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May 15, 2003
Your Competition
The other day, some lefty weenie was bleating on NPR (hmmm. this is probably not the best way to open.) Anyway, he was complaining about something I forgot. It may have had something to do with Iraq or not. The point was that it took him just a couple sentences into his rant when he started putting forth arguments about how corporations were being anti-labor by picking places that were anti-union. A few sentences later he was back in the 20s with Eugene Debs moving forward through the depression and the Great Society. I rolled down the window, but I didn't barf.
I knew a guy who lived in San Diego, operated a drill press, was married with a couple kids, a mortgage and a new car. He was 25 and happy and used to crack jokes about my work in computer science. Since this was the early 80s, drill press operators in the union made more money than computer programmers. He had a point.
San Diego and the NPR weenie are bourgie brothers. They smirk and crack wise and invite us to be pro-labor in their bourgie brotherhood. This is what human beings ought to be able to expect, they say. Decent job, living wage, health care, mortgage if they have good credit. Raise a family, send them to public school, improve your life. Who could argue with that? Those evil corporations of course, and me.
Way out in Guangdong Province is the competition. I know about them because there are documentaries that show at midnight on one of my 500 cable channels. They are that close. These people grow their own food, they live in concrete houses, they sew their own clothes, they birth their own babies without hospitals. They live to be 60. What a shame.
Human beings don't speciate. We are not endangered. We are robust. Everybody lives past the age of procreation. Even in deepest darkest HIV infested jungle slums and favelas, people live to be 25. They have babies. Humans are built to last and we are lasting. Inevitably we all have to compete with each other. The good news is that those of us in the northwest corner of the globe still have volunteer armies who are damned good. We have physical distance, if not economic distance.
People on the radio and on the cell phone are trying to steer corporations into giving Americans the kind of salaries that allow them to work until they are 60 and then retire for the rest of their life expectancy. Need a dental plan? Of course you do. How else can you get a smiling job in the bourgie brotherhood? That's the kind of jobs we have to have here in America.
It's not going to last long.
Posted by mbowen at May 15, 2003 07:30 PM
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