Post-Labour Day post

I was picking up a rental car the other day and saw that the company (Enterprise) were advertising an entry-level job. And I felt an odd desire to apply for the position. I don't need a job and Enterprise is most probably looking for someone in their twenties and not a guy in the autumn of his career. What drove it was a nostalgia for work in the service industry.

Like most people my age, I started my work life with a number of jobs in the service industry in my late teens and early twenties. I liked the work as much as I liked school, which is to say I liked it quite a bit when I had a good boss and hated it when I had a bad one. But those jobs turned out to be incredibly important to my working life.

For starters, I learned more at those jobs than I ever did at school. Almost every worthwhile career skill I have I learned in the service industry. Skills that sound simple but aren't such as how to talk to a customer on the phone. How to place a cold call. How to deal with a disgruntled customer who is right to be disgruntled. How to deal with a disgruntled customer who is just a jerk.

I learned that customer relations are more important than how well you actually do the work. No, I'm not saying that the quality of service or products doesn't matter. But it won't matter how good your service or product is if you have bad customer relations.

I learned firsthand about the uselessness of unions. Yes, I know, they did lots of things in the past, but I worked in three union shops, two of which became unionized while I was working, and all three were a disaster. Unions are antithetical to good service industry practice.

Not unrelated to the above, one of the things you can really see on the job in the service industry is who is going to make it and who is not. This is particularly true when you work with university students and recent university graduates. You see a lot of really smart people who could thrive in the academic world who just don't have it. I my case that person was me who just didn't have it was me and I had to make some serious changes to my attitude and appearance.

I also learned how to be laid off and how to quit. (It's amazing how many people don't know how to quit.)

But when I look at people I know entering the job market for the first time today, one of the things they all have in common is their disdain for the service industry. They want their jobs to be more ... well, I'm not sure what they want.

A big part of the problem is university and the anti-capitalist, anti-middle class values they teach. Worse is the false status that university conveys on graduates. Once upon a time, a university degree was something really special and a sign of achievement. It's little more than glorified high school now.

But another part of it is that people have lost any sense of how rewarding a good service-industry job is. That is a big part of why I felt the tug when I saw the sign at the Enterprise office. I deal with these people fairly often and it's a good company. If you were just starting out, you could learn a lot from these guys. They aren't the only ones.

Sort of political Monday

Who goes down with him?
By him I mean Obama of course. The more accurate question would be, "If he goes down, who goes down with him?" I'd say the odds of his winning are less than fifty-fifty. I base that on two things: 1) the economy is against him and 2) he's not a very good politician. But there are still all sorts of ways he could win. (Someone with only a forty percent chance of winning can win 4 times out of 10 after all.)

But what if he does lose? At this point, most people are focusing on the potential consequences for him, his administration and his party. I think the larger cultural consequences are more interesting.

For Obama's victory as not his alone.

The greatest tragedy, and the easiest call, is that an Obama loss would not be good for black men. It's not right and it's not fair but racist assumptions will be made and they will be made by the people who take the greatest pride in not being racist.No one will actually sit down and conclude anything but an Obama loss, combined with the memory of the Tiger Woods meltdown, will lead them to focus their attention on issues other than the how well black Americans are doing for a while. Nothing overtly racist will be said or done and lip service will be paid any time "race" is discussed but the related issues will slide onto the back burner for a while. (No one wants to talk about this aspect of it much, but the Tiger fiasco was a monumental event for white attitudes about black men.)

The other easy call is the media. who are, in any case, going down no matter what happens to Obama. They will go down a lot faster if he loses. The press and entertainment industries invested their all in the notion that this guy was a transformational president—not just another FDR or Reagan but another Lincoln—and he clearly isn't going to be that. Still, if he wins it will be possible to spin him as a success of some sort. If he loses, these people are going to look ridiculous. And they are in no position to recover from ridicule.

The final easy call is left wing feminism. This will be a bitter pill because liberal feminists swallowed their principles and dutifully surrendered when Obama started to take the lead from Hilary Clinton. That is the second time they have taken one for the team, the first being when they made a travesty of their most cherished values in order to shield Bill Clinton. Some sort of huge shake up within that movement is inevitable and an Obama loss will precipitate this.

The toughest call would be supporters of Keynesian economics. It's not enough, however, that Obama lose for them to be permanently diminished however. For that to happen he'd have to be replaced by a strong and successful president who clearly moved away from Keynesian policies and—this is the most important part—saw significant economic recovery under his or her tenure. If that happens, into the dustbin of history with them.

Who gains? I would guess that the paradoxical result of this would be a chance for regeneration within the Democratic party. There is a lot of rot and, as the cliché about fish and politics has it, the head rotted first. A revolt against congressional leadership that drove the current leadership into retirement would almost certainly be a good thing for the party.

The biggest beneficiaries, however, would be the angry white men who watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report. This group won't feel the loss any more than they feel the loss of their favourite team at the Super Bowl. They'll feel the need to redefine themselves following an Obama loss but that will be a net positive. I'd guess they would decide to focus on business and family and probably develop leisure interests other than politics. All of which would be very good for their mental and physical health. Every time I meet one of these guys these days I'm staggered at their seething anger. All they can do is sneer at everything.

What are they selling? A reading list

A few things that I think are related to this morning's Womanly Virtue post.

A great or notorious, depending on your point of view, Katie Roiphe piece on male novelists,
A Catholic woman's response to Roiphe,
A piece by the suicide David Foster Wallace on John Updike,
Two previous pieces of mine about marketing alcohol  and marketing miniskirts to women,
A previous piece of mine on whether women are more likely to put out for guys who drive Porsches, and
Recent research that suggests that women find sexist men attractive for casual sex.

What are they selling? Another image

This is a close-up of the Millais painting Ophelia.

And the question is, Do you see a woman drowning here? Literally as opposed to figuratively drowning that is?

The painting is supposed to represent Ophelia about to drown from Hamlet. Millais was so obsessed with realism that he made poor Lizzie Siddal, who modeled for the painting, lie in cold water for so long it affected her health. But he isn't even trying with that facial expression. I've seen that look on a woman's face a few times and I never once thought of calling 911 when I've seen it.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

What are they selling?
The salon is called "Cut + Blo".

This is the picture they had in the window yesterday immediately under the words "Cut + Blo".

The Serpentine One said, "Not exactly subtle."

So what are they selling?

That may look like a rhetorical question but it's not. Yes, of course, they are selling sex. But what kind of sex?

A good way to get a grip on that is to ask, "Who are they selling this sex to?" Because the answer to that is "women". This is a hair salon for women and they are only going to make money if that picture makes their customers feel like they have come to the right place. So take a look at the picture again and consider what sort of sexual scenario is likely to follow if a woman gives a guy that look? Now consider that, for this advertising to work (and it does work), there have to be a substantial number of women who want to evoke that response.

No I won't spell it out but the key point here is that the appeal for the woman who buys this stuff is to emphasize what he can make her do for him rather than her intrinsic worth. And not because she is some sort of expert practitioner; the image here is a of a woman not quite in control of herself or, as the Robert Palmer song had it, "The lights are on but you're not home." Cut and blow indeed! (For extra bonus points, take a good long look at the picture, then see what sort of images that come up when you Google "Pre Raphaelite Women" and consider what a  paradoxical word "innocence" is. )

To paraphrase Kant, any properly humanist morality will treat human beings as ends rather than means. A woman who seeks that sort of presentation is emphasizing her worth as a means not an end.

And let's not kid ourselves, this stuff works. Not all women but lots of women (particularly young women) see that sort of advertising and they reach for their wallets. This isn't some odd quirky approach that only this salon has adopted. Lots and lots of people have managed to not go broke with this approach.

Yeah, I know the official line: Women only do this to themselves because society puts all sorts of pressures on them to live up to these awful male fantasies. That's why the more rights and freedoms women have gotten, the more they have tended to dress like nuns maybe? Alternatively, maybe it's time to give up on Kant.

Over to you Mr. Palmer:

"Technical"

This bit of jargon began showing up in fly fishing literature in the 1980s. It meant you had to get the technical details right in order to catch what were invariably described as "highly selective trout". That meant getting a very small fly that matched whatever the trout were eating at that precise moment in colour, shape and type and that this fly had to be fished on the end of a very fine tippet of a very long leader (the tippet being the last section of said leader).

This technical talk isn't all crazy but it sure tended in that way and did so pretty quickly. It is ludicrous, for example, to speak of highly selective trout. Trout don't select so much as respond to stimulation given that they do not have a complex enough nervous system to do anything you could reasonably call selecting. That said, I used to believe it once. I once took my father on a trip to a tailrace fishery where the fishing was supposedly "technical". He wasn't having any of it and spent the day bashing the water with a big wet attractor fly and catching lots of fish.

This technical talk also lends itself to some of the worst kind of macho posturing. There is a bit in a Thomas McGuane novel where he talks about casting into the wind with flies so small you couldn't see them attached to gossamer fine triplets on the end of fantasy-length leaders.

But technical became the word. I heard it creep into the jogging world a decade later when people started talking about "technical" clothing. It also appeared in sailing. Note that these sports are associated with a certain level of wealth and culture.  I suppose it is an inevitable product of so many guys in high tech industries making a fair chunk of money and playing a bigger and bigger role in higher culture and politics.

Just the other day, though, I was reading a guy talking about "technical wading". All he meant by the word was that the current was strong and the rocks were slippery. And I thought, the word has now lost any sense at all along with the technocratic culture that produced it.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Regrets, I've had more than a few
The fall is coming. You started feeling it in the evening air about ten days ago here. Not actual autumn but the sense that it was just over there and thinking about moving in. It's nothing to complain about. For starters, it's the most beautiful season in this part of the world by a considerable stretch.

It's also a season of plenty. The animals (including us) feed especially well over the next month or so. For humans, the autumn of our lives is a time when we are most likely to have accumulated wisdom, comfort and wealth.

But, for all that, it's still fall and this is the season when it's hardest to believe that the cycles go on forever. And they do not, in fact, go on forever.

Back where I grew up, the water in the once great salmon rivers is usually getting low this time of year. It's time to fish smaller flies, more delicately presented, so as not to spook the fish. Salmon are not that easily spooked otherwise. I knew a great salmon fisherman who would slam his line and fly down on the water and still catch them with a regularity that few others could match. But in the fall things change.

I've been reading David Adams Richards' book Lines on Water. It is one of life's oddities that there is lots of great literature about trout fishing and not one single great book about salmon fishing. And the Atlantic salmon is not a true salmon but a trout, something that you might ought to have improved the odds of someone writing a great book about Salmon fishing.

Alas no and this book won't change that. I had hopes for this one because, without giving too much away, David Adams Richards and I overlap quite a bit. He is about a decade older than me but we know and knew a lot of the same people. My uncle was his parish priest when he was a boy. Beyond that we think in ways that are very much alike.

It doesn't take a great angler to be a good angling writer. John Gierach, for example, will cheerfully tell anyone who asks that there are angling writers who are much better fly fisherman than he is. But he is not only a much better fisherman than you or me or David Adams Richards, he is also better than we could reasonably hope to be. To be as good as he is, you'd have to turn the clock back and live a completely different life and there is the rub. As a consequence, he draws from a very deep well when he writes about the subject. A good example of this is what happens when Gierach writes about the person who is better than him. He knows enough to confidently identify the exceptional person and not get taken in by bombast.

Richards, while he is better writer than Gierach, is not, unfortunately, capable of this. Too often he writes about what he thinks is the mystique of the sport but is really just some old con man taking him in. The odd result of this is that his book comes off as being really about himself and salmon fishing seems more like a gimmick he used to try and hide this that doesn't quite come off. For Gierach, fly fishing for trout has been and is not just his life but is, rather, life itself; when he writes about one he writes about the other.

I do think, though, that Richards passes by what could have been a great book in these pages. He is determinedly writing one kind of story but his real story is something else. As The Last Psychiatrist likes to remind us, when we do that our real intention keeps slipping through:

I was a town boy. And my father owned a business downtown and went to work in a suit and tie.

His world consisted of approximately eight blocks. As far as serious fishing was concerned, I may as well have been living in downtown Toronto.

The boys who fished with their dads would look on me as someone who knew nothing, a neophyte. This angered me. It angered me because they were right.

The story Richards wants to tell is a story about a crippled child who overcame all obstacles to become a salmon fisherman. The story he actually tells is a story of a man angry with his parents. A man who looks back and regrets the things he didn't do because of them.

He called me, in his gruff old voice, "the little Christ child" because of the pitchfork going through my left foot a few years back. He had made the mistake—just as many others in my neighbourhood had—of believing that this is how I had become lame. He didn't know the real reason—my mother falling on her stomach when she was pregnant, and causing a brain hemorrhage—and I did not volunteer that information.

There is ton of anger and regret in this book. I think Richards thinks he has dealt with that and he wants to tell a story about something else, about a guy who triumphed over the lameness through dogged persistence but the story that keeps haunting us is the one he didn't tell about the angry boy denied boyhood.

It's too bad because that is a universal story. Not denied childhood. Childhood is the problem. We are given extended childhoods that we don't really want. Childhoods that run so long that when they are over its time to be adults. What the war and depression generations denied their children was boyhood. And we still do that to boys now.