[lbo-talk] Re: direct sales ( what it used to be called)

Tom Walker timework at telus.net
Tue Dec 21 21:50:56 PST 2004


frank scott wrote,


>use, but among those with little or no formal education, direct sales is
>often the only way to - seemingly - latch onto the fulfillment of the
>american dream...


>which is not clearly revealed as a nightmare until you get to grad
>school...

What I learned in grad school was that it, too, was a pyramid scheme...

No, seriously. And the direct sales/grad school nexus is captured archly in a 1937 novel titled (all modesty aside), _The Sandwichman_. Or, as Harold Rosenberg wrote, "American Life is a billboard; individual life in the US includes something nameless that takes place in the weeds behind it."

or, as keith gessen wrote in a review of Pastoralia by George Saunders,

"Saunders... wants to know how much of our humanity we get to keep. Not much, as it turns out. Marx warned that, in a capitalist system, "the worker becomes a commodity, and indeed, the most despised of commodities." Saunders' correction is that the worker becomes an advertisement, and, indeed, the most wretchedly inarticulate of advertisements...

The Sandwichman



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