The Voice of Empire, Ctd.

I assumed the "Missing Fifth" Our Mr. Brooks was referring to in his column today
was the fifth of schnapps he clearly must have been bombed off his ass on when he pulled this dreadfully bad, fact-free tone poem out of his ass today.

It is just startling bad, even by the by-now subterranean standards that the New York Times permits Mr. Brooks to continue to get away with.

Week after week.

Year after year.

But Mr. Brooks is not a "writer" engaged in the craft of writing competently about, well, anything.

Instead Mr. Brooks is a mediocrity who is in the immensely profitable business of writing and saying things pleasing the the elite ruling class that he serves so slavishly.

And that is never going change.

I was planning on taking the whole thing down bolt by bolt, but only got this far (Bobo on the left, me on the right) --

"...Americans should be especially alert to signs that
the country is becoming less vital and industrious.
One of those signs comes to us from the labor market.
As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently,
in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between
the ages of 25 and 54 worked."

In 1954, the average white guy could walk out of high school
and get a good job with benefits and a future.
Thank you organized labor!
In 1954 America was unchallenged as the world's
economic and manufacturing superpower.
In 1954, oil was dirt cheap and the simplest
computers took up entire rooms.
In 1954, the full power of the GI Bill
was starting to pay big dividends.
In 1954, segregation was still the law of the
land throughout much of the South,
and more subtle but no less devastating
forms of work, housing and public accommodation
discrimination were in evidence everywhere.

In short, comparisons between 1954 and today are fucking idiotic.

-- before I called it a day

You see, I am one of that "missing fifth" that Our Mr. Brooks clambered glibly over today in an effort to create shitty content for his awful column. But far from being, according to Bobo. One of those whose idleness chalked up to a "lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute" I -- like about a jillion other American men -- was simply laid off. As a part of the Great Recession, which Bobo's very own Conservative policies set in motion, so thanks for that.

Like a jillion other middle aged-men, I was quite capable and competent in my profession and doing -- by every metric -- a bang-up job.

Like a jillion other middle aged-men, I sacrificed a lot to the job, regularly clocking 100 hour weeks, doing the work of five people and doing it well.

And then, like a jillion other middle aged-men -- bam! -- in an instant it was all gone.

Since it appears that sucking the wizened dicks of the Ruling Class from the pages of the New York Times is pretty much a recession-proof/job-for-life kind of thing, this is not something I would expect Bobo to comprehend, but like a jillion other middle aged-men who don't make a living handjobbing oligarchs, I have had lots of jobs over the last two years. Jobs that required a vast array of flexibility, competence, hard skills and soft skills.

All were part-time or temp. Hour-for-hour, all paid far, far less than I made when I was working full-time. None of them came with benefits. And I was happy to take each and every one of them.

I shone on every one but, in the end, I learned the same, hard lesson that a jillion other middle aged-men have had to learn in the last few years: that unless your name is "Daley" or you once helped an alderman bury a dead hooker, no one wants to hire a worker who is over, say, 45 into a full-time job with bennies.
Regardless of qualifications.
Period.

From Mr. Brooks' own paper, April 2009:

But soon after, in January 2008, he lost his job. His company was shutting down much of its student loan business. Still, Mr. Blattman wasn’t worried. He received a $188,000 severance package and says, “I thought I’d find another job quickly, and actually wind up ahead.” He is well regarded in his field. Jim Murphy, a former president of the New York State Financial Aid Administrators Association, calls him “innovative, dependable, an asset to any organization.” Tony Doyle, a dean at Widener Law School, describes him as “a highly capable, dedicated professional.”

None of that matters in this economy. Mr. Blattman has been out of work ever since, 18 months. He moved to New York because he thought prospects would be better than in Florida. (“I couldn’t go back to Maryland, tail between my legs.”)

But after applying for 600 jobs, he’s had just three interviews — two of them over the phone. At the only in-person interview, for a position supervising international admissions at a Westchester County college, he was asked about salary. “I said: ‘Whatever you’re paying, I’ll take it. I understand it’s a different world now, I can adapt.’ ” The job went to someone half his age, he says.
...

Mr. Blattman has many people to commiserate with, but few to network with. “Ninety percent of the people I worked with lost jobs,” he says.

After his layoff, he bought two suits, “to be prepared for the glut of interviews.”

He’s never worn them.

All of which is to say my current temp-and-glad-to-have-it job wore me the Hell out today.

Or perhaps, as an uninvigorated member of the Bobo's "missing fifth" this is just one more sign that (as our Mr. Brooks warned) I have begun to "pick up habits that have a corrosive cultural influence on those around them" and will now "find it hard to attract spouses."

Either way, this time around I am leaving the bulk of the fish-barrel-shooting vivisection of Our Mr. Brooks' latest travesty to the good people over at Reality Chex.

Enjoy.

Our Mister Brooks thinks the federal government should stop spending so much for the "comfort" of unproductive old codgers when the money would be better spent helping young men who are out of work and can't find wives. Without acknowledging his own, of course, he writes of the "mendacity" of politicians who "demagogue Medicare."