O Happy Day

[Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer]

>>Manual labor for no
>>purpose other than to enrich the overdogs is, of course, empty labor. But
>>manual labor to help enrich one's community, one's family, oneself, is labor
>>of the highest order.
>
>Why *manual* in this sentence, DP? Why? Why isn't any work to enrich one's 
>community, family, self, 'of the highest order'? I want to know.
>
>Aren't you on lists like this because some other effort than said labor 
>might contribute to the enrichment you claim to desire? Or is it just 
>another forum to flex your sweat and be impressed because someone else was 
>in an even more glistening macho element of 'the service'?
>
>>Socialists used to think this way, before they went to
>>college, got tenure.
>
>You think...? If you don't know 'working-class' or 'manual-labouring' 
>socialists, Marxists, communists, unionists and various other 'ists' who 
>are those ists because they want to transform their work from the 
>moving-dirt form of labor to something quite different then you must lead a 
>much weirder more cloistered life than most of these tenured graduates you 
>deplore.
>
>So we're going to -- I've read a bunch of posts on this thread before 
>replying -- list our workerly credentials are we? What the hell for? If I'd 
>never raised a sweat in my life; if I'd been born to privilege and 
>opportunity; if I'd worked in 'intellectual' or even office-work all my 
>life (as if that's not manual labor anyway) -- that would not prove or 
>require I fail to enrich the above list of good ideas.
>


>But maybe the sig file does make a point -- sure it makes as much of a 
>point as your noble work as a janitor. Over the years I've worked making 
>take-away food, as a bank teller, as a mail clerk, selling clothes in a 
>boutique, selling Avon, as a student, cleaning houses, tutoring Japanese, 
>as a marketing analyst, and then as an academic. For very significant 
>periods of my life I've also been a full-time 'housewife', and unemployed. 
>This academic life is the easiest I've had not because it's the least hard 
>work -- it's not -- but because it's the most pleasurable, productive, 
>stimulating and rewarding. I also think it's the form of work which enables 
>the most above-mentioned 'enriching' activities. By light years. It is so 
>much more wonderful in all these ways than disturbing dirt -- which I have 
>also literally been employed to do -- that I am personally offended by the 
>implication that there is *by default* something honest and vibrant about 
>the disturbing-dirt form of manual labor.
>


>Catherine [proudly the following...]

Yow! What howls of outrage! Jesus, some of you on this list are as humorless
and self-righteous as the standard caricatures of the Bookish Brainiac. I
simply proclaim the joy and pride I take in the physical labor I perform (in
concert with my mental and creative activities), and in return I get
hammered with all sorts of defensive posts. Are you all that insecure with
your places in life? I could care less if every one of you was spoon-fed to
the age of 21. I merely made my observations in response to other posts. I
did so with humor and high spirit. Calm down. I'm not trying to prove
anything, and neither should you. Please go back to chattering about what it
means to be "white," and discuss what "hot topics" will animate the Lenin
conference. I'm done with this.

DP