DESTROYED BY TOBACCO

Old-timers tell the new pro boxers they’re going to get their head shook, their money took, and their name in the undertaker’s book.

Marines inform recruits they’ll get screwed, blued, and tattooed.

The prediction, in my racket, is expressed as “Welcome to Hollywood.”

But somebody killed Marilyn, and William Desmond Taylor, and the wives of various screen notables (Robert Blake, R. J. Wagner, O. J. Simpson). And somebody framed Fatty Arbuckle, and graylisted Cliff Robertson; and many threw their friends under the bus of Joe McCarthy; and many do the same today of this or that person accused of not only crimes and misdemeanors but violation of some newly evolving taboo.

And life on set is physically dangerous. There are pyrotechnics, firearms, vehicles moving, a ticking clock, mounting fatigue, and often incomprehensible or absurd directions from on high. And life on the set is the escape from the pointless absurdity of Corporate Loathsomeness.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), remembered as the architect of Central Park, also directed the United States Sanitary Commission, created to deal with invalids and veterans during the Civil War. He was a farmer, a surveyor, a sailor, and a traveler. I recommend to you his A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 1853–54.

He was a Yankee, a Christian, and an abolitionist, but he writes not as an advocate but as an economist. That slavery was an unutterable evil is evident not in his commentary but in his reportage.

Virginia, with soil, climate, water transport, and natural resources superior to those of the rich Northern states, he writes, was nonetheless poor. The soil was exhausted by the constant replanting of tobacco; manufacture was nil, the simplest of implements were imported from the North, waterpower was not exploited, and the populace was indolent.

He attributes their decay in the midst of abundance to a cultural derogation of labor—that is, of the relationship between cause (work) and effect (prosperity).

The Cavaliers, who were Virginia’s Planter Class, considered themselves Lords, which arrogance was, of course, aided by their exploitation of slaves.

The slaves not only did the fieldwork but were the artisans. They were the weavers, millers, blacksmiths, mechanics, tailors, carpenters; their wages kept by their owners.

But as the slaves were not working for themselves, they did not, as may be imagined, work with the same zeal that inspired Northern laborers. The slaves were supported—at a subsistence level, but nonetheless—independent of their work’s quality or quantity.

And so the cost of that produced by slave labor, as Olmsted demonstrates, was four times higher than that of free—and had they paid for labor, and that labor’s income been tied, as per usual, to production, the resultant profit would have compensated the South for the emancipation of their slaves.

The destruction of the Biz by Diversity Commissars is not the cause, but a result, of corporate degeneracy. The hegemons, as they grow fat, become less sassy, and the confusion about objective (making money by supplying a need) caused by affluence attracts exploiters as the sun calls forth maggots from a dead dog.

The DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) apparatchiks are one with the life coaches, therapists, and personal shoppers of Beverly Hills—they are the outsourcing of commercial reason by those who can’t be bothered.

To get serious for a moment: the appropriate Los Angeles political entities don’t need to “solve the Homeless Problem”; they simply need to do what they were hired for: to enforce the laws pertaining to Homelessness. Should that enforcement cause the Homeless to go elsewhere, the City Council, etc., will have done its job.^I

Just so, the purveyors of Hollywood Product, Public Companies, haven’t been so placed to solve (real, imagined, or exploited) social problems but to entertain a paying audience.

“Ignorance is weakness; and the ignorant man instinctively merges his ambition and his claims of justice with those of an aggregate—makes that aggregate an object of partiality and bigotry, and finds satisfaction for his enthusiasm in the success of those who guide and represent it, though that success in no wise affect his own interest,” Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States.

1. I. Might the City Council fulfill its responsibilities with decency and compassion? Certainly. It would be decent of them, additionally, to do the job they were hired for, and supply the adverbs, to taste, subsequently.