Their great collective enterprise was the labor of consumption, and with it the derivative of debt, a byproduct, like the methane exuded by factory-farmed pigs, that funded the patriotic service owing to God, country, and the American Express card. The work was maybe mindless, a substitution of what is animal for what is human, but it fattened the gross domestic product, enriched the insurance companies and the banks, welcomed the second coming of an American Gilded Age, and now accounts for the increasingly grotesque disparity between the income earned as wages and the revenue collected as rent, interest, dividend, stock option, and year-end bonus.
Americans with jobs imagine they now work longer and harder hours than did their forebears on Mark Twain's Missouri frontier; if so, their labor serves a purpose other than the one in hand. Finance accounted for 47% of total U.S. corporate profits in 2007; 58% of Harvard University's male graduates in that same year (the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Wilson's small class of persons deserving of a liberal education) took up careers as high-end traffickers in the drug of debt. It's a lucrative trade, up to the standard of the cotton export from the dear old antebellum South. That it doesn't add to the sum of human happiness or meaning is probably why the gentry on the lawns of Connecticut, together with their upper servants in Washington and the news media, talk about the lost battalion of America's unemployed as a set of conveniently invisible numbers rather than as a body of fellow citizens.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham's Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper's Magazine , he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America , Theater of War , Gag Rule , and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay introduces "Lines of Work," the Spring 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly .
Copyright 2011 Lewis H. Lapham
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