Raising
the minimum wage has again become an issue at local to federal levels. Given
the increase in labor costs this will engender means that management will
always be opposed to such a measure, as will those who feel management will
seek to offset those costs by cutting the workforce (a threat from management,
in fact). Labor is the biggest cost for many, if not most, companies, and they
find that maximizing profits can best be done by short changing employees.
That sucks.
Increased labor costs are necessary
if people are to make a decent living from their labor. One way to offset these
costs is to impose a maximum wage.
Putting a cap on the earnings of executives and other highly compensated
employees (including movie stars, rock stars, and athletes) will go a long way
toward keeping labor costs within bounds that do not impede reasonable profitability.
Why are the costs of the producers always blamed for draining profits, and not
the blood-sucking corporate execs? In fact, capping the salaries of the
overpaid could actually accrue benefits to consumers in reduced prices.
Capped at what amount? Say $500,000
per year? Maybe more, we can quibble about that. If you can’t live a
comfortable life on $500,000 per year, you probably need to get some sort of
therapy.
Many will say such a ‘draconian’
move would violate their god-given right to be multi-millionaires. There is no
such right. Many will say it is ‘un-American’─ maybe so, but in a good way.
People should have the opportunity to move up and accumulate wealth, but how
much does anyone really need? Are car collections, houses on every continent, 6
bedroom houses for 2 people, 57 pairs of shoes, opulence in every choice be it
food or furniture; and a wide range of other extravagances one can imagine and
can observe indulged in by the uber-rich, really justified? On what grounds?
Are we really expected to believe that their work is so much more valuable than
the hired help?
Few of us do, and most of us know
exactly what worth they bring, and sometimes it’s a lot, and often times it’s
not. But it’s never worth the price paid by workers.
I watched the PBS American Masters segment on J.D. Salinger the other night. I
always liked Salinger, and have always been perplexed at why a book about a
miscreant and hateful adolescent got to be required reading in schools for so
long. It’s probably a good thing. That audience can relate, and that the
schoolmasters allow it is probably admirable (it could be getting time to
change the curriculum now though). Never mind the wackos. They’d have latched
on to something or someone else in any case.
I respect Salinger immensely for
saying; ‘Fuck these assholes. Catcher will give me a living for the rest of my
life. Why bother? I can live a peaceful and sane life.”
It’s an intelligent approach.
But I think his choice was founded
on his hyper sensitivity to criticism, which he would not have been able to
indulge if Catcher hadn’t given him the resources. He wouldn’t have been able
to do it without those resources, and wouldn’t have chosen to do it even given those resources, if his later
works didn’t receive some harsh criticism. If those works had achieved
universal acclaim he would have appeared at the opening of an envelope!
He bowed out when the mud-slinging
started slapping him in the face.
He was no masochist.
Narcissist, yes; masochist, no.
From then on, he claimed to have
been writing on a daily basis. It was all for ‘his own pleasure’. There is an
archive, and we would expect it to be a huge archive, after 45 years!
Is it? Will it be?
Perhaps, but I’m willing to bet it
will be an endless ramble, with brilliant passages that make you wish he was
more calm and collected and could weed out the chaff and get to the quick, so
that it was all brilliant.
He was too self-indulgent to be able
to do that.
Now take Simenon.
Georges Simenon was a Belgian who
wrote in French. He was a high school drop-out, and a journalist in his teens.
By his mid-twenties he was rich and partly famous for his hundreds of pulp
novels. Then he hit on the character of a detective and wrote about 75 mystery
books around him. In the middle of all that he began writing ‘hard novels’. Sometimes
they’re called psychological novels, for some reason. There are a lot of them.
I don’t think anyone is quite clear on just how many but there is little doubt
that no one has surpassed the output.
Whatever you call them, they are a
wonder.
Currently I’m reading Dirty Snow, a book about a young man
living in an unspecified city in an occupied country and who is eagerly diving
into a criminal lifestyle‒in a world where ‘criminal’ has become undefined and
amorphous. We think that we are in France, or Belgium in World War II, but
nowhere is there a mention of ‘German’ or ‘Nazi’ or ‘France’ or ‘Fascism’, or
any reference to a specific time and place. Hitler is nowhere to be found. Things
are mostly circumscribed to a small urban neighborhood. As the book progresses
one is sucked into a more and more surreal world‒Philip K. Dick and Kafka come
to mind‒which still somehow feels like the world we all live in. The book
transcends time.
It’s not even his best book.
How did he do it? How could someone
write so much, so well?
Simenon’s style was spare, sparer
than Hemingway. The lines lay down like a blade of quick fire. Read Simenon
after just a few hits of decent weed. Any more than that and you’ll blow it…none
or less would be fine…but do it anyway.
Unlike Salinger, Simenon was not
afraid of criticism. I’m pretty sure he didn’t give a damn. He had all the
acclaim he needed, and caring about that kind of thing would interfere with
getting laid, an obviously more satisfying pursuit. He claimed to have had sex
with 10,000 women.
Now there’s a common pursuit of these two writers...myth-making. It’s
not among their most attractive aspects, but it worked for both of them, in a
big way. It’s worked for a lot of writers, in fact. Myth-making. Not essential
for a writer, but for a writer who would achieve financial success?
Hell, just another character, eh?
But what a contrast! I’ve liked both
these writers, and they have both had an influence on me. I don’t think
Salinger could touch Simenon however, and it’s a measure of America’s
preoccupation with itself that Salinger’s myth is so much bigger than
Simenon’s, and that a writer who freely gave it all to the world, and
maintained his artistry while he was at it, is less read and discussed than one
who hid it away, like a squirrel.
You pretty much know that Salinger
will disappoint, while we have all the evidence we need of Simenon’s
brilliance.
