| Tuesday, August
5, 2003
Hard at work on the column. The Gods
of the Copybook Headings yesterday reminded a reader that we have here The
Old Issue, and it's still very relevant. Any good citizen of the
Republic ought to read this every now and then for the health of the soul...
Working Class and
Proletarians
In private mail I have been in a long and perhaps enlightening discussion on
tariff and what's wrong with a system that reduces large parts of the
population to proletarian status; and discovered that
"proletarian" is now used in a strange sense, "working
class," and apparently it's all right to have such a class. Well,
"working class" is fine: I'd be very happy to have a large
working class, and in fact that's why I favor some kind of protection for
manufacturing jobs. We have lost 5 million such in the past decade or so. Manufacturing jobs are precisely what we need: not only is the output hard
goods, things and not paper and the stuff dreams and bubbles are made of,
but the work is something that those skilled with their hands but not
intellectuals can do. Half the nation is below average in intelligence.
Yes, I know, that is a truism, but it is true, and that fact has
implications. It has long been known that real wealth
is not possession of things, but the ability to make them. We are busily
developing that ability -- in China. Our free trade system causes us to lose
skilled labor jobs because of price, requiring our workers to go into
intellectual activities: but then we have set it up so that they compete
with the intellectually skilled unemployed overseas. The result is
that Earthlink tech support is now conducted from Bombay, which reduces
costs, but isn't precisely good news for the experienced tech support
people they had in Pasadena. First we lose the
manufacturing jobs. Then we lose the intellectual jobs that were to
replace them. Some of this came home to me
when I took the train home from San Diego Friday night: the train takes me
to Union Station where the Red Line LA Subway connects to take me to
Universal City. At the Universal City station I can get a Metro bus to
Studio City: the whole trip from Union Station to my house including a
three block walk takes less than an hour. I got to Universal City about
11:30 at night, and there saw an old friend I had not seen for a couple of
years. I recalled missing him at Niven's parties. He's been
out of work for three years, and lives in a homeless shelter, and has
been, I think, ashamed to come to the Club (and unable to pay dues, I'm
sure). He was at one time a systems operator for a hospital computer
system: the kind of job that's at the edge of professional, and which is
vanishing. He worked hard, but he is not physically capable of manual
labor. When budget cuts got him laid off he had work in tech support, but
that too got exported. It was about then that he vanished, and I am
ashamed to say that once he was out of sight he was out of mind. Another
old friend used to be a furniture maker. There's no work now. Note that
being an independent in that business requires not only the skill to make
goods, but also to market them; something an individual laid off in his
fifties isn't likely to develop. Both of these men have become proletarians: not working class, but
proletarian in the old sense, people who own nothing,
and have little or nothing to contribute to the state but their votes and
their progeny. Now we have nothing to fear from these people; they worked
most of their lives and they are even now looking for work. But now
imagine a generation that has grown up without work, without the concept
of work: to whom bread and circuses are the norm, a way of life. Who don't
even think in terms of being useful, but rather of their entitlements. Add
to that a rotten school system which strives to raise the self-esteem of
those who have no achievements and little prospect of achievement or even
employment: who don't grow up thinking that "a man should support his
wife and children, it's the right and proper thing to do" and who
aren't even a little ashamed of the notion that with a little bit of luck
they, or someone, anyone else, will go out and work and start
supporting you... I think it's a formula for disaster.
Telling people it's all right not to work, and it's not their fault that
they're citizens but not taxpayers... Tariff to protect
working class jobs may not be the answer, but there darned well has to be
some kind of answer. Forcing our citizens to compete with the brightest
people in undeveloped countries may get us cheap goods, but it's hard
lines on the citizens. Now I have to work on the column. Go
read The Old Issue again
and think about this for me.
And
here is an important story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A19083-2003Aug4.html
> Tan meanwhile argues that Lyme disease patients can't afford to
wait for the science to inch its way forward. Her imagination still reels
at the thought she was tested for both syphilis (after 29 years of
marriage) and Lou Gehrig's disease before her doctors considered her for
what the CDC terms "the leading cause of vector-borne infectious
illness in the U.S."
>
> "I've never met a single person in my lifetime who had ALS,
but they tested me for that before Lyme disease," Tan adds.
"It's not the way the medical community should be dealing with these
very real problems that people are having."
A reader points out that Lyme disease and ALS have similar
rates of occurrence, and thus Ms. Tan is being unfair, and I have been
unfair by using that cut quote.
I hadn't intended to be: it's still an important story, and
thanks for the admonition.
Current Mail
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CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
And I am getting a ton of
mail "returns" as undeliverable. Since I didn't send any of
it, it's clear that someone is faking my return address. Heaven alone
knows what they are sending. DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS THAT PURPORT TO BE
FROM ME unless you expected them, and don't open any that execute no
matter what you expected. I have of course sent some documents and
pictures, this being column time, but not only would those be expected by
those who get them, but you know the format I use.