Orpheus's Journey to the Economic Underworld

"... and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers."

 -- "Tithonus, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

      Before me now the ice of Powder Horn Pond, dissolving in the cold grey rain, rises in a mist, wild and drear, floating ghostly in front of the pines.
   
       In previous years, this would have been snow.
 
      But though this is dreary, it is not one tenth so bleak as a certain place I am wont to repair, in the   pitchness of night: the 24 hour Wal-Mart in Plymouth. Here, you can see, in all its grimness, the Underworld of the American economy. Here, you meet shades and spirits who refuse to meet your eyes, doing all night the packing and shelving and heaving and pulling and pushing that late Capitalism, hurtling the Earth -- or its species, at least -- towards disaster, requires to feed its bottomless, cancerous maw. All of them are tired. They have the zoned-out fatigue of long distance air travelers. This is their second or third job, if statistics are any guide. And they still aren't getting by. Many are old -- quite old, doing a young person's work when they should be sitting in the fullness of their life's own pasture. Many are immigrants, from Latin America, southeast Asia, Africa. Many work with headphones in their ears to more tolerably bear the interminable monotony of stacking Pringles, row upon row, in the small hours of the day. None of them want to talk, much less make eye contact. Even a genuinely strange character like myself goes unremarked.

       These are this economy and society's undead. Once, they knew life, if even for a briefest moment, maybe as a child at a playground, or as a young mother in the firstness of mother-child love; and that urge to beauty and freedom does not go away. For though they labor so, out of their own and their family's necessity -- their direst need -- they do so with the grudging knowledge that they are being deprived of their hard-won and ancient liberties, liberties to a good, fair, and decent life in this country. We once fought a war for those freedoms -- many wars, in fact. We fight wars for other reasons these days.

      And know all ye, with your cloud computing and your The Economist magazine and NPR's "Marketplace" -- know you, that these wakeful, haggard souls are what support all of you, what make your rarefied existence possible, what make the sushi and microbrewery "tastings" possible. And they may go one supporting your arrogant selves for a few years more.

       But they aren't going to do it forever.

       No. Some day, they are going to take back what is theirs. And you will rue that day, you Calculators and Sophists -- you will rue that day!

         After all,

        "When Adam delved and Eve span,
         Who was then the gentleman?"
            - John Ball, priest to the English Peasant's Revolt, sermon at Blackheath, Summer, 1381.