Pretext, Past, Posterity

I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway. - = - = - Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever. But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”. But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free. - = - = - Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place. And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back. And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.” Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point. “The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It” “First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda. And I can see how you’d get upset. -=-=- “What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.” Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves. Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine. But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests… “He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic. Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict. You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through. (There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.

) The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?” (“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.) And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?) Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline. And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH. And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.) “But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!” If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together. - = - = - The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight! The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s. You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK. Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics. Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool. - = - = - I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before. Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on. But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split. And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option. - = - = - Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.

Happy 10th birthday, This Post!

God bless.

on the fourth of july, remember that american independence was a land grab

you hear this a lot, but what does it mean, specifically?

the pre-1776 americans who came from a sex, race, and class background that enabled them to participate in the conventional history of america sought to buy into aristocracy as a system of production. they were the youngest sons of minor aristocrats, the children of men with rank and no land, successful but socially limited military officers. there were people other than white men in america, but our history is not defined by them, they were not in power, they struggled to survive and their voices are faint and hard to hear. even the reality of working-class life in america among white men is largely silent; children read thomas paine’s agitation for the bourgeois revolution in america but nothing about his labor agitation in the us and england, nothing about his work as a corsetmaker or his parallel struggles to break into the bourgeoisie personally and defend workers as a class. we learn about the composition of washington’s teeth.

more people know washington had teeth extracted from slaves than know he was rich, and had an obvious and immediate material interest in the revolution as a wealthy planter.

george washington was arguably the richest man in america. not in money, although there is that. he was rich in land; he was a successful surveyor, planter, and politician. “politician” makes sense to us, and while it meant different things in the 18th century (and certainly he would have rejected any attempt to identify him that way) it’s something we can comprehend pretty well.

the planter class were slaveowners. this was a universal fact of revolutionary america; there was nowhere near enough ‘free’ labor in america to maintain their massive, highly inefficient cash crop farms. expanding the population of slaves in america was a major priority to intensify production.

before the cotton gin made cultivars of cotton that grew outside of fertile bottomland economically viable under even plantation slavery by reducing the titanic amount of labor necessary to make their bolls usable for fiber, the major cash crop of america was tobacco.

in america, because of peculiarly american mythology, we tend to believe that in the late 1700s and most of the 1800s people didn’t understand crop rotation or soil nitrogen. even in the context of european agriculture this is incorrect. soil nutrition was an incomplete science, and the primary fertilizer in the west was not an efficient nitrogen source but bone meal, yet american planters understood the basics of crop rotation and fertilization. they simply refused to use them because they would have driven up costs.

the rudiments of the agricultural revolution were things that wealthy american planters chose to forget. this is why america is larger than europe and has only been a food exporter in living memory - not because it is infertile, but because its economy was one of indifference to fertility, and this set down powerful cultural roots and industrial norms. the dust bowl was a product of this history as much as anything.

in slavery times, wealthy american planters planted a crop of tobacco on every surface available to them on good land - and they could tell if land was good for tobacco by means of both common knowledge about agriculture and surveyors’ trade secrets. a good way to tell in virginia was to count the pines.

they continued to plant tobacco season after season, crop after crop. the land was never given rest, never allowed to lay fallow. no land capable of raising tobacco was used for anything else; food and feed crops that would have partially restored soil were grown on bad, rocky, marginal soil.

in a few years, the best land used this way would become utterly infertile, and would be allowed to revert to barrens. the semi-indigent white smallholders of the antebellum south filled this vacuum, and in struggling to make do with an agricultural technology adapted for intensive, land-destructive agriculture, degraded soil still further.

the planters who had used up land then acquired more. land was cheap; formally it was necessary under english law to acquire title from natives, the english system of transfer of title was not a native institution and was easy to use to steal land. the american mythology includes a story about settlers buying manhattan for $50, and a riposte that this represented an easement and not a permanent purchase to the native lenape. there are also stories about natives selling land they did not own. these are both applicable in some cases, inapplicable in others; the interface between white settlers and natives was unstable and heterogeneous. in most cases, white title to land under english law was only ever ambiguous at best, and the land bought in this way rapidly became incapable of supporting people outside of the deformed european style of agricultural production prevalent in america. even if the system were not rigged against natives, economic pressure would still have created a comprador class which sold out and moved north and west, and this would still have intensified political struggles among natives and between natives and white settlers.

these conflicts, and legal hassles for the british government, lead to the proclamation of 1763. we hear mostly about it forbidding squatting - white settlers moving over the mountains and claiming land without title. in the american popular imagination this is what the revolution changed.

the reality is that the main thrust of the proclamation of 1763 was that the purchase of native land in america by private agents was forbidden, and all such purchases had to be formal purchases by agents of the crown itself. to a planter class whose bloated, vampiric way of life depended on shady and frequently illicit private land deals between themselves and natives, this was a deadly threat. from the word go, it was challenged by planters - who, being sustained by the legal system in a basically predatory life, in general took pains to be literate in the formal law of england and keep copies of significant precedents in common law courts - using a forged version of the pratt-york opinion.

the pratt-york opinion held that the british east india company was within its rights to purchase land from princely states in india. it held, unambiguously, that its decision did not apply to america, and american skeptics always expressed scorn and ridicule about the idea it suggested of dealing with indian “princes” and “governments”. (after the war, john marshall made it clear that there was no homology in the eyes of anglo-american law between the formal, legitimate governments of the raj and american indian nations.) but when you think about it, the same logic was really at work: the british east india company was an agent of the crown in its own right so its expropriating land from natives was in the crown’s interest even without its formal say-so. and so in a sense were american planters agents of the crown in this capacity. if george washington, the richest man in america, was not an agent of the crown in north america, who even was?

forged versions of this opinion, which clipped off language making it unambiguous that the decision was inapplicable to america, circulated widely. they are in evidence in the personal effects of washington, jefferson, lewis and clark. whatever the crown said, the land grab would continue, be damned any border or line. more land was needed so more land would be taken.

before, during, and after the revolution, washington was a surveyor; he wrote down the characteristics of land which white people had seen but had not investigated in depth for its suitability for plantation agriculture. he took the best land of the west for himself. it was not considered unseemly or ridiculous that he would do this even while on campaign; it was a necessary part of his profession and a universal behavior of the plantation aristocracy.

the use of land in this way continued after the war, and especially after the war with tecumseh’s confederacy was won at tippecanoe; land was close to free for the first white people to survey it, and cheap as dirt for the rich planters that came after them.

this is how americans became rich. this is how american capital came to exist. this land grab logic extended into the west, and this is part of the reason oregon was settled so far in advance of the great plains - the thick, dry grasses of the modern breadbasket of the us were not suitable country for cash crops, and only at its southern margins did plantation slavery ever successfully advance.

it is sometimes treated as inevitable that this should have ended, that plantation slavery reached its zenith before the civil war and the civil war was part of its decline. but this country was literally founded by people who stole land to farm so intensively with slave labor that it was destroyed for agriculture for generations - and those people would never have imagined most of what we think of as 'the south’ being subject to their economic system. it was not suited for tobacco or long-staple cotton. but american and european industry, whose hunger for production was insatiable, found a way.

this form of production followed exploration, opening, and exploitation of native nations distant from white settlement by a diverse class of explorers and outdoorsmen. it followed that exploration and opening more or less everywhere. when we read histories of the rest of america we encounter other, less discussed cash crops, far outside of the main area of plantation slavery: ginger, indigo. (ginger in particular was a cash crop because of british merchants’ penetration of markets in china.) the same economic logic that applied in plantation slavery applied everywhere, and while some crops were limited by the absence of free labor, enormous families and punitive economic policies against the indigent were tailored to minimizing that. the same economic idea - land is limitless and can be destroyed without consequence, and labor can be someone else’s problem - underlay everything america did. it underlaid acquisitions of millions of acres of land with no conceivable economic use to agriculturists.

it underlies, in distant echoes, the modern american system, where the acquisition and mortgaging of domestic land is one of the primary ways capital disburses to the middle-class; where intensive use of land in existing settlements under gentrification follows a predictable pattern of exploration, exploitation, expropriation, and transfer to large investors. state violence is not the end-all and be-all of this legalized theft but it is always present and always on the side of capital and its agents.

and the american innovation, the core of the american experiment, is that if you have enough money you’re as good as god’s vicar on earth. it worked for washington and it works for your landlord.

happy fourth of july, everybody!

So yesterday I remembered that Slate and Salon had been around for like twenty goddamn years, and I thought it would be funny to go back and check their early stuff and see how much had changed and how distant the past seemed

I settled on this issue of Slate, April 26, 1999 which of the earliest Wayback Machine archives was the first one to be something useful, sooo, let’s take a look

First off, it leads with a bunch of features that are really just summaries and links to other publications or websites - I forgot before social media platforms and blogs, really, how much websites were just daily-updated lists pointing you to interesting things elsewhere. It’s interesting that many of these summaries don’t have any links, I’m not clear whether that was because they were of dead-tree media that didn’t have websites or because of journalistic etiquette policy.

I remember that back then old-line journalism was kind of daffy about the net, and I know some places at least frowned on linking to internal pages, because they wanted you to approach and navigate through the front page, paper-style. So as to prevent someone from undermining their advertising model and system of cross-promotion and cross-subsidy exactly like Facebook did maybe, so.

The big news of the day was NATO’s war in Kosovo and the Columbine shooting, which had just recently occurred (and seemed to be shorthanded more as Littleton than Columbine at this point). So, what kind of OC do they have on the war?

Ah, hm. Masha Gessen kinda mawking us towards Eastern European war, William Saletan meandering in circles stroking his chin, Jonathan Chait (in an installation of regular feature “Crapshoot”, tagline “Dumb Ideas Exposed Here”) dismisses the notion that soldiers are underpaid and in need of the raises they recently recieved

So, the more things change, I guess. What else, what else? Oh, “Explainer” was them. That wasn’t cited enough as a precedent to Vox, at least their early intentional style, the modest height they dived off to chase clicks

Looking around in other links there ARE some really striking bits in here though.

man was just ahead of his time

ditto

That’s Conservative Judiasm, if you were curious

nice

NICE

yeah, I guess those were two actual movie trends

uh

uh

…

haha wut

…ah, I’m gonna regret it, arent I

THERE’S the Slate I knew and loved

So, takeaway lessons?

First, yeah, I guess Slate really always was a liberal hawk rag, getting high on R2P.

Second those external links to essays from names you’d still recognize on the necessity of war in Yugoslavia are fuuuuuuuucking bonkers though. I forgot how crazy the ‘90s were when we had no idea what to replace the Cold War with

Third I forgot how much they were still running a literary tone carried over from “small magazines” - in the selection of culture topics and the general tone of writing

25 years ago!

you know what, fuck you *unkills your character*

this is the funniest fucking reply, everyone else go home

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING TO GET YOUR MEDS BEFORE THE PHARMACIES CLOSE

they are going to be CLOSED OVER THE HOLIDAYS and so will the DOCTORS WHO SIGN YOUR PRESCRIPTIONS.

if you don’t have enough meds to last the next THREE WEEKS, put in for your repeats and refills tomorrow! that’s Wednesday! do it! don’t go to hospital at New Year because you ran out of stuff!

it’s that time of year again! get your meds!

I myself think that Batman is the flip side of Santa Claus, who - as I’ve said - in turn is the modern vision of the Christian God.

The lineage follows that in the age of desert nomadism, God was a force that created water and food in the desert and rearranged inconvenient geography - mountains, seas; that in the age of early settlement and tribal war he demanded ethnic solidarity, granting in return victory in war; that in the era where settled tribes were subsumed into Mediterranean empire, he was a fisherman/shepherd who unified mankind and ended war; that in the era of courtly feudalism he was at the head of heirarchies of angels, saints rewarded with face time to press their clients’ claims; and so obviously in the age of bourgeois democracy he’s an industrialist who rewards socially approved behavior with consumer goods and punishes its opposite with violence.

“Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?”

—From “Nackles”, by Donald Westlake

You know if we're lazily smearing things as anti-Semitic based on long-forgotten historical resonances can we do people who complain about the commercialization of Christmas?

This really started at the 19th Century dawn of the German Empire, contemporary with the growth of a thick commercial retail culture – "Christmas" as we know it is essentially an epiphenomenon of the department store – and much early criticism focused not on how it detracted from a religious cast the holiday had once had, but on how it was becoming a yearly ritual of riches flowing from Christian pockets into the tillers of Jewish retailers, manufacturers, and traders.

As time progressed and the Second Reich fell, this was the theme of infamous interwar antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer's editorial cartoons at Christmastime every year.

(This was also, coincidentally, when and where the traditionally minor Jewish holiday of Hannukah was glowed up into a rival gift-giving celebration, so as to undercut Christmas as a draw for [then much more common, often with secular motives of cultural belonging] conversion.)

There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead, that I read in college.

I read it in a class with Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.

He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.

Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.

And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.

And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.

And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.

And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.

When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.

And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.

And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were

and

Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.

(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)

In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.

And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.

Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.

And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.

So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.

Happy Labor Day!