The Old Job Con

I think it was Freud who said that humans need love and work to be…uh…folks who don’t have to blow time and money curled all fetal and — yech — “vulnerable” on a couch ratting out their mothers to guys like Freud. I thoroughly agree. Work is something to do during those awkward years between birth and death, a necessary excercise of mind and body (combined with at least an hour of working-out if the largest muscle used in your work is stuffed all hot and stiff inside your skull).

But sometime around the mid-eighteenth century a new fad took the world by storm — und lotsa drang imposed by Power — inspiring people — usually at gunpoint — to leave their work, cram themselves into factories, like brains in skulls, and “donate” as much as 18 hours a day to Power, who had no work, just money. Once der volk had donated enough mind and muscle to become law-abiding, patriotic citizens, that is, clay, ready willing and able to listen to whatever Power had to say (i.e. un-able to do anything else), they allowed Power to convince them that this new fad, aka The Job, was not mindless, dehumanizing slavery, but work. Big mistake.

Turned out the fad persisted even longer than flower-power would at a later date. Finally, some Country/Western sharpie wrote a ditty called “Take This Job and Shove It” and the whole “job con” was blown, pissing off millions of the original workers’, or rather jobbers’, decendents, but by then it was too late.

Except for a few gigs in Law, Science and Medicine, all the work was gone. Folks could no longer get by on a few bucks earned sewing garments at home, converting nearby trees to furniture, or simply farming the land, which was now the property of Power and in no way tax-deductible. True, a select few artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs learned to whip up corn-ball, popular books, “hit” songs and velvet Elvis paintings, but in general der volk were broke and had to pay big $$$ for both necessities and useless junk, now known as “consumer goods” that no one in their right minds would actually buy if not brainwashed into a sort of functioning narcosis via advertising, sponsored by Power.

Hell, in NYC it cost $50,000 to rent a parking space within a block of the SteelGlassAndCement towers many jobbers now lived in, and the only reason they “needed” these tiny squares of asphalt was to keep the cars they “needed” to commute to jobs in cramped cubicles high up in huge SteelGlassAndCement towers that dwarfed the monolithic monstrosities in which they slept at night in order to wake up early for their…jobs. Couldn’t fit a car in no elevator; had to carry the damned thing up twenty flights of stairs to yer high-rise apartment and keep it in the living area (or kitchen if you were a cowardly traitor and bought some pip-squeak foreign car); hence, expensive parking lots were the only option. And the less “fortunate” couldn’t even afford cars; they had to wake up extra early every morning and cram themselves into gaseous buses, or worse, train-cars dense with other…cattle — underground, no less!

But what the hell does this shit have to do with Furhman’s beans-and-greens diet, at least as it applies to me? Probably nothing. Possibly everything. We’ll see…