in a handbasket. You heard it here first

There’s a book just out by Dolores Goodman Kearnes, who had that book about Lincoln maybe ten years ago, and I first got hooked on her way before that when she did a book on LBJ, even being invited to his ranch while he was out of power and just sitting around waiting to die.

It’s about Theodore Roosevelt and one of the big events was the election of 1912 when he was running on the Bull Moose ticket while Taft was the Republican and Wilson was the Democrat and Eugene Debs (who I’m still reading that book about) was running as the socialist from inside prison walls. The thing is you then had three progressives (precursors to the today’s liberals) and one socialist.

Debs by the way carried no states but did get six percent of the vote which is pretty high for a socialist. One of the reasons he didn’t carry more is because the other guys stole his platform which was the eight hour day and other worker’s right things, which, when enacted, made our working experiences soft relative to those who came before us.

The radicalism of the turn of the century is mostly forgotten these days, we 60s types were pretty unaware of it. Had we been we would have realized what pipsqueaks we were compared to them.

Well the workingman had some power then. Probably because he had no power to begin with and the captains of industry pushed him to desperation, and he had nothing to do but fight back. The workingman looked great standing up to the bosses, not so great when he looked down on minorities and wouldn’t let them be part of the battle. And not so great maybe when he got what he wanted and then turned his back on the struggle and said I got mine, fuck everybody else.

The lefties that had fought the fight with him were forgotten, and it was partly their fault because they were constantly fighting between the socialists and the communists and the unionists. Well they were fighting for abstract things and what the workingman wanted was material things and once he got enough of them he dropped out.

And now the union guys are fading and getting picked off. Probably they should have continued their fight until they had unionized everybody. But there is that other problem in that the guys running the union are not the workingman anymore and when some moneybags guy drops by they are easily tempted.

And another thing that made things easier back in our day was employment was pretty low. You didn’t have to worry about losing a job because there was always another one just down the street. And for those of us who went to college it was pretty cheap so we weren’t carrying around those horrific student debts that you hear about.

Used to be, maybe a little before our day, that you could go to work for some big company and spend your life there and they probably wouldn’t treat you too badly and you could come out with a reliable pension.

Do you ever read the business section of the newspaper? Myself I scan through it, but I am so bored I seldom pick anything up. But there is a very pro-business slant to the articles in between the conglomeration of conglomerates. One of the things they laud is how the New Man will not be tied down to some boring company all his life, he will flit back and forth, going from company to company doing this and that as his abilities allow, and the companies will be begging for his services and he will be in the driver’s seat.

And I think that’s all bullshit. What is really going on is the companies are hiring him only until they can find somebody cheaper to take his job and then shedding him like dandruff to find another job at some other company who will hire him to work cheaper than the guy they fire to hire him.

The employee is never in the driver’s seat, and even less so in times of high unemployment like now, and it will only get worse.

Because we are all going to hell in a handbasket. And if you didn’t hear it from someone before now, then you heard it from here first.

And it must be true because an old guy is saying it.