Perhaps I have this wrong.
I swear I remember a time when novelists portrayed the life of the bureaucrat, politician, or prison guard as the bleakest of all vocations; barren, grey, full of the tedium of rules, regulations; of capricious changes in protocol. I swear such jobs were described as the very acme of inefficiency, laziness, and meaninglessness. And I swear that other storytellers talked about the dreariness of those bureaus that were indeed incredibly efficient, portraying them as mindless, soulless assembly lines of conformity, warning us all that the perfectly efficient world was a dead one. Like a concentration camp, full of mechanical, dehumanizing harmony.
But perhaps I have this wrong.
I swear I remember a time when being an employee of the state was something one admitted with reluctance, fearing embarrassment. Unless one was a governor, or some other such personage of apparent import (like a foreign diplomat), a person did not generally flaunt that he or she was on the public payrolls. After all, state workers were not just seen as poorly compensated. They were seen as somewhat incompetent. Saying one worked in the public sector was not the sort of thing one boasted about at a dinner party, unless one simply meant to boast about job security or some other banality.
But perhaps I have this wrong.
I have this vague but haunting recollection of teachers, singers, poets, rock stars and filmmakers, all warning me about the vapidity, the soul-stripping vapidity, of work in government, of employment in the wastelands of civil service where conformity is tantamount -- for the collective "good." I thought I was weaned on rebelling against this soul-robbing collectivization. Wasn't I? Wasn't I told that the public sector, that world encased in red-tape and regulations and reforms and agendas and referendums and motions and amendments, was a black hole of creativity? Wasn't I warned to flee such places? Weren't these places and jobs always portrayed as eternally dull and insipid, inspiring nothing but listlessness and ennui? What about "estrangement" and "alienation"? Weren't these the offspring of the government complexes epitomized in the flat cement of the Berlin Wall? Wasn't I told to dream big dreams, to be my own person, to find my own way, to be a free spirit creating my own meaning, my own value and art? Wasn't I told to cultivate my own sense of the beautiful? I swear I was told these things, and that the state, the enemy of beauty, was death, just like the state hospitals were death: that if you wanted the worst humanity had to offer, just turn to the government for a job, or real help, or some cure.
But perhaps I have this wrong.
I can't tell you where these images come from, the ones I have in my head, of drab and pitted hallways, of neighborhoods and projects -- often the same thing -- stretched out in grotesque repetition, cut in perfect egalitarian geometry: of impersonal streets on which one could only see blank-eyed pedestrians, or bicyclists rolling toward some government factory. I don't know where I heard comics mock "Gubmint cheese" and other sub-standard "charitable" handouts. I don't know where I heard satirists sneering at military housing, or condemning the projects I saw as a kid in the south Bronx, Newark, Jersey City, or the fringes of Philly. And I swear I was told that a government-made vehicle was a "shit box," especially if it came from those places where government was at its most-controlling best.
But perhaps I have this wrong.
Where, I wonder, did I learn to cringe when that huge family in upstate Wherever -- where all of them were employed by the prison or state college -- told me that I ought to get a "real" job and "work for the state?" Somewhere I must have learned to recoil when I heard of some poor sap who had to go to the state hospital for surgery, but I don't know where. Surely I must have been told by someone that having a public defender instead of a private defense lawyer was for losers, that everyone knew great lawyers didn't defend the lower primates in district or county court. Somewhere along the way someone must have told me that the county nursing home was not where I wanted to live out my days. Didn't someone tell me these things?
Where, oh, where did I learn to equate the state with mediocrity, and far worse? And where did I get the idea that the private sector was where the achievers were, where talent flourished, where the best of the best were allowed to innovate, to explore and create and create and create, and were then challenged to innovate even more? (Oh, yes, I am aware of the dehumanizing potential of the free market and unfettered industry, but I am not suggesting these are lovely, either. But I may be suggesting that they are lovelier.)
All I can conclude is that I invented this all by myself. This is my doing. I am just dreaming that school -- and art and music and film and literature and church and nature -- taught me that the labors of the state, when made the highest good of society, are hell on earth.
But perhaps I have this wrong, too.
©2010/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.
