October – December, 2001
In 1998 about 30 percent of American workers made $8 an hour or less.
– Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed. This is a good book. As a
research project, Ehrenreich traveled to different cities and tried
to live on low-wage work. Well-written
and witty. Her conclusion is
that wages are too low and rents too high, and the only way you can
make it is to have two jobs. I wish middle-class people would read this
and find out how the rest of us live. The jobs I’ve had have usually
been on the next rung above the jobs Ehrenreich got, but it’s been a
struggle. She nails it pretty
well, especially the degradation that employers heap on you.
What she doesn’t describe is the constant worry that your job
could end at any minute – and you may not get another one. “Eighty-one percent of large employers now require preemployment
drug testing, up from 21 percent in 1987.” – Ehrenreich “Only later will I realize that the want ads are not a reliable
measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time. They are … the
employer’s insurance policy against the relentless turnover of the low-wage
workforce.” – Ehrenreich And they can fire anyone on a whim, because they have a constant
supply of new applicants. Lots of desperate poor people out there. Office temp agencies, I’ve found, put ads in the paper when they
don’t really have any jobs to offer.
They’re just building up their files. And wasting our time. “Wherever you look, there
is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of
local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices.” –
Ehrenreich When I got out of college in 1971, with a BA in sociology, it
seemed my only option was to be a manager trainee – an assistant asshole. I
tried it briefly, in a restaurant, but was unsuited to the work. “I have been discovering a great truth about low-wage work and
probably a lot of medium-wage work too – that nothing happens, or rather the
same thing always happens, which amounts, day after day, to nothing.” –
Ehrenreich The main characteristic of working-class work, in my experience,
is crushing boredom. It gradually squeezes the life out of you, until you just
want to escape. When I worked as a data entry clerk a few years back, there
were days when I felt like any minute I would have to get up and walk out. “In the first quarter of 2000, the poorest 10 percent of workers
were earning only 91 percent of what they earned in 1973.” – Ehrenreich Ehrenreich says the Economic Policy Institute has defined a
“living wage” for a family of one adult and two children as $30,000 a year, or
$14 per hour. About 60 percent of American workers, she says, earn less than
that. She says there is a taboo against revealing how much we make. I’ve
always liked breaking rules. In the last few years I’ve made $9-$10
per hour doing office work or scanning and image editing. Presently
I get paid $8.12 an hour for taking care of a quadriplegic. I took this
part-time job because I could not find an office job. The Oregon unemployment
rate, in Oct. 2001, is 6.3 percent. There are too many applicants for
office jobs. And I am 61. “Then too, the particular political moment favors what almost
looks like a ‘conspiracy of silence’ on the subject of poverty and the poor.
The Democrats are not eager to find flaws in the period of ‘unprecedented
prosperity’ they take credit for; the Republicans have lost interest in the
poor now that ‘welfare-as-we-know-it’ has ended. Welfare reform itself is a factor
weighing against any close investigation of the conditions of the poor. Both
parties heartily endorsed it, and to acknowledge that low-wage work doesn’t
lift people out of poverty would be to admit that it may have been, in human
terms, a catastrophic mistake.” – Ehrenreich And now, with the economy heading rapidly downhill, former welfare
recipients are losing their low-wage jobs. A lot of those still on welfare are
bumping up against the five year lifetime limit set by the so-called “welfare
reform” bill of 1996, passed by Democrats and Republicans and signed into law
by Bill Clinton. Which is why we must never ever vote for Republicans or Democrats. Poll: 94 percent of Americans agree that “people who work
full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.”
– Ehrenreich The six percent who disagreed must have been employers. “Hope is the harshest kind of dreaming.” – Walter Mosley, “Black
Betty “Each
stage of life gives you something different. And it gets more and more internal
as it goes along. The older you get, you kind of go into yourself; you don't
start great big new projects, you don't do all the things you did at earlier
stages. There's a lot of reflecting on the past, you kick into a different
mode, and certain things that seemed real important don't seem that way
anymore.” – director David Lynch, Salon.com About four years ago, at the age of 57, I was diagnosed with a
form of leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells. I was treated with
chemotherapy, which I was told had about a 60-70 percent chance of working. It
put the disease into remission for over three years. Now I’m getting
chemotherapy again, with about a 50-60 percent chance of working. So far it’s
working. So I see a trend here: it looks like each time I’m treated the
odds of success go down about 10 percent. Apparently this is because the few
cancer cells that survive chemo are the ones most resistant to it. The cancer
adapts to chemo the same way bacteria adapt to antibiotics. Doctors call these treatments “first line,” “second line,” etc.
According to my oncologist, all disease treatment follows this pattern.
Apparently they try their best shot with first line treatment, then fall back
on second line, etc. And with each step the odds of success go down. I read somewhere that most diseases are not cured, only
controlled. But you can always hope they’ll control your disease until they
find a cure. The problem with noise is that you can’t hear your own thoughts. One of the things you should prepare for, especially if you’re working-class,
is that as you get older it will become more difficult to get and keep
a job. If you can, get out of debt and save money. I’m less than four months from early retirement at 62, and finding
it hard to survive. Being working-class reminds me of the title of a WWII movie: They
Were Expendable. So we are. You can never be sure the job you have today
will be there tomorrow. If I didn’t have bad luck I’d have no luck at all. I’ve mostly quit following the war in Afghanistan. I feel like,
what does this have to do with me? I’ve got my own war right here at home, a
war for survival, and it’s economic. The left talks about how bad the corporations are, but my
experience is that small businesses are no better. To all employers, employees
are expendable, to be dropped at a minute’s notice. How we survive after that
is not their concern. The market is working. Working for those who have the
power. What can we do? Stop buying. Take them down with us. Oregon governor John Kitzhaber recently decided not to run for the
Senate. One of the reasons given in a news article was that everything moves at
such a “glacial” pace in Washington. Or
not at all. Senators and representatives,
most elected with corporate money, are not going to change anything. They’re still arguing over “patients’ rights” when millions of
people don’t have medical insurance, and most of us lose it every time we’re
laid off. And I’m paying $253 a month
for mine. I don’t think most people in this country want to know that the
system is broken. They just want to look away, get on with their lives, pretend
that everything is okay. And I’m writing instead of job hunting because I’ve just about
exhausted my ability to cope. Forget liberal altruism. I wish people would start operating politically
out of progressive self-interest. What happens when you lose your job and your medical insurance at
the same time you need very expensive treatment for a serious illness? Unless your job is very secure, even when you get older or have a
serious illness, you are skating on very thin ice. It’s common for medical treatment for a serious illness to cost
tens of thousands of dollars. My
present round of chemotherapy will add up to around $26,000. If you don’t have
medical insurance there is no guarantee that you will even get medical care.
Hospitals, especially, can be very hard-nosed about seeing to it, in advance,
that their bills will get paid. Can’t you just go to the hospital emergency room? Yes, and
supposedly they have to treat you. But from what I’ve heard they will just
stabilize you and put you back out on the street. They won’t provide the
long-term treatment that most life-threatening illnesses require. That isn’t
the function of a hospital. I wonder now why anyone would need gambling, or any other form of
artificial risk, when life itself is so risky. So impossible. I read recently that by age 60 there are five single women for
every single man. What that tells me is that a lot of men have died along the
way. The average lifespan of the American male, I believe, is about 76. A few
years more for women. But obviously a lot of us don’t make the average. The way things are going I may not be here in five years. I should
do what I want to do now. Mainly I want to read and write. I feel like I have to study aging, as I do everything else. In America there seems to be a widespread feeling, especially
among the middle class, that it’s weak and in bad taste to complain about the
unfairness of social arrangements. In America we have no labor party. The curse of marijuana is that it’s fat soluble, so can linger and
be detected in the body for months. Unlike cocaine, methamphetamine and
alcohol. So choose wisely. Accepting current social/political arrangements without protest
leaves us collectively weak. I believe we should look for ways to reduce the complexity of our
society. For example, replacing medical insurance companies with a “single
payer” government run medical insurance program. As we reduce complexity we also reduce bureaucracy and the likelihood
of large organizational problems. Society becomes more understandable, less
alienating, easier to run. Wisdom: I’ve learned that if I’m going to drink too much wine at a
party I should drink it from a mug, because it’s harder to tip over than a glass. I need a big timeout. Like the rest of my life. I’ve been wondering if, after the initial shock of aging wears
off, people get a second wind. How liberalism has failed us: you can’t buy beer with food stamps. TV: “This is the best hair day of my life.” “The illusion of security is at the heart of spectacular
capitalism.” – Peter D. Kramer, Spectacular Happiness By “spectacular capitalism,” he means capitalism as spectacle. One of the main points of his novel is that just about everything public in American life has been turned into a spectacle, and we relate to it as such – the news, etc. A spectacle is not real. It’s a show, and watching it makes us sick. A poor substitute for the reality most of us cannot bear to look at. The main character is a college professor who blows up the unoccupied beachfront homes of the rich because, in his view, they shouldn’t be there. Kramer, a psychiatrist, is best known for Listening to Prozac,
nonfiction, which I haven’t read. Some more quotes from Kramer that resonated for me: That moment, Manny said, led him to formulate his theory of mental pathology. That there is a certain sort of person, a sensitive or susceptible man or woman, who develops a chronic disgust for contemporary life, its relentless demands and inconsequential rewards, it emotional emptiness, its superficiality, the fifteen hundred advertisements we are exposed to every day. Existential bulimia, Manny called the condition, an interminable sense of something sticking in the craw, a constant impulse to reject what is shoved down the throat. I have never been one to feel outrage. All work is Sisyphean. We make our fruitless contribution, playing at shaping chaos. Manny often said I was dogged in my
efforts for others but resourceless when it came to helping myself. I was a child saved by reading. But then radicalism rests on the
assumption that normative behavior can be deranged. Who, taking any distance
from his life, would choose to be as inattentive to moral consequence as the
average successful American? In society’s judgment, to be sad amidst
excess is perverse. It turned out you did not need help,
except (this was the psychologist’s assessment) socially. To diminish your
awkwardness, your alienation. Traits your mother would once have seen as
stigmata of blessedness – the disposition to remain an outsider in a corrupt
society. The moral emptiness of the spectacle lies
in its translating politics into personality. I am insufficiently moved by spectacle, or
moved in the wrong direction. Yeah, all those American flags just make me want to throw up.
America is a shark wearing flags. A shark that has almost perfected
high-altitude bombing. A therapist, I understand, reframes the problem. One time I visited a friend who is a therapist. I was upset
because an ex-girlfriend had dumped some craziness on me, and because I had
just been to one of the worst ever public meetings on a political issue I’ve
worked on for years. “So,” said my friend, “You’re tired of [ex-girlfriend’s] bullshit
and you’re tired of [political issue’s] bullshit!” Well, yeah. She had reframed both issues so that I could move
forward in a constructive way. For a while I put distance between me, the
ex-girlfriend and the political issue. “The characteristic emotion of modernity is nausea.” – Kramer I feel I’m living in a country that needs a major overhaul, and
most people are just too busy to notice. The personal is political. Politics is about not getting screwed. Government is a service business. If it doesn’t provide a service,
people will stop supporting it. They will vote for tax cut initiatives.
Discouraging, when the most we can hope for from government is our money back. There is nothing sacred about current American business practices.
They are not enshrined in the Constitution, and some of them are fairly
recent. I can’t remember when I first
heard the word “temp,” but it must have been in the last 20 years. Jobs were much more stable for my parent’s
generation. We could change things. We could define “temporary” as no more
than three months. After that they
would have to either make you permanent or get rid of you. I was once a temp
for two years and three months. Not long ago a court ruled that Microsoft had to treat most of its
temps as permanent workers, because that’s really what they were. Which means they now get stock options, etc. “She thought of the four walls that awaited her, the hopeless job
– waitressing or fast food or some such slow crucifixion of the spirit….”
Writing exercises: “Sometimes we write along one highway of ‘I
remember,’ seat-belt ourselves in and drive. Using the negative, ‘I don’t
remember,’ allows us to make a U-turn and see how things look in the night.
What are the things you don’t care to remember, have repressed, but remember
underneath all the same?” – Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind Psychotherapy: Working-class people do not pay $90 per hour to
talk to someone about our worries. We drink. When the world gets to be too much for me I seal myself off from
it through silence and spaciness.
I read somewhere that men don’t understand houses. Women do. “Progress in human affairs … consists of abolishing a manifest
atrocity and replacing it with what will eventually be seen as a more subtle
atrocity. Cultures dependent on slavery, for instance, gave way to cultures
dependent on wage-slavery.” – Howard V. Hendrix, Empty Cities of the Full
Moon Smoking isn’t a habit or even an addiction. It’s a disease. I’ve found that the physical and mental slowing down associated
with aging is selective: it applies mainly to things I don’t want to do. Like working. “I really have no respect for college,” [Bob] Dylan later
explained. “It’s an extension of time. I hung around college. It’s a cop-out,
you know. It’s a cop-out from life. It’s a cop-out from experience.” – David
Hajdu, Positively 4th Street College was supposed to be our ticket to the middle class. Sure
didn’t work for me. The New Left of the 1960s “was somewhat uncommon historically as a
force promoting radical change to be distinguished mainly by age rather than by
race or class.” – Hajdu Then, starting in the early 70s, we got older, left college, found
jobs. And it all faded. Bush says he’ll bring terrorism to its knees. Terrorism has knees? I don’t see any way life can make sense unless you’re allowed to
invent it yourself. In a way winter is easier. I don’t expect much from winter. “The first thing a black man and a poor man learns is that trouble
is all he’s got so that’s what he has to work with.” – Walter Mosley, Black
Betty The lack of money is the root of all evil. We’re paying a very high price for the oil we consume, in the form
of so-called defense costs. But people in the Middle East countries are paying
a much higher price, in the form of perpetual war. We need to cut back on oil
consumption, and change U.S. foreign policy. At my age you know a lot, but that doesn’t mean there is anything
you can do about it. Oct. 2001: Oregon unemployment hits 6.4 percent, with three
quarters of decline in the number of jobs, putting Oregon officially in a
recession. Help! And I just got laid off, after three weeks, from a part-time job
taking care of a quadriplegic. He decided to make other arrangements. The pressure never stops. It must be hard to give children enough happiness so they can make
it through the rest of their lives. Chemotherapy, at least as I’ve experienced it, is not a big scary
deal. It’s six months of not feeling right, not feeling good. What makes me mad is that I have to work, and worry about money and
maintaining my medical insurance, while I’m doing chemo. I want to go around telling everyone how vulnerable they are to
serious illness, tell them to think about different social arrangements. Health
care should be a right. We are political cowards in the U.S., voting for Democrats and
Republicans, both parties corporate fronts. The worst part about the war on marijuana in the schools is that
kids know, from experience, that adults are lying to them. So they also don’t
believe anything else the adults tell them, such as the dangers of smoking
tobacco. What I’d like to see instead of “just say no” brainwashing, is to
tell kids the truth about each individual drug, tell them which are dangerous
and which are not. After which they’ll go out and do as they please, resulting in a
certain number of casualties. As always. Car accidents and war. Last weekend I went hiking in the west hills behind downtown
Portland, from the Zoo down to the Rose Garden. Pretty, although I think the
fall colors had already peaked. An Orange county politician: “It’s a system, Joe. It’s a process.
Preserve and utilize. Build and condemn. Tax and spend. Conservative and
liberal. All parts of the same system. Think forest, Joe. Don’t think
trees. Millions of trees, but just one forest. And that’s where all of us
live.” – T. Jefferson Parker, Silent Joe “He was careful to use the word support because Americans
loved to use it so much, as if friends and family were actual structural
elements that held them in place, as if they were so physically fat and
mentally weak they’d collapse without support.” – T. Jefferson Parker, The
Blue Hour Yeah, well try getting older.
Or any number of other misfortunes. Try hanging on to the slippery
bottom rung of the economic ladder. The truth is we do need support, and mostly
we don’t get it. I wouldn’t know how to help someone who badly needs a job
right now. Chemotherapy gets in the way of working. Not because fatigue, the main side effect, is disabling, but
because I have to do it three half-days in a row, every month, for six months.
Where do you find an employer who will put up with that? Would yours? Try to find a safe place before 60. “Fear is nature’s way of rescuing us from that other defining
human trait – stupidity.” – Chris Lydgate, Willamette Week Women should come with manuals. Everything else shouldn’t. “Between 1960 and 1990, output of manufactured goods of all kinds
continued to rise, but the number of jobs needed to create that flow of
production fell by half.” – Robert L. Heilbroner, forward to The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin, 1995 “…more than 75 percent of the labor force in most industrial
nations engage in work that is little more than simple repetitive tasks.
Automated machinery, robots, and increasingly sophisticated computers can
perform many if not most of these jobs.” “Although timetables are
difficult to predict, we are set on a firm course to an automated future and
will likely approach a near-workerless era, at least in manufacturing, by the
early decades of the coming century. The service sector, while slower to
automate, will probably approach a nearly automated state by the mid-decades of
the next century.” – Rifkin I use a computer to check out my books now at the library. A local
supermarket chain has a couple of computerized checkout lines, although most
people, including me, still do it the old way. Instead of the extinction of species, maybe we should be concerned about the extinction of
secretaries. I read years ago in a
business computer magazine that a lot of companies have gotten rid of all of
their office help. Instead, they expect their “knowledge workers” to type their
own letters and make their own travel arrangements. Computers have made it a
lot easier. As I type this, Microsoft Word is checking my spelling. If I
misspell a word it puts a wavy red line under it. Sometimes it automatically
changes it to the correct spelling. What interests me the most about Rifkin’s ideas, besides getting
rid of work, is how could we measure this change to see if it’s really
happening? As far as I know, although
there are ups and downs with the business cycle, the total number of jobs has
continued to rise. What we’re seeing so far, I think, is a shift from well
paying manufacturing jobs to poorly paid service jobs. Rifkin wants to cushion the impact of job loss by reducing the
work week, as they’ve already done in some European countries, and using
government grants to nonprofits to create jobs out of what has been volunteer
work. I’ve got a better idea: let’s
just give all the surplus people a subsistence income and set them free. Americans hate the idea of fairer social arrangements because they
assume they’ll lose rather than gain.
And we don’t trust our government. Noise: I think I’m paying a price for not having gone to enough
loud rock concerts when I was young. What work takes from us is control. It’s such a relief to come
home where I can control things. Working-class jobs don’t age well. There comes a time in life when you’ve used up all your choices
and you have to just sit. The American spirit is one of largely unfounded optimism. November I got on the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) today, which is a
tremendous burden off my shoulders. Now I don’t have to come up with $253 a
month for medical insurance. For all the nasty things I’ve written about the system, the social
worker couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful. He works in Aging Services,
which may have something to do with it. Maybe they realize that after a certain age we’re like kids
playing on a freeway. Everything goes so fast. So many details to miss. A little like
being 10 again. “Huh? I meant to do that!” Let my people go. Maybe old people are a protected species. I know from my own experience of losing my mother about 10 years
ago, it gets lonelier when they’re gone. A fairly typical experience at my age is standing in a room trying
to remember what I came there for. Old age is poverty, at least for working-class people. We have to
be able, and willing, to live poor. I’ve been an animal long enough. Now I want to downshift and
become a vegetable. My parents had an expression, “rushing around like a chicken with
its head cut off.” I saw my father chop the heads off chickens when I was a
child, so I know what that looks like. That’s how America strikes me. Noisy,
agitated, frantic, never a moment’s peace. Funny how I’ve ended up preaching poverty. Making a virtue out of
necessity. Well okay, poverty isn’t a virtue, frugality is. Not wasting
money. It makes survival more likely, and gives you more freedom. Lately I hate TV. I guess because I’ve been forced to watch it
while taking care of quadriplegics. Like watching a tribe of monkeys run around
pretending to be human. I’ve never understood the need so many people have for constant
noise. They seem to feel uncomfortable without it. You go into their homes and
the TV is always on, even when they’re visiting. What’s that about? A lot of people regard credit cards as security, and I can see
their point. There have been a lot of times this past year when I could have
lowered my stress considerably by borrowing a few hundred dollars. But how would
I pay it back? Credit cards are too seductive, a trap. I know an old woman on
Social Security who went crazy and ran up a huge bill on her Visa card. She had
“good credit,” just enough rope to hang herself. I think the privileges of the middle class are invisible to them.
It’s like a fish not seeing the water it swims in. I need a guardian angel. I’ve read that children constantly scan the adults around them to
see if the adults will take care of them. I can’t watch most TV sitcoms. Their lives don’t seem to be
anything like mine. My life doesn’t have a laugh track. I applied for one but
they said I made too much money. You have a class of young strong men and
women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these
people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working
in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our
generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the
spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is
our lives. We have a great spiritual depression. –
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club Some of every generation feel it: something’s wrong, I’ve got to
break away. We end up living lives that have nothing to do with who we are.
It’s that total disconnect that drives us crazy, that kills us. The acting, the pretending. Just act normal. Article recently in the Portland Tribune about
Palahniuk. He says after Sept. 11 he
doesn’t think Americans will want to read “transgressive” novels. So he’s switching to horror. Which is crap.
Why do people read it? If you could restructure the world around you, to fit who you are,
what would it look like? Capitalism is a gambler’s religion. Civilization is hardest on the young, because they’re still alive. “We are the middle children of history, raised by television to
believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars, but we won’t. And
we’re just learning this fact…. So don’t fuck with us.” – Palahniuk I don’t want to change. I want to follow my habits. I want to do
everything the way I’ve always done it. Leave me alone. I object to the idea that alienation is neurosis, a purely
personal condition in which distorted thinking makes the world appear evil.
Alienation is a social disease. We see the world all too clearly, for what it
really is. I didn’t invent the old homeless woman I saw tonight on the
downtown Portland bus mall, sitting on a bench, all her mountain of possessions
piled up on a shopping cart with a tarp over it. She’s almost always there.
That bench is her home. I didn’t invent the fact that I will join her if I lose my crappy
job. Coming home late at night on the bus after work. Crazy guy loudly
talking to someone invisible. In my usual tolerant liberal way I think, get
this fucking freak away from me. I’m tired, I want quiet, I do not want to put
up with a raving lunatic. Honestly, for the worst of them, there’s something to
be said for institutions. I want the crazies off the street and the trash picked up. Smokers out of the bus shelters. Shut up the barking dogs. Outlaw leaf blowers. Leave me alone. Dancer In the Dark: I guess this movie is art, but I found it painful to watch.
Tragedy occasionally relieved by singing and dancing. The main character,
well-played by Bjork, imagines her life as a musical because “nothing bad ever
happens in a musical.” But what happens to her is nothing but bad. I shouldn’t watch tragedies when my life and the city around me
are in the dumps. But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone feeling good after
watching this movie. Even the woman’s sacrifice for her son doesn’t make it
noble. “Manhood” is a meaningless concept used for the purpose of social
control. A paradox: my friends who are more conventional than me have
greater freedom of movement in this society, more possibilities. Doors are open
to them that are closed to me. They have risen higher than me in the class
structure. But I get to be who I am. When I’m not working. “None of them knew what was Real, that was what the gypsies said.
The secured classes had made a world for themselves to keep out the real world;
they never changed, not much, as if they had stopped time for themselves.” –
Mark W. Tiedemann, Realtime How do we shake up our “secured classes,” loosen their hold on
reality, make them afraid? Register and vote Green. George Harrison died. The icons of my youth are fading away. I wonder what would happen if the baby boomers stopped running
from politics, as they have all their lives, and took a stand? I don’t believe working-class people have any reason for
allegiance to the system. We’re being used. How to cure depression: go to war against your culture. As we used to say in the Navy, there is no doubt in my military
mind. To be political, you have to take it personally. Imagination is not just for artistic creativity. It can be used to
invent different social arrangements. Tonight the homeless woman downtown, in her long red coat and
Santa hat, was sitting on her bench doing a crossword puzzle. It seems odd that we labor at justifying everything we do. The
truth is, aside from necessity, we do what we do because that’s what we do. This is what I do. My theory about depression is that it evolved to help us deal with
illness or injury. It slows us down, makes us want to crawl into our caves,
curl up and be still. Conservation of energy. Or to prepare for death. When we tend to not get depressed is when there is an
emergency and we need to take action. The brain says, regarding depression,
“not now!” They say if you’re about to be hanged, “it concentrates the mind
wonderfully.” I recommend antidepressants if you’re nonfunctional, but not for
what Freud called “mere unhappiness,” where they don’t seem to have any effect.
In my experience the older, tricyclic antidepressants are as effective as the
newer ones, and they’re cheaper. If money is an issue shop around, because
pharmacies have large differences in what they charge for the same drug. Look up the usual therapeutic dosage and make sure your doctor
starts you in that range. Some doctors prescribe low dosages, defeating the
purpose, because they’re afraid you’ll use the pills to commit suicide. You can’t assume that your doctors, especially nonspecialists,
know what they’re doing. Part of any professional’s bag of tricks is sounding confident when they’ve no right to be. Muholland Drive: I give up. I’m not even going to pretend that I understand this
movie. Around midnight on a cold rainy night, at a bus stop in downtown
Portland, a drunk staggers up to me and asks, “Are you friendly?” I say, “I
don’t think so.” “Everything turned up: the almond eyes, the slightly receding
hairline, the corners of his smile; all like small horns on a masquerade devil
or, more likely, a minister who had studied sin for too long and who was
finally overwhelmed by its beauty.” – Walter Mosley, Fearless Jones I feel like I’m swimming upstream, against the current of
chemotherapy side effects, fatigue and headache. Aging means saving the worst for last. “More than 200 women and children are turned away from shelters
every night in Portland.” – Portland Tribune “Fewer than 40 percent of jobless Americans were able to receive
unemployment benefits last year, the Department of Labor says.” – USA Today The problem that a lot of us have with work is that we have no
choice: we’re forced to accept whatever job is available. My present job, for
example, taking care of a quadriplegic, could not be more unsuited to who I am.
Unless it was sales. Perhaps the only “advantage” to being working class is that we get
a bigger dose of bitter reality than the middle class. We know what is really
going on, and it doesn’t fit into any rosy scenarios. It’s a hard grinding
process that, over the last year, has squeezed most of the life out of me. Meanwhile Ds and Rs are bickering in Congress over the extension
of unemployment benefits. I would like to put some of those assholes in my
shoes for a while. When I got a job in September my unemployment claim had
about $200 left in it. This is why we need a safety net, okay? We can’t let people fall off the edge and end up sleeping in
downtown doorways on cold winter nights. If you’re not afraid you don’t know what is going on. Ken Kesey died. I haven’t read him in years. He was always more
interesting to me as a cultural icon, early hippie, Merry Prankster, than as a
writer. But I’m sad to see him go. He was 66, and he died of cancer not
bohemian drug consumption, which he gave up long ago. “When you get the
message,” he wrote of LSD, “you hang up the phone.” And the message was … I can’t remember. The only magic I know is reading. It’s randomness that runs working-class lives. The jobs we depend
on are continually collapsing, so we can’t depend on them, can’t plan ahead. We
give up on planning. In my working-class family I see a clear pattern of impulsive
decision making. We often don’t look ahead and see the inevitable disaster. As
if hope could only be sustained by not looking ahead. Employers are weirdly mixed up: they still like to see a stable
work history, but they also want the freedom to lay off employees at the drop
of a hat. The old have your cake and eat it too syndrome. Not to mention that they expect us to keep buying their products
and services after they’ve taken away our incomes. The last time that was
tried, it resulted in the Depression. “During the 1980s, the hourly wages of 80 percent of the American
workforce declined by an average of 4.9 per cent. ‘Back in the early 1970s,’
observes labor economist Frank Levy, ‘the average guy with a high school
diploma was making $24,000 in today’s [1989] dollars. Today a similar guy is
making about $18,000.” – Rifkin A working-class loser is someone who never acquired a safe,
comfortable spot from which to watch the rest of the country go to hell. If you
have, I hope you enjoy the show. Actually as I got older I learned to stop making impulsive
decisions and creating my own disasters. Now my body and employers create the
disasters. One thing that helped me see the pattern and turn it around was a
dream I had in the late 70s in which I took the first bus that came along and
ended up going in the opposite direction from where I wanted to go. I thought
yeah, that’s the kind of thing I would do. When I was in graduate school studying counseling, in the early
70s, I came home one day and launched into a long speech to my wife about
growing our own food, finally getting to the punch line, which was that I
wanted to plant a garden in our front yard.
She told me later that she was greatly relieved: she thought I was going
to say we had to move to the country and become farmers. Later, after I got depressed and dropped out of school, we were
living in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the jobs I had, (average length
about three months), was working as a janitor in a bowling alley. While I was working one night I got very
excited and couldn’t wait until I got home so I could tell my wife about my
great plan: she, our dog and I were going to walk to Oregon. We had a car, I
just thought it would be cool to walk.
Fortunately, by the time I got home she was sleeping. By the next
morning I had realized that since my feet had been hurting on the job it
probably wasn’t such a great idea to walk to Oregon. This is the way I grew up, the way my parents lived. Like me they
were restless people, and they were always picking up and moving. What I hope to get from retirement is to become an observer rather
than a participant in my culture. Participation is too painful. I just want to watch. I’ve never liked rules. I’m probably the most rebellious person I
know. But there are some rules you have to follow – don’t borrow
money you can’t pay back, get at least some exercise, control your mouth
– or bad things happen. I need to produce words like rats, that gnaw their way into
people’s brains. 2024 by Ted
Rall – a funny graphic novel, a takeoff on 1984, an extension of our
present “whatever” culture into the near future. Designed to do damage. “Whatever” is cultural exhaustion, the feeling people get when
they know the deck is stacked against them, and that they’re not likely to do
well, even if they follow the rules. It’s how I feel right now. “Oakland’s not death but it’s definitely a coma.” – John Shirley, City
Come A-Walkin’ When I took a BASIC programming class at Radio Shack in ’82 I
found it interesting that BASIC had a random number generating function. Just
like life. In life, the effects are not special. Blow: This
movie is one huge bummer. It isn’t entertainment, it’s punishment. Retirement: a calendar that doesn’t have stuff scribbled all over
it, blank spaces…. I’m trapped, and art is the only escape. Getting older means becoming more fully conscious. It hurts. The Germans who ignored the Holocaust were a classic example of people
“not being political.” Safety net programs were cut, by Democrats and Republicans, during
the Clinton administration. I read recently about a family of four who get $168
a month in food stamps. If we do nothing about that, if we keep blindly voting
for those same Democrats and Republicans, then we are responsible. Register and vote Green. Sleep is the greatest thing in the world. I’m spending as much
time unconscious as possible. If I could change my culture I would make it less aggressive,
competitive, consumptive, cold and selfish. I guess that’s what religion was
supposed to do, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore. In 1963 I got out of the Navy and bought a Japanese motorcycle.
The manual advised, “Do not put transmission in neutral upon descending hill on
the pretense for to save on petrol.” If I could sum up American culture in one word it would be “more.”
We always want to do and have more. A 48 year old man was talking to me about “expanding” in
retirement. He doesn’t get it. I told him I want to contract. I want day after
day with nothing scheduled, nothing I have to do, nowhere I have to be. One of the advantages of being 61 is that I’m pretty much devoid
of ambition. The only reason to do anything now is if it’s interesting. The way America’s set up, everyone is supposed to live the same
way. If we have to do that, we might as well be dead. In 1966 Congress passed, and Clinton signed, the so-called Welfare
Reform bill. It abolished welfare as an entitlement program – where you get
benefits if you qualify – and put a five year time limit on it. Now, the New York Times reports, welfare recipients are
reaching the five year time limit while a recession is abolishing the low paid
jobs that are their only alternative. When I talk to middle-class people about this, or the safety net in general, they don’t get it. Because it doesn’t effect them personally, they have a willful blindness about it. “In the country, only 40 percent of the newly jobless are eligible
for unemployment compensation. Down on the street, the number of homeless is up
in some cities by as much as 25 percent.” – Ellen Goodman, The Oregonian December A modest proposal for the proper disposal of 2001: pile dog shit
on it and set it on fire. “Of course, for all the pain they bring, layoffs are a part of
every downturn. Many economists say that the United States has prospered in
part because it allows companies to get rid of workers with ease, making
businesses both efficient and readily willing to hire new workers.” – New
York Times The voice of the enemy. I see the getting rid of, but not the hiring. Working-class people
can’t live with this level of economic instability. We better find a way to
fight back. Don’t buy. This is not a love song to America. America where the chickens come home to roost in New York. The toner cartridge in my printer is empty and I can’t afford to
buy another one, so I’m writing letters by hand. It reminds me of when my car
died in the late ‘70s and I took up walking: it seemed to take forever to get
anywhere. I suspect the baby boomers will finally get political after
retirement. Most are going to be dependant on government programs for their
support, and they will have to fight for their share of the pie. It’s a holiday Just a holiday It’s not that we’re growing old Growing old, growing old -- The Beatles? I would like to leave ancient history alone and just live in the
present. The present is hard enough. Such a fine line between spontaneity and chaos. “In a deep and dark December”: This is the time of year when we
expect the most from ourselves, and have the least to give. Addicts are gamblers: they think they can get away with it. Physically I mean, not legally, which may be
the least of their worries. Alcoholics gamble that they won’t destroy their
livers or too many brain cells – and lose. Smokers gamble that they won’t wreck
their lungs – and lose. Gamblers take big risks, and lose, and blame everyone else for it. Yes I know the human race couldn’t have advanced without
risk-taking, but at some point it becomes self-destructive. When you don’t
bother to calculate the risk and decide if you can afford to lose. Cancer: one in two males will get it, one in three females. An article in Discover magazine, Dec. 2001, says that lab
animals, birds, rats and mice, in barren cages repeatedly bite the bars and
show other signs of “serious brain abnormalities.” Yet “new drugs – including
antidepressants – are routinely tested on them.” A researcher suggests
improving the quality of the cages so the animals have more mental stimulation.
“Mice in enriched conditions are probably going to be much better models of
normal human beings.” Which leads me to wonder if anyone has tried treating human
depression by altering working conditions. Many, perhaps most, working-class
jobs offer little mental stimulation. You might as well be a rat in a cage.
Been there, done that. I’ve been reading that the public health system in this country,
due to lack of money, is not prepared for large-scale chemical or biological
attacks. I’m looking forward to retirement in a few months, when I can
finally indulge my interest in ideas without the distraction of a job. I wonder
what would happen to our society if we offered the curious and creative a
subsistence income, so they could just do their thing? A friend asked me, if society changed in the way I want it to, who
would do the work? There are a number of answers to that – a lot of us are
obviously not needed now; a lot of work is unnecessary; most of it could be
automated. But I would like to ask in return, under our present system who does
the thinking? Because I don’t see much happening. We’re just too busy. What is especially missing is out-of-the-box thinking. What we
have is way too much follow-me-as-I-go-in-circles thinking. The kind you find
on television and in newspapers. You know: ·
Cure
terrorism by killing foreigners. ·
Cure
unemployment by giving tax breaks to large corporations. Actually a lot of what we’re getting now is just low-level
propaganda. “United we stand.” There are buses running around Portland with
that on their electric sign boards. Like I need Tri-Met to tell me what to
think. If we really are standing united, and I’m not, then we’re failing
to think for ourselves. We ought to ask, for example, where is the historical evidence
that giving corporations tax breaks increases employment? How do we know
they’ll invest the money, given the poor present market for their goods and
services? If they do invest the money, how do we know it will be invested in
this country? Large corporations with U.S. headquarters are multinational. They
often find it cheaper to move their production facilities to other countries. What makes more sense to me is to give the money directly to those
who are hurting the worst: the unemployed. Restore the cuts to the safety net programs – welfare, food
stamps, Medicare, Medicaid – that were made during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton
administrations. Here’s my favorite example of thinking outside the box: a while back someone suggested in a newspaper column that government fight air pollution by buying up all the old cars that cause most of it. Pay people enough that they could buy newer used cars that aren’t as polluting. “Most of us have the genetics to get us to our mid-to-late
eighties in fine health, but we mess it up by smoking, not exercising, and
eating a rotten diet,” says aging specialist Tom Perls in Discover
magazine. I don’t smoke, exercise moderately and eat a reasonable diet, and
I still got leukemia. My mother said before she died, “The body wears out you
know.” I write all this stuff down because there is no way I can work it
into conversation. You can read faster than I can talk. The problem with poor people, someone said, is that they don’t
have enough money. “There are about 1 million trillion insects alive at any moment.
They are responsible for most pollination and are vital for the global
circulation of materials and energy through all the land environments. If
insects were to disappear, land ecosystems would collapse. If humans were to
disappear, those ecosystems would return in a few centuries to near their
original healthy condition.” – biologist Edward O. Wilson, Discover “Due to the U.S. [economic] sanctions imposed on Iraq, from
1990-1995 an estimated 500,000 children in Iraq under the age of five died of
malnutrition and preventable diseases.” – Craig Rosebraugh, The Portland
Alliance One definition of “working class” I’ve read is a household income
below $30,000 a year. About 40 percent of U.S. households. A secondary definition I would use is the kind of work we do:
routine, repetitive, little or no control over how we do the job or working
conditions, low skill level, low respect and appreciation, take orders from a
supervisor, often high stress due to lack of control, subject to frequent
layoffs. A simple definition is, you’re working class if you have to worry
about money. In Oregon, Jeff Thompson reports in The Portland Alliance,
the bottom 60 percent of families have had zero income growth since the late
1970s. Adjusted for inflation, Thompson says Oregon’s median hourly wage
has hit the following peaks: ·
Late 1970s $13.65 ·
Late 1980s $12.68 ·
2000 $12.21 These are the peaks. During and after a recession the median
hourly wage falls. In 1996 it was $11.36. But these are median figures, the point at which half the working
population is above and half below. I would be more interested in seeing
figures for the bottom 40 percent. Many times I’ve read that over the last 30 years the working class
has lost ground economically, the middle class stayed the same and the upper
class made out like bandits, partly thanks to generous federal tax cuts for the
rich in the Reagan, and now the Bush II, years. By the way, I’ve never made more than $10 an hour, doing office
work. Now I’m making $8.45 an hour taking care of a quadriplegic, part-time,
the only job I can get. Oregon’s unemployment rate recently hit 7.4 percent, highest in the nation. Apparently, job-wise, we are too invested in electronics and heavy equipment. So when businesses cut back on buying it hits us hard. In January unemployment benefits in Oregon will be extended 13 weeks. In an interview in The Portland Alliance, Christian
Parenti, author of Lockdown America, talks about the difference between
the U.S. and western European countries, in terms of how they take care of
their population: Compared to the U.S. the [western]
European countries have huge social welfare systems. Those countries are social
democracies. … That’s not to say there isn’t poverty in [western] Europe. But
in terms of the polarization of income, they don’t compare [to the U.S.]. Even
in the rough, decimated parts of England, the people still have the dole. The
dole is inadequate, but you have housing allowances, job centers, training
schemes. It’s a fundamentally different situation in which to try to survive. …
[In England] They have free nationalized health care, access to university and
higher education, training colleges. Higher education used to be free until the
early 1990s. It now costs money, but it still costs much, much less than the
equivalent in the U.S. In the U.S., Parenti says, we do things differently: U.S. capitalism simultaneously needs and
is threatened by poverty. It produces poverty organically and deliberately
through policy at times. The capitalist state always has to manage poverty. It
needs poverty, because without poverty wages will go through the roof and
profits will collapse. That’s the fear. At the same time, poverty is
problematic, because the poor rebel, the poor threaten, and from the monied
classes’ perspective, the poor show up in the wrong places at the wrong time. … And what happened in the crisis of the
1970s is that the U.S. started moving away from the incipient social democracy
that was developing since the [1930s] New Deal and through the [1960s] War on
Poverty and began restructuring the economy so as to undermine the power of
labor and consumers vis-à-vis big business. This was an attempt to shift the
burden of taxation to poorer people, an attempt to lower wages, and lower the
cost of business so as to boost the profitability of corporate America. The U.S. elite manages the poor, Parenti says, through repression,
by publicly blaming the victims, by “locking up the poor, arresting them for
small drug crimes, raiding their neighborhoods, etc.” Thus the growth in
prisons. The U.S. locks up a greater percentage of its population than any
other country. At year’s end, Dignity Village is still going, although the city keeps moving it around. There always seems to be a deadline as to when it has to move from whatever worthless piece of publicly owned ground it now occupies. It’s always a cliffhanger as to whether the Village will find a new place |