Letters to the Editor
Laurel962
Published Letters: 486 Editor's Choice: 37
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An insider view
[Read the article: You can't stop a tidal wave with a fork]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've never owned a typesetting company, but I HAVE been a typesetter....guess that would make me one of Mr. Silverman's "50 year old grandmothers". (ummm....thanks David. Guess you'll never be 50 yourself.)
As such, I could have told you in the early 80s that typesetting was a clearly dying field. Up until the late 70s, typesetting was skilled, respectable work largely done BY MEN, unionized workers in publishing plants or newspapers, who made very good wages, plus overtime and health insurance and PENSIONS. They were driven out by computerized typesetting systems that were almost entirely run by non-unionized, mostly female workers, who made roughly half as much money, few benefits and no pensions. By the Macintosh era (very late 80s, early 90s), it had already devolved into a scenario where around half of all typesetting was done by freelancers, with OK wages but zero benefits. And so it went.
Mr. Silverman basically exploited this situation, exactly as his Indian successors did -- he outsourced to the hinterlands, paid mediocre wages, no pensions and hired his "50 year old grandmothers" (who could presumably be paid less, since they had husbands, or some such retro thinking).
What really crushes me in this story is how Mr. Silverman allowed his greed for GPS guided bicycles and personal trainers and steaks and Ben&Jerry's ice cream to permit him to raid his poor old dad's lifetime of savings, destroy his dad's retirement and then he apparently sat back and watched his dad drink himself to death. Furthermore, Mr. Silverman is sort of OK with all this, as he is OK with other companies having outsourced his own to death. He's a pretty laid back guy -- I have no doubt he will succeed nicely in the new, dog-eat-dog sort of economy.
What I get out of this tale is that if Mr. Silverman had had a gram of common sense, he would have seen what was obvious when he was in grade school (that typesetting was a sad, dying profession suitable only to be done by pennies-an-hour, third-world wage-slaves) and he would have sold Clarinda YEARS before the all-too-obvious collapse. Then he would have made at least some money back, and his dad might have lived to see a decent retirement and some grandchildren. Maybe his partner Dan would have sobered up as well.
I don't have an answer to outsourcing or the way huge conglomerates continue to drive out both diversity in the marketplace and mom-and-pop businesses. What I do know is you can't have a prosperous middle class society founded on NO jobs, NO health insurance and NO pensions. The check hasn't come due for most Americans just yet, but it will and plenty soon. The problem is that our media is dominated by upper class types who don't feel any pain yet -- they are in protected fields, or ones unlikely to be outsourced. As long as we all keep shopping and spending and watching American Idol, everything will be OK! Why plan for the future? Look at Mr. Silverman: ruin a company, ruin hundreds of people's lives, drive your own father into bankruptcy, your best friend into suicide -- but the guy is happy as a mudlark, writing books, getting articles into Salon. He'll be just fine.
It's only the rest of us who are screwed.
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Yes, you are
[Read the article: Am I an alcoholic?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is a bit unnerving for me to read, because I have a girlfriend exactly like the LW -- she drinks herself into oblivion every night, on red wine, telling herself (and others) that she needs to "relax" after a hard day.
She also excuses drinking ALONE at night because she wants to "watch TV shows her husband doesn't like". A good point one poster here made is 'how big is a glass of wine"? The standard is a 4-6 ounce glass, but my friend (and probably the LW) are almost certainly drinking big tumblers or juice glasses or brandy snifters of wine. A better measure might be how many standard BOTTLES of wine she is going through. My friend switched from regular 750m bottles to 1.5 liter bottles, so she could say "oh, I only had one bottle of wine!"
Another thing that jumps out at me is the only reason the LW wants to change, or even dares to label this "alcoholism" is that she is (slightly) overweight and wants to lose weight. It is fascinating to me how much weight and the desire for thinness can drive human behavior these days (on another thread here on Salon, about IVF, notice how much of reproductive technology is driven by the desire of women not to gain weight, not to have multiple pregnancies that will make you fat, etc.).
I have to wonder if the LW was super-slim, would she even care how much wine she was pounding down?
I don't know what the official definiton of alcoholism is these days, but my own view is that if you NEED to drink, if you constantly use alcohol to alter your mood (instead of anything like exercise or video games or stamp collecting), if you drink alone and secretly -- then you are an alcoholic. The precise quantity of alcohol isn't that relevant. The real problems in the LW's life -- a distant marriage, a dull job, a mid-life weight gain -- aren't things that she will take action on while she's dulling her mind with wine. And despite laws to the contrary, this is no different than dulling your mind with marijuana, or prescription drugs or exessive spending or any other hobby, habit or addiction.