Labo[u]r's Love's Lost
Hell, yeah, nobody wants to work. Also: the clouded joys of accurate scrying.
So it’s again our phony, Bolshevik-baiting, bosses-approved and false-consciousness-stupefied-proles-ratified not-1-May “Labor Day”. All reasonable humans are glad for a long weekend over which to contemplate the faerie vision of benign/non-uppity AI-sherpa’d Luxury Gay Space Situationist Communism — that’s the one in which is suffered commerce of the species involving personal and limitedly-private substance deployed, with prudent restrictions, to underwrite and to profit from enterprises, car il est interdite d’interdire and all that Soixante-Huitarditude — if not quite so much for the logically concomitant beginning at about 15h00 local time on the Monday to dread Tuesday. In memory of the late David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs) and socialist suicide (and Marx’s son-in-law) the extremely-late Paul Lafargue (Le Droit à la paresse), doughty campeones of the individual sapient primate’s sacred right to dispose itself (or not!) in the doing of its choice (or to choose not to make a choice!), I here bring before the constant reader a much-recycled sherd of commentary in their strain from the equally-deceased Buckminster Fuller:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
My figure for the infinite inspectorial regress has ever been that of an anonymous FIRE sector cubicle-drone checking a spreadsheet already subjected to serial and, really, embarrassingly redundant onceovers (I mean, it’s only supposed to be once, right?), the whole wretched waste of every subclass of energy you might care to name implicated therein aimed at creating spectral assurance for the capital class that they’ll lose not a mill of value from the next quarter’s rents-driven dividend increment. Given that Bucky delivered himself of that pronouncement in 1970, in an epoch whose tech looks to us like the 1820s’ looked to denizens of that thrashingly-delirious year after Altamont (one of whom was … weird! … mine own self!), and that entry-level white-collar jobs are even now vanishing into the maw of the machine, the cohorts of grads in the pipeline at present fain might advert to the strategy — it of exactly the same vintage as Sri Fuller’s observations — wherein they as soon as the diplomas are settled on them cut the soles off their shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the flute. Beats workin’.
[The illustration at the top is a detail of a bit of allegorizing soft-porn Mannerism by Hendrick “Muscle Mag” Goltzius — take a gander at his MCU-avant-la-lettre “Knollenman” Hercules sometime to discover why I attach that nickname to him — who for this 1582 piece, and somewhat unusually for the period, both invenit and sculpsit. The names of the labeled principals are I think false friends friendly enough to require no translation.]
Chronicle of a Death Drowning Foretold: Two Decades On
Everybody fancies the notion of being a prophet (the type without honor in their own countries — among whose number I imagine Kassandra unheeded may be counted — excepted, although that’s pretty much all of them), but I make so bold as to claim that I pulled it off, once, anyway.
On 8 August 2005 I finished writing the words to the accompanying song — a critique, as it happens, of the coming Trumpism, but from the necessarily-unwitting perspective of life amid what I now frame as the intermediate precipitating Bushism, which I knew was itself chaos — the rampaging id-spasm that was the GWOT sufficed to demonstrate that — and sensed was precursor of worse to come. Fifteen days later — watching/reading the coverage of Katrina and the stunningly inept management of the aftermath by FEMA and nearly every other agency, parsing the tune's diluvian imagery and its figures of dispossession and dislocation and criminality; of fragile and dangerous attic refuges; of citizenry misled always everywhere; of the blithe swath capital cuts through our common world, leaving in the cleared zones the desuetude of even the minimally communitarian — I was feeling like a Horselover-Fat-style precog. Do I arrogate too much to myself? Yeah, probably. Judge for yourselves.
O My Blood/For Thomas Friedman
The brothers were busted in Brownsville, Texas;/the one cogitates and the other one flexes./The form of the story is the thing that vexes/till the blow from behind lands and direly decks us.
The sisters were settled in Billy’s attic;/the one yatters on and the other one’s vatic./You just phone it in and go on automatic/till the Bad Other’s dreams go all hypostatic.
O my blood,/what have you done,/o my blood and kin?/Tell me how —/please look at me —/all this did begin.
O my blood,/your race, now run,/fades in sudden din./Look you now/and you will see/just how deep you’re in.
“Someone else’s present pain/anon the good of all/fosters like the flooding rain/in every souk and mall”:/this the cozy and the sleek/affect through perfect smiles,/weeping for the faceless meek/to hoard the tears in phials.
Thus it is I daily pray:/blessed suffering, pass our way,/blight sound flesh and proud mind flay,/the others’ passage for to pay —/an it please the Voidness, may/God bless the U.S.A.
hey
The parents were peddled some patent fable;/the one is the chair to the other one’s table./We impotent watch, as tethered by some cable,/till the wreckage is piled past the point of stable.
The family was finished by bad vibrations:/the Other, the One and the ramifications./The way of the Cross’ll have to close some stations/till we fail and we fall; then exult the nations.
O my blood,/what have you done,/o my blood and kin?/Tell me how —/please look at me —/all this did begin.
O my blood,/your race, now run,/fades in sudden din./Look you now/and you will see/just how deep you’re in.
[NOTE TO SUBSTACK POOBAHS: I HATE your fucking text-block regime.]