Mhall46184@aol.com
On the Nature of Work
“What should they find incredible, since they no longer believed in a rational universe?”
-C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
In Mr. Johnson’s 6th grade science class we kidlets learned that work is defined as the transfer of energy from one object to another. For many of Mr. J’s students work was further defined by their parents as farming. Still, I’m not sure how many joules are required for a small boy to urge balky jersey cows x 24 from the woods to the dairy barn at five in the morning with the sleet rattling. The small boy, now all grown up, knows only that he is thankful daily that he will never, ever have to do that again.
In a movie set in Nazi-occupied Poland, a number of folks gather discreetly to view a play, which is forbidden. While waiting, a man asks the woman next to him what her occupation is. She mentions that she was studying law before the war, and asks the man his job. “I break rocks,” he replies proudly.
The scene is a bit contrived, but is meant to demonstrate the Christian concept that all honest work is noble. This is why attorneys and quarrymen belong to the same country clubs. Still, the concept of the dignity of good and useful labor obtains.
Last week a young American woman’s dissatisfaction with her useless work appears to have motivated her to violence, resulting in the wounding of others and her own death.
Her work was neither in law, milking cows, or quarrying rock, but in taking pictures of herself for a scheme on the InterGossip.
This, in contemporary slang, is A Thing.
A man take pictures of his dachshunds or his children or himself doing awkward things and posts them to YouTube on the InterGossip. If enough people – really, really, really bored people with no purpose or direction in life – are determined by a corporate matrix (that sounds like something from cheesy outer-space films from the 1950s) to watch certain moving pictures, advertisers are matched with the little films and the poster receives a small stipend for every contact, or “hit.”
Apparently a favored few make a living by humiliating their dachshunds, their children, and themselves for the amusement of the unfocused.
This is said to be work, but it produces no food, no music, no fencing, no housing, or anything else of utility or joy.
This poor woman took humiliating pictures of herself glaring at the camera, dancing awkwardly, and giving opinions. She received money for doing so.
She felt she wasn’t being paid enough money for her specialness, although she had enough disposable income to buy herself a pistol and then drive to YouTube headquarters to shoot people she had never met.
The unhappy woman promoted herself as an “athlete, artist, comedian, poet, model, actor, singer, director, producer” (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/youtube-shooter-nasim-aghdam-left-behind-twisted-online-trail-article-1.3914285) as well as a vegan bodybuilder and an animal rights activist. Human rights, nahhhhhh.
Apparently she felt that real work – milking cows, breaking rocks, practicing law – was beneath the dignity of an artist, and was so obsessed with making and watching images of herself on a little plastic screen that in the end she ceased to exist at all.
Poor, sad woman – if only she had herded a few cows or worked the counter at the fast-foodery or volunteered at the local charity re-sale shop she might have realized through her aching feet and tired muscles that she was a child of God who was both useful and needed.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment