The Rockets' Red Glare

There is something unfortunate in having wealthy parents. For the first twenty-odd years of your life, they raise you to expensive tastes -- wanting to enjoy the fruits of their own luck and labor, they can hardly indulge themselves and not their children without being uncommonly cruel. Suddenly, adulthood arrives, and the parents worry that they've done a disservice -- that the safety net of money will prevent their offspring from making a way in the world; without the motivation of hunger, they will sink into obscurity, squander their carefully cultivated potential! And so, at twenty one or thereabouts, you are left with an empty bank account, no job experience, no savings of your own, and an ingrained habit of desiring only the exceptionally fine.

Sometimes, I wonder what my parents were thinking, but then I realize they had no better way to deal with the situation, short of providing an aeternal allowance. At the same time, I am frustrated by the assumption that money is the only motivator. Certainly, it is a motivator -- there's the classic example of garbage men, who certainly wouldn't do the job on a volunteer basis. (However, I've lived in a town with no garbage men, and it runs more smoothly than any I've seen. When you port your own trash, you make less waste.) Obviously, we as a society need certain jobs done, jobs which are not intellectually transcendant but which make life run smoothly.

I say "obviously," but I think it's a bit of an excuse. I've mentioned garbagemen already, and the New England town where households sort and transport their own trash to the dump. How about waitresses, another classic low end of the service sector? Here in Japan, I've never seen one. The cook takes the order and brings the food; the cook welcomes the guest to the cook's restaraunt. You rind or find them, comes time to pay out, and as for the time-consuming business of refilling drinks, you do it yourself -- faster, easier, more efficient. School janitors? Same type of thing. At least once a week, the teacher and students set a period aside to clean the building and care for the lawn -- and you can bet there's less mess and vandalism to care for. Think further -- think of the automated check-outs popping up at grocery stores, or the automated check-in at airports.

When you think about it, a number of the "necessary" jobs seem a lot less necessary -- and not because of some great leap in technology. Why do we keep them? They're not smarter; they're not easier. They're certainly not cheaper. They don't train the worker to any higher purpose, or breed new skills. They trap people in dead-end, low-pay, unrewarding jobs. Nevertheless, if a national figure suggested dissolving these driftwood jobs, there would be a public uproar. "How will I make my living?" people would scream. "Without waiting tables, how do I make rent?"

At first, this seems a valid (if stupid) answer for why we keep these jobs. Think on the evils of corporate downsizing, the disregard for life that says one person should do eighty hours of work instead of two doing fourty. Problem is, that's not a good analogy. Corporate culture was founded only sixty years ago, and it's never quite worked. It's a business model where the big decisions are made far away from the problems by people whose only leadership qualification is money. It's a poster child for diseconomies of scale; it's fallen into its own trap of stock options, 401-Ks, and HMOs, and can't for the life of it struggle out. Moreover, it's founded on the same fallacy as the above defense for keeping the jobs I've described -- the idea that money is the same as profit.

Certainly, a high employment rate is a good thing, economically; I'll spare you a treatise on the money multiplier. But there are different kinds of unemployment, and not all of them are bad. Let me give you an example: I have hired Chad to move beans, one by one, from a pile at the front of my house to a pile at the back of my house. After that, he is to return the pile, bean by bean, to the front of my house. He is to repeat this process indefinitely. One day, I wake up and realize this bean-moving does not augment my quality of life. Even assuming I want the beans moved somewhere, why wouldn't I do it in one fell swoop?

I fire Chad. He complains a lot. Then he realizes he now has the time to pursue voice acting, which he likes better anyway. Even if he's making less money now, he has other intangible rewards, like a sense of purpose and a pleasant working environment. Moreover, he no longer has to pay for a chiropractor, or the round after round of drinks to forget work.

What I'm talking about here is opportunity cost. Let's revisit our friend the waitress. She's making a good living by refilling your drink. What is she not doing?

- She's not making pottery, so you're eating off ugly plates instead of attractive ones.
- She's not tutoring disadvantaged children, so you're too afraid of gangs to walk home.
- She's not opening her own restaraunt, so you have less choice of a meal.
- She's not reading up on the latest treasury bill, so your government is no longer accountable to the people.

In short, you are paying your waitress to diminish your quality of life! Instead of getting your own water and tithing that fifteen percent to a charitable organization or artist or struggling-but-worthwhile business, (or taking off work a few dollars early to spend time with your family,) you prefer having someone around to resent and complain about!

This problem is not as simple as I seem to make it, but the essence is unchanged: we assume that giving money away would make people lazy and unwilling to work, and the fabric of society would be torn apart. But money is a pathetic motivator -- it pushes people into unfulfilling jobs, asks them to waste their talents, and persuades us to hold onto inefficient business practices. The continued ability to eat will always outweigh questions of worth or morality . . . and we'll all spend our nights wondering why life seems so pointless. . .

Firefly

I have always been inordinately fond of Tarot cards. I have always been fond of cards in general -- the waxy feel of the paper, the babbling sound of a good shuffle, the fun of arranging and rearranging abstract symbols -- and Tarot cards are often more beautiful than a typical Bicycle deck. I believe in the subconscious, the unconscious, and the potential of the moment; mystical or not, I find Tarot a useful interpretive tool, often quite helpful in therapy.

7th Sea contains a fictional magic system built around Tarot; it is a world where "fate witches" see the webs that connect people, strands that are labeled with swords or staves. This person and that have the two of cups between them -- the dawning potential for a romantic relationship. Those over there are held by the Queen of Coins -- the woman is the man's generous patron.

Each suit, you see, represents a different sphere of relation. Cups stands for matters of feeling, matters of the heart. Swords stands for conflict. Coins bely dealings of a fiscal nature, and staves give body to bonds of respect. Some links are stronger; some links are weak. The same person you love with a passion may be your most contentious rival.

Aside from these links, which everyone has, a small few have an "aspect" -- a card of the major arcana which colors their lives and gives them great influence. Perhaps a man is crowned with the Wheel of Fortune, and he seems supernaturally lucky. Perhaps another bears the Chariot Reversed, and he's cursed with the hubris of never backing down from a fight.

I think there is some small truth in this system -- not that veiled women wander among us, tugging on our friendships, but that a few people seem singled out by an archetype, or an incarnation. We joke that my husband is Death incarnate, not because he is a fearsome killer, but because of his knowlege of endings, (and his unique way of looking foward to destroying the world when Armageddon comes). He has Hades' gift with money -- and with it, Hades' unsympathetic love for irony. He is infinite, uncompromising -- and not without compassion.

For me, I feel that I'm War; not today's institutionalized, technological destruction from a distance, but the fight of those who believe in a cause. Revolution, not Imperialism. Terrorism is cowardly. Bombing is cowardly. Guerilla warfare, last stands -- they're hideous and overly romaticized, but they mean something. They are the actions of people with nothing left but an idea; that idea may be wrong or harmful, but it's a reach for the eternal, noble at least in its attempt. Of course, modern warfare has eradicated that option. Rally 9/10ths of a nation to your cause -- you still lose if the other guys can shoot you from a mile away, from behind a shield.

We cannot even have a revolution of intellect. Mass media is owned by a few large corporations, all of them deeply invested in the status quo, as they are the status quo. Stage a million man march, and see how quickly the press points to the millions who aren't there; on the other hand, look at how few people doing a power-friendly concilliation classify as "a movement." (Silent majority, my ass.)

I am War: I champion change, for what happens in the absense of movement? Stagnation. Stink and death and rottenness. No hope. No momentum. No promise of a better tomorrow. You can see it all around you -- the empty pre-fab buildings. The Wal-Martizing of American culture. (Laugh if you want -- we used to have regional cuizine.) The growing ranks of unemployed; the falling voter turnout. Service economy. Top-twenty radio. A one-party system.

I am War, and I sound my trumpet for revolution . . . only to hear the notes die as they leave the horn. Maybe that's why I like the Internet, the true last frontier, the new Old West. Every generation has its battleground, Oregon or India; this is ours.