Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Mon, 7 Sep 1992 17:33:47 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      And Nobody Seems To Know Why

"Truth which is not Highly Inappropriate has got something seriously wrong with
it."
"Coming to the Point is a Crutch. Making a Point, even, is a Crutch."
"The impossibility that you can possibly exist by any causal or etiological
process known to science and sensible people who believe science or at least
take it for granted that it is Scientific, will invariably induce the Scientif-
cally minded to try to kill you." (From yesterday's class notes.)

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"A New Covenant is a New Deal for which God will get you."

Twenty-five years after money grew on trees and affluent young people knew
enough about media power to stay away from San Francisco with a flower in their
hair but to panhandle spare chinge mister in some other city, the low born scum
are doing it as before. Sufficient numbers involuntarily dropped out, became
Discouraged Workers, so that despite the loss of 86,000 jobs, the official
Unemployment Rate declined (7.8% to 7.6%); the total or absolute number living
in Official Poverty reached the level preceding the War on Poverty; real wages
fell yet another month. Two full time adult workers are today required to bring
home the Real Income earned by the old-fashioned husband alone in the old-
fashioned "nuclear family."

It has got to happen. The federal government subsidizes this decay
systematically. It subsidizes, first of all, the continued existence and
subsequent enrichment of rich people, who must be bribed, "given incentives,"
which is the same thing positively loaded, to want to get rich contrary to the
the natural order of the universe of classical economics. There is also a
subsidy called the Investment Tax Credit. To make use of the Investmemt Tax
Credit you must go to the bank and borrow enormous quantities of money to build
an enormous factory manufacturing enormous quantities of Things generally
speaking pretty much alike. The economists have a technical term for Things so
made, the Widget. Hard math formulas exist in the subscience called microecono-
mics specifying how many people would have to work so hard with what equipment
to make how many widgets to be sold at every possible price. The widget
industry at its current stage of maturity and market saturation would have to
make a very big splurge to produce a bigger cheaper widget at a very visible
increase in the productivity of workers due to high technology CAD/CAM, JIT,
NCRs, and all the gibberish you young people learn today about hich techy
fiber opical breakfast ceral and such. My father was a salesman before they had
Marketing, and a lousy salesman he was, too. Anyhow the Widgets you build in
that South Puffahookah CA widget plant will all be stamped MADE IN USA and get
the purchaser feeling right proud.

Or you can build the factory in Indonesia, which is this year's country of the
future. But Indonesia better look over the shoulder, here comes Mexico
promising to turn all of itself into a maquiladora zone which will spread out
the crowding at the border which just gets folks mad as hell and class struggle
minded.

Or you can buy bigger and newer computers to put in the office, and you would
put up another office building if you could have a few you already own blown
up. Whatever happened to good old junk bomds? Turned to garbage long ago.

You will if humanly possible and not under imminent fear of death do the third
or the second, rule out the first. This is because the bank is charging huge
interest rates, nowhere near as huge as they once were, but too huge for you to
borrow unless the federal government also guarantees that they will pay back
for you what you cannot get out of owing. Chrysler Corporation, Lockheed, and
some cherished American Traditional banks got that kind of deal.

So you will put the bucks into the computers and overwork the office workers as
you have always been able to do before. The formerly derided 9 to 5 job has
become the 7 to 7 job. This does not include the commuting time. Sometimes, if
your empleyee is so terrified of the disgrace of an unemployment likely to be
prolonged or permanent, he she it will actually assume all the costs of staying
at the desk by any means necessary: The out and out worst thing in the world is
to be Officially Unemployed when from the Looks of you, Unemployed means Not
Saleable At Any Price. That is why on my first job Playing The Keyboard, that
what typing on a computer is about, you Enter it, It punches in your face. Hate
breeds craving to rape its nonexistent mind while it destroys you, on the first
job I started out at ), Zero, he was doing me a favor letting me "get hands on
experience," worked my way up to $400/month *before* taxes. Second was working
for a psychiatrist, he paid me in orange pills to do more work, "I had to buy
your labor with prescriptions!" There was something against Slavery in the
Constitution, against Extortion at all levels, but that was got around; my
mother had to subsidize the $20 a day to get to work via public transport and
cab. Then there was Child Support. And a Shrink to put up with the
psychiatrist. I'm well off now.

Once Mitch Cohen of the Red Balloon Collective brought some lumpen-intellectual
introduced as a Writer for the Village Voice to a meeting of the Red Balloon
Collective. He was describing the horrors of office work: "You *have to pay*,"
he said, "whatever the job *costs*." This one I did stare at, right in the
eyeball, and he jumped out of his skin, "What are YOU doing here? WHO ARE YOU
WORKING FOR?" When Normals persecute weirdos as psycho from looks alons, the
statistics will show they know what they are doing.

Martianship has its privileges. As a methodology of social investigation.

The job of the office worker is if not always 7 to 7, at least at an all time
record in terms of workweek. That workweek, for professional and managerial
employees, is at least fifty hors a week. Refined Ladies and Gentlemen of
HISTORY, you should, if you ARE doing everything They, Them, The Administation,
The Bosses, want outta your life, are working one hundred hours a week. But
think of the benefits and perquisites of office.

You work WHEN you want, most often on WHAT you want. Practically nobody in the
Real World, as non-Academia is called, can make that statement. That's why They
call it Real. Real for Painful, as in life is real, life is earnest.

You have a Humbert-Siegel-Rossi occupational prestige score ten points higher
than the President of the University whichever department you are in.

Third, you do lots of it in your house. You are spared the increasing futility
of going home. If the Boss wants you 7 to 7, you do 7 to 7 and you work harder
than ever knowing that the Boss can just as surely make it 6 to 8. If the Boss
sees you killing yourself, you can postpone it.

No, that's wrong. The Boss is watching per hour Costs rising, the harder you
are working. You can get fired for the hardness? hardhood? wherewith you work.
The office worker consumes Stuff on the job, consumes Stuff off the job. That
the economic categories are the same for making Stuff as for analyzing data
sets really helps very little in understanding the real economy and why it is
so inefficient the more technically advanced it gets. There really is, really
really is, just as Marx said, a big difference between what's made in a factory
and the output of an office. He screwed up however on the whole new world of
the economy of Mental Life Industries which you need the office for.

The Office is the basic unit of society. I said that before. And you spend
so much time in The Office that you NEVER USE THE CONSUMER GOODS YOU BOUGHT.
We have become a country where people do not use things up, they HAVE things.
(Which means, inter alia, that the less people go home, the less wears out,
and people do not buy new stuff till they move or the old stuff is so obsolete
you could never get used to it again. Like my typewriter. Wrote three books
with it, of which two were published. Computerziz too easy. Will never publish
again sniff sniff stay perished.)

Why do I go home? All the folks in the apartment are Communists, they know what
the single True Truth is. This is not the kind of Truth you get nowadays in the
Academic Humanities in the USA: There is a narrow *band* of *truishness* within
which the probability of something being on the whole truish is better than
even, provided that everything which is truish is meaningfully different from
everything else which is truish. Everything outside the band of truishness is
less than even in the likelihood of its being truish, and no responsible
scholar is going to stick his or her neck out for dubious stuff of that nature.
Unless, and this is a very big unless, that which has had aspersions cast upon
its truishness manages to sell itself. Recall, I said that *nothing* exists as
recognized Knowledge or Ideas unless *first* getting itself Sold, an Advance, a
Publishing Contract, the Movie Rights the lawyers worked out, the musical
recording rights valid not merely for the Milky Way galaxy but throughout the
universe, quantities of copies in circulation, royalties, number of articles in
refereed journals on your CV (which, people, let's face it, is a HARDER SELLING
JOB than pushing tinker toys for money). And getting itself Sold as truish in a
way MEANINGFULLY DIFFERENT from the way that conventionally truish stuff is
truish.

You can tell, people, I have been watching the Educational Television channel,
Derrida and Deconstruction list (DERRIDA@CFRVM). Join today, beat the rush.

Now for Blows Against The Empire.

First Blow (or First Blood): Do Not Go Home!

What is at home anyhow? Housework and parenting. There is not a single solitary
organism in your house you can talk to about anything really interesting
without using the telephone, even your son. If you and your wife are Normal
Armenians, you are both obsessive compulsives, so your symptoms had gotta be
precisely matched, which never happens. You, Normal man, are totally freaking
obsessive compulsive about sex acts. Your Normal woman wife is totally freaking
obsessive compulsive about housework. Ten years ago you might still have been
able to bludgeon her into Submission. No longer. You are required to do half
the housework which means, you do it all while she watches, criticizing every
last move you made as totally useless. THEN, she does it all the Right way,
perfectly, antiseptically, while YOU have to watch. You sexually fantasize
about your daughter.

This brings up Parenting. The range of meaningfully different styles of
Parenting is rapidly shrinking. You have Dysfunctional, you have Abusive, and
you have Spoiled Suffocating Overindulgence. End of list. Whatever happens with
your kids is YOUR Fault.

You have no good reason to go home. You tell Them, "The New Covenant says: You
do your part. I put in sixteen hour days, I am NOT going to Take Responsibility
for whatever goes on where I do not belong. If you cannot sell houses and cars,
Billy Boy, and the Japs are threatening to not buy another $10,000 bond for the
National Debt for this reason, too barfing bad. I meant well, and I called up
the Polish consulate, I say, what you use to pave the road to the Hel peninsula
and he say, Is no road to the Hel peninsula, put that in your bubba pipe and
smoke it, don't inhale on me."

Sincerely,
Daniel A. Foss,
saying tune in same channel next time, and
"Who the hell needs Agnes Kruchio if you got a good lead in show?"
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