Week 10 13.12.09

As a result of ever continuing cash flow problems I have in hand photocopies of the three chapters from John Dos Passos’ USA detailing commentaries on Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ford and Thorstein Veblen. As discussed in the lecture this is a book describing the tragedies of a collection who individuals who were significant in early 21st century America.

The one I liked was the story of Veblen- The Bitter Drink. Accused by a fellow student as lazy I immediately empathised with this man. The story describes a very clever and natural thinker who didn’t fit to the path his Norwegian parents, or indeed society at large, sought for him but neither did he feel at ease with the academic life that he was resigned to. Dos Passos repeatedly says that Veblen ‘had a constitutional inability to say yes’ I don’t believe that this was right. He was a man who did not say yes to society, he did not say yes to the things that would lead him to the life that others had or others expected him to have. He said yes to what he wanted to do. To say yes to this above anything else and takes the most courage of all. It is also because of this that I do not believe that he was a lazy man. He was not. He simply did not say yes, because he knew he did not have to and he knew it would not serve him. This man said yes more than any of them, he said yes to more difficult things than taking a job offer or buying a house or a car, he said yes to not taking employment, he said yes to reading Latin and Greek and owning nothing but books and boating on the river and turning up to the university in a coonskin hat. He said yes to scandal on a cruise liner, to living like a hermit and practicing carpentry, to teaching what he believed in and not what he was asked to teach. He said yes to resigning from a job he wasn’t happy to do. These are the hardest things to say yes to, this man is the man who says yes in the noblest way.
These thought were further clarified after ‘googling’ him where I learnt about his theories relating to conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. Veblen believed that businessmen (or service providers as we might call them today) are barbarians in that they do not do the difficult tasks themselves, they do not produce like farmers or labourers but simply shift goods around, taking a profit for themselves while creating the illusion to the genuinely ‘working’ class that they are necessary and represent an improvement of the basic feudal society history while actually promoting a feudal society run by themselves. This is made possible by man’s disposition to consume or waste money in order to display a higher status when compared others.

All I can say is jeez; if this guy thought this back then he would have a whole lot more to say about it now. The first thing that came into my mind when reading this was Range Rovers. One can buy a perfectly good working car that offers the same amount of utility (I am specifically referring to those idiots who drive clean Range Rovers in cities) for a far smaller amount of money yet the Range Rovers and Range Rover dealers still exist profiting from conspicuous consumption.