232

Because I can’t think of anything else to say, I’ll let Fredrick Douglass play us in.

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

[…]

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. (The Meaning of July The Fourth for the Negro, Rochester, New York, 1852)

Read the whole damn thing, why don’t you. And remember, s was true in his time, so it is in ours: you don’t have to be black man to be treated like a slave. His was the slavery of whips and chains. Ours is the slavery of economic pressures, interest rates, propaganda, eternal drudgery. The very form of slavery that the slaveholders of Douglas’s time decried. From their lofty perspective, toiling in a shoe factory for sixteen hours a day, performing the same task over and over and over, was beneath the dignity of any white man, save perhaps the Irish (who weren’t really white in any case, being largely Catholic and thus tools of Satan). At least, the slaveholders argued, their brand of forced labor uplifted an otherwise idle and obviously inferior race, giving them the twin gifts of Christianity and Civilization (which, to most Americans, then as now, is the same gift given twice).

One of the most famous articulations of this perspective, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh (of Port Royal, Caroline, VA, as the title page adds—so readers will literally know where Mr. Fitzhugh is coming from) went so far as to claim that, “Christian morality is the natural morality in slave society, and slave society is the only natural society. Southern Slavery “has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world.” After all, “The whole moralé of free society is, ‘Every man, woman and child for himself and herself.’ Slavery in every form must be abolished. Wives must have distinct, separate, and therefore antagonistic and conflicting interests from their husbands, and children must as soon as possible be remitted to the rights of manhood. Is it not passing strange, wonderful, that such men as Channing and Wayland did not see that their world of universal liberty was a world of universal selfishness, discord, competition, rivalry, and war of the wits. "

All bullshit, of course, save the part about “universal selfishness” and “discord.”

I walk the all-but empty streets of my adopted city and in the distance I hear the mortar-crack of fireworks. I can’t help but be un-American on this, our most sacred of secular holidays. I can’t help but think, “What the fuck are you people celebrating?” The fact that, for the first summer in God-knows-how-many-millions of years, the Arctic is melting? The price of gas, set to reach $7.00 by year’s end? This and every other nation’s increasing wage disparity? America’s new national past-time of conspicuous consumption? Or the ubiquity of wage slavery?

It’s a term I’ve longed to reintroduce to the American idiom, as it so perfectly sums up our position in this mournful first decade of the twenty-first century, when the rich get richer and the poor eat themselves away to nothing, all with a smile on their face.

Most generally, you could define “wage slavery” as “a social condition, whereby a person is rendered totally dependent on the cash economy for their survival and the survival of their immediate dependents (parents, children, guppies, whathaveyou).” But, wait, you might say, Isn’t that all of us?

Precisely.

As with some much else, the concept of predates American by centuries. One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two years before the Declaration of Independence the Roman lawyer/statesman/philosopher Cicero, in what may or may not have been a letter to his son, noticed that, “vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.” (De Officiis, 44 B.c.) And we can’t even think about a topic like this without bringing in the obligatory quote from Karl Marx:

“The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.” (The Principles of Communism)

Currently, I sell myself for $11.25 an hour. The CEO of Goldman-Sachs (the firm predicting that $7 gas, mentioned above) is pulling down $6 million a year. He won’t be worried about a two hundred dollar dentist bill breaking his household budget. His name is Henry M Paulson Jr, and I don’t know what his wife does for a living. My partner daily wastes her life riding the highways of our adopted city, prostrating herself before any employer with the merest hint of an offering. She’s falling all over herself for the chance to be exploited; to become just as burnt out, depressed, bored and unmoored as I’ve become.

For the past two years I’ve been a tick on the hide of my region’s largest utility companies. Portland General Electric, Comcast Cable, the Seattle Steam Corporation, the Spokane River Water District…these are the faceless, corporate entities that pay my rent, buy my shoes, and put food on my family (as Our Glorious Leader might say). They are, in effect, bribing me to not care, to keep my head down, do my job, and not worry about the fact that their actions have destroyed the salmon population, despoiled the local river systems, turned lakes into toxic soups, flattened mountains for their coal and gas, and poisoned thousands of miles of ground with their ever-expanding network of leaky, bargain-basement pipelines.

I should ignore the fact that, to the U.S. Forest Service, everything is an excuse to cut down trees. Weevil infestation? Grab your saws and hardhats, boys; we’ve got to kill those trees to save ‘em. Fire season? Can’t have fire without wood to burn, and why burn it when you can turn it into x numbers of board-feet, which equals y dollars, which equals a z increase in Weyerhaeuser’s stock price. That way the CEO’s can feel good about themselves when they award themselves another pay raise.

Should we celebrate the fact, on this July 4th, that CEO Robert J Stevens of Lockheed Martin makes over thirty-six million dollars a year? What about Mr. David J O'Reilly of Chevron, with his “mere” $34.61 million? Is that what you get when you sink a pipeline deal with Burma’s military rulers? Not bad, all things considered. Closer to home, there’s Brian L Roberts of my good friends at Comcast, pulling down $38.98 million.

Do you think you’ll catch any of these men scratching their heads in the grocery store dairy isle, wondering if they can afford a block of cheese? No. Extra sharp cheddar doesn’t even count as an “expense” to someone with a summer home in Big Sur, a penthouse in Manhattan, and the ability to actually pay for a $200 hamburger.
Yes, we can actually shit gold. What a dream this is, this American Dream. Would that we could all wake up one day and realize that things don’t have to be this way.

Noam Chomsky observes that

“Anarchists of this tradition [the libertarian, Anarcho-syndicalist one that Chomsky favors] have always held that democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful…”

But who wants to hear something like this? On this of all days, how can I, a free, American male (who, thanks to my ten-hour days inside an office, can even pass for white) talk about “income inequality” and wage slavery? Today “my” country turns 232, and in spite of the perfect socio-economic storm I can feel, even now, gathering on the horizon American shows no signs of slowing down. No force on earth seems capable of opposing the onward march toward the Apocalypse. As a concerned citizen of country owned outright by rich assholes who, as George Carlin so rightly articulated, “don’t give a fuck about you,” what have I to celebrate today, save one more day of life on Earth?

I’m under no delusions here: no one will read this post. Any who do will probably accuse me of being a pinko-commie-faggot-Marxist who’s obviously rooting for Al-Kay-Duh. But as Eminem says, “I write songs for me. Fuck what you like.” Replace “songs” with “essays,” “blog posts,” or “masturbatory rants” and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with my exact frame of mind. In that spirit, I’ll let another contrarian writer from Missouri, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, play us out.

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office- holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is a thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to. Its institutions are extraneous. They are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is the loyalty of unreason.”

Preface to Initial Conclusion after One Day of Experimentation in the Field of Modular Thinking

Today I mastered the ability to do my job without the need for directed, conscious thought.

Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.

So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.

I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…

The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.

The Ghost of Dian Fossey

Yesterday I received a rejection letter from Asimov’s. A form generated, Xerox copied, standard issue reply. A McNotice; their editorial staff did not lower themselves to signing it with a sig-stamp or a robopin, depriving their letter of the personal touch I characteristic of, say, F&SF’s rejection letters.

Easy enough to make out why I did not rate the robosignature. As Harlan Ellison reportedly said to the creator of Babylon 5, “Stop writing crap and you’ll start selling.”

Raised on the Novel I, spent the longest time balking at the Short Story, both as a medium and as a form. Too short, I thought, too base-board. To forgettable, to clichéd. Too O. Henry, and how I hated O. Henry. Bastard. Now I must pay for all this time spent in spite with time spent perfecting my personal achievements of the form; going through the same, slow process of experiment and expectation that’s allowed my Novel In Progress to swell to 30,000 words, with its end only barely in site.

I recognize the necessity of this learning process. The bricks of Rome rest on a bone yard of centuries and Robert Heinlein I am not. No contest winners on my hard drive, and I also recognize the fact that, in the process of writing everything but the Good Short Story, I’ve written myself an indeterminate sentence: twenty-five to Life in the Big House of Service Industry Economics. By day I look through my bars and dream of life on the Outside, where the toils of my class of worker are swallowed by the same visual background radiation that allows us to pass orange jumpsuited work groups as they trim brush along our highways.

Thankfully, my coworkers suspect nothing of my plans to consign them to nonentity oblivion. If they did I’d promise to make it up to them as best I could: by immortalizing their struggle for the wider world, preserving it in its own prison of abstract, symbolic representation.

I doubt that would cool them. This is why writers must remain anonymous. To be affective students of the human animal, we must allow ourselves to be possessed by the spirit of Goodall and Fossey and disappear into its midst.

Cubefarm, Act Two: Propagandistic Boogaloo

On Tuesday I get the memo. “There will be a mandatory meeting Saturday, 2/10/07, from 9 to 9:55 a.m. Please bring your Operations Manual.”

On Friday I check the bus schedule and for the millionth time I curse My Fair City’s public transit company. Where is Charles Foster Kane when I need him, and his oh-so yellow journalism, to protect me from Trimet Corp. and its pack of money grubbing pirates?

On Saturday I rise and catch the bus. I read Woman on the Edge of Time. My commute is ninety minutes of sit, stand, and wait. I put twenty-six pages to bed before I arrive.

Inside my coworkers are ranged around the desk. My manager allows himself the privilege of standing. He addresses us in a direct, unhesitant voice that is used to being listened to. A manager’s voice. His bald plate of a head glows in the overhead lights. He tells us that, in 2006, our call center processed seven hundred thousand two hundred and ninety-six tickets. I am supposed to be impressed.

We are told to meet quota in the upcoming busy season. We are told which door to exit through in case of a fire. We are told not to put our feet on our desks, chairs, power strips, or cubical walls. We are told the team who moved our furniture to its new location spent five hours cleaning the walls of our “pods,” and that it was “not fun.” We are told to clean up after ourselves. Candy bars may be eaten at our desks, but “messy” food is off limits. “We have a nice break room for all of you. Use it, alright?”

Nine o’clock becomes nine-fifteen becomes nine fifty-five. We’re told to hang our coats on coat wracks and sit quietly at our desks. I think of kindergarten. The rules were exactly the same in Mrs. Neatherton’s class and the only “pods” that concerned me were Seth Brundle’s telepods. I think back to my five year-old self, and the first time I watched David Croneberg’s The Fly. I think of Geena Davis literally knocking Jeff Goldblum’s block off.

“And remember,” our manager says, “whenever you press your ‘Mute’ button, what you say still goes on the recording. All your calls are recorded. The microphone is always on. And sometimes the board members are listening.”

We are, to him, giant five year-olds in need of constant supervision. That being impossible, the “adults” being busy with their own, oh-so important lives, our supervisory benefactors revert to their favorite default method of control: fear.

“Fear,” as Darth Maul once told us (in a line cut from the finished film, thank you very fucking much, literally cutting his spoken performance in half) “is the mind-killer. Fear is my weapon.” A certain “path to the dark side,” fear is also the most effect means of self-enforcement known to man…in any galaxy. Fearful individuals are too busy watching their own backs (or mouths, as the case may be) to ask questions, demand leniency, or feel patronized by jumped-up, self-important authority figures. They want us to worry about our every move. They want us cowed into a state of glassy-eyed stupidity. They need us to police ourselves because (as has been true throughout history) there are far more of us than there are of them, and their masters are all-too ready to subscribe to the same tactics.

Thus fear, like an avalanche, flows downward, always gathering force as it goes, leaving those of us down in the trenches of our modern, service economy to bear the brunt of its weight. Any good German (or good America) will tell you that the fearful are the most compliant and compliant parts allow the machinery to move all the more swiftly.

“Remember, the moment you come into work, you decide whether or not to have a good day. It’s your choice.” The only choice we, at the lowest levels, are allowed in view of all of the above. Do we accept the repetitive, mechanistic character of our work, which requires virtually none of our conscious attention? Do we ignore the fact that we are, daily, reduced to the level of component parts if a societal machine erected for no better purpose than to preserve a corporation’s private property at the behest of a government? Do we reject any grandiose delusions we might have that we are really creative, intuitive, rational, inventive, human individuals with individualized needs, beliefs, experiences or capacities? Do we ignore the fact that every one of our callers possesses all these traits as well? Do we merely sit and work, screaming in desperation behind the smiles frozen to our faces (“Remember: they can hear a smile in your voice”), unable, even, to sympathize with our fellow toilers for fear that some suit with visions of lawsuits dancing in his head might fire us because of an offhand remark?

We are meant to, yes, as to acknowledge the consciousness destroying quality of “work” (which “requires” so little “exertion of physical or mental effort” that I’m beginning to doubt its claim to the word, as defined by my copy of the Oxford) would render us incapable of performing it. The sheer absurdity of the situation would reduce us to giggling heaps, were we motivated by our own survival to maintain a facade of seriousness. Sometimes this happens to me, and I know now that my every bout of uncontrollable laughter survives, somewhere, sleeping next to every muttered curse, every offhand comment and every paranoid utterance.

However, my manager is right to say the choice remains in our hands. We could always chose to merely act as if we’ve made the choice. Turn these choices into a role, breathing new life into the Bard’s old world as we “performed” our working “lives” for an audience of “superiors”, remaining just sentient enough to play the role of obedient machines. The only danger in that was articulated by Nietzsche a century and a quarter ago, in one of his most over-used of quotes: Beyond Good and Evil’s Epigram and Interlude 146. All together now:

“Whosoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

Strange to hide that thought, of all places, amidst a page of unmitigated nineteenth century sexism.