Summary: As we are deluged today with bland, anodyne pronouncements about Labor Day, we often forget that American workers are overworked, underpaid, and generally underappreciated. America lags behind most of the rest of the industrialized world in most of the indices of labor, whether pay, vacation, healthcare, or variety of other significantly indicators.
As much as American workers are underappreciated, so too is the American sense of humor. Time was that Americans could laugh at things. Today, however, our national conversation has been hijacked by the severely humorless, by grim, prim, dour, sour, Puritans determined to police our utterances with a view to making us take seriously things that often don’t deserve it.
By: Paul S Marchand
ENOUGH WITH BLAND, ANODYNE LABOR DAY PRONOUNCEMENTS
As we read and hear all kinds of anodyne pronouncements today about labor, let’s take a moment to stop and realize how unclothed –skyclad, even– the Emperor really is, and how our workers do not live in anything even resembling a so-called worker’s paradise. Most of us who get our news from more responsible sources than Fox (or who get our polling data from more responsible sources than Rasmussen) are rightly concerned about worsening economic inequality and the stagnation of wages and purchasing power in the American middle class. With each year that passes, America’s middle and working classes fall further behind and closer to the poverty line.
Today is not a day for bland, anodyne pronouncements. Today should be a day of remembrance. Today we should remember the martyrs of Haymarket; today we should remember the strikers, the agitators, and the intransigent fighters in our own time for the dignity of work and workers; they have been waging a fight sanctified by nothing less than the Gospels and the examples of such great souls as St. Benedict, who used to remind his monks that work is prayer, and that work itself possesses a dignity that makes it precious in the eyes of God.
Today is not a day for bland, anodyne pronouncements. Today is a day when we should hold ourselves, and our government, accountable for America’s poor performance in the realms of labor. We lag behind most of the other industrialized nations the world in terms of wages, health care, parental leave, vacation time, collective bargaining, and a host of other indices in which we often come in woefully behind.
Today is not a day for bland, anodyne pronouncements, nor is it a day for us to embrace our poor labor performance with the kind of unthinking, belligerent pride that so often trumpets itself as “American exceptionalism.” We really do need to get past the idea that improving our labor practices somehow makes us cheese eating surrender monkeys. That the UK, France, or Germany may engage in some particular labor practice in which we do not does not ipso facto make such practice wrong or immoral. Yet we Americans, caught up in an often specious feedback loop of exceptionalism, mixed with a rough and ready rugged individualism, liberally adulterated with a “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” myth, often recoil from the labor practices of Europe or Japan with pious horror.
Instead of offering bland, anodyne pronouncements, maybe it’s time we remembered that the early American fighters for labor were a rowdy, passionate bunch, not particularly interested in making nice when their families and children were starving. Today, maybe we should forgo the hamburgers and hotdogs; maybe we shouldn’t bother with the white shoes; maybe we should take new resolve from our martyrs, determined to continue the work they began, determined to ensure that America no longer cuts such a pitiful figure among the great nations of the industrialized world.
Instead of offering bland, anodyne pronouncements, we should militantly republish the words of America’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who did not fear to declare a fundamental truth his successors have run from as fast as their legs will carry them. “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
LIGHTEN UP, PRIGGISH ONES!
More (relatively humorless) works have been written on the subject of humor than one can shake the metaphorical stick at.
Still, it does seem that the ability to laugh, whether at oneself or at a situation that needs laughing at, is a wasting asset in American society. Time was that Americans could laugh at things. Today, our national conversation seems to have been hijacked by a notoriously morose group of priggishly prim, grim, dour, sour, severely humorless Puritans, most of them unhealthily ready to police the laughter of their neighbors with a view to making us take seriously things that simply do not deserve it.
Yet, non-Puritan America often manifests a saving grace of humor. Some of it may be crude, overly direct, or even mordantly uncomfortable. The best humor dares to call a spade a spade, and to hold up for critical examination some of the dearest shibboleths of our time. Abbie Hoffman was right to suggest that “sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.”
Yet devoted followers of this or that cause often cannot stand the possibility of levity. The notoriously humorless St. John Chrysostom used to rage against his congregations when they laughed, crying “Christ is crucified, and you laugh!”
Chrysostom has his own modern successors. Recently, a Facebook friend of mine posted a picture of California’s converted DC-10 fire service water tanker flying low over a residential neighborhood in the path of a wildfire. I found the picture amusing, and so posted a comment which ran, in sum and substance, “Junior! Stop playing with your drones around the house.” Another person, prim, grim, dour, and sour, with all the humorlessness of an unhappy, deeply closeted upbringing, chose to excoriate me for my “inappropriate” sense of humor, which he saw fit to characterize as “shameful.”
Well, screw him and the horse he rode in on.
The America I live in still has room for humor, levity, and irony. The America I live in is the America where the first Challenger joke manifested itself within less than half an hour of the doomed space shuttle’s explosion. The America I live in is not afraid to tell George W. Bush and Barack Obama jokes. The America I live in is even secure enough of itself to enjoy jokes at the expense of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the British Royal family, not excluding HM the Queen.
Because telling jokes and deploying humor is often a critical emollient in troubled times. We live in a world that author Pat Conroy has trenchantly described as “a vast orb of disillusionment and pain.” In finding the humor of things we also find the seriousness of things, as well as finding our sense of proportion and soothing Balm of Gilead for anguished souls.
To be able to laugh at disaster or to mock the pretensions of the overprivileged makes it possible to carry on. To deploy humor against fear, disaster, or pretension is our equivalent of Victor Hugo’s Cambronne in Les Misérables throwing down the elemental, excremental word “merde” in defiant response to demands for his surrender at Waterloo. “Borne down by numbers, by superior force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression: "merde!" We repeat it,-- to use that word, to do thus, to invent such an expression, is to win!”
To laugh at horror, to laugh at tears, to laugh at anguish, and to find one’s soul in the liberation that comes out of mockery, to to thus, to find such an expression, is likewise to win.
So, I repeat it, screw the humorless, priggish, puritan ones, and the horses they rode in on. To laugh is to live.
-xxx-
Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and nobody else’s, and certainly are not intended as legal advice. If you are a grim, prim, dour, sour, severely humorless prig, you know what advice I would tender to you and to the horse you rode in on.
