LeftExchange
Things Ain't What They Used to Be by
(That is the title of a Duke Ellington piece that I again listened to yesterday. A musician, slightly disillusioned one might guess, is reported to have commented on hearing the title “they never will“ while another, more cynical said “and they never were“).
Things aint what they used to be!
It´s enough to read a daily paper.
Shareholder-value?? Does a shareholder have a specific value?? Depending on what?? Weight, length or number of gold fillings?? And Social Competence???? !!!! That´s what we used to call asslicking in the old days! Is there no one who can speak a straight sentence anymore?? The only advantage of using those funny new words that no one can understand, is that one understands that anyone using them must be a fake! Consultant or investment-advisor most probably, of the sort who always 6 months after it happened can explain, with all due expertise and including the latest trend-words in economics, why you shouldn´t have followed his earlier advice or why Enron crashed.
And I´ll go further! If I one, just one more time come to hear a wellfed, welldressed, welltanned and wellarticulated bloody CEO mention “what the market wants”, I´ll strangle him! Or if someone sneaks up behind me and says “investor”.... or “market player”.... or any of all those other new words that didn´t exist in the 60s when every single school-kid could get free new books regularly and didn´t have to drag around with 137 copied papers held together by an old rubber band. Those times when we had very few millionaires or golf-courses but the kids could find real jobs and the pupils could get milk with their free school lunch, the sick could afford their medicines and a worker´s pay was enough to live decently on. Nowadays when the GNP is tenfold what it was in my youth all I ever hear from the new kind of politicians is that we must save and “slim” and sell out. At the same time that lowly paid nurses and teachers are working themselves to burnout I have never before read so many reports of how the “leaders” of business and state celebrate birthdays eating wild salmon or berries specially flown in for the occasion from Canada or Iceland.
In those days a spade was called a spade. Deforestation was deforestation and not a “reafforestation area” and a “player” was a Pelé and no Armani-suited martini-guzzler playing monopoly with others´ money. People killed by a stray bomb were not swept away under the guise of “collateral damage” and attacking local civilians with tanks and attack helicopters was not called “active selfdefence”. The criminals were put in prison and company presidents were not let off by claiming “unforseen market fluctuation”. Stealing community assets was not excused by clouding it with the word “privatization” and before the great “globalization” you could travel in most every country with less fear than you probably experience from a walk today in a lot of downtown areas.
In the 60s one could go to a normal restaurant and eat a nice steak without hormones and antibiothics and served with real sauce bernaise made on real butter and not flour and additives. And one could do it without having to mortgage the house, wife, kids and goldfish!!! In those days I had a simple job as gas-station serviceman. The gas-stations even had service in those days. Instead of selling milk, chips, beer, TV-dinners, rubber dinghies, mountain bikes, flags, candy, barbecue sets, microwaves and skis, we sold car accessories, bolts and fuses and even checked the air and changed light bulbs free of charge. And the spare parts to the cars could be found in every town and weren´t concentrated in a giant central warehouse in Kaiserslautern or Madrid in central Europe to be delivered “just-in-time”, (usually too late), by stinking lorries that clog up the roads from North Cape to Gibraltar. And when the long awaited camshaft finally arrives, it has rolled longer that it will do in the car when fitted.
If I´m not mistaken, I think doctors could visit sick people in their home without being hounded by the medical association. Lawyers were, of course, the same as now, but much fewer!
But one is not supposed to say that it was better in the old days. Oooooo noooo!! Don´t mention it! If you do you are an old nostalgic or hostile to developement, and if you are you should be in a old people´s home and not take part of any discussion on contemporary society. I wonder if one is even allowed to BE in the community? It probably has to be decided by the market. Or some sort of subcommittee. And then it´s easy to guess what will happen. They hold a lot of meetings in fashionable places, pay some consultants a lot of money and then produce 2693 pages of incomprehensible text that says on one hand yes but on the other hand no, but only a little, and they need a payrise anyway and it really is nobody´s fault and they all have alibis.
1960.... just imagine. It was different at that time. You could get a drivers´ license without attending a traffic school. I remember that the test was even possible to understand. Like “If you drive in 50 km/h on dry tarmac, how long a distance do you need to stop?” That was easy and one could just tick the box that said 12 meters or something. In today´s traffic schools you can see questions like “you approach an intersection as pictured, what do you have to expect to happen?” Who in his or her right mind can figure out that you should tick alternative D?? I mean it´s not really self-evident that “A tank-battalion will soon pass”?? Just because one can see an infantry colonel in the corner of the picture!!
The athletes earned peanuts compared to today, of course. Most national team people in football, icehockey or any other sport had normal productive work in weeks doing anything from house-painting, selling insurance to repairing cars or when it came to women, secretaring or waiting in restaurants. On the other hand the sports were very fair and I never saw a footballer using dirty tricks on opponents and there are rumours that the visiting teams many times were even applauded for good performances and not shouted down with bad language. Except for the odd extra carrott or a lot of training, the performance boosting of doping was unknown. The dark ages some might say.
Maybe I shouldn´t say that everything was better in the good old days. We didn´t have the internet. If we wanted to have a look at naked ladies we had bloody well to go out and look for dressed ones and get them to shed their clothing in due time! We couldn´t just surf here and there and click or double-click on the interesting stuff. On the other hand we probably preferred real women instead of pictures. And feel them in person instead of clicking. Everything was more real in a way, I have to say. Less virtual, maybe, but more real!
When contemplating if it really was better in those ancient days there are many things to take into account. Maybe it was better only for us simpler folks.... Those with a lot to invest maybe didn´t see it the same way. If I´m completely honest most banks were probably not very interested in investing those 479 swedish bucks I had saved at that time (before running to the shop and buying a racing piston and camshaft for my 54 Ariel HS 500cc). Today they would surely demand 500 in surcharges just to open an account, anyway.
But some things have improved since a lot of things exist today that didn´t exist then. We didn´t have motorbikes that could do 300 km/h!! If we wanted to drive ourselves to kingdom come we had to kindly enough do it in 150! Without a CD-player!! And we didn´t have cable-channnels filled with American action-movies where everybody say “shit” and “fuck” all the time. Or commercial TV where they interrupt anything that might be important by trying to get you to buy obscenely high priced training equipment supposed to give you a flatter stomach or a more well-shaped behind without “hard work”. We didn´t even have cell phones or genetically modified tomatoes that stays fresh for 2 ½ years.
And we didn´t have market analysts or finance consultants. We had to make do with fortune-tellers and our old finance Secretary. And we didn´t have pork chops so fat-free that the dust rises when you take a bite. Or phone-services where it costs the earth to listen to dirty talk by unknown women for 10 minutes. Come to think of it, we didn´t even engage in dirty talk with known women.
We hadn´t even nuclear power!
Some youngsters may ask me “if you were not in the EU, how could you travel in Europe”, but then I answer truthfully that just like today you need your passport and a ticket. Exactly the same as now except we didn´t have to fork out billions of our tax money to Brussels.
And if someone asks me “If you didn´t have nuclear power, did you not have power shortages? Didn´t you have to freeze some winters?”
This is a piece that I originally wrote in 1998 as a contribution to a “Sweden´s best Stand-up comedy texts” competition. It won the regional finals but come third in West Sweden finals.
In translating it I have updated and made some changes, but even if a lot of things aint what they used to be the core is as was.
And, yes, I´m aware that I´m slightly onesided!
Jerre
Jerre Skog
www.skog.de
April 5, 2002
And were they? Well, I´m inclined to say yes. Better even, in a lot of ways!
See what words they use nowadays in order to confuse and trick us.
“Incitement-Amplification”.... “Resource-Deprived Human Assets”....
“Sector-oriented Market Policy”.... “Optimated Resource-Flow”....
“Collateral Damage”.... “Destabilization”....
“Social Competence”.....”Shareholder-value”....
Saving??? Only some, my friends, only some have to do it!!
We were not in the European Union!
Hmmm, when I think about it, it really WAS better in those days.
Then I have to confess: “Yes, it could happen that power was a bit scarse sometimes!!
The power deliveries could be interrupted by heavy snowfall!
IN THOSE DAYS TOO!”
It was written to be delivered as a monologue in a rather fast, fluent way of stand-up-comedy and I still suspect that the actor who was picked to deliver it was slightly too serious as it come out more like the Hamlet-monologue from Shakespeare. Very deep and soulsearching! The first five sentences alone took half an eternity to come out instead of 10 seconds!
