Occasionally I visit the poetry/literature site TheThePoetry, and this morning, while doing my early news read, came across this very well-written and passionate article by Joe Weil titled simply, “At National Tool.” Don’t be shocked by some of the language he uses–it might not past muster in Arizona, but it is entirely appropriate in the larger context of the point he making. At least, that’s my opinion (note, however, that I’m artificially sanitizing it in the quotes below…what that says about me, I don’t know, and at this hour don’t particularly care). Anyway, a lot of items resonated with me in his well-crafted rant on modern culture, among them this passage:
Americans expect jobs to be fulfilling. They think they have “careers.” They’ve forgotten it’s just a f***ing job and its meant to feed and clothe you–that’s it. It can’t kiss you. It can’t go to your father’s wake, and it sure as hell does not define character. Some of the worst scumbags I know are a success. I am Zen in this respect. We are corpses and success means very little if you remember first and last things and sleep soundly in the coffin of the truth. All jobs are good jobs if they keep you from starving to death and they don’t make you a murderer, a crook, or an overseer and contriver of someone else’s suffering and enslavement. Any job that contributes to the misery of the world is against God. It is also, and more importantly, against humanity.
Couldn’t agree more. And for the record, the fiction, promoted in some academic quarters, that in pre-industrial days happy peasants took pride in the work they did with their hands, is largely just that, a fiction. Ruskin, as I recall, was one such wishful thinker, and I’ve read some wide-of-the-mark Marxist analysis of Wuthering Heights that promotes the same nonsense regarding Heathcliff, of all characters. Funny how it’s usually the Marie Antoinettes of the world who create “peasant cottages” and dream of how idyllic it must have been to live in the country, or to live as “poor folk”, preferably in the days before industrialization. Forget the never-ending, back-breaking labor and lack of modern medicine and often sanitation (with all that these entail). And the myriad social injustices at every turn.
Quod Sumus...Hoc Eritis 