Bukowski and Dead Christmas Trees - The Monday Morning Memo

“People have always worked, he explains, but they have only held jobs – with wages and employers and vacations and pink slips – for a very short time. And now, with the proliferation of cybernetics and robotics and automation of all types and degrees, jobs are on the way out again. In the context of history, jobs have been but a passing fancy. Nowadays, he would have you believe, the state uses jobs, or rather the illusion of jobs, as a mechanism for control. When there is a public outcry about some particularly vile instance of deforestation, wreckage, or pollution, the ‘pufftoads’ hasten to justify the environmental assault by trumpeting the jobs it allegedly will save or create – and then the protests fade like the rustle of a worn dollar bill. Foreign policy decisions, including illegal and immoral act of armed intervention, likewise are made acceptable, even popular, on the grounds that such actions are necessary to protect American jobs. Virtually every candidate for public office in the past 70 years has campaigned with the rubber worm of ‘more jobs’ dangling from his or her rusty hook, and the angler with the most lifelike worm snags the vote, even though all voters except the cerebrally paralyzed must recognize that there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs as time – and technology – progresses.”

- Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, p. 195-196 (1994)

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