SALON

Wednesday, Apr 7, 2010 12:20 AM UTC

Where’s our old-fashioned government jobs program?

It's intolerable that 15 million people are unemployed and many more underemployed. Work is redemptive

By

Topics: Unemployment,

Where's our old-fashioned government jobs program?

I think of myself as conservative and that’s why it was so irritating last Sunday in church when we were instructed to cry out gladly on cue, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia,” and so I did not. An invasion of privacy, and when the trumpets blared, trying to goose us into jubilation, I wished we could roll the rock back over the tomb with them inside it. I don’t do jubilation on command, and I don’t grin just because a photographer tells me to. I am irked at the cancerous spread of flutey mood music in public places and the plague of nannyistic warning signs in our nation (“Caution: coffee is hot.” “Road may be slippery when wet.”), and I avoid committees of earnest, well-meaning people. I believe in the entrepreneur, the impassioned individual. I’m a conservative.

On the other hand, I don’t like an individual to whistle in a crowded elevator, not even quietly. It is just too creepy.

It’s the conservative in me that wishes we had an old-fashioned government jobs program, such as FDR’s Works Progress Administration, which hired unemployed people to work to build roads, libraries, public toilets, hiking trails, tens of thousands of small useful projects. (When my dad saw the initials WPA on the cornerstone of a building, he said it stood for “We Poke Along,” but he could afford to be disdainful since he’d been hired after high school by his uncle Lew to pump gas at Lew’s Pure Oil station.) My inner conservative thinks unemployment is wasteful and damaging to the spirit — 15 million unemployed, many more underemployed — a disaster, a blight upon the land. Intolerable.

Work is redemptive. When I was hired, right out of high school, to wash pots and pans at a hotel in Minneapolis, I felt real jubilation. After the deaths of James Dean and Buddy Holly, I had adopted a tragic view of life and imagined I’d die in a crash or else become a hobo and wind up destitute, but instead I was paid actual money to run racks of dishes through a machine. It felt princely at the time.

Two years later, I worked the night shift at a morning paper for a cigar-smoking city editor named Walt who liked to bark out my name and see me jump. When he told me to call the hospital and find out if the kid who’d been struck by the hit-and-run driver last night on Selby Avenue was still alive, I called. The kid was alive. I wrote up the facts on a manual typewriter and passed it to a blotchy-faced cadaverous man at the copy desk and it went into the paper that landed on people’s doorsteps the next morning. Page 14, bottom. I felt I had a place in the world. I was easily replaceable but felt exalted anyway.

Back in those days, I used to visit relatives on their farm and they always found jobs for me to do. It was not right or decent that a healthy man should sit and stare out the window, so I was allowed to run the manure spreader. I reached back from the tractor seat and pulled the lever that engaged the drive mechanism and the scrapers moved the wet manure to the rear where the big teeth on the revolving drum flung the clods onto the corn stubble. I did this about as well as a person could.

Years later, I got a job in radio thanks to my willingness to get up at 4 a.m. and sound cheerful on the air. I could’ve gone into manure spreading instead, but it seemed too specialized and didn’t offer enough hours, so I chose radio. Two different career paths but there are similarities. You can’t do radio fast, and you can’t run a manure spreader in high gear: You’re apt to clog up the works and have to stop and clear the mess by hand. Both jobs, done well, contribute to society in some small way and give you, the professional, a crucial sense of well-being.

When you have shoveled tons of wet manure and broadcast it across 40 acres of stubble, you feel you have given a good account of yourself. Sometimes radio is like that too. You talk about your salad days along the Mississippi and a truck driver hears it as he barrels west through Montana and years later you meet him in a cafe and he tells you what you said. It’s a job. We all need one.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)

© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Garrison Keillor is the author of the Lake Wobegon novel "Liberty" (Viking) and the creator and host of the nationally syndicated radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," broadcast on more than 500 public radio stations nationwide. For more columns by Keillor, visit his column archive. More Garrison Keillor.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 61 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Journalists file suit against Manning's trial secrecy: Plaintiffs including Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange demand press, public access to trial and documents
162 points163 points | comment
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
149 points150 points | 66 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
147 points148 points | 97 comments
vote
Report: Nearly a quarter of Americans struggle to afford food
142 points143 points | 13 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
77 points78 points | 21 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations