Meditations on Unemployment, Politics and the Summer of Despair

For the past couple years, as the Ohio Collegiate restructuring unfolded, the angst and dread over my future, both as an academic and a rent payer,  have sought long distance, off peak, and sometimes beer fueled (on my end) conversations with my dear friend, colleague (is it weird to still have colleagues when one no longer has an institution?) and mentor Susan Naomi Bernstein. I have always found her counsel wise, her optimism heartening, and the integrity of not only her pedagogy but the world view from which it sprang to be both a comfort and a battle cry: Tikkun Olam. Heal the World.

This hasn’t always been easy, and I’ve found myself of late reflecting her moral authority back, her counsel. Like many Americans, including this one writing, she has found herself on the outside looking in, between positions…euphemisms aside, she, like me, and like the over 9 percent of Americans (this, of course, does not include those who are no longer eligible for assistance) are on their asses and without work. And like many Americans, it is difficult to maintain any sense of optimism and not giving in to despair when the news is almost invariably shitty. 

This summer has been particularly difficult for both of us; both of us have been engaged in exhausting—and disappointing—job searches and interview processes.  I have been teaching, finishing a thirty credit hour graduate certificate, for five years (autumn, winter, spring, summer, rinse, repeat) knowing that my department would likely be dissolved, and for the last year, knowing that my contract would not be renewed, and I would teach my last class the night before I was officially separated.  On top of this, we both lost a friend, colleague, inspiration and beer buddy, Adam Vine, to the lightless void of suicide.

Through on top of that the ridiculous Rochambeau of our politics, the overheated rhetoric of the Dick Armey’s 2010 useful congressional idiots, the spineless pandering of the President, who we had invested so much into and seemed to be just another spokes model for the crypto-Reagonomics of the Clinton- era “Neo”Liberalism (or, when the New Left decided to work at Dad’s bank and go to Dead shows on the weekend), things seemed bleak. Depression and hopelessness set in: exhausted, and it seemed that the bad guys would win.  The America that had the promise to change things, to continue toward that more perfect union, that could build things and create living wages, the America that if you worked hard, found your niche, had a place for you…vamos.  If Richard III saw that “Now is the winter of our discontent…”, this was surely the Summer of our Despair.  Or, to quote Jim Lahey “the winds of shit” seemed to be swirling, and nobody has a jacket.

“Who am I if I am no longer this?” and the Endless Nameless

Last week, for the first time in nine years, the University’s fall term began—and I was at home.  Not at home as in “Oh, as an Academic Tutor, I don’t start until next week” at home, nor the “Ha HA! Tuesday-Thursday schedule! Extra day of prep and syllabi tweaking” at home. 

No. I was at home because I didn’t have to be anywhere at home. At home in the “No Job” sense.  An intense sense of existential dread had been haunting me in waves since I had turned in my badge and keys, taught one final, very surreal evening class (complete with student penned libertarian protest music),  limped home and spent a long, dark night of the soul staring into the yawning maw of a professional abyss that was to be my new reality. 

The reasons are exhaustive and exhausting as to why this came to pass, but they can be reduced to “Elections Have Consequences”: Collegiate Restructuring.  Politicians, who belong as far away from education and its institutions as is humanly possible, decide to “fix” something, and, without considering its moral, intellectual or logistical implications, make it so and those of us who either do the educating or the learning are left holding the bag.  For the poor and working class students in the state of Ohio, as well as many of us who taught those students, the bag turned out, especially in Cincinnati, to be the only consolation prize. The venn diagram between the community college and the university was a chasm of the “fix” assumptions about participation of the parties, problems of accreditation, left those students out.    I, too, found myself on the outside looking in, a victim of restructuring, a shit economy, budget cuts and too few years in the profession

Ten years ago, I made the decision to go to graduate school. After few years of shit jobs, ranging from construction laborer to house painter to the library job I wrote about previously in “Tuesday’s Gone”, I found my priorities re-ordered on that terrible day.  Sure, I liked this job, but when death comes ripping, as it did, I felt as though it was time to get on with it.  I mean, this wasn’t ever meant to be permanent.   I needed to move. So I applied to, took a lousy GRE, and was accepted to graduate school.

Graduate School was, of course, a hazing ritual that gave me a way to think about the discipline, but also the academy itself, so I haven’t really been surprised what has transpired over these years, and, unlike many of my colleagues from my time in graduate school, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and find myself in a full time teaching position at the University less than a year after receiving my M.A. in English.

What transpired between that first class and the last one is sublimely edifying, though too long a tale for this post; my three readers will have to wait for an re-telling of that particular tale.  My desire to educate within the university was kindled as an undergraduate, watching the solar brilliance of the professors, their socratic elegance, the torrent of words and ideas, the humanity in the humanities. It was rekindled with equal brilliance in those graduate seminars and classes where the substance of the discipline, rather than the politics of the Ivory Tower, was stressed, where I learned to think about that “solar brilliance” and the certitude of knowing that, in a life where a sense of belonging was either tenuous, met with suspicion or non-existent, that I had maybe found a home.  I belonged with these people; I was one of them.  For my father, a UAW man of forty three years, the first in his family to graduate from High School, the idea that I was a university  professor was proof of the transcendence of the American Dream, that working hard, doing the right things, pays dividends. 

He still does, as he is adamant about reminding me with our weekly chicken and beer long lunches, where all manner of of things are discussed and world problems solved.  I am not sure: “Who am I if I am no longer this?”

I feel very much a drift, a person who, in passing his  bookcase, will thumb through a 1947 Viking Press Finnegans Wake, only to return to his couch, empty handed, to an Xbox or the loving torpor of cable news, numb: “WTF happened?”

This week, the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana’s epochal Nevermind was released, and while I have yet to purchase it, I am certainly contemplating a certain wry-rony in purchasing this with part of an unemployment check.  When it was first released, I was seventeen years old, making it possible to embrace “not belonging” for millions of kids like me.  But those were different times, as Uncle Lou would say, for while they seemed desperate, and we who were so moved by that music looked to a future beyond Reaganomics, beyond the war, beyond George H.W. Bush (and soon enough repudiate his Brahman entitlement with a saxophone wailing rake from a place called Hope), the truth is that we had no idea how bad things would get.  There was still a dream to pursue, though it seemed a bit further off.  But concert tickets were cheap, the music coming out was challenging and righteous, and whatever, and however, it was manufactured for consumption by the emerging merchants of cool, the pre-packaging of Punk (as if the Pistols were as put together as the Monkees) for the masses, it doesn’t make it any less valid, or life changing. Unless, of course, you were (or are) one of these punker-than-thou dicks (and Christ, there is a version of these people in every generation; see Don’t Look Back if you doubt me) who only listened to bands that had just formed in a garage an hour ago because, man, they ain’t sold out.

Well, my imagined caricature of the smug pricks of Christmas past, how sold out do you feel now?  It seems that neither Nirvana, or Bad Religion, made much difference: Clinton tacked right, sold out organized labor.  The millennium came, and while we were worried about banking software, the Republicans rolled back financial reforms dating to the Depression.  Then, in a 5-4 decision, we got stuck with the ne’er-do-well son of the Bush we had just gotten rid of. Things went down hill from there.

The music has aged well, and while there is, perhaps, a nostalgia for a time when things looked like they might be starting to go in the right direction, it also spoke—and speaks—to the uncertain future, displacement, and finding beauty in despair.  I…WE…are sorely in need of such objects d’art right now.

The answer to  “Who am I if I am no longer this?” is currently being formulated as the endless nameless.

Hold Music for the Unemployment Office

Last week, like millions of Americans, I became unemployed, the sad saga of with I will not go into detail here, but plan to in a future post once the bitter hangover of a failed American dreamer subsides—then, I will be able to sing the whole sordid business in the clear and rational tones I am not famous for.

At any rate, I received my paperwork from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, and while glumly perusing the boxes, graphs and words looking for a number to budget my life around, I saw that my employer (a research one university) had submitted the payroll records of my time there. They were only off by five years. So I called, and was put on hold.

At that point, I began the kind of weird fantasizing that one does on hold, or in line at the DMV, or any bureaucracy that chips away at one’s mortal coil in exchange for confused looks, indifferent grunts, or worse—the need for more paperwork.  But my fantasy wasn’t a violent revenge fantasy, or anything like that: these people are just trying to get by, too, do they job, and avoid being a poor workless schmuck like me.

No, my fantasy is about hold music. What kind of tunes would play if hold music reflected the kind of work done at that office or business, e.g., the Unemployment Office?

Something like this:

1.       Gang of Four “Paralyzed”

2.       Captain Beefheart “Dropout Boogie”

3.       Bruce Springsteen “Johnny 99”

4.       Johnny Paycheck “Take This Job and Shove It”

5.       Alex Chilton  “Lost My Job”

I suppose anything from Cibo Matto would work for the grocery store check-out line, but what about the Post Office? Maybe this?