Dear Hirer, CEO, Human Resource Person, or Head Honcho:
Please consider what follows as perhaps a joke, something the “guys” in the office might find humorous, even to tacking up over the water cooler where the never used suggestion box hangs.
I promise not to mention in the telling here the plays of Mamet and Miller and their scathing indictments of American capitalism — is there any better kind?
Having cleared my throat, let me get on with the task. I am writing this letter not for my wife, but about her. She needs a job. I know, I know, she has met all the requirements and parameters for someone in today’s economy for getting out and looking for work. What work she does find is essentially sales, especially insurance companies who give her a battery of tests to see if she “fits” into the corporate culture, which is an oxymoron in any case.
Behavioral psychologists compose these horror tests at the behest of companies who want only piranhas and sharks. As a retired therapist I can say that behavioral psychologists could not do person to person psychotherapy for they are technicians, the very antithesis of what it requires to be engaged in dialogue with another human being who is hurting. Yet they design barrier tests that savage and screen out people seeking out work.To her credit and to my delight, she never passes! A humanistic shout to the heavens, I say. Yet she needs to be consoled, for she is being kept out, shut out regardless of her talents — and her age. Oh, the aching damage wreaked upon good souls.
Jane is highly gifted: plays the piano, a little violin, has a great memory which would have served her ably as a therapist, but that would involve another degree and more college loans. She has several graduate degrees, has sold retail, owned an art store, can mat and frame prints, et al, is more than computer savvy, taught herself auto-didactedly how to set up websites, can speak knowledgeably about art across the centuries; indeed, she has exquisite taste in most things artful, has the ability to express openly and freely her joy in life and living of which many businessmen have no comprehension. Open, playful, a master at the minor arts — cooking, sewing, raising her sons (not a minor art!), maintaining her home, her only strident deficit as I can see it — and it is monumental in this culture — is that she is a “failure” at not finding work.
Brother, can you spare a job?
Jane is an information specialist, an inflated term for librarian and there is no or next to little work for librarians in the job market. Yet librarian schools and most schools of education churn out graduates, counting on a mass delusion that work exists, the downside of being “humanistic.” As I list her qualities and skills, I would hope you would refrain from judging her, especially from the perspective of the market economy, you know, from the perspective of a Trump or Romney, stalwart mannikins all.
Capitalism from its start in a secular manger has always, I mean always, equated work with human character, work with meaning and purpose, work with freedom, and the chilling Nazi slogan, “Work sets you free,” that famous ode to Nazi capitalism at Auschwitz.
I have observed that my dear wife, at times, until I set her straight or she listens carefully to me, is in pain, anguish and suffers from American despair. Unlike despair anywhere else in this world, she turns her American rage inward, eviscerates herself for not getting a job in this economy, equally laid waste by Republicans and Democrats.
How clever of capitalism which is really each one of us, high and low, to indoctrinate, insinuate, and infiltrate our sense of self by equating the inability to get work an indictment of our moral character and fiber as human beings. Nothing more Calvinistic exists. Nothing more Mormon, a cult soused in religious marketing. If I squirt sideways at other groups, I must say it is unavoidable, for we are all part of the problem.
The cruelest toxin in all this is that many tens of thousands damn themselves as being inferior or less than because they cannot get a job. It is the brilliant and Machiavellian aspect of capitalism that shifts the blame because of its inadequacies and collective failure to take care of its own brethren on to the backs of those who are most eager to try, work and contribute. And the most vicious part of it all is that it has given many of us a slave mentality, feeling that even if we were set free we wouldn’t be up to the job. Indeed, if raised in slavery one is not up to the job. Freedom has to be learned.
So, what say you, oh chum? Do you have some work in the office, something not demeaning, but constructive? Can you offer my wife some work?
Nothing at this time. Come back some time later. Give us your resume. It will work out for you. Keep the faith. The screening test says you don’t have the aptitude for the job.Try again down the line with us. Make do. Chin up. After all, you have a husband who cares about you.
Yes, I care about her very much. And fuck you!
Sincerely,
The Dispossessed. The Displaced. The Demoralized.
