Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker
Perhaps the worst outcome, and certainly the most lasting, of our corporatized, financialized, and monopolized economy is the utter collapse of the dignity of honest work. Not only have we lost a large and secure class of skilled, often unionized labor, but we have lost what they used to give us: quality products from lettuce to living rooms that not only served their purpose to the user, but provided a respectable living to the producer. Somewhere along the way, a bunch of MBA’s came up with the idea that the shittiest possible product at the lowest possible cost was the way to go, and everyone but they had to suffer for it. Thus, humanity’s most enduring occupations, growing food, building homes, and making things in general became shoddy externalities that cost too much money; which was only to be made in the selling. Caveat emptor, and all that…. Ayn Rand says that you can sell food that poisons people, consumer goods that fall apart, and houses that won’t outlast their mortgages, and somehow the market will sort it all out, and we’ll all benefit. Call me crazy, but I see no evidence of this.
My experience is chiefly derived from my twenty years in the building industry; as a remodeling contractor, I have been dissecting houses built from the 1870′s up until the new century, and the precipitous decline in quality after the 1950′s has been nothing short of astonishing, and it can almost entirely be laid at the feet of deregulation, standardization, and the planned elimination of skilled labor. If one were to purchase a house in this area built from its initial “discovery” at the end of the Oregon Trail until 1965 or so, all of its intrinsic elements, if even minimally maintained, would still be useful; doors, windows, siding, floors, tile, brick, all were built to last, and often be tradesmen who clearly took their work seriously and performed it with pride. If you bought a house built in the 1970′s or after, the damn thing might need to be torn down soon, as building codes no longer required any permanence, and construction itself became just another in a long line of things to be either outsourced or turned over to modern day slaves, preferably both.
What we’ve gotten from this is two levels of impoverishment. First, that of the worker, who once was a proud stonemason or carpenter and now hangs out outside Home Depot, and second, a built environment that is shoddy, replaceable, and homogenized, and eats away at the very idea of home and hearth for the increasingly fewer Americans who can still afford such crap. As houses have become bigger, they have become worse, yet still unaffordable to those who slap them up for speculators’ profits, and utterly disposable along with the landscapes they blight.
Drive around any city, since that’s the only way you can get around in our “free market” world, and just marvel at the number of recently “new” buildings that have been tarped and scaffolded, having failed at that one requirement since time immemorial, keeping out the rain, and you’ll see what I mean. Litigation alone over the building’s unsurprising failure will consume more than enough money than it would have taken to put the thing up right in the first place, but the guys (it’s almost always guys…) who marketed the trash, be it a condo complex or subdivision, already got their money and ran, under the cover of a LLC, natch, and caveat emptor can get pretty personal.
Long ago, we decided that the guys in the suits were somehow better than the guys in the overalls, and look where it’s gotten us. Fleeced again.
When I was a tadpole, we lived in a Craftsman-style home at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in SoCal (just east of Pasadena). It was a beautiful house, with built-in bookcases and a built-in china cabinet in the kitchen (this was the house with the cracked back porch whence came the Potato Bugs).
A few years later we moved into a new house which had no external signs of craftsmanship whatsoever. Even then it struck me as little more than a cracker box.
Locally, there are some homes under construction that exhibit signs of attention to quality. Maybe it’s a new trend.
But I agree with your general thesis.
Rich man,
Poor man,
Beggar man,
Thief.
Well, the quality you think you see is fake. First of all, there are no longer any such things as a starter home of, say 2 bedrooms and 1 bath, so it’s impossible to know what the ordinary market would bear for the masses, and whatever “charm” has been grafted onto these new concoctions is still just an agglomeration of distantly manufactured parts designed to be slapped together by unskilled labor at the site. The windows are still plastic, the siding still composition, and the floors are still some flimsy crap on top of the plywood. Styles and functionality are standardized with no respect to local climate or materials, and nothing in them can be repaired when it fails; only replaced. They probably don’t have potato bugs, though, since the Chinese drywall usually kills them.
You’re right. Those of us who have spent our lives breaking our backs to get ahead, and to give something to our children that we didn’t have, and to feel that we are contributing to the betterment of the “American Dream” are wondering, “What the hell are we doing?”
All of our efforts have only made some fat cats at the top of the heap a couple of million more bucks. Nothing that is good for “the people” has changed.
You do realize, I hope, that the LLC honchos who left the derelict buildings in Portland have already pocketed their profits. They are spending this evening at their country club in Nassau (Bahamas), planning their next exploitation of the working-class dupes in this country.
I’ve been one of the “overall” guys and one of the “suit” guys that you mentioned. It really makes no difference. We’re all just pawns on their greed-driven chess board.
Today, the Randian puppet masters are in complete control of both the government and the social structure in this country. We just need to figure out how best to live in this environment with out making too many waves.
Così è la vita
Well, I make a pretty decent living because I actually know how to glaze and hang a window, paint woodwork, and otherwise fix old things, which a lot of people do value, if they still have the money to do so.
Sorry for the rant, Hag.
I decided to have two martini’s tonight.
<blockquoteIf they still have the money to do so….
Three thoughts:
1) When I was kid, you weren’t nobody less’n you had solid hardwood furniture — cherry, maple, walnut, mahogany, then later, pecan, and finally oak. (Only trash had veneer or finish-it-yourself pine.) Now such hardwood is sold by the pound.
2) When I was born, the population of the U.S. was 133,000,000. Now it’s about 310,000,000, give or take.
3) The Italians make beautiful plastic furniture. I like it.
Are these three thoughts unrelated? I wonder. My take, Hag, is that quality and craftsmanship simply can’t be equated solely with traditional methods or materials. If it is, we’re doomed either to have nothing, or to live in Las Vegas,
Sigh… Screwed up tags, plural subjects with singular verbs, etc. I didn’t have a second martini, but maybe I should have headed off to bed a little earlier anyway.
Well, Europeans seem to do fine with houses built to a 100-year design life for materials, where here 20 is all that is required, much of it built on farmland. I do think we should have smaller houses, and closer to jobs and transit.
Been hanging any of that Chinese sheetrock lately, Hag?
Maybe old Tom could give us his take on commies and their American corporate enablers, supported by our dauntless free market trade negotiators, shipping such a fine product to the good ol’ USA.
I hear they also export tons and tons of really fine, roofing-grade corrugated tin.
Nah. I only use USG, and for good measure, the waterproof kind. It’s harder than the regular. Still, I can’t understand the economics of Chinese drywall, except perhaps as a way for them to dump toxic waste… A sheet of regular, American drywall retails for about $7, and is quite bulky and heavy to ship around the world.
Just reading that Bob Dylan has cancelled his planned Asian tour because the Chinese government still considers him a threat and won’t let him perform in Beijing and Shanghai.
Maybe he refused to sign for some Chinese sheetrock when it arrived for installation in a new addition to his house.
I heard he needed some more room for his gold records.
Notes on plaster and its non-uses in the theater:
“As it is extremely difficult to find an actor capable of eating a real ceiling, it will be found convenient in performance to substitute the tops of old wedding cakes for bits of plaster. There is but little difference in material between the two substances; but the taste of the wedding cake is considered more agreeable by many people.”
… from notes on “Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, or, The Fatal Gazogene: A Brief History for Barns and Booth”
… By George Bernard Shaw, 1930
~~~
Shaw sets the scene:
“In a bed-sitting room in a fashionable quarter of London a lady sits at her dressing-table, with her maid combing her hair. It is late; and the electric lamps are glowing. Apparently, the room is bedless; but there stands against the opposite wall … a piece of furniture that suggests a bookcase without carrying conviction. On the same side is a chest of drawers of that disastrous kind which, recalcitrant to the owner until she is provoked to violence, then suddenly come wholly out and defy all her efforts to fit them in again. Opposite this chest of drawers, on the lady’s side of the room, is a cupboard. The presence of a row of gentleman’s boots beside the chest of drawers proclaims the lady is married. Her own boots are beside the cupboard. The third wall is pierced midway by the door, above which is a cuckoo clock. Near the door a pedestal bears a portrait bust of the lady in plaster. There is a fan on the dressing-table, a hatbox and rug strap on the chest of drawers, an umbrella and a bootjack against the wall near the bed. The general impression is one of brightness, beauty, and social ambition, damped by somewhat inadequate means. A certain air of theatricality is produced by the fact that though the room is rectangular it has only three walls. Not a sound is heard except the overture, and the crackling of the lady’s hair as the maid’s brush draws electric sparks from it in the dry air of the London midsummer.
The cuckoo clock strikes sixteen.”
Just Friday I was talking to my friend Chad about acting; his daughter is in a school play, and we were discussing the benefits of theatrical education. I told him that audiences don’t realize what goes into writing a play; stage directions can be great literature in themselves. I remember specific examples from Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, Eugene O’Neill, etc, and a neat trick in “Deathtrap” where the stage directions are read onstage as part of the plot. I haven’t read much Shaw; sounds like I ought to.
Shaw’s plays are one thing; his lengthy commentaries and criticism are something else again: hilarious, with deadly insight into people and society.
“The most forceful writer of drama in English …
since Shakespeare.”
– Brooks Atkinson
Gone fishin’ … fish gone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04cannery.html?ref=us
Ah, sardines…. How many Caesar salads can a hag eat?
Out here on the north coast, where the suburbs closest to Cleveland were settled in the early 1800s, which is old by west coast standards, we have some absolutely beautiful houses that were made the olde-fashioned way: plaster walls, full basements, oak floors, hardwood, built-in cabinets, mantles, real fireplaces, brick, now sealed but originally coal-burning furnaces, now sealed but original incinerators, milk boxes, detached garages, slate roofs.
The first house I bought in the late 80s was built in 1920. It was a 3-story frame home (with vinyl siding), with a slate roof, hardwood floors (covered in horrible carpet I tore up), french doors, and a finished basement and third floor. It had 4 bedrooms, 2-1/2 small bathrooms, solid oak floors and doors, glass doorknobs, the works.
I had to remodel a little – the wiring went bad and we had to replace all the “knob and tube” with Romex (ugggh, what a nighmare) and some of the plumbing had to be replaced with all copper, and the fuse box was replaced with a big breaker box (looked like something from NASA when we were done with it), but it was an amazingly well-constructed home.
The do not make houses like this anywhere anymore.
The house I live in now is only slightly younger, probably constructed in the 40s, all brick, plaster walls, hardwood floors, real fireplace, small bathrooms, full basement. It could use about $20K in remodeling just to spruce things up a bit. If it were anywhere in the east or west coast, or even in Chicago, this house would sell for over $1MM. Since it’s in a Cleveland suburb, it’s worth about a quarter of that.
I could never live in a house built after 1950.
Out here, all of the in-city neighborhoods were built out before the 50′s, so I rarely have to work on any newer than that, and why would I want to? It’s dispiriting. Wiring, plumbing, and heating systems can be changed; if the house is a dreary box with aluminum windows and hollow core doors, who cares if it’s got 200 amps?
Oh, and there are thousands of similar houses all over Cleveland. I would estimate that fewer than 25% of the homes in Cleveland and surrounding suburbs were built after 1950.
You’re right on the money with this post, keep it up!
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