RDH - The World Is a Dangerous, Dirty Place, or How to Take Pride in Your Life and Work, Even If You’re a Working-Class Meat Lover Under Siege by the Vegetarian College-Girl Mentality

The World Is a Dangerous, Dirty Place, or How to Take Pride in Your Life and Work, Even If You’re a Working-Class Meat Lover Under Siege by the Vegetarian College-Girl Mentality

March 28, 2007

Today's media would have you believe that an urban life burdened by few accessories save a handful of wireless Internet devices and an offering from Starbucks and a degree from a major university or elite college are all that's needed to thrive in this world. Being a young, thin, attractive female with a lot of money and a first-class postsecondary education is, apparently, an even bigger boon.

The sad corollary to this message is that if you are someone who does something like maintain public school buildings or lay pipeline for a living you might get the idea that you got off on the wrong track. Don't let the media bully you into thinking this is true. That privileged young pixie—whether she can flip her hair while text-messaging or not—needs those pipes every bit as much as the rest of us do, even if she consumes a meatless, dairy-free diet.

"Wait a minute, are you seriously addressing the working class with this article, and not the people who think for a living?" Yes and no.

Another thing to remember is the fact that computers and wireless routers and iPods—taken together*—amount to many trillions of tons of metal and plastic, most of which would have been impossible to wrest from the earth by fashionably dressed people. But, generally speaking, the prototypical fancy young liberal alluded to in the first paragraph of this piece would agree with the ACLU that every American adult who has been fortunate enough to stay off the rolls of the sex offenders is essentially a decent person.

So you should feel especially good about yourself if your job is physical—if, in other words, you do something more than mere knowledge work. Those clerks and administrators and therapists and writers and structural engineers and all the rest depend on the physical infrastructure for every single aspect of what they do, from visiting the restroom to vacationing in Maine. The only exception to this is the face-to-face meeting, that ancient ritual that requires nothing in the way of wires or pipes or steel beams or concrete. (But such meetings, far more often than not, depend on some sort of vehicle and no small amount of petroleum to bring the various bodies into the same place at the same time.)

Another thing you should feel less than embarrassed about is your tremendous appetite for food and beer. Activities like pounding and hauling and drilling—not to mention loading and unloading the truck—require a significantly greater degree of caloric energy than typing and lecturing and preparing spreadsheets and taking notes on the sleeping habits of your depressed late-afternoon patient. You don't have the luxury to sit around and rail against the fast-food chains or to micromanage the nutrient density of your diet.

Speaking of fast food, it's all well and good for the college-educated publishing intern to advise that one should follow her example and "go vegan," but what does that have to do with the grim realities of the world? Go vegan indeed. It's one thing to sip green tea while reading the musings of Joan Didion or even Irvine Welsh and quite another to ice one's aching knees the night after another day of backbreaking work. Put another way, what's fine for the salon doesn't necessarily cut it out on the job site. Still, the media is controlled, obviously, by writers and producers, so you need to hold your ground and fight back. Here are some tips for doing just that:

1. Drive your truck everywhere, even if it's got a commercial license. This tends to keep the liberal intelligentsia at bay by hitting them where they're most conflicted: they would like to sneer at you for driving a gas guzzler, but at the same time they want that problem with the septic tank fixed.

2. Try to limit your social interactions to those that involve your peers. In other words, to paraphrase that famous exhortation of Karl Marx, the real workers of the world need to stick together. Exposing yourself to liberal balderdash is counterproductive.

3. If you drink and are not on probation, make beer central to most nonwork or break-time activities. This step alone will tend to reinforce your nonutopian, nonvegetarian, nonconservationist worldview by excluding women and children from most of your discourse. Moreover, intoxication itself tends to inhibit the development of a thoughtful, balanced perspective on life.

4. Don't discuss politics. Most real workers don't need to be told this. But in case you're lured into a political discussion, maintain silence or switch the topic to women or sports.

Meat: murder or caloric metempsychosis? This is one all people—from Buddhists to atheists—can agree on: when you eat meat, at least a portion of the animal's life force (i.e., calories) passes into your own body, giving you an influx of energy—to hammer out a theory of relativity or to just hammer nails.

5. Don't downplay the fact that you eat meat. There are lots of great bumper stickers out there, but too often it occurs only to those with fancy degrees to advertise their preferences. Fortunately, if you do real work, you probably drive a truck or a van, and in that case, you have more than enough rear signage space to fight back. Whenever possible, aim for manly defiance: e.g., a sticker featuring a pig (with its telltale curlicue tail) and the words "I like mine pulled!"†—an especially effective slogan that implies that manly work deserves manly rewards.

"I like mine pulled!"

6. Avoid sneering at people who obviously don't do any real work. This is especially important if you work on college campuses. Give the kids—even the rich, spoiled ones—a chance to play out their fantasies, as divorced from reality as they might be. Remember that many of these people will become rich adults who, more than anyone else on the planet and notwithstanding their youthful nods to conservation and energy efficiency, will need lots of material resources, built and maintained to elaborate and exacting expectations, in their bid to find some sort of answer to their guilt-driven existential angst.

And that about covers it.

*It is essential, in fact, that all these gadgets, past and present, be taken together. There would be no iPod without the Apple IIe. Computers, which require human input to reach their full potential, are only fully tested and refined in the marketplace.

†What would otherwise be a rather lofty and pretentious play on words is brought down to earth, with this example, by the association of the male member with good old-fashioned barbecue pork, pulled apart by hand and served on white bread with plenty of sauce.