Thinker, teacher,

poet, preacher, 

 

Mother, father,

voted-for-Dan-Rather, 

 

I am

What I do, not what I say

 

If I do not do, 

do I not have a say?

 

Why is it enough to tell you what I do? 

For a living?

When I would much prefer to tell you what I am?

When I feel alive?

 

Blue-collar

White-collar

segregation 

by uniform

 

Public sector

Private sector

divided 

by pay-slips

 

Slogans to believe in:

 'Arbeit macht frei'

'careers for life'

your career for my life?

'fair exchange is no robbery'...

 

Microserfdom

personal freedom

 

Freedom to relate

freedom to individuate

freedom to sleep in late

 

The concentration camp transposed to the corporate cubicle

defined by our employment status

symbol:

golden handcuff

velvet glove

 

Battle

scars

of the boardroom

cutting up 

the world

into profit... 

                     sized...

                                    subjects 

 

With so many people out of work and looking for work now there are important questions it is tempting to overlook in this atmosphere of ambient economic and cultural anxiety.  These are questions that have a significant bearing on our future relation to the culture of employment, perpetual questions such as:

 What the world calls 'work', is that what we call' work'?

Why do we work?

What do I call myself:

Employer or employee?

Drone or director?

Wage-slave or  new-wave?

What I call myself, must it be simply a derivative of what I do? 

 

Before this recession there had been extraordinary changes in our relation to work: the traditional  'job for life' had been replaced by the 'mid-life crisis', the idea of re-training and re-education in one's middle age was becoming the new tradition.   A generation of serfs were being superseded by a generation of self-starters.     We were raising children to believe they could be whatever they wished.    Celebrity programmes and the internet offered everyone the chance to have much longer than Andy Warhol's proposed fifteen minutes of fame.   The world was our oyster and we were  each a grain of sand that could yet become a pearl.

The economists warn that this recession may be followed by a depression.   I agree.  But the depression I fear is one of hopelessness, lost dreams, flattened expectations, destroyed ideals.    So, I urge you to consider once more:   What do I call myself?  What I call myself, must it be simply a derivative of what I do?  What I call myself, is that the limit of what I can be? 

                              ***

We all recognise the joke because it has universal appeal: 

"Help! Help! My son - the engineer - is drowning!"

Who does she fear losing: 'son' or 'engineer'?

                               ***

Meanwhile,  here's Sinead singing of two lovers who have only love, of a suitor who will not be slighted for his  lack of worldly goods...