In researching the problem of poverty in a world of plenty, I finally stopped to examine "the work ethic as we have known it," and found in it a "nodal point" of interconnections as dense and variegated as the tenacious convolvulus in my landlady's front yard-- and as hidden.

Growing up in blue-collar small towns in Canada, holding various jobs in city and country, it was perfectly obvious to me, and repeatedly expressed, how much most fellow workers hated their jobs. At the same time, when the conversation lifted from the personal to the political or philosophical, the "work ethic as we have known it" was suddenly supported by the most unexamined cliché rhetoric. It was assumed. It was unquestioned. It was unconscious.

The devil is in the self-evidence. Tracing this apparent contradiction led to less articulated zones of inverted values: a constant but indirect pride in suffering (sacrifice), and indeed a competition in suffering. Along with this, in males there was (promoted and sustained by all entertainment media) a love of violence. The "goodness" in this violence was that it was revenge promoted as justice.

Religious values lurked largely in these obscure zones, and reading through books, which served as flashlights (torches) through these dark caves, I came across the mouldy skeletons of John Calvin and John Knox. But not before a tour of the first Industrial Revolution, and the 19th century brutal "moralizing of the proletariat" during the time of Dickens. Ralph Waldo Emerson then wrote of "the habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance." This realist recognized the obvious demoralizing of the proletariat, which has sustained down the generations. To thicken the plot along these lines, this demoralization is covered up by "denial" in the form of "pride." "Pride In Work" is the name of a shameful workfare program in the US.

As indicated, to ponder motives, I dived (sounded!) from the horizontal/historical quest downward into various models of psychology, finding there a tremendous world (our own) where actions and motives are as inside-out and backward as the world of Alice's looking glass-- "denial," "projection," the "Repetition Compulsion," "Ressentiment," the "Fantasy Bond"-all valuable pictures of the strange behaviour of the animal who has invented, created, and profoundly denied the Horn of Plenty.

In attempting to unearth and limn the "work ethic as we have known it," I isolated and tagged no less than 36 themes. Following the cue of Narrative Psychology, Jesus, Scheherazade, and other great figures who taught through stories, and the expert on the radio who stated that 8% of people in the West read a book after high school, I decided to gather anecdotal (and some scholarly) material presented in oral modes. I chose to fish mostly the great pond of daytime radio, specifically CBC1, my country's Public Broadcaster, because it seemed to me there was a lot of good stuff there going unheard because people were at work.

 

 

Furthermore, assessing the modern or post-modern psyche as preferring bite (byte) sized information, I fished for key lines and seminal clips with potent valences. It took 20 years to land enough of these to assemble an Associational Documentary which illuminates/reveals all 36 themes of this incredible rhizome, the resplendent garment of our emperor. Of course he is naked, the listener says. Of course he always has been.

In The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade cured the King's clinical depression by 1,001 stories. The World Owes You A Living reveals the emperor's nakedness by 1,001 very short stories from 1,001 storytellers-- all interconnected.

 

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Jack Saturday 's The World Owes You a Living is like the wonderful audio
montage artistry of a Firesign Theater or a Ken Nordine, but with a
discernable political point. Highly recommended.

- James J. Hughes PhD,
producer, Changesurfer Radio; Executive Director, Institute for Ethics
and Emerging Technologies

 

 

For the complete documentary in mp3 on one CD, please click here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Joyce did to prose and Pound did to poetry, in my opinion, made those arts contemporary with both quantum physics and the films I liked. They had broken linear order into luminous fragments--quanta--which they reassembled into synergetic wholes--like a Bucky Fuller design... to read them involved stepping outside subject-predicate order into the modes of thought you find in differential calculus or in the montages of directors like Wells, Eisenstein, Kurasawa. Robert Anton Wilson

 

 

 

 

 

comment in mp3             ...Upon this gifted age, in its dark hours, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts... They lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric... --Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Hi! I just got back from a very long tour around the "work ethic as we have known it." The "Protestant Work Ethic (Weber 1904-1905)", what a dragon! I didn't just walk around the edge of it, I sought a bit of spielraum for the muse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

InstInstead of approaching poverty as a whole made up of many parts, we tend to address it bit by bit. It's like having all the pieces of a puzzle before you, but letting them lie scattered and unlinked. From Total Poverty Awareness By David K. Shipler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tour took 20 years-- the time it takes, I'm told, to make a good garden. But the product to offer takes six hours and change to play in its entirety. Furthermore, I'm told the modular nature of hundreds of short clips invites closure for any time being-- driving to work, out for a run, riding the bus, flying an F-18.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People are hungry for alternative voices, not just the voices of officialdom. --Amy Goodman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This walkabout combines the sound-bite with what critics claim is missing-- in-depth "analysis" (meaning "loosening"-- spielraum!) via juxtaposition and segue rather than by commentary. So here's a whole Ring Road of sound-bites-- a full meal-- a big picnic! And, though assembled catenatively, related varietously, each individual item is intensified, vivified by juxtaposition and free association--- (not random association, though that is a technically available wonder in itself). "Associational Documentary" is the term granted it by New American Radio in New York, who played an earlier version of this work across the US on their FM affiliates. That term is great, but (not a criticism) it is not explicit in naming the musical quality of such composition-- timing, rhythm, drama, tension, resolution. However, perhaps a concerto for strings is an "associative documentary." Of course it is!