live without it. As Paul LaFargue pointed out over a century ago, we beg for more of it! We say we have a right to it! And what is work? It is simply doing what somebody else wants you to do, virtually anything, and for any reason, in order to receive paper that justifies your subsistence in a world of people and things. It is a totally rapacious and pervasive ideology that a select few seem able to identify, much less question, and yet it is at the very center of most, if not all of our collective and individual idiocy, anxiety, malaise, and suffering unto death.
This is a re-edit of a diary I published and un published because it was too angry and it depressed me. It was like a train that went nowhere ;). I was inspired to work it over by two excellent diaries by two thoughtful diarists.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
There is no use approaching recent controversies rationally while accepting them at face value; conservatives are more afraid of conservatives than liberals are, and their heads aren't in any of these debates. They are motivated by simple self-preservation. They feel, as I do, that there will be, or is, a dividing line between debt-peonage, the middlemen, and the owners of everything. Their seeming idiocy is at root a calculation that power has solidified in this way and they will say whatever they need to say to stay north of indentured servitude, slavery or death. The more brazen the actions and the more jaw-dropping the dishonesty, the more it signals a demand for total obedience from republicans or tea party independents large and small.
This should underly all of our discussions and we should never pretend to have some 'acceptable' debate with people who have made the calculation to lie and obfuscate in order to ensure that some sorry sucker can be oppressed other than themselves. That is unless, like me, you're dense and want to argue for 4 hours in circles until conservative supporter cops to their underlying motivation in the form of "having mouths to feed". But then, and this is really my thesis, you might be susceptible to that underling motivation because you've been primed by the ideology of work, and that's most of you, I've come to believe. In reality, the only difference between the 'progressive' you and the conservative them is that you mistakenly believe that your civility, scholarship, objectivity, hard work, good works, conscientiousness, consistency, sleepless activism, and neighborliness, make you useful or worthy of sparing. When the shit hits the fan, I worry that you are going to be a little late in selling out when you inevitably do, if you haven't already, if insufficiently so.
You see, work is a jerk. Work is an insufferable jerk. It's what keeps you from marching in the streets, from having much money to give, from speaking your mind, from living according to worthy principles. It's what deludes you into thinking you've done something valuable, in this peculiar historical context, when you put your head down at night. It allows you to hold your head high when you meet with friends and family, feel worthy of a certain lifestyle, and want to take bad news in small doses when there is a torrent of bad news. And work, in all likelihood, has made a jerk out of you, just as much as it has the confederate in the American flag shirt. You want to make a living, commute, keep your head down at work, interview, seem worthy of employment, fight for your right to work, play your position, be compensated for your efforts, be invited to speak on panels and various media, show work ethic, show your credentials, be recognized as competent, cash in on your authentic experiences, upbringing, identity, be professional, display mastery, be prudent, wax meritocratic, work something other than a soulless job, pay your bills, do your due diligence, pay your dues, make wise consumer choices, and have what I would call a 90's sensibility in myriad other ways, all the while the people who have concentrated the wealth of the world into their hands have grown tired of paying you and don't really need your work, so much as your subjugation, silence, and disappearance. Work=subjugation.
Unregulated work=silence and disappearance.
Why, when I carefully sat in this chair, am I falling to the ground and breaking my backside?
Probably because that chair is broken and so is no longer a chair.
It's Marcy Wheeler's job to discuss debt peonage, Lakoff's to discuss framing, Krugman's to dispell economic myths, Bower's to discuss electoral politics, Marshall's to be the reasonable journalist, but it's all market niche work and none of them deserve a sandwich any more than a depressed alcoholic obese person with mild retardation, or a porn star who partied with Charlie Sheen during his crucifixion by
la societe du spectacle. It is not about good people versus lazy people, smart people versus dumb people, the prudent versus the impulsive.
Work is a tyrant and a teacher. Work taught you how to lie, to boast, to inflate, to obey, and to be obscurantist. Work demands conformity. Work taught you to punch down and kiss up. Work taught you that human beings are fungible. Work taught you that you are useful in one or two ways, so long as your only question is "How do I do better?". Work taught you that, as with Qaddafi, the HR department wants your true feelings to dissipate in the air like a fart, and never to appear in print without consequences. Work won't hire you if you're not working. Work taught you that it can judge moral character, that moral character is work ethic, that you can't want a job just because you want to eat and put your head on a pillow at night. Work taught you how to love whatever's available like it was your dream since childhood. It pays to be a calculating jerk at work. Work teaches you to network, or, in other words, to treat people, friends and family as a means to an end. Work is realistic because it has supplanted the real. The water cool replaced the stoop. Work makes people with disabilities, mental, physical, and psychological seem like an unrealistic demand of your sour charitable feelings. Work will fire you if you have a picture of yourself in a bra on Facebook. Work needs you to pee in a cup. Work has to be all day, everyday. Work taught you to be sick a few days a year. Work gets tougher every year, pretends you're going through tough times when your really going INTO tough times, because work is making as much money as possible, and that money goes into a few hands that don't have the personal appetite to buy the goods and services you would render. Work taught you that your depression causes a loss in productivity. The economy is the topography of work, an image of an uninhabitable planet. The economy is a handful of bank accounts where all the currency eddies. Work is not for the faint of heart, and the faint of heart need not apply, unless the faint of heart wants to eat and not freeze to death. Work teaches you that enjoyment subverts the morality of work. Enjoyment is for those who acquiesce. Enjoyment is for the artist formally known as you.
Celebrity grants you some reprieve, but you yourself become a product of consumption and can be devoured for any perceived deviations such as ungratefulness, mental illness, drug dependency, eccentricity, or sexual abandon. Celebrities who don't deviate turn into highly conventional conformity police and petty scolds (comedians especially--if you don't laugh, you have no sense of humor!). Celebrity is a 24/7 freak show job that allows a person-turned-robot to eat the lunches of thousands of unlucky onlookers. Celebrity is held up as the reward of super-human achievement, when it is actually more akin to being Leona Helmsley's dog, pampered and muzzled. Celebrities help you part with your money with the obligatory product endorsements, over-priced events, and the furtherance and aestheticization of ideological constructs pushed by people who think of the plebs as livestock. After all, what happened to the problematic Lou Reed/Iggy Pop style interview? Answer: too many jobs involved.
This brings me to a view I've long held, that our culture, such as it is, lives under into what I call a "Tyranny of the Listener", which admittedly has no ring to it, but I guess I prefer accuracy. We can't hear the points people are making when some aspect of our micro-targeted personality is turned off by their approach. We dismiss people as coldly as Vlad the Impaler because we don't think they live moral lives, or because there is something that offends us, like we don't like swearing or insults or sexuality or their accusations of racism, sexism, ageism, or homophobia; we think certain words are off limits; the person's wearing mom jeans; we think they've lost credibility; they're too angry, too depressing, too green, can't spell, too crass, too cliche, too religious, too anti-religious, or too original. I'm not talking about disagreement, I'm talking about the preclusion of any sort of back and forth at all. I'm talking about the refusal to hear any truths at all, leaving the most wronged, the most despairing, the most urgent, again, the most original, stuck on a pike by the Danube, so you can feel vindicated in an impersonal sort of way. But the truth comes out of many mouths irrespective of all the above criteria. Alas, the power is all too tempting and precious, and, if you think about it, we've learned it from work, from the interview process, most especially, from the HR department, and certain service roles that "interface" with the general public rather than the VIP gold circle (where nearly everybody gets sweet as pie). We channel that authority and relish it. "Rankism" has it's home in the authoritarian nature of the modern workplace. It breeds conformity, complacency, mediocrity and corruption.
Environmental Degradation
I always wondered why so-called progressives supported nuclear power. The real reason is that we "need it" as part of our "energy portfolio" so that we don't have to "depend on foreign oil". Without it "the numbers just don't add up". Well, what would that energy portfolio look like if we didn't lie prostrate at the feet of our superiors? What if we worked when there was a legitimate task to be accomplished, not because some jerk wants to get junk made by slaves to sell in mall kiosks? Notice how they don't want you to fix bridges, be a climate scientist, build windmills, let your field lie fallow.
The 'Brights'
There's an ongoing attack on Christianity and Judaism by pedantic popularizers of popular science. They set their sights, not on notions of the Fall, or the fallen world, everyone having their cross to bear, or the darkness of the human soul, which seem problematic to me, but on altruism and loving your neighbor, stranger, and widow as yourself. In the society as pyramid scheme, they want to grease the slopes for anybody that doesn't serve their interests, or for any one who isn't 'kin'. They mask their rage and bigotry with chipper talk and cloak their barbarism in the long-neglected garment of enlightenment. They want us to pull away the veil of ignorance called 'love' and join them vicariously in their peculiarly masturbatory love of allegories about unvarnished brutality in nature, allegories which serve as perfect models for the work place.
Education Turned Propaganda
Everybody cries out about how badly we need our children to be inundated with math and science, as it relates to our industrial competitiveness, when its clear that we're selling off our assets to global entities. They just want a massive thinning of the heard until the most observably brilliant plebs present themselves for work at Deutsche Bank, Alcoa, Guantanamo, Glaxo-Smith Klein, Monsanto and GE. It makes me angry to have to say over and over that the only competition they really are looking for for the rest of us is to undersell the Chinese with regard to our labor. What makes this propaganda so appealing? The ideology of work. People who have interest and proclivity wrt these disciplines feel that they deserve to eat and have a roof over their head, while the great majority of Americans were imprudent and ill-prepared for the meritocratic world of outsourcing and budget cuts. And all the progressive math/science/finance heads can run around heroically proclaiming that they'll save us from our ignorance and disuse, advocating vociferously for the narrowing of our inquiry to the needs of the rich assholes who can't get enough.
Austerity as the Final Push of Work Ideology into the Remnants of Culture.
Everybody wants to be a poet, a writer, a dancer, a song-writer, a musician, a photographer, a story-teller, an essayist, a painter, a conceptual artist, a filmmaker, an actor, a professor, a blogger...let's roll our eyes. You gotta be good, and I mean really good, if you expect to make a living(!) at it. You wanna no why? Because nobody has any f-ing money, is why. You wanna know what good is? Good is sounding 'professional', which is to say, to show evidence of hard work, a desire to please, a wariness of polemic. Good is never failing to demonstrate impressive bourgeois knack. Cirque Du Soleil is good. Good is marketing yourself and networking and paying your dues, licking the boots of every fief in every fiefdom. Because there is no money circulating down here, and because we are all focused on the Spectacle, the task of moving our cultures forward together is a mortifying, coercive, and ultimately damnable task. For conservatives, if these efforts don't include bigotry, sexism, homophobia, or the glorification of work, violence, and "the good ole' days", they are a way of singling yourself out for slaughter or euthanasia.
The Urgency of Work
Work is always incredibly pressing. Businesses and organizations reel when there is a loss in productivity. The shareholders react emotionally. The CEO's cut jobs. The numbers people hit the airwaves and re-explain the reality of the marketplace. Pensions are raided. Striking workers and their families should probably starve. America does amazing things with our shared efforts! What does it do? Uh...it provides jobs for a lot of people that would be allowed to perish without them. And it sells a little more to them than they are allowed to afford through marketing, planned communities (developments and chain stores), and the extension of credit. What does America do? Why is it great? That's the fatal question. We don't have inalienable rights and we are only allowed to pursue other people's happiness, which is probably limitless perversion and decadence. After all, who do you think could afford a trafficked child? Just sayin'.
Finally, the answer for why are we not out in the streets is we think we deserve what we have, because we've been allowed to have it, we feel we worked hard to get it, while the logical flip-side is that the less fortunate have done something to deserve their fate. Deep down we don't believe that's true because I think we have an inborn notion of fairness, but if we lost our position, our status, our carefully managed public personas, the fruits of our striving, if we melted into the faceless despair of the downtrodden, if we risked our jobs, we would have nothing.
Bring back the much maligned phrase "sell out" that went out in the 90's. It will describe perfectly what a lot of people will do if they are asked to do what needs to be done, to risk everything and put your fate in the hands of the gods for what's not a disgusting capitulation to a societal devolution into hyper-modern barbarism. Work stoppage has to be on the table. Otherwise we're like Qaddafi without airplanes.