Hildegarde

So, this post starts today with an admission:  sometimes I write this blog because I feel like it, and sometimes I write this blog because something has me incensed or annoyed, but sometimes I write this blog to keep myself out of trouble.

I have, I will admit, a tendency to fly off the handle–there’s a cliche for you–when I’m angry.  Not upset, mind you, or just nervous or frightened, but world-class, dyed in the wool pissed off.

This poses a couple of problems.

The first is caused by the fact that it isn’t all that difficult to get me world-class, dyed in the wool pissed off, at least for very short amounts of time. 

These short sessions are usually political, and, oddly enough, they can be set off by either side of a debate.  In fact, they can be set off by opposite sides of the same debate on back to back days.  I’ve thought about these some, and I’ve decided that what I’m actually reacting to is not the content of the arguments but the tone.   There’s something about a certain tone that just blows all my corks, and blows them even when I agree with the sentiment involved.

For the kind of world-class, dyed in the wool piss of that lasts, though–and is likely to last for years–you’ve got to do something egregiously wrong, and I doubt if I’ve had more than four or five of those over the entire course of my life.

I am, for reasons far too complicated to go into here, having one of those now. 

And the problem is, my instinct is to sit down and write a letter–or an e-mail–just nuking the entire joint.   The nuking would be entirely deserved, I think, but the party I’d direct it at, but I’ve gotten old enough to realize that it might not be the best way to proceed from here. 

My older son has dubbed this particular type of letter “the kind of thing that makes your lawyers want to put their heads in a toilet and flush,” and I get that.  I really do get it.  In a legalistic and bureaucratic  age, I’m likely to end up with more of what I want at the end if I keep my mouth shut and let the diplomatic hands take over.

But.

Big But.

There’s something about this particular way of doing things that makes me crazy.  It feels to me like I’m giving in to a modern ethos I disapprove of entirely, to moral and ethical relativism of the worst kind, to the world where nothing is right and wrong any more but only appropriate or inappropriate.

And it occurs to me, as well, that there is something here about the differences between–ack.  Not urban and rural life, exactly, but contractual life and relational life.  Maybe.

Okay.  Those words probably make no sense.

On the one side of this mess are a group of people for whom nothing more than a word and an agreement has ever been necessary to get something done.   If I tell you on Tuesday that I’m going to buy your two million dollar house on Friday next, then I’m going to buy your two million dollar house on Friday next.   If I tell you that, fifty years from now, I will do X as long as you do Y for me–then when the fifty years are up, that’s what will happen.

On the other side I have someone whose every response to a complex web of obligations is, “but there wasn’t anything on paper, right?”

So I’m going slowly through the afternoon, wanting sincerely to cause an enormous fuss before I can talk to my lawyer on Monday, and knowing that that would only make things worse.

And I’ve got about thirty people angry at me, because they think that the reason the obligations are not being met is that I’m not meeting them, when in reality I have no control over whether they get met or not, at least for the time being.

And I think that this ties in with something I was talking about yesterday a bit and that I’ve talked about before–the reduction of everything and anything not just to personal advantage, but to personal material advantage.

And now I feel like I’m blithering. 

I’ve spent the evenings almost every night since my mother died watching endless DVDs of old Perry Mason television shows, not because the mysteries are so wonderful, but because I like the sense of living.

Okay, that’s really blithering.

I like the general assumptions, let’s say:  that most people are good and honest if you treat them right; that we all have an obligation to be good and honest ourselves even if it costs us something; that integrity is more important than getting what you want.

I’m beginning to think that sort of thing is something worse than out of fashion, and I am thoroughly depressed.

Corned beef for dinner, though.

That won’t be bad.

I am definitely having one of those days when I think I should post regular FB status reports on my frustration levels, because they might have something to say about whether or not I end the day without doing something rash.

So to speak.

But instead of that, let me make a book report.

Actually, I want to make a two book report.

The first is on something called Nothing Personal, by Eileen Dreyer.

In general, I try to make a point of not commenting on contemporary mystery writers.   I don’t think it really matters who I do or do not “like,” and who I do or do not like certainly does not say anything about whether the book is “good.”

But a friend of mine sent me the book, and he wanted a report, so I thought I’d give one.

Nothing Personal is a light mystery without being a cozy, written by a woman whose main work before that date had been in romance. 

In most cases, this would not be a great recommendation for a book for me.   I think romance tends to get the least talented genre writers out there, and romance publishing is so anal-retentive about controlling content that writers who survive in that milieu get far too used to taking orders and following other people’s “tip sheets.”

As it was, this turned out to be one of the better forays from romance I’ve read, and it also managed to come to me at precisely the right time.   I was, on the day it arrived, desperately in need of something light and diverting.  It was the right thing at the right moment in the right place. 

And the plotting was not bad, the mystery actually had a twist to it at the end that I didn’t catch, and I read it right through without stopping in the course of a day.

And there was an underlying issue which I am very concerned with at the moment–what I sometimes call the “bureaucratization of everything,” so that the purpose of all institutions becomes not something they do but simply the survival and the aggrandizement of the entity itself.

In the case of this novel, the institution is a hospital, once a charitable foundation run by and staffed by nuns, now locally known as “St. Serious Money.”

But.

I wish I could put my finger on the but.

Everything was balanced.  Every element existed, it fit the overall framework, it wasn’t a bad set up if she wanted to start a series (which she may have done, as this was published in 1994).

The best I can do to explain it is to say that the writing felt like she was spending all her time on autopilot–the thing lacked, I don’t know.  Narrative drive?  Emotional intensity? 

It was making me a little crazy, because on one level I liked the book a lot, and on another I kept feeling as if the writer didn’t really care one way or the other. 

On that, of course, I’m almost surely wrong.  But that’s the way it felt.  I would read another book by Dreyer, but only under the kind of circumstances I read this one in–circumstances in which I needed to fail absolutely safe.

Safe is not what I’ve been feeling reading the other book–admission, I’m only about a third into it–Death With Interruptions, by Jose Saramago.

Yes, yes, I know.  Most of you have rejected Saramago out of hand, because what I say about him makes him sound “literary,” but he’s still my favorite writer on the planet at the moment, so you’ll just have to live.

He isn’t my favorite human being, but then, he doesn’t have to be.  A lot of writers live in one moral universe in the things they write and another in day to day life.

Suffice it to say that Mr. Saramago, who won the Nobel for literature in 1998, is a Portuguese Communist of the old school, and close to 100 years old.   They seem to like to work a long time in Portugal.  There’s a Portuguese film director who is 100 years old, and still making movies.  He’s the only person on earth who has been working in the business the entire time it has existed.

Death With Interruptions has the kind of premise that would make a fairly standard sci-fi movie:  on the first of January, in one country and one country only, people just stop dying.

They don’t get better if they’re sick.  They don’t stop deteriorating if they’re very old or in a coma.  They just don’t die.  At all.  Ever. 

You can cut their heads off.  You can run them over with trucks.  You can fill them full of strychnine.  It doesn’t matter.  They just don’t die.

That is, they don’t die unless you take them into a neighboring country, where they die just as they would be expected to, given their age or their injuries or their illnesses.

This book may be different from any other book by Saramago and end with some explanation of what has happened here and why, but I’m not counting on it.  

The novel reminds me a lot of Blindness, the only one of his books I know of to have been made into a film.  In Blindness, everybody in Lisbon (or almost everybody, there are one or two exceptions) is struck blind for no reason anybody can tell.  A few weeks later, they regain their sight.   The only explanation officialdom can come up with is that it must have been a virus–but the cause of the blindness isn’t the point.  How people behave in the midst of the crisis is.

Death With Interruptions  is that kind of thing, and right now it’s very funny.   The undertakers have gotten together and demanded government relief of various kinds, since immortality will mean that they don’t have an occupation any more, and their occupation should be kept alive.   The owners of nursing homes are losing their minds over patients who hang on forever.  The hospitals are drowning under an influx of patients who will never get well or pop off.

And, and the Churches don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad one, but they’re inclined to think bad, and have started praying that God will start letting people die again.

Then, in the middle of all this, all order breaks down, and society becomes largely ruled by “maphias,” so spelled because the leaders want to distinguish themselves from the Italian kind.

This is largely what Saramago writes about–the nature of and our relationship to the increasingly bureaucratic state.  And he does it without preaching or writing treatises.

He’s got a book called The Stone Raft in which the Iberian peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and goes wandering around in the ocean on its own.

The symbolism in that one was, probably, as direct as it’s possible to get. 

But I’ll go finish this, which, like most of Saramago’s work, is shortish, and then on to more conventional mystery novels.

Yes, I know.  I said I was going to disappear for a while.  But it turns out I’m far too stressed to have nothing constructive to do, and these days I’m defining “constructive” very loosely.  At any rate,  what I really want to do is scream at some very specific people, and that probably wouldn’t be the best idea right now.

So, let’s get to this other thing.

The beginning of it is this:  how do you define “lying”?  If I say something that is objectively, provably untrue, but honestly believe it, am I lying?

How about if I report something as true that I believe is true but that is in fact an interpretation of raw data that is at least questionable?  Am I lying?

Cheryl’s report of the proposed change to the Canadian media law would have addressed that question by requiring you to prove that somebody knowingly told an untruth on the air. 

It was opposed, I can only presume, by people who thought that it would be much harder to convict and punish someone for “lying” if you had to prove not only that his statement was untrue (or an unlikely and tendentious interpretation), but that the speaker had known it was untrue.

Which brings us to our second question:  have I ever seen Rachel Maddow and/or her program?

The answer to that is:  yes.  Quite often.  When Keith Olbermann was still on the air, her show followed his every week night, and most week nights I watched the two back to back right before bed.   I’l admit I was a bigger fan of Olbermann’s, but then I like combatitive types, even when they’re not all that accurate all the time.

Maddow is, certainly, the calmest and most even-tempered of a very hotly tempered bunch.  And yes, she’s got that PhD and went to all the right schools and has all the right markers of high academic achievement that are so important to her audience–and for that matter, to me.

But precisely what one commenter found “better”–that Rhodes Scholarship, the PhD, the measured reasonableness–my working class relatives find repugnant and abhorrent.  They find her “smug,” “self-satisfied,” “snobbish” and “deceitful,” where they find people like O”Reilly, Beck and Palin “down to earth” and “regular people.” 

At the risk of causing a firestorm of howling and gnashing of teeth, I don’t think this makes my working class relatives stupid and resentful any more than I think those of you who think her attributes are “better” are self-satisfied and smug.

I think what we’re looking at here are class markers, pure and simple. 

And this time, by class, I’m not talking about money.  I’m talking about a web of attitudes, tastes and behaviors that cement us to that group we think of as “one of our own.” 

And no, I don’t think conservatives are less likely than liberals–or working class people less likely than the educated upper middle class–to be “accepting of difference. 

I think it depends on the difference.  The educated upper middle class will surely be more accepting of you if you are gay, and they’ll champion the institution of gay marriage, too–but their tolerance is likely to go south fast if you’re a gay member of Dignity who thinks homosexual sexual practice is objectively morally wrong and that gay people can only live morally by being celibate.

As for why I said I think Rachel Maddow lies–it again depends on how you define “lying.”  If you mean it simply as saying something that is objectively untrue, whether you know it or not, I’m good.

But here’s something else:  we all tend to feel that if X person claims Y is true and we “know” it’s false, that X must know it’s false, too, and the only reason X is saying it is for advantage or gain or spite or something…either that, or X is just too stupid to know what we know.

My first eye-rolling moment came during a week when Maddow presented a special set of programs on “right wing domestic terrorism” that were as silly, over the top, and skewed in their “evidence” as anything Glenn Beck has every presented.

(Well, as to Beck–that I’ve seen.  I’ve got a low tolerance for him, a larger one for O’Reilly, so I might be better off sticking to comparisons with the latter.)

Yes, of course, there are militias, and silly people who decide to “go sovereign” and drop off the grid, and these groups and people increase during liberal administrations.

And, exactly once, there were a couple of them (Nichols and McVeigh) who did something really bad.

But it takes a truly Herculean effort to distort the evidence to imply that these groups are as dangerous, as active, as well trained or as imminent a problem as al Qaeda and its various couins. 

Excuse me if I think that the reason one does something like that is to cut off discussion of the other side of an issue without giving it an honest hearing. 

The other thing I’d mention is the extent to which Maddow has bought into the conventional wisdom that “the only reason the Tea Party hates Obama is that it’s racist!”

I’m sure there are some racists in the Tea Party, but if you really think this, you should go back and take a refresher course in the Clinton administration.   Clinton was white, and yet the hysteria over Clinton himself and his administration in general and the prospect of “Hillarycare” in particular was, if anything, far worse than anything the Tea Party or anybody else has managed to say about Obama.

No, they never accused Clinton of not being a United States citizen–but they did accuse him of hiring a hit man to murder Vince Foster, and an actual US Congressman from Georgia used to invite people to his home and shoot bullets into a pillow to demonstrate how the death of Foster “had to be” a Clinton-ordered “hit.”

And, while we’re at it, the left wing response to George W. Bush wasn’t exactly a model of reasoned thoughtfulness.

(Does anybody remember the Die ChimpHitler!  Die! Die! incident?)

For what it’s worth, I find all this enormously frustrating.  I make it a point to actually read both sides of the issue, or the spectrum of both sides.  I know what the actual objections to government health care reform are, and I know what the Tea Party actually means by “small government,” and I know the difference between the Tea Party and establishment (corporate) Republicans. 

And I spend day after da reading and watching people set up straw men and knock them down, and nobody discusses the issues.

I could do this from either side, but since I’m responding mostly to pro-liberal posts these days, let me pose a question for that side for the day.

I’ve spent a lot of the last fifteen years taking care of and/or dealing with people with terminal illnesses, and in the process I’ve arrived at a decision that’s very important to me.

At the end of my life, I want to be able to choose a hospital in which it is absolutely forbidden let patients “die with dignity.”

I want a hospital with an absolute, unquestioned, and unmitigated commitment to keeping people alive as long as possible.

I’m not being completely idiotic here.  I’m not asking to be kept alive on respirators and machines that make my heart beat.  What I am asking is that I be in a place where nobody will ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to cut off food and water to me as long as I’m able to ingest them. 

You can shut down the rest of the machines, but you can’t shut off my food and water.  And I want a hospital that would refuse to do such a thing to any patient inside its walls, ever.

Now, please note–I am not asking that all hospitals be like that.  I am not asking you to end your life in such a place, if you’d rather be in a place that goes by “die with dignity” rules.   Personally, I think the “die with dignity” movement should be called the “kill off the old people when they get to be too bothersome movement,” but you may not feel the same way.  You should have a hospital that runs by your rules in this matter, as long as I can have one that runs on mine.

ALSO note–it would NOT be acceptable to me to be in a hospital that says it “follows the patient’s wishes” and lets some people “die with dignity” and others hang on as long as they want.

Climate matters.  I’ve been around dying people and the doctors and nurses that treat them a lot in the last few years.  I know that there’s way too much of “she isn’t being reasonable, if she was, she’d know she doesn’t REALLY want to live like that.” 

I know that, when I’m sick and dying and not able to do for myself, the closest thing I have to protection against “she doesn’t REALLY want to live this way, she’s just not thinking straight,” and a grave earlier than I want, is an institution that does not compromise–no, not ever, period, no exceptions.

Now, if that is what is most important to me–can you tell me if, under a nationally standardized system as this new health reform bill aims to create, I would be able to find a hospital like that?

Or would every hospital be required to allow “death with dignity” and “living wills”? 

So that I’d be told–oh, don’t worry!  They’ll honor patient wishes!–even when I know that that isn’t true, and has never been true when such rules have been instituted, anywhere?

And if that is the answer, and this is the most important health care issue for me–should I support the new health care law?  And if I don’t, because of this, does that make me a “racist”?

I brought this particular issue up for a reason.  It’s what the “death panel” “hysteria” is all about, and on Rachel Maddow’s show as on Olbermann’s, all I ever heard about this “issue” was a disingenuous disclaimer that no such panels exist.

But saying that the people who were worried about that were just stupid or emotional, or that the people who targetted the end of life counseling as “death panels” were “lying” about them.

They were instead zeroing in on an approach to a certain problem that’s actually pretty well established–a “way of thought” that they recognize in the wider world and don’t like.

Oh, and one more thing.

I am, in spite of my reservations on this particular issue, a big supporter of a single payer health insurance system.

I do, however, understand why most of my working class relatives are not, and I understand what they’re afraid of, and I don’t think they’re being hysterical, stupid, or led around like sheep by the evil minions of Wall Street.

I’d be interested in a program where the two sides actually discussed this particular issue without just assuming that their opponents or evil, stupid or venal.

But if we’re going to go by the Canadian law’s definition of lying–which apparently doesn’t include the requirement that the speaker know that what he’s saying is untrue–well, Rachael Maddow isn’t the only person who has lied about this issue.

I don’t believe in signs and portents,  of course, at least not on any conscious level, but I’ve been having an interesting couple of days.

The thing this morning was just peculiar.  I have a 40 ounce tea cup, a huge thing, but not a very well made one.  In fact, I’ve got three identical ones, one I use every morning, one that I left at my parents’ house and that is probably now in storage somewhere, and one that I keep as a spare on my kitchen counter.

It turns out to be a really good thing I keep a spare, because this morning, while I was pouring boiling water over my usual two Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey tea bags, the thing just cracked apart.

And it made a really good job of it, too.  It came apart into three pieces and drained weak tea water all over my living room floor, since I’d decided to go in there and listen to some music this morning before I went off to teach.

I recouped and got the spare and made myself another pot of boiling water, but the thing was strange. 

I bought those cups as part of  a big gift package of coffee that was being offered in grocery stores a many Christmases ago, and then I brought them to Florida with me.  My father was still alive.  The hurricane that killed his roof was still far in the future.  And my mother still recognized me at least half the time when I went to visit her in her nursing home.

At any rate, it turns out that I’m just too restless to do nothing.  So here I am, and I’ll have you know that I sat down last night and did an entire set of grades and alphabetized the hand backs. 

I got my galleys sent back to St. Martin’s, too, and a ton more paperwork signed and sent for Greg’s surgery.  I think Matt thinks I’m crazy.  Sometimes I think I’m crazy.

At any rate, I’ve got two things, one a response to one of yesterday’s comments, one new.

The response to yesterday’s comments is this:  Robert noted that if you get your degree at one of the extension campuses of the main state university, all anybody knows is that you got it at the university.

And, I agree–the University of Connecticut does indeed have extensions.  In my day, they were limited to the first two years, with the rest to be completed at Storrs.  That might be different now.

But what I was talking about was not UConn extensions but a separate state university system.

Connecticut–like, I think, California–has a three tiered system of public tertiary education.

At the bottom are the community colleges.  At the top is UConn and its extensions.  In the middle are the old state “colleges,” now predictably called “universities”:  Western Connecticut State, Southern Connecticut State, Central Connecticut state.

These are more selective in their admissions than the community colleges, but not by much.  And they are a lot less selective in their admissions that UConn and its extensions.  The standards are middling, too.

And the graduate and professional schools–at least the good ones–keep sliding scales for judging the transcripts of different institutions.   If want to go to Harvard Law or the Yale Graduate School, you will in fact get less credit for an A from Wesconn than you will for an A from UConn. 

What’s more, if you want a traditional academic major–which you can get at UConn and its extensions–you can’t always get it at one of the States. 

I’ve never thought it was the case that only “trust fund babies” could, or should, or could benefit from a liberal education–but in a situation like this, only relatively well heeled ones can afford one.   It’s rapidly getting to the point that only the most expensive places offer a student the chance to get what was once universally considered to be a college education.

The last thing is about a link that showed up on FB from several people this morning, and that is about the Canadian Parliament’s rejection of a bid by the prime minister to get a law repealed that forbids “lying” on the Canadian airwaves.

This, the article exulted, was a great victory for “civility” in public discourse,  and it just went to prove that lying is what Fox and those right wing radio talk shows hosts know they do.  If they didn’t, why would they need to repeal a law against lying in order to get on the air?

It was one of those times, you know, when I had to sit there and wonder if people were actually this obtuse, or only this disingenuous.

So, first let me clear up a few things.  Do I think that Fox News and right wing radio talk show hosts like Limbaugh lie? 

Yes, all the time.

The problem is, I also think that MSNBC and Keith Olbermann lie. 

Fox lies about liberals and MSNBC lies about conservatives.   They lie outright, they lie by omission, and they lie by deliberately misrepresenting the positions of their oponents. 

I’ll admit that I don’t listen to talk radio–mostly because I can’t stand all the yelling–but both Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow are former radio talk show hosts, so I figure I have an idea.   Both of them either lie about their oponents or do absolutely no real research into their oponents ideas and views before they blast off with an opinion.

The problem with a law against “lying” on the airwaves is that the “lying” is always going to be in the eyes of the beholder.   When the American left wing was sending out nearly daily bulletins about how Bush and Cheney meant to declare marshall law, suspend the Constitution and install a fascist Republican regime that could not be voted out of office–all while stuffing ballot boxes and practicing wholesale election fraud–they were lying. 

When Canadian media repeated this sort of thing, it was lying, too.  But nobody, as far as I know, prosecuted any part of the Canadian media for doing it. 

My guess is that if Fox moved into Canada and started saying the same thing about Obama, they would be prosecuted for lying–and they would, in fact, be lying.

It’s the selective enforcement that’s the problem, and such selective enforcement is inevitable.  That’s why Swedish television wouldn’t allow Alan Dershowitz to be interviewd about his book The Case for Israel unless the station wanting to interview him also interviewed an opposing Palestinian view–but never required any station presenting the Palestinian review to also interview somebody defending Israel.

I wouldn’t go in to a country that had such a law even if I expected to tell nothing but the truth twenty-four seven, because I could not be assured that what I honestly believed to be the truth wouldn’t be labeled a lie and used to harass me simply for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom.

And I would know, up front, that my opponents could lie all they wanted to and never get called on it.

The Canadian Parliament’s decision not to repeal that “law against lying” isn’t a victory for “good journalism,” or for “civility in discourse.”

It’s a victory for censorship, pure and simple. 

My teacup seems to be holding up.   And I need the caffeine.

And not very coherent.

First, Mike–college loans may be a Republican plot, but the situation that got us there was squarely a project of Democrats. 

It was liberals, not conservatives, who wanted “everybody” to graduate from high school, and liberals–and liberaly theory–that responded to the fact that not everybody was doing that (and some minorities were not doing it in higher percentages than whites) by dumbing down standards to make the “goal” possible.

If high school graduation standards were now what they were in 1950, we wouldn’t need to be having a discussion about college loans.  Most people would not go to college, but they would reach the same skill levels most of them do now by going to high school with no out of pocket expense.

Employers would not need a college degree to have of hope of getting somebody literate, since a high school diploma would already guarantee that.

And since people would graduate from high school at the same rates they now graduate from “college,” there would not be a tidal wave of high school “graduates” to weed through when trying to fill a position.

I really, really, really don’t want the federal government paying for college, and I don’t much want the state governments to do it either, except for the state university systems. 

Centralization means standardization.   He who pays the piper calls the tune.

And I want lots of alternatives to the present state of university “education” in the US, because it is not, by and large, education.

Second, Robert–alas, you’re a good two decades out of date on college fees.

Tuition, room and board  for the University of Connecticut this year comes to $21,198. 

Granted, that’s better than a private college, but it’s still not low enough to make it possible for most people to work their way through the way they did in my father’s time.

Of course, you could reduce your costs even further, by doing two years at a community college and then two at one of the lower level state university campuses, like Wesconn or Southern.

The problems with this are two fold.

First, employers and graduate and professional schools tend to read community college as “so bad in high school he couldn’t get in anywhere else.”

And second, the fields you can “major” in are limited, and largely restricted to the vocational.  If you want an academic degree, you’re largely out of luck.  But even if you want something more substantive than “business administration” on any level, you’re largely out of luck.

If you want teaching or nursing, though, you’re golden.

The third thing has to do with something completely off the wall, but I couldn’t help noticing it.

Charlie Sheen seems to be going completely nuts, but on one level I sympathize with his rants.

I don’t know how Alcoholics Anonymous and 12 Step Programs because “accepted science” and people who specialize in them became “addiction specialists,” but when you’ve got “doctors” who fail to fix 95% of all the patients they “treat”–a number, by the way, that represents exactly the percentage of people who kick their addictions with no help at all–I think it’s breathtaking we call them experts in anything.

And now, I’m likely to be off the blog for a day or two. 

I just got a phone call from my mother’s nursing home, and she died at 3:45 this morning.

I’ll talk to everybody when I can breathe again.

I’ve just had one of those days where, by the end of it, I can barely believe I’m still standing.  I had about six million things to do, it all had to be done as quickly as possible, the places it had to be done all had to be inconveniently driven to, and there was thick fog and freezing rain.

And then, of course, we’ve got the obvious–two of those things could not be finished up today, so that I’m stuck going out at seven in the morning tomorrow to get them done.

It would be redundant to say that I need staff.

But the small good part is that all of this was actually important stuff, and not the endless make work of modern going along to get along.  So at least I feel like I’m accomplishing something.

Or doing the groundwork  for accomplishing something.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the posts of the last few days, and I want to get into a side issue.

Except that it isn’t a side issue.

Most of the students I teach are poor.

They are, in fact, very, very poor.  They’re not working class.  They’re not “working poor.”   They come from families that are destitute or something close to it.

If they’re “minorities,” they tend to come from the cores of small, dying industrial cities.   If they’re lucky, they live in public housing projects.  If they’re not, they live in one of the nearly ubiquitous “triple deckers,” wood frame houses with single apartments that run through each floor, three floors tall.

A lot of my white students live in triple deckers, too, but the ones they live in tend to be in more rural areas.  There are a lot of triple deckers lining the two-and-three street town centers of towns with populations in three figures.

The trouble with the three deckers is that they catch fire a lot, and when they catch fire they always seem to take a few people with them.   I knew a woman–not a student–who lost both of her two small children in one of those fires.

Here’s the thing–the places I teach are relatively cheap, and they offer a lot of financial aid.  No matter how much financial aid they offer, however, they’re almost never free, and that means that they’re charging kids whose families often either don’t have a car or have one that shares out with everybody (and starts about two thirds of the time), who lose their heat at least once every winter,  who think TGI Friday’s is an “expensive” restaurant–they’re charging these kids and their families money out of pocket to learn skills that they would have been able to learn free (with no out of pocket at all) in high school fifty years ago.

Whenever I hear somebody rattling on about “massive transfers of wealth” from the poor and middle class to the “rich,” this is what I think of, and it holds for lots of kids whose parents make a lot more money.

A year of tuition, room and board at a private university these days–not a good private university, but any private university–tends to run a minimum of $45,000 a year. 

If the kid is exceptionally talented and can actually get into an Ivy or the equivalent, the out of pocket won’t be all that bad–in the range of about $8,000 or so. 

But a lot of perfectly ordinary middle class kids from perfectly ordinary middle class families are paying full freight for second and third tier universities, at prices quite a bit higher than the minimum, and with little or no help. 

What they get for their money is almost never a real education in either Robert’s sense of the term or mine.  They don’t learn useful vocational skills, and they aren’t introduced to the scope and depth of Western culture, either. 

They spend four years taking a mishmash of random courses that don’t hang together in any particular way, at standards of “accomplishment”  that wouldn’t have passed muster at a Gold Coast high school in 1969. 

Their colleges do the best possible job of spending as little as possible to provide them with the “education” they think they’re paying for–hiring more and more part timers at rock bottom wages, raising class sizes, scrimping on the equipment provided in labs and practicums, requiring “general education” classes that amount to a kind of head tax, and offering courses required for the majors only alternate years, so that most students have to spend five or six (instead of four) expensive years getting through to the degree.

And all to end up at “skill levels” they would have reached before they graduated from high school fifty years ago.

In a real sense, we have done away with free public education in the United States.

The very best of our public schools do a stellar job for about the top ten percent of their students.  A Wilton High School will give its honors students an education that will beat Exeter’s on virtually every level.

But everybody else–at Wilton, too, but especially at lesser schools–is left to float, to “graduate” with little in the way of useful skills and many fewer at a much lower level than they would have managed a generation ago. 

And if they want to actually graduate from high school–to have the skills and knowledge they should have as high school graduates–well, they’d better be sure to be ready to lay out a lot of money and take a lot of loans.

I have no idea if I’m being very coherent here, but what seems to me is going on here is a massive scam–the educational equivalent of charging the same price for tuna fish but making the can only six ounces instead of eight. 

And the prices keep going up every year, just as the standards keep going down.

I mean, sigh.

Sigh.

Truly.

First, let me state what should be obvious–I wasn’t talking about useless “arts” degrees.

Granted, a useless arts degree would be just as useless as any other useless degree.  But an arts degree that actually was an arts degree would be very useful indeed, although in no sense vocational.

The useless degrees I was talking about, however, are useless business degrees.

Virtually all the people I’m talking about have undergraduate “degrees” in “business administration,” “management,” marketing,” “human resources” and other areas of that kind.

And the problem with those “degrees” is that they have virtually no content, no standards, and apply to nothing in the real world that exists outside of deliberate bureaucratic constructions.

Cathy’s director of student services, director of undergraduate studies and director of graduate studies will all have these kinds of degrees, as will all the people working under them, and there will be lots of them.

But those positions are at least screamingly within sanity, sort of.  How about a “director of student success,” with a staff of fifty?  For a college with, say, about 3000 undergraduates?

In case you’re wondering what a “director of student success” and an “office of student success” do, they:  keep track of the attendance and grade records of every student in every class; contact students who are failing to show up to urge them to show up; counsel students about the root causes of their failure to show up; keep track of students who are not handing in homework; provide tutoring for students to get them to hand in homework; run a writing center to provide students with editing services if they are unable to produce papers in standard college English…

You get the picture.

Here’s the thing about the “office of student success.”

First, as Cathy F notes, something of this kind eats up enormous amounts of money that could be used to hire faculty and staff for regular academic departments.  The present state of full time vs. adjunct faculty is almost certainly at least partially the result of the growth of just such departments as this.

Second, this department eats up enormous amounts of faculty time for both full and part timers, because as part of its “mission” it requires faculty to submit reqular reports on student attendance, student grades, and student compliance with assignment deadlines.

Third–and this is the kicker–this department is completely unnecessary at any university that is actually functioning as a university. 

It exists only because the university in question does not see its mission as educating anybody.  It sees its mission as getting paying customers in the seats and keeping them there.

That’s why it’s more than willing to spend full-time salary and benefit packages on 24 year olds with bachelor’s degrees in human resources, but virtually no money (and less and less every year) on faculty to actually teach the students anything. 

And since its mission has become getting paying customers in the seats and keeping them there, it doesn’t really care too much about whether or not the students who are admitted actually have the preparation to do actual college level work.  

It therefore admits more and more students every year whose preparation is inadequate even for higher-level high school work. It then shoves as many of these kids into “developmental” (read “remedial”) classes as it can, reduces requirements in regular courses to the ludicrous (it’s possible in some of the schools I know for a student to get through four years of “college” without every being required to read a single complete book or to do a research paper of any kind), and, when even that doesn’t work–well, we’ve got the “office of student success.”

At the end of four or five or six years of this kind of thing, you have a student who “graduates” with a “degree” that signifies…well, it isn’t quite  clear what. 

Even a degree in fingerpainting would have real value in the real world if it required students to read several whole books a semester and understand them and do the old-time standard 20 to 40 page research paper every single term with correct documentation and extensive sourcing.

At the very least, such a degree in fingerprinting would tell us that the student who successfully completed it was capable of sustained effort in a complex goal, the ability to discover and organize disparate elements of that goal, and a whole host of other things.

A student with one of these “business” degrees can “earn” one while never having to produce a single long paper, ever.  All tests are multiple choice or short answer, and the questions and answers are up on Blackboard in advance.   None of what he writes has to have correct grammar, punctuation and spelling–if we required that, too many people would flunk out. 

If he can’t get his act together to get to class or get his homework in, no matter how meager that homework is, there’s the “office of student success” to follow him around. 

And when he graduates, he’ll get a job in…one of those same administrative departments.

Yes, of course, while he has this job, he’ll be getting real pay and real benefits and living a comfortable enough life.

But he’ll be doing it at the expense of the rest of us.  It costs us all a lot more to keep these offices and departments open than the salary and benefits of their staffs and directors. 

It costs us first because such offices actually make the businesses and organizations they function in less profitable, less efficient, and less resistant to downturns in the economy and other random problems in the environment.

It also costs us because we’ve created a class of people for whom “college” is a largely standardless, valueless waste of four years whose only reason for existing is to make one “pay one’s dues,” after which he is entitled to a “career.”

And, of course, when businesses and other organizations start getting wise to just how wasteful this all is, the result is…a big pack of “middle class college graduates” who can’t get “middle class college graduate” jobs.

Businesses, by the way, are often stuck with similar largely useless or dysfunctional departments–departments to ensure compliance with Byzantine and often contradictory regulations and court decisions (see all equal opportunity hiring guidelines and then add court decisions about reverse discrimination), departments that exist as attempts to bulletproof the organization against employee and customer law suits–you can run this around the block a few hundred times.

Yes, there are certainly common sense regulations that must exist to keep this society functional, but we live in a situation where government tries to micromanage businesses and organizations and where businesses and organizations respond by trying to micromanage their employees, clients and customers.

But it’s all an illusion.  Big Giant Corp doesn’t move its operations to China because it can pay an engineer there a fifth of what it pays one here. 

That’s very nice, but the real bait is this:  it can do without a good five or six of its big bureaucratic departments altogether. That’s saving it a lot more money than the mere differential in particular salaries for particular positions. 

To the extent that AI will take over these kinds of jobs–I saw, great.  They shouldn’t exist to begin with. 

Do I think this means that there will be nothing but billionaires and starving masses?

No.

I think what it will mean is that we’ll finally have to start coming back to reality. 

Eventually, we’ll have to except what is true:  spending four years reading a chapter a week in a textbook and taking multiple choice exams twice a term does not make you “college educated,” even if the piece of paper you got at the end of it says you are;  declaring the wonders of the progress we’ve made in getting more and more people to graduate from high school or college does not mean we’ve actually done it if we’ve only done it by dumbing down the standards to the point where each level actually only indicates the accomplishments of two levels below it from a decade ago;  that there is no way to be “safe” and there never was.

And think.

I haven’t even gotten started on the thing about “don’t you dare get a job at McD’s to pay the bills when you’ve been laid off, because no decent business will ever hire you again for the kind of job you used to have.”

All right.  That’s not much of a post title, but I start a lot of sentences that way.

It’s Saturday, and I’ve been informed by a flurry of frantic e-mail that it’s been five days since I’ve posted to this blog, or maybe six.

And I don’t even have the standard excuses.  Usually, what happens is that it gets so cold that working in my office is excruciating.  I work in a sunroom, and I like it that way almost all the time.  I’ve got two walls of windows that let me look out on the back yard.  I can see turkeys and plot their murder.  I can see the neighborhood dogs and wonder why people let them wander around like that.  I can watch birds and squirrels.  Mostly, I can avoid that closed-in feeling that makes it so hard for me to work.

The downside, of course, is that two walls of windows are not much protection when the temperatures hit minus 7, no matter how high I put on the heat in the auxilliary heater.

But, like I said, nothing like that has been happening around here lately.  Mostly, I’ve just not been sleeping much.  I’ve got the new Gregor, whose deadline has been pushed up, so I’m doing almost twice as much editing as I ordinarily would to get the final draft in on time.   Then I’ve got the natural worries over Greg, whose first surgery is tentatively scheduled for the 17th of March. 

Then I’ve got school, but school has been less of a strain than it normally is.  I’ve got my schedule down to exactly one course that runs two days a week, in the early morning, so that by Wednesday I’m on a long week-end.  Other than that, I may pick up a night course for adults that runs only one night a week, and in the frame, too, so I’d still have the long week-end. 

At any rate, there’s not a lot of teaching to keep it on my mind.  But the double work load on the Gregor novel means my back aches a lot, which means I don’t want to sit at the computer, which means I don’t write a blog post. 

And, you know, with no sleep, I’m not sure how coherent I’d be anyway.

But I have been thinking about blog posts, mightily aided in that effort by the fact that Mike is also posting on FB, and what he’s posting is more doom, gloom, and AI is going to take everybody’s job away until we’re all lying in the street.

Which I still don’t agree with, but in my befuddled state over the last couple of days I actually tried to come up with something concrete to say about all this.

I therefore took a survey of exactly 92 people.  This is not a statistically significant sample, and it’s not a randomly chosen one.  The people were Bill’s cousins as far as I know them, plus their spouses, and my cousins on one side of my family (the other side is more difficult to get in touch with) and their spouses.  Beyond these 92, I also talked to all the adjuncts I know that I could get in touch with, which was another couple of dozen.

I want to report what I found in a second or two, but first I want to clear things up.

One of the problems with this entire discussion is that too many of the terms are vague.  What’s a “high paying job?”  Who counts as “middle class?”

For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to stipulate the following:

a) A middle class job is one in which the person working makes at least $45,000 a year and works in an office, or in sales, or in some other capacity that is not labor with ones hands, and which offers benefits, at least to the extent of health insurance.

b) An upper middle class job is one that satisfies all the requirements of the above but pays at least $100,000 a year.

c) A working class job is one that requires one to work with ones hands in some way, and that pays whatever it pays.

I deliberately left the question of the pay of working class jobs open, for reasons that will be plain a little further down.

But what I did not do is to define what makes a “well paying” job.  And I didn’t do that because I don’t know how to control for the situation on the ground.  If you make $60,000 a year and you live in Westport, you’re poor.  If you make that much and live in Fremont, Nebraska, you may very well be the richest person in town. 

For the purposes of “well paying,” we’ll say “gets your bills paid, including your mortgage, and gets you some of the things you want as well as all of the things you need.”

So, given these more or less loose definitions, how are my 92 doing?

Actually, pretty well.

Bill’s father and his father’s brothers, as well as some of the men on his mother’s side of the family,  worked in a local vacuum cleaner factory.  It was unionized.  It also packed up and moved to North Carolina back in the 1980s.

Of, their children, Bill’s cousins, all but one is working, and all of them are working full time.  And all their spouses are working full time who want to be.

The exceptions:  one member of the family just spent several years not working at all so that he could help his wife through terminal cancer.  He’s in bad health himself, and it’s unclear to me if he’s physically capable of going to work at all.  At any rate, he isn’t looking at the moment.

Two of the wives have small children and are working part time until those children are older.  I was informed, sometimes loudly, that this was their choice and I’d be an elitist bitch to assume otherwise.

So, you know, let’s let that one stand.

Every single person on that list working full time makes a middle class salary as defined above, and all of them have health insurance through their employers. 

Every single family has taken at least one “away” vacation in the last two years–and that means since the economic turn down.   The favorite choice was a week at DisneyWorld, and I’ve looked it up.  It’s not cheap.

Every single one of these families owns its own house and is current on its mortgage.  Most of them, to be fair, bought those houses before the 90s boom in prices. 

Only two people had been laid off since this turndown, and both of them worked for large organizations with layers and layers of middle managers.

And both were middle managers.  Both of them found jobs with comparable salaries within eight months of being laid off, and both of them found “middle class” jobs.  The jobs, however, were in much small organizations or institutions. 

Of course, these are the kinds of jobs Mike is afraid AI will replace, but they’re also the kinds of jobs I tend to think of as “largely useless.” 

I posted something about this ages and ages ago, but I’ll say it again.  We have a huge load of people in this country who are essentially doing no useful work.  They have jobs and titles and salaries and benefits, but they produce very little and nothing of substance.   The “work” they do is largely an artefact of the bureaucratization of business and the professions. 

Government offices can afford to do that kind of thing forever.  Private businesses cannot.  Those jobs were going to go whether AI was invented or not.

That said, the rest of the group is interesting.  The best paid among them, and the only ones who are financially in the upper middle class, are all working class on any other measure.   It turns out that plumbers make very good livings.  

The most impressive of the group were the two brothers who went into a plumbing business together a couple of decades ago, and in the meantime have managed to send 6 children through four year college courses without need a dime in loans to do it.

The least impressive of the group is the guy who works part time as a golf pro at a country club and full time as a PE teacher in the public schools in one of the less well-heeled towns of the state.  His children are still small, so I don’t know what college is going to amount to.  He was, however, one of the people who took his family to DisneyWorld for a week this year, and his wife stayed home full time until the kids entered school.  She now works part time in a dentist’s office.

Oh, and the other thing.

Every single one of these families (except the one with the wife who died of cancer recently) has a higher standard of living than their parents did.

It isn’t true that there are “no jobs” or even that there are no “well paying middle class jobs.”  And there are certainly many jobs that AI isn’t likely to snatch away from us (somehow, I don’t think it’s going to be a computer fixing my toilet).

What is true, however, is this, and that’s where the experience of the adjuncts came into play:

1) It is certainly true that certain kinds of jobs are disappearing, and those are not just manufacturing jobs but also the middle-management paper pushing gigs in large organizations.

The reason they’re not disappearing from smaller organizations is that smaller organizations almost never have the money to hire them in the first place.

But as difficult as it might be for the people who have these jobs to lose them and not be able to find another, the simple fact is that they were an illusion to begin with.   They’re the artefact of 60 years of demanding that everybody go to college and, when that ran into the wall that is reality, dumbing down the standards to the point where “college” became a euphemism for “junior high school level skills.”

And all of it delivered to kids with the message that those other jobs–plumber, electrician, machinist, you name it–were “bad” for a whole host of reasons. 

We have created a generation of workers who have never made any useful contribution to society and who have been miseducated in a way that makes it unlikely they ever will be able to.

But the second thing is more interesting yet, and that’s where the adjuncts come into play.

The adjuncts have, by and large, the kind of jobs Mike is talking about–part time, paying practically nothing, offering no benefits. 

Most of them are not unionized, but the ones that are are actually hurt by the unions they’re forced to join.  Those unions do not represent adjuncts directly, they represent “faculty,” in which is included full-time faculty.

The problem is that the interests of full time faculty and the interests of part time faculty are not necessarily in alignment.

The union has certainly gotten compensation-per-course levels raised to close to double what they were ten years ago, but at the same time it has negotiated contracts with the institution that include a limit on the number of courses an adjunct can teach in any one semester. 

The result is that adjuncts getting the new, higher salaries are actually making less money–by over a third–than they were at the original low salary when they had no restrictions on the number of courses they can teach.

And, since the contract stipulates that full time faculty must be provided extra courses to teach at adjunct salaries any time they want them, even if the only way to give it to them is to throw an adjunct out of the course she’s already been hired for–well, tough for the adjunct. 

And, of course, since such switches tend to come just days before the semester starts, there is no time for the adjunct to find another teaching job at another place.

Of course, the union also demands that the disrupted adjunct be offered another course in compensation, but it does not require that that course be on-site.  That means that an elderly adjunct who cannot drive at night can be offered a night course at a satellite campus forty miles away–and if she turns it down, oh, well.  That’s her choice.

Adjunct faculty positions are among the worst available out there for “middle class” people, but here’s the thing that really hit me.

In every single case, the difference between whether an adjunct managed to get out of the slave labor pool and into a full time job was easily predicted by age.

Almost all the full time people at my place had been adjuncts.  Every single one of them had applied for their full time positions when they were in their thirties. 

Every single adjunct I could find who first applied for a full time position after the age of 48 had failed to find one.

And yes, I know.  It’s against the law.  But it goes on anyway.

I’m willing to bet that this situation is general–that if you work at a standard white collar job and lose it, your chances of getting another one can be reliably predicted by age.

Some of this is rational.  It’s a pain in the butt to try to hire somebody new.  If I hire somebody who is 50 now, he’s likely to be gone in ten or fifteen years.  It’s expensive to provide health insurance for people over 50, so the younger my work force, the health care costs for the business go up. 

(Watch for a lot more age discrimination under the new insurance mandates.)

Part of it is a matter of existing set-in-stone bureaucratically derived pay scales:  person X with Y experience MUST BE paid more than person C with D experience.   Given a choice, they’ll take C. 

Which means that the longer you work and the better you are at what you do, the bigger a liability you become.

But I seem to have written a book here, and I’m really tired.

So maybe I’ll try to get back to all this later.

And Mike says:

>>>”OF COURSE jobs came to replace all those he listed–jobs as software engineers, technical writers, special effects technicians, CGI artists and directors,”

No.

>>>

And I say:  YES.

I wasn’t giving a comprehensive list, just a set of examples.

And the fact is that there are not fewer jobs in the US now than there were 50 years ago, there are more.

And some of those jobs certainly pay less, but some of them pay more, and some jobs that used to pay very badly pay much better now than they did.

And yes, eventually the jobs we know of now will go away too–they always do–and it will be something else in demand instead of what we have.

And then what will work will be something else.

And then, like now, most jobs WON’T be in big companies or offer stability.

As for the rocket–bring it on.

I’m not afraid of this kind of change, and I see no indication that we have stopped being what we have always been:  the creature that innovates and invents. 

I don’t have a lot of patience with the idea that well, these new jobs won’t count, because you won’t be able to do them if you haven’t bothered to get much training and you’re not very bright.

This is beginning to remind me of the obesity hysteria–we’re all getting fat and dying early because of obesity related diseases!

Except, well, on the whole we’re all getting fat, but we’re ALSO  (on the whole) living longer.

Somebody ought to investigate the dissonance.

The machines are taking all our jobs away–but on the whole, we’ve got more jobs (not less) than we used to have and one the whole people are better (not worse) paid than they were before.

Don’t believe me?

Go look at the average middle class house from, say, 1955.  It’s about 1000 square feet (half the average now), has no central air conditioning, contains exactly one television and one if any cars.  There are no game systems, no computers, no DVDs, and very little in the way of stuff to play music except maybe on single hi-fi, and probably not. 

And, yes, we do go into debt for some of that (or some people do), but not nearly everybody does, and debt levels won’t even begin to explain the expansion of personal comfort over the last 50 years.

And the bottom line is and always will be simply this:

Apple gets to be a billionaire company by selling things to people who are not billionaires.  That’s the case with everybody else–oil companies, electric companies, electronics companies, you name it.

The dystopia you imagine cannot exist.

If we ever even approached it, it would fall apart.  Wealth isn’t just “there.”  It must be created.  An Apple Computer with nobody to sell computers to will go bankrupt.   A Google without companies able to sell stuff to people and therefore take out ads would go bankrupt.

The consumers are as important to the system as the producers.  A world in which Apple makes one computer a year for one rich guy in Malaysia is a world in which Apple is just about as poor as everybody else.

And everybody knows it.

Every once in a while, I’ll admit, I get frustrated.

But let’s see what I can do about this. 

Mike Fisher wrote:

>>>The steel mills went away. And no jobs came to replace them.

Many of the auto plants have gone away. And no jobs came to replace them.

Other manufacturing jobs have gone away. And no jobs came to replace them.

Then help desk jobs went away. And no jobs came to replace them.

Law firms (some of them anyway) are farming out much of their legal research overseas. And no jobs have come to replace them.

Oh, some of the people have moved on to other jobs. Low paying, usually service industry of some kind, jobs.

Now the machines are threatening to take over even the jobs that have been shipped overseas AND higher skilled jobs that are, as yet, still here.

There will be no jobs to replace them.

It hasn’t worked that way in a long time.
>>>

And this is such unrelieved nonsense, I don’t know where to begin.

OF COURSE jobs came to replace all those he listed–jobs as software engineers, technical writers, special effects technicians, CGI artists and directors, all those people who do everything necessary to get you CDs, DVDs, cable and digital television…

And I could do that for a day and a half, listing all the jobs that didn’t exist in the year I am born that people work at now, many of which are actually going begging because we can’t find the people able to do them.

If no jobs had come to replace the ones that went missing in more traditional industries, we would have fewer jobs available to do than we used to have.  We in fact have more.

If all the jobs that came to replace the ones that went missing were lower paying than the ones we lost, then we would have fewer higher paying and more low paying jobs available–and what we have is the opposite.  There is actually a lot more and a lot higher paying work for people with training than there has ever been before, and there’s no sign I can see of that stopping.

What will we do when automation takes over all that other stuff, assuming it does?

I don’t know.  It will be something we haven’t invented yet.

All the doomsday scenarios depend on the assumption that people will stop being people.  We will not invent anything new.  We will not change in any way.  Everything will stay just the way it is now, except automation will come and take our jobs away.

I’ll say it again–nonsense.

Or, not to sound elderly, bullcrap.

Part of the problem here is the the unstated assumption–if  jobs go away, the only was they can be “replaced” is as jobs for the same people at the same skill levels with the same benefits and salaries as before.

But that’s never happened, and it’s never going to happen.

Some of what Mike is discribing is what I think of as a correction, and I think it’s very real that that correction is coming.  It’s just that I don’t think it’s a bad thing.  I think it’s a good one.

Until very recently, neither teaching nor medicine was considered a way to make a great salary and great benefits.

Why not?

Because these are not market operations.   Neither sick people nor very young people have lots of money.  They can’t pay through the nose to learn Aristotle or get their gall bladders fixed.

We’ve blinded ourselves to this reality by pushin the payment for these services off on third parties–insurance companies and the government, mostly–who can pay inflated wages and benefits for skills that have always been in demand, but that have never before been remunerative.

And I probably spelled that wrong.

In the years before WWII, college professors had patches on their tweed jackets not as a fashion statement, but because without them the jackets got holes and the professors weren’t making enough money to get them replaced.    Doctors were in the same boat. 

People who went into these profession went into them out of dedication, not the conviction that this was the best way to be the snag the accoutrements of the upper middle class.  Hospitals and schools were deemed charitable institutions and given tax exemptions on the assumption that they provided a service that could not and probably should not be provided profitably.

If we’re going back to that, I’m really not going to be very upset.  It bugs the hell out of me that I am taxed at a higher and higher rate to keep a hospital like, say, Yale-New Haven open, when that place operates its billing department in ways that would be deemed unacceptable in a credit card company.

As for writers, a fair number of people would say that your only choice would be either no career or best selling author now, but it’s not that simple.

First, a lot of what Mike is talking about happened a long time ago, even if not with the aid of AI.  The mystery magazines were paying the same rate per word for short stories in 1980 as they had been in 1930.  Do the math and you’ll see that that was an enormous cut in pay, so much so that it was no longer possible, by 1980, to make a living writing mystery stories.  A

As for short articles in magazines–well, if they can do that, God bless them.  But it won’t save the magazines anyway, more and more of which are going out of business every year. 

And they’re going out of business for precisely the reason I’m not worried about machines taking over from writers, artists, and musicians any time soon.

Or ever.

The machine scenario is just stage forty-seven of the corporate “takeover” of movies, books, television, and music.  That’s in scare quotes because it hasn’t actually happened.

What has happened is this: 

Great, big, huge media conglomerates have arisen, and they have proceeded to behave like great, big, huge media conglomerates.

The kind of people who are successful in such organizations have no idea why people listen to music or go to the movies or read books.  They look around at what sold well last year and go, “Aha!  What people want is detective stories about nuns with talking cats!  We’ll get somebody to write a talking cat mystery!”

So they do that, and their talking cat mystery flops all over the place, and they wander away confused–but also panicked. 

Something went wrong, but they don’t know what.  And since they don’t know what, they don’t know how to stop it from going wrong the next time.  They do know that talking cat mysteries are just bilge.  Nobody wants those.

So the next really good talking cat mystery to come along gets turned down by every big conglomerate.  Then it gets picked up by a small press.  Then it takes two years to hit #4 on the Amazon list.

Then…all the conglomerates want talking cat mysteries again.

You see it happen in music and movies all the time. 

The very same technology that makes it possible for the conglomerates to get away with hiring fewer and fewer people means that individuals who aren’t conglomerates or much or anybody at all can make and market their own books, records, movies and Internet television shows.

It’s happening as we speak.  Dan Brown self-published The Da Vinci Code when nobody standard would publish it.  So did the guy who wrote The Celestine Prophecy.  The corporations jumped in and bought both after they were already proven best sellers on their own.

The writers and the artists and the musicians will be fine in the long run, as long as they can change and adapt.

The jobs of the future will look different, feel different and be different than the ones we have now.

They will be in areas and industries that don’t exist yet and that we cannot yet imagine.

But not only has that process not stopped happening, it’s actually working at a far accelerated pace from anything we saw before 1960.

Change is not bad, and it is not going to lead to anything at all like your dystopia.