Are You Really Useful?

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Wolynski. We are grateful for the opportunity to share her reflections on Contextual Criticism. Please check out her blog here.


In the movie "Deep Impact" an asteroid is on collision course with earth. When it hits, there'll be a tidal wave all the way to Ohio. Morgan Freeman, the president, announces they have a network of caves and 250,000 Americans can be saved. 50,000 will be handpicked and the rest, by lottery. No one over 50 is eligible, unless they're outstanding.

I have a problem with the lottery part - you should be saved only if you do something useful. There are many jobs in present day America, even without an asteroid coming, that are so useless to society, it boggles the mind.

Take the financial sector - stockbrokers, investors, accountants, financiers, bankers, hucksters, only there to make sure money begets more money and making our lives miserable. When the floods come, a plumber is more important than Donald Trump. To my mind, he's more valuable even without the floods. No, we'll only need a couple of bookkeepers to keep track of the seeds and the rest of the accountants can be hung out to dry.

We don't need businessmen, a rather broad term. My definition of a businessman is a crook gone straight. After the robber barons plundered the land, they couldn't go on calling themselves robbers, so they came up with businessmen, as did the Mob. Nice name to cover a multitude of skullduggery.

A career in marketing - what the hell is this? What is that you do exactly? Take meetings all day with other parasites? Marketing consultants, focus groups, anything to do with sales - a whole plethora of people who call themselves vice-presidents, produce absolutely nothing, but feed off those who do.

After the floods, we won't need salesmen of any kind, insurance or otherwise, or tele-marketers or any agents or middlemen. If you want to sell widgets, first make them yourself. The insurance industry, like Wall Street, is legalized gambling and produces nothing of value. Go back to insuring ships at sea and nothing else.

But the capitalists might argue, look at all the jobs and careers we've created that never existed before. Well, with unemployment officially at 10% (that's unofficially 20%), looks like those bogus careers are bogus after all. When I walk down the street, I can see plenty that needs doing and no one to do it.

Ask yourself, am I really useful? Making money for the sake of making money will eat away at your soul (and that goes for poker players, too). At the end of the day, have I made a difference? If not, have I made one person laugh?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

"Accountants hover over the earth like helicopters,
Dropping bits of paper engraved with Hegel's name.
Badgers carry the papers on their fur
To their den, where the entire family dies in the night".

- Robert Bly, "Poems for the Ascension of J.P. Morgan"