Thanks to internet information overload, I'd estimate that I consume at least 500 mini-factoids, polls and survey results per day. Or maybe it's 500 million per day, because that's what it feels like. But one single statistic has stuck with me ever since I first came across it back in January, the one that claims that one out of every five men in the United States is unemployed.
The Great Recession has been especially tough on dudes. This trend has been pored over for a while now from a number of angles, and the socioeconomic impact is so powerful that it's caught the attention of America's thinking class. Just today, I got my copy of The Atlantic with a flaccid male symbol on the cover, and a feature article called "The End of Men." It's your basic new-journalism piece, full of shock illustrations and pullquotes designed to scare half the audience and validate the beliefs of the other.
Beyond the window dressing, it's a good article! ("Good," of course, meaning "I agree with it.") That the salary scoreboard is changing is indisputable fact, based on raw numbers and observed evidence. And I'm not here to defend my gender. I'm more interested in American male population's internal dynamics, or rather, where my brothers are at right now.
Financial strength is purely relative in a world where economies crash and recover on a monthly basis. So rather than watch the hierarchy, I take a more potential-based view of personal production, lay it out on a continuum. On one side, the skilled manufacturers, craftsmen and specialists -- the makers of things. At the other end, the "knowledge economy," the people who earn money in return for their thoughts and decisions. (This group has been around long before my beloved dot-com era; folks have been involved in management decisions for some time now.) A spectrum bridging the tangible production with the intangible. In the middle, complete uselessness and non-participation, the walking dead. Personal life in the first world can easily be defined as the ongoing struggle to avoid the black hole of irrelevance.
I am a DWM, 38 years old. Advancing age prevents me from ever again having a career building stuff, so my lot in life is to cling to a stake on the cerebral side of the divide as long as I can. I've come to approach this as a game. And I like games, having grown up around sports. Most days, it feels like hanging onto the landing gear of a helicopter, knuckles white, legs dangling behind me, my shoes falling off and disappearing into that swirling vortex. Exciting!
That very Atlantic article cites a projection that computer engineering will be one of only two of the top 15 industries that will continue to be men's worlds for years to come. (The other is janitors.) Perhaps the man's man of the future will be the digital hustler, wrangling giant amounts of data, building towers of code up to the sky, programming Robots.
And I am the digital hustler.
But what will become of the useless men, stuck in endless circuits of reschooling and retraining, finding that each new chosen profession is just as irrelevant as the last? (And what happens when they're too old to give up this hamster dance and join the military?) I live in Rhode Island, one of the most useless states in the union, where nothing of tangible or intangible consequence is produced. But the industrial revolution started here, and I've grown to love this place for that irony alone. Rhode Island has been devastated by the downturn -- or rather exposed by it -- and we were one of the first states to crack the 10 percent mark on reported unemployment. In short, we've got a lot of useless men here.
I notice them when I go into downtown Pawtucket to mail something at the post office or pick up a book from the library. They're all over the streets in increasing numbers, all colors, shapes and sizes. And they're not very nice or friendly, most of them. Just last week, two blocks away from historic Slater Mill, a white man with a greasy t-shirt over a bulbous belly asked me for the time.
I showed him my left wrist. "I'm sorry, I don't have a watch on."
"Can you give me a dollar for the bus?"
"No, sorry."
"Fuck you."
Useless men tend to be quite surly.
My father (retired and beyond all this) was recently in town for a PawSox game, and he turned to me at one point and said, "Everybody seems so angry." Useless men are indeed angry and frustrated, and this hostility generally lies just below the surface. It's kept from boiling over into blind rage by consumer products like violent video games and NFL football. Loud arguments over terrorism/Obama/Bush [depreciated]/Congress are also examples of healthy and dignified outlets for this aggression. Occasionally, there are threats of bodily harm to others, but those generally stay empty and unenacted upon -- once the subject has the flash realization of insufficient funds and inability to defend legal action. But stripped of manhood, free of manly responsibilities, they become manlier than men.
The key historical document of this dynamic is, of course, Fight Club, a novel published in 1996. It's fictional, but Chuck Palahniuk looks like a wise sage now. The book and movie triggered a wave of organized backyard brawling and the rise of the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a major sport, but coded in the work's DNA is what happens when men become useless: a.) extreme withdrawal into self, and b.) reversion to simian tendencies.
It's one out of five now, but there is no mini-factoid, polls or survey result that suggests that things will get better. ("Better," of course, meaning "the way it was 20 years ago.") The United States is now a place where "stuff" is made elsewhere and most of the only people smart enough to run "things" are women! There's a whole lot of in-between, and millions of males are being pulled into that economic sinkhole. There will be more and more useless men, and fewer and fewer social services to help them. My advice? Invest heavily in things like ultimate fighting and pro wrestling.
What happens now? Where are we going? And where will it end? What we're seeing is what happens when the concept of society stumbles, when basic human nature escapes out of civilization's cracks. And I have seen what may be the ultimate endpoint, one of the most extreme and sad cases of useless manhood in the entire world.
Last summer, I traveled to Peru with a humanitarian organization. An hour's bus ride north of the capital city of Lima is Pachacutec, a desert town, a series of dune villages of shanties that are literally built on sand. It's a cruel twist that the place is named after one of the great Inca warriors, as it's one of the most destitute and poor regions on earth, in a nation that has one of the most extreme income disparities found anywhere (51% of the nation's wealth is distributed to the top 20%).
We were there to distribute hundreds of pairs of new shoes. As the day went on, I began to realize that nearly every recipient was a woman or a girl. Once I noticed this, I counted men. There were several teenage boys, the local drunk, and the hustling horchata vendor on his bicycle (he didn't need shoes). Where were all the men?
"There is nothing to build here, no money to be made," my translator told me. "So men abandon their families and go closer to the city. Most of them become day laborers, and spend what they earn on alcohol and prostitutes."
"Wait," I replied. "Don't they send some money back home, take care of their families?"
He shook his head sadly. I summoned up all the power of my sociology minor at the University of Oregon and rattled off a series of reasons why this is completely unsustainable, most specifically from a population standpoint. At the very root of it, one of a society's basic needs is enough sperm to survive.
"They grow up, they have children, they leave. Over and over. It's a cycle that has repeated for generations now, and there's nothing that can stop it. The cycle is unbreakable. In 100 years, if you were to come here, it would look exactly like this."
