The Art Neuro Weblog

More Thoughts on Getting 'Stiffed'... Or Is It 'Staffed'?
If so many of the fathers of the babyboomers had cursory jobs, then it is possible we must ask, that some of our fathers had such jobs. What gets outlined in the book is a process whereby so many white-collar fathers found themselves in arbitrary layers of management without something concrete to achieve. In that sense, a job, as they had it contrasts starkly with having a trade.
So Faludi presents us with a scenario whereby white-collar fathers did not discuss the specific nature of their work with their sons, because they themselves knew that it was arbitrary. What wisdom or skills could be passed down from the abstract paper-pushing in these jobs?

My father worked for a trading company for years, until he went independent. Two aspects of this strike out at me. One was the phase in which he was very frustrated by the company he worked for, because the company was always in the red. It didn't seem to matter what he accomplished as a trader, the damn thing was never going to be any good, because it was a subsidiary of a larger stock-broking firm that had interest in racking up red-ink for tax purposes. I wanted to know ho his trading business worked, but he never really sat me down and explained that. Instead, he explained that I should try and become a doctor or a lawyer, and we all know where that ended up.

Now why was he pushing this profession stuff on me? I think he felt he didn't have enough skills to be marketed except for his skills in the market place; and hat he felt a man should have skills he could rely on, and a job with social status to protect him. My response to that was that Medicine was essentially plumbing with humans, and was not some special *thing*. We were both actually very close to the nature of labour in our society, but we could not articulate what Susan Faludi is articulating in her book.

What are the important and necessary skills in our society? Whatever they are, then, they truly deserve the term 'profession'. Let's say this part of our society is not the garbage-in-garbage-out end of the system. Coherent input that is expressed as economic needs is the in and the resulting service it the output. As the grade of the input gets away from needs, the more the output becomes hazy. And so, everything else is just a process of place-holding in jobs. (The recent boom in 'Human resources' is fascinating. It seems to me, it is a situation where a bunch of people got jobs to tell other people where to go get jobs. Isn't that just a meta-job?)

For instance, is journalism a profession? Is it even necessary in our society? While all of us hunger for information, the truth is, our economic need for most information is pretty low. Do we really need to know about the mating habits of Hollywood stars and starlets? Do we really need to know the curious finds scientists make in the universe? What do we really need to know? Perhaps, the most useful function of the Newspaper is the classified section and the advertising it carries?

What about education? What about accounting? What about marketing? What the hell are these jobs? How much do we really need this stuff? And now I can see that there are federal politicians thinking the very same thing: Why don't we just cut the crap out and see what really is required to run a society? And if people fall by the wayside, just institutionalise them; in prisons and mental asylums. Give them names PTSD. ADD. Why did Stalin have gulags? Because if one were rational, there simply weren't enough meaningful jobs to go around, so the excess population had to be culled. It's all perfectly rational, you see? :)

Most of what we do is meaningless. Some of us were born with this meaninglessnes, while others have achieved it, but the truth is most of us had it thrust upon us. The tissue of lies that keeps us separated from the kind of existence we find in 'Grapes of Wrath' or 'the Gulag Archipelagos' and Death Camps are quite thin indeed.

- Art Neuro