Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 2)
by guest columnist Doug Anderson
(YESTERDAY, we visited a Seattle poet/salesman who is forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is more of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.)
Salesman: What’s really bugging you?
Poet: Well, when you read the PSBJ you start thinking how much richer everyone is than you are.
Look at the numbers they throw around on the first few pages. Venture fund X raises $340 million. Y Store contemplates a $20 million dollar placement. Z Company launched with a startup stake of $50 million.
Then, by extension, you start thinking how much smarter everyone is than you are.
Then, when you flip to the back section called Briefcase, you see the pictures of all the men and women being promoted in their various professions. You reflect how much better looking they are than you.
And the writing is generally wretched. A completely depressing experience.
S: Well, I can’t cave into your inferiority complexes. I have to get out and sell things to keep you in poems and theories; so let me do my little duty here.
I open the paper and head straight for the For the Record section. This is where I can find out if company Zlab has been hit with a federal tax lien, a civil suit or is selling off pieces of itself. If so, stay away.
On the other hand, if company Zlab is moving into a brand new 900,000-square-foot warehouse on Monster Road, they could probably use a few new pencils. Time for a sales call. See? That’s all there is to it. We’re just about done.
P: That’s a relief.
S: You’re such a bohemian.
The PSBJ ain’t so bad. It’s better than the flimsy scenarios of murder and mayhem that are the truck and fare of the daily papers. You’re supposed to be interested in people, right? When you’re reading through the PSBJ, don’t you feel you’re getting a deeper sense of what your fellow citizens; are up to?
Maybe if more of you literary types read the PSBJ you wouldn’t write such ephemeral twaddle. Maybe it’s not so imaginative but it’s just what it is: it’s the record of balls and enterprise it takes to generate wealth.
P: Well, I’m much moved, Mr. Businessman. Excuse me while I go blow my nose into the American flag. You’re really taken in by this stuff, aren’t you?
S: Like I say, it pays the rent.
P: Oh, Balls. The PSBJ is nothing but a tear sheet of pasted together public relations flyers. Puff pieces smelling strongly of the heavy oil of the region’s marketing engines.
S: That may be; but there is something here, rather than nothing. There’s a lot of money around. That’s news. Just because you feel inferior in front of all this wealth, you shouldn’t take it out on me when I try to read the PSBJ.
P: It’s not that I feel inferior. I just feel there’s something missing in all this craven mammon worship. You said you feel like you’re getting deeper knowledge about our fellow citizens; but that’s an illusion.
Look at the PSBJ. There is no analysis here. It’s all pompoms and cheers. There’s not a bad dollar spent anywhere. Dollars don’t kill people; people kill people.
Look at what assholes most rich people are. They’re fearful, pinched, shrewd, selfish. You don’t see any of that reflected in the PSBJ.
S: OK Mr. Poet, do you have to be so insufferably ’60s? What do you propose?
P: I object to mindless dollar adoration as embodied in the PSBJ. The exaltation of money as the supreme good becomes a kind of religion. It allows us to slough off the questions of what our life is for of how to treat our neighbor or what kind of future we want for our kids. It pretends to stand for Art but all we get are toasters.
S: I’m going to have to stop here. I’ve got to go to work.
TOMORROW: Copyrights and wrongs.
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