Letters to the Editor
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Crazy?
Has Camille Paglia gone crazy? Does she just randomly write about whatever? Is she stoned? What's going on? Democratic debates, black soap-opera stars, the uslessness of high school, hair extensions, Rosie O'Donnell? Do these things have anything in common at all, or does she just crack open her laptop and write about whatever she's been thinking about for the last five minutes?
So difficult to pick my favorite dumb/pretentious thing that she wrote in this essay, but I guess I'll go with this:
"Upper-middle-class families should be ready to support their children's unorthodox choice for a career in carpentry, masonry or landscaping. We need to strip the elite aura from the claustrophobic "prestige" jobs in sterile corporate offices, where high salaries drug the worker clones from recognition of their own imprisonment and castration."
Ah yes, shine on, Camille, you crazy diamond. Watch out, upper-middle class people, because your children will all soon be carpenters... because that's what upper-middle class children do; they pass up high school and college for low-paying vocatoinal jobs. Not that there's anything wrong with being a carpenter, but, what the fuck is she talking about? ...Thank god we have people like Camille -- a professor at an arts college who writes books about poetry that other people have written -- to expose the meaningless of upper-middle class life, and expose the values of good honest work. Yes, Camille. And I'll be waiting for you to resign for Salon.com and quit your job at the College of the Arts. Come on, baby! Do you realize that your high salary is merely drugging you, and blocking your recognition of your own imprisonment and castration?
--OM
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Bummer!
I've been eagerly anticipating another festival of self-centered, moronic sophistry from good ol' Camille. I feel a little let down- the only really stupid thing in it is her opinions about trade school. OK, I'll bite: we're having to import engineers from Asia just to fill all the jobs that we can't outsource *to* Asia, and Camille thinks public education should be reformed to teach carpentry? You should mosey on down to your neighborhood Home Depot, Camille, where you can find Latino immigrant carpenters who will do twice the work for a quarter of the price of a native. The only advantage natives have is a better command of English, which is why we're all working the drive-thrus. Tell me more, Camille, about the exciting opportunities awaiting today's students in the fields of landscaping and air conditioner repair! And about how much they're like art school!
All right, I'm done.
The only thing worse than Camille's trademark infuriating stupidity is a Paglia column that's just kind of boring, mostly because the letters aren't as good- witness the needless pissing match over whether Mormonism counts as a kind of Christianity. I know, more needless than this letter, right? When Paglia's as dull as this, it's almost not even worth it to write in. . . almost. You suck, Camille! Ha ha!
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the new trade skills
Aside from skilled carpentry, plumbing, etc., the real "new working class" jobs now are in IT service management - network admins, system admins, dba's, etc. I'm not opposed to vocational schools - it wouldn't kill the US to have properly trained machinists to work on prototyping machinery or production tooling for high-end product manufacture, for instance - but I think Paglia is a bit behind the job market here.
FWIW, My maternal grandfather was a mechanic, and he seemed pretty enthusiastic about my likely future of being trapped and neutered in an office job. I suppose that only having a few pence to his name and getting by on a pittance of a state pension (plus what my parents could help with) didn't seem too liberating for him.
As for the satisfaction of doing something manual with a beginning, middle, and end, that's why I do my own yard work. Well, that and I'm cheap.
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Don't Worry, Folks
As soon as Joan Walsh realizes that publishing Paglia will yield letter response numbers that are never more than a Three on "The Finger Scale", she'll drop her like a bad habit.
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Camille...
is AWESOME!
Have I mentioned that lately?
Thanks for publishing her, Salon...I get all happy when I see her name up there.
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Voc Ed
While on paper I am all for bringing back a level of education that allows the non-college-bound an opportunity to earn a decent salary, and indeed I had taken such courses in high school, the cold reality is that many of those kinds of jobs no longer exist in the US. A 4-year degree is almost obligatory for even crappy jobs (e.g. Enterprise Rent-a-heap requires all of its front-desk people to have degrees, at least in the past) with the MA/MS/MBA the new bar. If I had stayed with the heavy-engine mechanic's track I was on, I would have found that my job had been shipped to Mexico or someplace else because it was cheaper to ship a broken engine to Tijuana and have it fixed there rather than send it to the Cummins shop in LA (which I doubt is there anymore).
When I was a teenager I had no plans to go to college (mom thought otherwise, and won), but even then in 1980 there were plenty of decent options for me. I can't imagine anyone fighitng over shitty McJobs for $8/hr out of high school because the good manufacturing and other union jobs are history for the most part.
Look, I know it's fashionable to assume that every kid should go to college, but the rude awakening is that not everyone gets a trophy and not everyone should go to college, even though a degree is no kind of guarantee: witness the dimwit, loud, illiterate and innumerate spoiled little shits who come into interviews all cocky and thinking they're going to get offered $85K for their first job out of college. I love crushing their fragile little spirits. Next! I eventually got my BS then an MS and I'm no happier, I think, than if I'd been working on big engines all day, but I'm probably making more. Big whup.