Worker's Paradise

Now that we are ruled by the black-leather-clad raised iron fist of our new Socialist Messiah, we should assess the state of modern American work on this Labor Day, the most oxymoronic of made-up American holidays where we celebrate the toil and sweat of the working man and woman by not being able to go to the bank.

This year we mark the occasion by no longer building cars and by willfully refusing to do research on things we purportedly feel passionately about.

Sort of anti-labor on both counts, but as we're all so post-industrial, that shouldn't really be a problem. The most important labor we engage in these days are in marathon Dungeons and Dragons sessions wherein technocrat wizards face down the mythically abstract Bilious Inflation Dragon--he of the Withering Baleful Breath of Hot Stagnation and the Spearfangs of Spiraling Energy Costs--with the +4 Adamantium Sword of Prime Interest Rate Adjustment. Some see Revenge of the Nerds as a cute coming-of-age movie with charming undertones of social reversal and gratuitous nudity. I see it as the declaration of a war we've already lost. In the defeat and humiliation of Stan Gable--a latter day John Galt--and the Alpha Betas (football players... yes, they use their feet and sometimes their faces, but still tillers of the earth) we see the unchecked rise of the information and computer-based service sector, acceptant of a lenient social structure devolving into organized chaos, drug use, corporate fraud (it only looks like a whipped cream pie) and partially led by a gay black rapper.

As in most things, I look to my children as an indicator of what hope I should have for our future. Although they are three white boys, I've done my best to raise them in a way that is more demographically representative. The oldest one gets to be a white kid from California (the control group), while the middle one I've raised as a Guatemalan illegal immigrant and the youngest I've convinced he is a 19th century Russian Jewish woman.

Despite their disparate backgrounds, they all seem to agree on this: Lego Digital Designer. Yes, that's right... American kids, instead of handling actual Legos now merely compile a design in abstracted virtual 3D space so that a Filipino child can then assemble the designed toy for him and then send it away for shipping. One assumes the Filipino child might take some joy in the assembly of the thing, if only in the knowledge that today, at least, he has fended off the imminent starvation of his entire family by the labor he provides.

And that's something we've gotten away from in this country. Working because if we don't, grandma dies. The best we can hope for now is that we're forced to do the same job, even if it doesn't pay us enough or fulfill us in any meaningful way, because changing jobs and insurance providers means dropping grandma and her "pre-existing condition." And I applaud that. That, at least, is an honest motivation for a hard day's work. Or if you rely on means-tested state subsidized forms of insurance, a motivation to not work. Still, the principle is the same: Grandma is going to die and there's really nothing you can do about it.

Happy Labor Day!