Meet The Press

Watching "Meet The Press" yesterday morning.

I take no credit for having the intelligence to do this. Carol is a devoted follower of the show, she is the intelligent one. I occasionally take a break from whining and pretending to pursue a writing career, to indulge in a little acquisition of knowledge.

Chuck Todd is doing a great job. Tough interviewer. Relentless. Intelligent. Informed.

Cool set. Major changes. TV sets are a point of pride for the "talent." He has taken a venerable institution and made it his own.

Here's the point. One segment of the show dealt with the reduction in unemployment numbers, the increase in jobs.

First of all, statistics are subject to manipulation and interpretation. You would think they are black and white, objective rather than subjective.

Come on, in today's world? Are you serious? Statistics are more like Play-Doh; shaped in the hands of the interpreter to be anything they want them to be.

In The Asylum I am still talking to people who are being laid off right now, and people who have been unemployed for years.

This has been going on since I started this phony baloney job in 2010.

Believe me, nobody comes skipping into The Asylum saying "I just landed the greatest job of my life. I have no more worries. I'm going to Disneyland."

Interestingly enough, the despair exists in harsh contrast to the privileged few, the landed gentry, the Peterborough aristocracy, who waltz into The Asylum and spend $700 on wine as if they were buying a Snickers bar.

It happens with all too much frequency.

Anyway, let's assume that jobs are being created. What goes ignored is the quality, or lack of, of those jobs.

Service industry jobs. Customer service. The most heinous of the heinous. Jobs that up end peoples' lives and turn them into corporate automatons.

Jobs that grant no weekends. Jobs that do not schedule two days off in a row. My God, what a concept. Who could possibly want two days off in a row?

Jobs that force people to work on Sundays. Even God did not work on Sunday, for Christ sake.

Quality of life has been taken away. The job becomes your life and your life becomes this unpredictable, segmented thing that allows you no peace, no rest, no chance to revitalize.

Victims stagger into The Asylum on Friday night, someone will reference the fact that it is Friday and, more often than not, the person in front of me will say "Big deal. I'm working Saturday and Sunday."

Weekends exist only as a historical reference for a great majority of the working poor.

Employers are fine with this. They love it. They want their employees tired and disoriented and desperate. It is easier to exploit them that way.

Bleeding hearts are lining up right now to attack me. "A job is a job. Anyone should be grateful to have any job. Times are tough. Suck it up."

Kiss my ass.

I'm talking about the slow and painful erosion of what life is all about. The concerted effort by employers to ignore the value of rest and family time and leisure.

These are the things that make up a life.

Not some soul sucking job that forces you to dance like a puppet.