← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Marcus Porcius Cato
Thread ID: 11558 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2003-12-20
2003-12-20 21:04 | User Profile
This is one of those wonderful articles from VNN that literally takes your breath away. It more than makes up for some of the inane 'How to score with a woman of quality' and 'I am an aristocratic white woman...I can perform fellatio expertly, with not even a hint of teeth' drivel that often makes its way to the VNN website.
Blood
by Squid
19 December 2003
"That God became man indicates only this: that man should not seek his salvation in eternity, but rather establish his heaven on earth." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Working every day, we end up asking ourselves what it can all be for. We lug, we tug, we strain and grope, pouring our sweat and blood into the limitless and grinding labor that always seems to produce such substantial things, but with no appreciation. The question is almost always rhetorical, though. We know why we do it. We know that over time, our work begins to define us. It turns us into men, capable of all that comes our way. It changes us into an enviable form of life that is free from the standard constraints of the workforce. Nine to five means nothing to us. We work the hours that we demand, and in the conditions that we require. We know that there are few people who have what it takes to succeed in a field where long hours and blistered hands are the only companions that you have, and we know that of the few jobs out there that a require the same toughness as brainpower, we measure up. Still, after a time, the question of why you do it begins to linger in your head. It begins to gnaw at your reason, and bothers you wherever you go.
After all, people pity you for who you are. They look at you with disgust, when they even look at you at all. They make you walk through the side door, even when your shoes are cleaner than their floor is. They say, "Oh . . . how nice!" when they hear what you do, and think of how depressing it is that people have to do such things in order to survive. You try to give them a sensible reason why you're involved in the trades, but for some reason, their stare that is laced with such phony approval always seems to make you falter, and your rationale always seems so false, even to yourself.
You give yourself the reasons, you've memorized them in fact, and no one can ever convince you that you are not part of a skilled workforce, or that your services are not essential to American life. Still, there comes that cold winter day when the frost clings to your face, when the warmest thing around to provide you with comfort is the water flowing from your broken main. Huddled, angry, and with your hands submersed in freezing water to avoid frostbite, your reason fails; you begin to wonder.
People sometimes ask me why I do what I do. The answer depends entirely on who asks. I usually just tell them what they want to hear, which is some sappy nonsense about skilled labor. I don't tell them the truth, though ö not ever. In fact, I've never told anyone how I really feel about working. Never.
This one time we got a call to go to some Section-Eight shithole in Washington Heights so that we could replace about a hundred feet of baseboard in a crack apartment. The job had to be done that day, because Housing had somehow gotten involved, and cared very much about the fact that these people had no heat. Just looking at the building told you of what to expect inside it. Broken windows, garbage and dog shit on the sidewalk, and a front door half hanging off of its hinges all added to the first impression. Carrying our tools up to floor five of this place, we knocked on the door and were let in. That smell? You get so used to it that it doesn't even phase you. The place was an absolute wreck. From underneath an overturned couch, a kitten with a face that was half covered in scabs ran over and wanted to play, but a hidden kick sent it flying out of the room and back into the darkness. I walked into the kitchen and saw a few hundred cockroaches in one corner, but only a dozen or so on the baseboard that I had to change. Like I said, you learn how to deal with it. So I took the cover off and smacked it hard against the floor to get the few cockroaches off of it and out of my way. With that, a pile of rust came flying off the cover and hit the ground, and when it landed, it squirmed, spread, and started jumping all over the place.
In my first encounter with fleas, they ambushed and got the best of me. We had to come back after a few minutes with duct tape around our sleeves and ankles and necks, and I ended up shaving my head that night. We called the foreman, but got the usual "just deal with it" attitude from him, so we ended up going into each corner, and we used bug spray to try to clean the floors. The spray was too slow, so we ended up using the acetylene torch with a wide head to clear the vermin away from where we had to work. The itch on my neck didn't die down for three days.
The first few years, I wondered how men did some things without complaining. Every time I saw a man clean a grease trap with a screwdriver, or use a jackhammer for twelve hours straight, or jump out a 440 line with his bare hands, I wondered how he could be so strong, and so resilient. No amount of sludge, glop, or goo will cause him to waver from his goal, and if his job takes all night, he will not stop until it is done. The prospect of injury and death is laughable, because his years in the field have made him strong and have tamed his stomach. He now looks at life with a crooked eye, one that allows him to whimsically and sarcastically confront any challenge that may approach him. The physical strength to carry out a project, and the mental fortitude required to see something to its finish have become a part of his being. He seems simply to belong.
Their abilities are amazing, but the sorrow! Such sorrow exists past their expressions of vigor. You can see it in the corners of their mouths, and under their eyes. You can see in the way that they walk, with that little shuffle as they pack up to go home for the night, or with the groan that they utter at age thirty as they rise from their seat. They feel so pathetic as they work for a person who doesn't know any of their names, and as they each collect a paycheck that seems to shrink from week to week. They know that in a time of crisis, they will use their heads and save the boss a million dollars, and they will always receive their just compensation -- one day's pay. Raises? Once they begin to appreciate what the boss gives them already, then they'll be ready for a raise. Until then, they are resigned to the fact that they will never be recognized for their work other than in a curt and insincere "Thank you" from their foreman at the end of a job. If they're really lucky, they might even get lunch bought for them. Through it all, the anger dwells, and slowly builds, eventually becoming in itself the genuine question of why they bother to deal it, day in and day out.
We were doing a gas job in Alphabet City in the middle of July when the super kicked in the door of one of the last apartments that we couldn't get into. On those jobs, you have to get into each apartment to do some work on the piping behind the stove. The super was greeted by mail that was six weeks old and a stench that could have melted lead.
I heard that the guy was dead for over a month, so when the lead mechanic asked who would go in with him, I naturally volunteered. After the minimum wage morgue guys flung the body onto their van, we went in, armed with Lysol cans and with plastic wrapped around our boots. The guy died right in from of the stove, and had melted into the linoleum tile, because there was a slippery layer of heat-rendered fat that had drained towards the middle of the floor, and a spot of blackened fluid on the cabinet where his exploding intestines had left their mark. Maggots were sprinkled into his residue, adding that special touch to the already vile display.
Of all the things I've ever dealt with, this one brought me closest to losing it. The smell and the heat mixed to create a hammer of nausea that became embedded in my stomach. It stopped me from even offering to do the work.
The two of us had to both grab the stove to move it, and we had a hard time because the tile was messed up from the morgue guys having to rip it up along with the body. After the stove was put back, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. The guy was a packrat, with forty year old garbage all over the place, and in my haste to leave I tripped over some old pots and pans and landed on my knees, right in the leftover gore that was all over the place.
Those pants got thrown out.
There are times when it seems as if you've become nothing but a washed-up high school dropout. There are times when the simple frustrations of life will build up to convince you that your life is meaningless. That feeling can go on for weeks, months even, but then something will always happen that lets you realize that what you do has so much more meaning than do the things that caused you to doubt yourself in the first place. Imagine, being on a fishing trawler for six weeks on the high seas. Imagine the constant work, the five hours of sleep every night, the frozen extremities, and the hopelessness of being surrounded by the stink of fish and of sweaty men. Imagine that your entire world has been co-opted by this existence, this monotonous and repetitive droning of tortuous and exhausting labor. Then, imagine that single morning when you awake from your sleep to find your fatigue completely at rest, and a curious longing in your brain. Envision that time when you rise to the deck, inhaling the air as nature intended it to exist, and with a vision of eternity that lies all around, uninterrupted by the contraptions of man and the ugliness of his presence. At that moment you would have experienced the world as few have ever before you. Perhaps it was the feeling of Cortez as he gazed upon America, or of Philippides as he proclaimed his people's victory with his dying breath. You would have worked for your reward, which was made never more sweet than in the wake of such a trying time.
It is no vacation snapshot or sorry and contrived memory of forced appreciation! It is whole life full of the genuine article! It is a life of constant and meaningful observation, of discovery, of wonderment! It is done for so much more than can ever be described. All the nights of anger, numbness, and pain give you a gratitude towards life that you never knew you had. It turns you into a man -- it is that simple.
Those who know nothing about such things would dismiss them as being the feeble rationalization of a person who knows that his path is worthless, but the pure existential sense of feeling your life blood pumping through your veins in the most primordial of instinct, that element that is survival, transcends psychology. The sheer will to construct, to build, to survive -- these forgotten aspects of life all add together to create a drive in our beings that so few can possess. These are the things which will lead to salvation, they are the things that allow us to truly realize who we are, and why we are here.
[I]We do it because it is healthy, because it makes us strong. Beyond all of that, though, we know in the depths of our beings what the true reason is. There is no selfishness in it, nor is there any scrap of self-sacrifice or pompous aggrandizement. Our deepest instincts tell us why it is to be done. Without it, we would be dead, in every way.
We do it because it is the right thing to do.[/I]
SQUID
2003-12-21 18:54 | User Profile
Marcus,
Aye, it's a good article. Too bad those who need to read it the most will not. Philip Wylie, the great social heretic of the 50s, noted that as soon as a large number of people accept that "hewers of wood and drawers of water" are beneath contempt, ossification sets in and nothing can be done about it.
I think it's happened.
In the 90s even Edward Luttwak noticed - and he's a neocon! Luttwak said (in his book, Turbo Capitalism) that American elites had embraced a kind of "perverted Calvinism" that believed anyone with money was moral no matter what they did to get it.
So we have an upper crust that looks down on downsized meat-packers and replaced-by-Mexican roofers, but admires the millionaire pornographer who is, after all, a can-do go-getter.
Welcome to the Kali Yuga, as someone put it.
2003-12-21 21:16 | User Profile
The all enveloping memory hole has all but comsumed one Ernest Sevier Cox, a leading Academician and Klansman of the first half of the last century. Major Cox traveled widely for several years researching the origins of racial strife and decay, including a hitch working in the mines of South Africa. After his soujourn abroad, he came to write the classic 'White America' which was viciously attacked by the usual suspects. The book, though dated, contains a treasure trove of insight as well as information. [B]The most viscerally jolting of these insights was his unequivocal contention that NO civilization can long survive the destruction of its white working class.[/B]
I also remember his description of pre-1948 South Africa, wherein the Negroes and other colored were, as is now little known, treated with great solicitude and deference bordering on obsequiousness by the Afrikaaners, resulting in widespread sexual assaults against white women, and general intimidation of the white populace. This all ended with the advent of apartheid in 1948 (after his book was published). It seems that the free range Negro predator phenomenon is scientifically reproducible across all geographic and temporal divides.
I haven't read the book in several years, so I won't attempt a general synopsis. It has much the flavor of the writings of Maj. Cox's great comtemporary, Lothrap Stoddard, also memory hole vacuumed by our gutter Aristocracy. For those wishing to peruse 'White America', its entire text is available at the following website:
[url]http://www.noontidepress.com/books/cox/watoc.html[/url]
2003-12-21 22:48 | User Profile
An excerpt from the book talking about the Chinese:
Their astronomy has scarcely advanced beyond the astrological state, while their medical art continues to be a hopeless mixture of superstitious practices, absurd nostrums, and a few grains of common sense. Excessively courteous among themselves, they are rude and aggressive toward strangers, with a deep-rooted contempt and even hatred for foreigners and all their ways. On the other hand, the Chinese, although reckless gamblers like all the Indo-Chinese and Malay peoples, are naturally frugal, thrifty and parsimonious, which combined with great staying power and capacity for enduring hardships on poor fare, makes them formidable competitors with the western nations in the labor markets of the world." (Ethnology, A. H. Keane, pp. 322, 323.)
The "Yellow Peril" is not so much that of armed aggression as of economic superiority based upon low standards of life, and, ultimately, of blood admixture of yellows with whites to whose lands the yellows incessantly clamor to migrate.
2003-12-22 00:40 | User Profile
Marcus,
Thanks for the link. I think I've found my holiday reading -- just in time.
2003-12-22 09:06 | User Profile
*Hey hey, the working man, the working man like me I ain't never been on welfare, that's one place I won't be Cause I'll be working, just as long as my two hands are fit to use I drink a little beer in a tavern Sing a little bit of these working man blues
Sometimes I think about leaving, do a little bummin' around I wanna throw my bills out the window catch a train to another town But I go back working, I gotta buy my kids a brand new pair of shoes Yeah drink a little beer in a tavern, Cry a little bit of these working man blues*
'Course down here in Texas this song would now be sung more properly in Spanish, which is a tremendous shame. I'll always be of the mind that there is infinitely more honor in earning one's dollar by way of the trades than simply pushing around papers or typing at a keyboard. Lord, please have mercy on the working man and don't let it become a lost skill among us white men. Mexicans aint us and we ought not to become dependent on them to build and fix things for our way of life.
2003-12-23 06:47 | User Profile
The yeomanry--the blue-collar middle-class--is as solidly the crux of America's economic greatness as the non-coms are of our military might.
Browned outta the Dems; snobbed outta the Pubes. Lumpenprole/cooliehood or bust, Whitey...? Is an electoral solution still possible?
2003-12-23 10:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.] Browned outta the Dems; snobbed outta the Pubes. Lumpenprole/cooliehood or bust, Whitey...? Is an electoral solution still possible?[/QUOTE]
Possible? Not with the Democrats or Republicans. Is there still time for a new party or do we just wait for the revolution?
Serious economic misery in '04 might focus minds wonderfully.:sad:
2003-12-30 10:11 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.]The yeomanry--the blue-collar middle-class--is as solidly the crux of America's economic greatness as the non-coms are of our military might.
Browned outta the Dems; snobbed outta the Pubes. Lumpenprole/cooliehood or bust, Whitey...? Is an electoral solution still possible?[/QUOTE]
No. No electoral solution has been possible since the neo-cons took over the GOP sometime in the mid-1980's, although it was probably even earlier, IMHO.
This thing is either going to go out with a bang or with a whimper.
I hope it goes out with a "bang," but given the apparent infinite gullibility of white folks, a whimper seems the more likely scenario at this point.
Walter