A Comment on Blog Comments

The post below this is too long to read. Consider it a footnote, which need not be read. I am going to summarize it here.

Philip Pilkington suggested that federal money be funneled through local governments to NGOs and grassroots organizations, which would spend it hiring people at minimum wage to do work that needs to be done. This would be better than having Big Government meddle in people's lives by hiring them for a new CCC or WPA.

I said (a) this is already being done in Minnesota, (b) minimum wage in the US is too low -- people can't live on it, and (c) what are these newly hired people going to do? The average NGO does not need a horde of unskilled workers.

Two further comments: I was being concrete and specific rather than abstract, and no one responded to me, though the comments on the article are going on and on.

This happened to me in re my Crooked Timber post as well.

In a sense, you might argue that I was telling stories, rather than setting up a brick wall of theory. And to answer a story, you need to tell another story or give a comparable piece of concrete and specific information.

Re hiring unskilled workers:

"When I worked in an NGO, we hired unskilled workers to make community gardens and to insulate houses."

Re lack of class consciousness among US workers:

"When I worked in a factory down south, I got to know these guys... Let me tell you the kinds of things they said..."

I came from an educated, middle class family and got a good education. When I first began to work in offices in Detroit, I couldn't understand my co-workers, and they couldn't understand me, even though we were all native speakers of English, and we all understood the words we were using. It wasn't a dialect problem, or a knowledge problem. It was a cognition problem.

Then I began to understand them, and a lot of middle class talk began to sound like bullshit.

I am not saying that my language use is working class. I'm still a highly verbal, pretty well educated person from a middle class background. But something has changed. What Barb Jensen is writing about language really interests me.