Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Sun, 6 Sep 1992 18:30:24 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss,
              Stolen Based Peoples Party" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      NATIONALLY TELEVISED ADDRESS, NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT DAY,
              TO THE ARMENIAN, GEORGIAN, ABKHAZIAN, AND MISCELLANEOUS MASSES

Men, Women, and Intelligent Things of all-Armenia, Greetings!
I speak tonight to the insecurely employed and to the securely unemployed alike
and, as well, to those who, in an access of sense said Screw it, joining the
ranks of the mighty Army of Discouraged Workers; to the quarter million in New
York City alone fighting for the choicer accommodations on brand-new N-Trains
to beat the heat, the hindmost having to sleep on the stifling East Side Number
Six or the West Side Number One.

My Fellow Armenians, it is Not Your Fault. It is Their Fault. There aint no
jobs. They are lying. There never again will be jobs. Sinking into depravity
is not understandable. It is not the last resort of the desperate. It is the
logical and rational choice of a way to live!

In all the mindless debate among the policy experts you have seen on television
where such empty and specious question are asked such as, is a dollar buying
less today but you're earning it more, or earning it more then buying less? Is
a dollar worth a dollar if the Japanese think not and the Germans are
permanently skeptical it's not worth a contanental, but you see that warm
reassuring glow if IN GOD WE TRUST and the allseeing eye of Divine Guidance
with the Latin words NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM, inexactly, "NEW WORLD ORDER," and you
get all turned on and hot and bothered and you say, "Hepzibah, my love, you
what yer name means in Hebeish? My organ of desire is inside of her. C'mere,
let's brek out the kid's confiscated grass, it's the last Fertility Rite of the
Summer Sex Season, we are gonna celebrate in Style, baby, we got MONEY! Call
up, invite over a sex therapist, will ya?"

What we should be asking is, why is there so much stuff so few dollars, even
with the Consumer Debt filling in for the dead soldiers, the real income lost
since the twelfth day of Never, 1973, when the US domestic standard of living
Climaxed at a multiple Peak Experience still resounding down the halls of
HISTORY and will until the day of Montezuma's Revenge, having to buy SO MUCH?

After all, we no longer consume. We cannot ever use things up the way we did
when they used to say, "Capitalism delivers the goods." Which it does not dare
do any more. Because as you know, when they made a mistake, which their own
suppositions about Human Nature led them into, delivering just a little too
much of the goods, the capitalist system went into convulsions which continue
to this hour.

They assumed, the nature of the human is that of the pig, whose appetite for
what it consumes is insatiable and what it cannot eat it finds comfy to wallow
in. It follows, we keep delivering the goods, The Enemy will indefinitely go on
using up the slop forever. "We will strike them from the air with incessant
bombardments of mass-media advertising. Then we will mop up on the ground with
battalions of salesmen, advancing relentlessly from door to door until the last
of the Enemy is driven into DEBT!" <cheers>

By the 1960s, on the eve of Dropping Out, money was, indeed, at last growing on
trees. There is no way, none, to prove I was any more Normal, not the same as
saner, I was if anything less, in that I knew so little, had done such poor
obsessoional thinking, that I was forced to hold on to every stupid idea, every
Paranoid fear, for a whole week when I can today change my ideas many times
more often than my under-..., uh. In terms of Normal, on the other hand, it was
on account of me, yours truly, Daniel A. Foss, or I.M. Vermin, my nom de guerre
in Syracuse NY, that the entire construct of Appropriate Behaviour was
invented.

You see, whatever Appropriate Behaviour was, I wasn't doing it, had
no idea I was supposed to be doing it, or had never learned how to do it and
did not know anybody who'd tell me that I should be doing it. Why that was, was
that, if I "really wanted to do it," assuming I knew there was a doing it that
I should want, I'd have done it already, which was easy for everyone else. So
I was willfully deviant. And if I didn't know about it, that was impossible, as
everybody knew about it. And if I knew about it but still felt no need to be
doing it, I was reality-impaired, you can't reason with That Kind, all they
understand is Force. Normal, as all my loyal readership and all the
sociologists on earth know, is Normal appearances, not looking wacko, looking
like having a prestigious occupation and the standard of living to prove it,
with the behavioural correlates which go with formal education. The education
itself does you no good and, looking for a job, may hurt you because you have
to explain why you will take their filthy stinking job with a PhD. If you look
like me and they catch you skulking around like you are doing nothing wrong,
they can put you on the Tenth Floor cross the street (Psycho Ward) and if you
use big ("overelaborate") words, you mark a box in the column headed Schiz. If
you believe something the thug in white thinks is "odd," like you have a PhD,
they mark a box for delusions. (DSM-III-R, APA, 1987)

Say on the other hand you
are freaking bananas, you have got a top government job, and you come out of
the movies and say you lost all of the 86,000 jobs the country lost last month
inside the theater. You look more like George Bush than he looks like himself,
and you can even *be* George Bush and believe down is up. You get a nice white
diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder (raving maniac), all the best people get it, but
you are Schiz if you are a bum. The reason is, with a very great quantity of
money you can be cured of Bipolar Disorder between flipouts, then resume a
highly successful career until they catch you again. But all the loot of the
Indies cannot do a thing for Schiz. [Based on years and years as a slave and
laboratory animal in mental health research projects.]

In the mid-1960s, even later because anyone with any brains was conspicuously
Dropping Out, that was grooving with the Zeitgeist, true consciousness, all I
had to do, given the deplorable impression I made then which was lots more
deplorable than it is today but they are stricter so deplore harder on me, was
to let on that I was a Doctoral Candidate. Which the one in charge of steering
me through the hiring procedure had already let on. Because if all I had to do
was sign my name, I'd screw that up.

I was a Doctoral Candidate, and though it was obvious I couldn't get elected,
couldn't win the Primary, couldn't even get on the ballot, I still got the job
and nobody said a thing about, "You cannot do a goddam thing." There was a
plethora of federally funded Thingies plethorating like mushrooms after the
fire in a burned out city. All I had to do was stay away from the office when
the Site Visitation Committee hit town in a raid. I had no work to do, nobody
had any idea anyway of what work should be done by perpetrators of bureaucratic
waste hired because they were Jewish hence Presumed Democrats Till Proven
Republicans (a good rule of thumb till Reagan times). Which I did not do anyway
as my capacity to get out of the bed and out of the bathroom and out of the
house was miniscule compared with today's. Can't Function these days at all, so
use your imagination as to what you called what I did then. What the higher-ups
did was just get more funds and grants.

My whole time was dedicated to putting in a solid sixteen hour day of hanging
out. Some panhandle for money, I did for conversation, get humans to stand
there and get Talked At at all costs. In such a way I got a minimalistic social
life if you didn't count sex. Which I did not, nothing to count. Till they
threw the Sexual Revolution at me and Nixon made it Compulsory. He had to
legalize *something*, and sex was what sold more goods than anything else. Same
time, our first gay president, Nixon, made a Depression to end what one Murray
Bookchin, a Jewish screwball in Vermont teaching Russian History at Goddard
College, was calling Post-Scarcity (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1970).

He had the wrong theory but the basic idea that there was too much Stuff is
"historically relative," not *absolutely* too much stuff. I've already said
that, back in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, society (Netherlands and
England, actually) got so rich so fast there was a "socio-characterological
revolution" which gave rise to the "rational accumulator" sometimes also known
as Economic Man. This was because Economic Man never had sex, certainly not
with the skivvy as a "chick" was then called who lived in to clean his rooms
which he shouldn't know how to do himself. Called "making productive use of
your time" today, see your Shrink for details.

The same principle operated after World War II in the prolonged boomtimes of
the 1950s and especially the 1960s. The principle was, give the people the
butter, you can charge them for as much of the guns as you can stuff down the
gizzards of the military. JFK and Johnson both. If they'd picked on any country
but Vietnam, whose sole reason for existence was wiping out foreign invaders,
and without foreign invaders to fight always lapsed into civil war until one,
most often the Chinese, showed up, they would have bought a foreign policy by
domestic bribery under the noses of the People. While the People would have
those noses in the pigswill.

Just at this time, with the whole career escalator of upward mobility tainted
by moral complaisance in genocidal war, the Second "sociocharacterological
revolution" broke through the surface of the Kennedy-Johnson boom. The logical
response was Dropping Out. The formulaic slogan was, "WORK! STUDY! GET AHEAD!
KILL!" The very expression, "Nine To Five Job" became an epithet, an obscenity.
Living was so easy that you could Drop Out, beg, steal, and generate a
subculture where those born in the upper middle class could not tell that they
were better born than my own lower middle origins, all dirt particles looked
alike and I took daily baths, even. Curiously, the Enemy was the white working
class "greasers," the Bad Kids chasing me into Thornden Park until they got
worried that others of their kind were going to steal thier cars.

Syracuse NY was "All-American City, 1966-1967." It was therefore at the time
the Test Market that Tulsa OK is today. The Business Community was stratified
into the Chamber of Commerce, dues $40 a year; and Metropolitan Development
Association, $400. In its 1964 report the MDA, whose executive director was
Vice Chancellor of Syracuse University (whose Pentagon research was done by the
Syracuse University Research Corporation), said that the Syracuse area economy
was "based on a solid foundation of defense-related industry."

I.M. Vermin, who had no idea the movie which had nothing to do with him would
not be made for many years, was scrawling APOCALYPSE NOW on walls. Bliss it was
in that dawn to be alive, to be young was the whole point of the thing, and
next best was saying you were doing a dissertation on those who were.

   ******

TWENTY-FIVISH YEARS LATER...
----------------------------
"Things are different today, I hear every survey say, for the cost of working
jobs is much too dear,
But if you are sore afraid, you will give up getting laid, and pay up what they
charge to have your fear...."

Sunday September 6, 1992 The New York Times Section 4, The Week In Review:
AMERICA ISN'T CREATING ENOUGH JOBS,   [which is true]
AND NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW WHY          [which, according to my mirror, is a lie]

Candidate Foss will be back following this message:

This is Alistair Cooke for Masterpiece Theatre, made possible by a grant from
The Mobil Corporation. Tonight, in this week's episode of King Andrew by Wm
Shakespeare and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Prince Andrew, with a dreadful hangover
after the live beheading of Fergie before a worldwide television audience of
two and a half billion people, is offered the hereditary Proprietary
Governorship of New York, a perquisite of his Duchy of York if slightly quaint
since 1688, on condition of restoring the Statewide Mandatory System Budget
Cuts mandated by Governor Mario Cuomo for ths SUNY system, and Mario is led to
the Block clad in the costume of his beloved St Thomas More in the film A Man
For All Seasons. Following this programme, you really you know shouldn't touch
that channel selector.

Daniel A. Foss
[continued]
"It was a far far better post I wrote this time than I should've written if I
planned ahead. Coming to the point is a CRUTCH!"
This post was extended past 200 lines solely because Agnes Kruchio said it did.
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history