Anybody want to have some fun? Check out Neal Stephensons book, Snow Crash. He claims he wrote it as fast as he could write and you believe him. The book has an enormous, rushing-river energy. More importantly though, it is a near-future dystopia in which globalization has so spread-out the wealth that economic life in the United States is basically the rich, rich, rich who own the various corporations and franchise businesses whose business models fit into single, three-ring binders, some people who have shitty but nourishing jobs who live in walled suburbs followed by, well, everyone else who form a struggling, economically meaningless majority. The fun part about all this, aside from its being Ayn Rands wet-dream, is that you dont have to look that far to start thinking Stephenson has something there. Free-trade agreements that allow companies to make it there and sell it here screw American workers into the ground. Welfare to work programs sound like an application of the Protestant work-ethic, but they also work as a government subsidy for cheap, part-time labor that puts downward pressure on wages while minimum-wage service-jobs teach Americans a whole new way of living and thinking: you can put in forty-hours a week or fifty or sixty—you can work your little tail off—and with the governments blessing, it still wont be enough to have you do more than make rent (maybe) and eat a lot of peanut butter: all of it with the blessings of the same government that changed federal rules about overtime pay under Bush II (one more reason to wish a few tumors his way) and sat on its thumbs while its buddies were setting up a Ponzi scheme that is still generating evictions. Aint we got fun?
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 17:33:12 +0000
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