More than a foot of snow to move from everything this morning. I think we've had about six feet in the last two weeks, literally. I tell myself that if this keeps up I'll rejuvenate myself with all the shoveling. Then when I'm half way through it I think I'll die before the end of the day.
For the morning, at least, I'm going to just point out that I think it's wrong to limit what I talk about on the basis of things being pleasant or fitting into some sense of what is permitted or what fits into some scheme of propriety. I deal with a lot of serious, violent, vicious practices and economic crimes and the hypocrisy that allows those practices to flourish and be mistaken for something good and, in the worst cases, politically, at least, an expression of liberalism.
There's no pleasant or nice way to effectively confront those kinds of things, suppressing the reality of what is being done or advocated through a conventional bowdlerization of it enables the hypocrisy and, also, the continuation of that practice. And the only reason to write a blog is to try to have some effect. I did that last night on another of my blogs in a way that has made some people really angry and outraged. Considering what the porn industry includes as its standard work requirements, I don't have any qualms about bringing it back up close, personal and involving them and their family members to people who advocate for the porn industry. They always think it's OK for other people but not for them and theirs. Well, I'm in the economic class that doesn't have the luxury of considering it from that intellectual remove. I have a relatively close relative who became addicted to drugs and was sucked into that line of "work". I have other loved ones who live on the edge who could be forced into it. When you advocate porn-prostitution, you've volunteering members of my family to serve in your pseudo-liberal fantasy sex industry, which is far too real for the people who are used by it.
If I could, I would require anyone who advocates the commodification, use, harm and destruction of other people, in almost ever case poor people, people without power, people who are vulnerable and desperate, be required to be subjected to the actual conditions which they advocate for those other people. When it's something like porn or prostitution or mining, or back breaking, dangerous and dirty work of any kind there is no nice way to say it to nice, clean people who never dirty their nails or high market clothing in a day. To paraphrase the line from Bob Dylan, their souls are dirty though their hands are clean. The stink of it is something you can't smell with your nose but it's there and pervasive and it spreads over the entire world, choking out anything good. I'm not going to spray a bit of perfume and ignore that it's poisonous.
Not necessarily relevant, I suppose, but I noted at Salon recently that all the concern for football players (now the Super Bowl is over, who cares, right?) was odd, considering how many people toiled in jobs that cost them physically, that wore them down, that even killed them outright (I remember a WSJ article about logging, and how office workers in Manhattan would be appalled if co-workers died regularly at work in the manner loggers do).
ReplyDeleteI pointed out football players in the NFL are by and large, stinking rich, but their money is earned through physical labor, not mental. So it shocks us that they get hurt, while we benefit from the bodily labor of people daily: construction, restaurants (I worked for a caterer briefly; let me tell you, food prep is physical work, and damned hard work. Not much of it, aside from heating up the food, can be done by machine), etc., etc. Those people affect my daily life far more than football players do, and yet I'm supposed to feel bad for watching a football game.
I'm not supposed to feel anything when I sit down in a restaurant, except hungry. I'm not supposed to feel anything when I walk into a building built by others, kept clean by others, etc., etc., etc. iI am supposed to feel guilty, however, about the lives of a handful of men who play professional football.
Yeah, right.