Phew. Another incredibly powerful piece. In this piece, a Mr. Leon Wieseltier talks about Oprah asserting that "There is no such thing as failure." [If the loss of a house or a job in a recession or a hurricane is “just life trying to move us in another direction,” then it is in the direction of pain, difficulty, anxiety, and despair. Except for those with the material insulation to survive it, failure is not a lucky break. Yet we slander the victims of hardship as “losers,” as if they are entirely responsible, or at all responsible, for their fate.] He then turns it to the notion that "average is over" -- that to succeed and find any semblance in this new age, you must possess extraordinary skills. [I am here only to say that average will never be over. We will never be a nation of innovators and consultants. (Neither will China.) There will always be schoolteachers and nurses and shopkeepers and cooks and mechanics and custodians and the old-economy rest; there will always be people who do not write code (how else will the hapless codewriters get through life?); there will always be people who work for other people. The sum total of all these people, and their skills and their labors, is called a society. A society is not an economy, and an economy is not an activity of futurist geniuses.] // [The ferocity about economic competitiveness, its promotion into a standard by which to measure things it cannot measure (“intimate relationships ... to the top in terms of quality”), is resulting in a loss of respect for ordinary work and a soft contempt for ordinary people.] Agreed. We uphold the already upheld and (excuse my language) shit on those who merely want to survive. Somewhere along the line, mediocrity went from being a term used to reference the lazy to being one meant to castigate an entire nation of hard-working people just trying to (excuse my casualness) make them ends meet!
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 01:41:23 +0000
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