[TheForge] new book review

[Justin Fellenz]

Actually, Andy, the problem is that we are turning into a new kind of
first world nation, but the stratification is changing. Used to be that
it was assumed that countries came from subsistence and retained the
various layers of productive ability--the difference between
first/second world status and third was the degree of development
beyond the subsistence and into the industrial: these terms were minted
when the success of a country was measured in its industrial capacity.
We are in the post-industrial era now, where countries like ours have
the luxury--or think they do--of ridding themselves of the
subsistence-level productive capacities on which economies depend. To
be a first world power now means that we can count on less-developed
countries to be our industrial heartland. What was Pennsylvania and
West Virginia once is now China, in the service of raising the total
standard of living in this country. It goes along with the current push
to get every kid colloege educated and ready for a white collar job.
The premise is that if you get your hands dirty making things you dont
make a lot of money and you don't have much status: do you want your
kid to be a lawyer or a laborer? It's a class distinction that's
seeping into our culture as everybody wants a piece of the big money
and the easy life. It's the same self-imposed myopia that lets people
forget that the meat they buy in the grocery store didn't grow that
way, and their car is a machine that needs to be fixed, not a
hermetically sealed box of magic. I love it when people tell me over a
steak that hunting is killing innocent animals and should be banned, or
reveal their terror at the thought of their car breaking down. Deluded
and helpless.

What gets lost, as it sounds like most of you might agree, is that
first, we *need* to be able to feed ourselves and make the things that
support our fancy white-collar world, and second, that there is skilled
work in the "trades" that many people would rather do than wear a tie
and fly a keyboard--and that many are better suited for. But the people
making the decisions (and I see this here in DC: a visceral disdain for
anyone who works with his or her hands--too real, to dirty, to scary)
are people who don't want to *do* things, they want to *have* things
and have things done for them. Been rich all their lives. And being so,
they actually believe that it's someone else's job to do the dirty
work--that whoever does that dirty work will keep doing it because
that's the way it's always been for them.

This process has happened throughout history, where the elite make
themselves useless to show how much power they have--that they are
above all the banality of physical living. The Japanese Heian court is
a great example, creating the Samurai class to manage their lands and
then getting eliminated by them when those "peasants" figured out who
really had the power.

Now me, I don't trust that anyone's going to feed me and protect me. To
me, if you don't have it in you to be a peasant again at a moment's
notice, you're asking for trouble. Stuff, as they say, happenes, and
not everyone in the world is dedicated to your well-being. But that's
me. Our country seems to think that we can conscript peasants from
around the world who will keep doing the things we don't want to do
without complaint forever while we direct them from our cubicles. We'll
see.

JRF

>   The USA is slowing turning into a third world nation and it's our
> own 
> damned fault for allowing treaties such as GATT and NAFTA to be
> passed 
> into law.  In principle, there is nothing wrong with them, but we
> cannot 
> work for $0.40 an hour and live.  If the rest of the world existed on
> 
> the same cost of living basis as we, there'd be plenty of jobs still
> here.
> 
> 	I wonder how far this will go before we change something.
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