What are we?

I haven't written in this blog in months, because I'm kinda chasing my tail writing two books at once, and it doesn't leave much time or headspace for essay writing. But damn. Once in a great while, even whilst embroiled in fiction, I just get too confused and pissed off about an essay-lengthworthy topic to just bitch about stuff to my two-legged and four-legged roommates. So here comes an essay.

I admit it: the only TV news I can tolerate watching is comedy news. (John Stewart, the Colbert Report, South Park.) The reason being that they aren't just filling time and making words come out of people's mouths; they really have to kind of get their shit together if they want to get laughs. (Also, I'm addicted to comedy, and I usually hate what's going on in the world, so the laffs are the spoonful of sugar that makes the awful, awful medicine go down.)

What I'm confused and pissed off about, thanks to Stephen Colbert's recent short segment on prison labor, is the question: What the hell kind of economic system are we living under, anyway, and where's the fucking exit door? I think I've mentioned before that the new global economy often looks to me like corporate feudalism. The prison labor situation, on the other hand, makes the U.S. chunk of that globe look like someone just deliberately cherry-picked the worst aspects of a "free" (as in free-falling) large-scale corporate market system and the worst aspects of a communist system and threw them in a blender with about ten pounds of dog shit.

What's going on is this: UNICOR, a corporation that's owned by the U.S. government (whuh?!) has a contract to provide the U.S. government with goods such as military uniforms and solar panels. They pay their workers hourly rates as low as 23 cents. (For some reason, the federal minimum wage does not apply to prison labor. I guess they're supposed to be paying their "debt to society"... by undercutting law-abiding citizens for a job. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. So much sense my cerebral cortex just said "fuck it" and started trying to figure out how it can set up a whiskey distillery inside my skull.) Their contract stipulates that they are the ONLY company that can sell the government certain things (it used to also stipulate that they could only sell to the government, but now that restriction has been lifted, and they can now also compete on the free market... with companies who have to pay their workers a minimum wage. That's like making one guy fight with two hands literally tied behind his back).

(For more reporterly, less frantically-ranting information on the issue, look at this shit: http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-prison-labor-is-forcing-small-businesses-to-close-factories-2012-9)

But wait, you say, how on earth can somebody in the U.S. feed themselves on only 23 cents an... ohhhhhhh, yeah. These are PRISONERS. They're living on prison food and sleeping in prison beds; hardly an enviable lifestyle, but one which is paid for not by the prisoners themselves but through taxes.


So as a taxpayer, you are actually subsidising, through the state, the feeding and sheltering of a SECOND dirt-cheap labor force--as though four billion starving third-world peasants weren't competition enough--which is now going to fuck over your going rate as a wage earner through the free market. WHILE YOU ESSENTIALLY PAY THEIR MISSING WAGES OUT OF YOUR POCKET. Your taxes are what is making them cheaper labor than you are, in other words. If you've ever wanted to star in a three-hole gang rape porn video, lucky you, because you're the only bottom who's going to enjoy this production!

Your taxes go up, your wages go down... too far down for you to buy health insurance, but not quite far down enough to get subsidized health care. So you'll also get to pay the new penalty tax for being uninsured (because where else are we going to get the money to subsidize health care for people who are barely poorer than you are?) WHILE you go without health care. Have fun dying of your next untreated disease! Well, by that point most people will probably be ready to be done with all this shit anyway.


Sometimes I think the government and big business have made a fun-times sport* out of fucking up people's lives, just to see which one can be more effective at it--and since they're our two major institutions (and one's binary-based political stance is supposed to be based on which one we "like" -- which only works for me if by that you mean which we would most "like" to see holocausted by a joint act of an extremely pissed-off coalition of every deity imaginable), this just looks like gloating to me. "Would you like to be a pro-business Republican and agree to get cornholed by megacorporations run by people whose families had the game tied up before your parents' parents were born? Or would you rather be a pro-government Democrat and agree to get cornholed by a tax system that will take part of your measly paycheck and use it on ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING BUT anything that would ever benefit you in any way? Your third choice is don't vote, and then you don't get to complain about anything we ever do to you because you're an irresponsible twat!" Uh, actually, if you could just drop me off on the moon next time you send a rocket up, I'd be fine with that.


* A sport where all the players are free agents and can swap teams at any time; if you'll recall, most members of Congress are either past or future corporate execs/consultants/lampreys

No, actually, it's not all about us

After somewhat obsessively reading the entertainingly hysterical forum-chat attacks on antinatalists that have been linked though Jim Crawford's blog over the past couple of years, and after recently being trolled extensively (also entertainingly) as an antinatalist in the comments section of Andy Nowicki's review of my book NVSQVAM on the AR blog (http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/untimely-observations/anti-life-fiction/ ; it's a thoughtful and lovely write-up but my god, I had no idea such a large percentage of the male Internet population never gets laid, ha ha), I feel qualified to make a generalization about pronatalist arguments.

To wit: breeders* (or would-be breeders) will, upon encountering antinatalist ideas, angrily grasp and sling the closest ad hominem fecal mass, whether or not they know anything about the, er, homo in question.

One of the preferred dismissals is to assume and declare that anyone who avoids creating life must lead a particularly shitty one, and is merely having a tantrum out of his or her pathetic personal bitterness. Or conversely, that anyone with a negative life philosophy must have a terrifically privileged life, and is simply lying around being angry out of spoileditude. Though some trust-fund babies are no doubt unjustifiably sullen, and some antinatalists suffer terrible diseases which illustrate far too clearly to them the horrors life is capable of inflicting on its inmates, I get the feeling that most antinatalists are in fact ordinarily fortunate people.

Most of the antinatalists to whom I've spoken or whose posts I've read seem to hold down jobs (at least intermittently, during the past few economically inclement years) which we like or tolerate or hate to varying degrees; most of us have a decent level of education, whether gained through autodidactic methods, universities, or both; I for one, while disgusted with the current global economy and my own treatment at its hands, have been enormously lucky in some of the non-economic gambles life prods us to take.

I've been overall quite lucky in love and friendship, particularly at present; I'm terrific at keeping myself entertained, and while I'm too viscerally disgusted by the glad-handling and dissembling skills that a better economic life would seem to demand to successfully develop them, I do get along with my fellow humans quite well when I engage them on a sincere and not a business level (and even when the levels are mixed). I'm talented at work that impassions and entrances me, even if deep down I know all endeavors are pointless; I'm quite easily entertained, and I get probably more pleasure than the average yay-to-lifer from the oft-lauded simple things like pets, books, sunsets, good weather, walks, conversation, and fellow-feeling.

I may display some depressive and crotchety traits due to my relentless realism, but neither anhedonia nor schizophrenia has darkened my doorstep, and my sense of humor has yet to fail me in a tight spot. I do not live in a radioactive mud hut in Cambodia, nor do I live in a shiny condo that Daddy paid for; I'm neither a 40-year-old-virgin nor a genitally surfeited rock star. I've never been able to afford a car, but I live in an urban area with somewhat functional public transit; I can usually eat something reasonably close to what I want to eat, although the fact that I genuinely love peanut butter toast really helps; I enjoy good health except for my fragile knees, asthma, allergies, and chronic mysterious stomachaches; I'm nearsighted, but my prescription is exactly the same in both eyes, a rare bit of good luck within the bad which frees me from having to keep track of which side of the goddamn contact lens case I've stuck which lens in.

In short, a human of average fortune. Neither privileged nor especially miserable. I may object to life in principle, but I do a pretty fair job of enjoying my own, even if sometimes all I'm savoring is the tang of irony.

So why would I cruelly deny my ovarial fruit the chance to share in those kitties and sunsets, if I'm so content with my own lot?

Because I'm capable of realizing and appreciating how lucky I am. Because I'm aware of the suffering of others. More vitally, because I'm capable of realizing how fragile my luck is, and by extension how precarious a life I would offer my offspring, no matter how rosy things looked when I decided to get knocked up. The Greek tragedies have much to teach on that front, but simple daily observation of the sports pages should be enough to drive home the point that no winning streak lasts forever, no matter how great you are; to paraphrase a recent Onion bit, every athlete eventually loses his grudge match with Time. Christ, look at old Brett Favre. Tomorrow you could go nuts the way he did, or get cancer. Wouldn't cancer and pregnancy be fun to go through simultaneously? And what a lovely story that would make for your motherless child to tell her friends.

This precariousness should be particularly easy to understand for Westerners who are currently in their prime. A decade is a long time in the global economy, and it's going to take two of them for the baby who's currently safe in your middle-managerial, yoga-toned womb to grow into a full-fledged worker bee. If things seem tough now that a salary freeze has forced you to trim your caffelatte consumption, just think what might be by the time Junior is flat-out working for the Chinese.

Do you suppose I'd feel differently if I were living in a more perfectly stable place and time? No doubt I would. But I wouldn't think differently.




* My use of this term is indeed pejorative, though not in the usual sense; while gay pride-ists (as though being born with ANY set of genes justified the folly of human pride) use it to refer snidely to heterosexuals, whatever their actual reproductive behavior, I use it to refer snidely to anyone who deliberately makes children, including gay people.

Welcome to my blog, HR folks/prospective employers, or: Freedom of Speech is a Serious Thing

What is this, Communist Russia?

Yeah, my resume looked pretty good; I have not one but two hard-earned BAs in difficult subjects and an employment track record that includes five years of being entrusted with perfecting the copy at a major metropolitan weekly newspaper. But then you Googled my name and you found the blog which I felt I was forced to begin if I wanted to support my fiction writing with an online presence. Now that we're both here, instead of you summarily deciding that I am far too cranky and dark in my humor to ever slip into a persona that will work for your team, why don't we, instead, have a short word about freedom of speech, followed by a slightly longer one about hiring policies.

Allowing freedom of speech is one of the things that makes our society something to be proud of. Indeed, it is shameful for political regimes to lock people up for stating unpopular opinions.

But at least in prison, even most political prisoners get fed.

So why is it OK to de facto starve people who don't write what you consider to be the orthodox opinion on their Facebook pages, blogs, and Twitter feeds? Social media and the blogosphere remain the main access point to public and social speech that most people have.

Making hiring decisions based on what you read on my blog, or asking to see my Facebook feed, is not just impinging on my freedom of speech, it is failing to even recognize the existence of personas. Do you appear to others to be the same person at work that you are at your Zumba class? You don't do stupid dances in the boardroom, and I am not going to come into the office and lecture people about antinatalism.

In fact, I'm generally popular in the places I work, except with the assholes, whom I simply avoid if possible; I avoid office politics, even if I talk about politics on the blogosphere, and contrary to my cranky online presence I am actually quite chipper at work, simply because it makes others around me feel better, which in turn makes me feel better. It's rather a mistake for you to throw my resume on the rejects pile.

Now. Can we talk about the possibly even more shitheaded mistake you may turn around and make while rejecting me? Let's talk about "experience." May I ask what you're thinking when you write an ad looking for someone with five years' experience in an extremely specific sector of a specific industry? You do know what you're going to wind up with, don't you? Well, unless you get a very devious liar for a new employee--congratulations!--you will get someone who's merely been lucky.

Because we all know no one ever gets experience without having experience anymore; after all, you do design the hiring process to work that way! Someone who got that hard-to-get first experience is not necessarily going to be the best person to eventually shine at the work; they're more likely to be someone who got the job through their mom, or dad, or college roommate, or cousin... in short, someone who's not only been basically picked at random based on his degree of separation from Kevin Bacon, but someone who is not likely to appreciate his position, since he didn't have to do or achieve or prove anything to earn it. What's called networking these days has a more accurate name: nepotism.

My best experience card is a very unlucky one, since print media has rolled over and died, and you want five years' digital media experience despite the fact that most of what Americans write on the Internet is still typed in English, on a QUERTY keyboard, just like it was back in the crusty old year 2001. But let me tell you what I did to earn that now-worthless experience chip anyway.

I went to the Chicago Reader knowing absolutely no one there; several of my to-be coworkers would later tell me me that I was the only person who'd been hired there without having a previous connection in ten years. I got that job by passing a proofreading test that almost no one can pass. I passed it without any experience as a proofreader, through my sheer aptitude and eye for written language. So do you suppose I can learn your sub-sub-sub industry's preferred style? Do you suppose I can catch up to the lucky moron who has five years' experience with the particular software your company happens to use? Computer programs are designed to be user-friendly; anyone of reasonable intelligence can teach themselves or use an online tutorial to learn any program you have. And within gaining a fraction of his weeks of experience with using such a program, I guarantee I can run rings around your CEO's nephew.

Of course, you may still be thinking: "If this woman is so smart, what has she been posting all these weird opinions on the Interwebs under her real name for?" I've been posting them for courage and freedom of speech, mothers and fuckers. Courage and freedom of speech. If you think I should starve to death for that, have fun looking in the mirror.

Sometimes I'm a dick and I write poetry

Life's so littered with regrets
You want to get the broom
But what is done
is done
and done
And that's our shitty doom.