In my mind, the perfect example of Man’s emasculation, in terms of a man’s place as a part of the greater society, are given in The Iliad, where the slave-hoarding, blustering figure of Agamemnon is superior in rank to Achilles, who is much more of a man. The same theme is repeated in Beowulf, although without the toxic relationship between hero and king. Still, in this Germanic epic, the King is honored as much for owning a bunch of stuff that he did not earn, as Beowulf is for saving the kingdom.
This reflects a process whereby a father earns honor through merit, and then literally passes that honor down to his sons in the form of political status and/or accumulated wealth, which gives the inheritor unearned social status.
The inheritor, of course, wants to keep his status, and further wants to pass it one to his undeserving progeny. He now has the option of discounting the merit and deeds of the real man, or of taking credit for those deeds, by buying them. As this happens through the ages, and across societal boundaries, we end up with a caste system based on money, of accumulated goods in the hands of those who pull the strings of economic redistribution, being used to reward those men who show actual merit, most obviously soldiers, thinkers, artists and athletes.
Below is an example from my everyday work life from two weeks ago. Actually, it is not from my work life, but from Joe’s work life. I am a part time visitor to his full time workplace. He is my direct supervisor, but has eschewed his authority. Taking note that I am just as good at doing our work as he is, he regards us as equals and makes shared decisions with me, deferring to my judgment without a shred of ego. You see, Joe is a throwback kind of guy. Born into the East Baltimore working class, Joe was raised by a hard-drinking Polish-American father to appreciate a man for what he does, and to only heed those words uttered by a man, willing and able to, back them up on the physical plane of existence, either by firing your ass, or beating it.
Joe and I work in a different way when apart, but when together, compromise, both of us respecting the other’s ability. Together, we do the work of 4 men in half the time that our 25-year-old coworkers do it in. Joe sees the world through a lens of merit, admitting that he does not understand much of it. He checks in with me often to interpret the current, seemingly insane, reality. Two weeks ago he checked in for real, finally fed up with something that bothers him greatly as a grocery clerk, the fact that money trumps merit, that clerks from other departments are regarded as superior, and us their servants, through the shear naked fact that they are paid a higher rate for doing the same thing we do in a different part of the building.
In 1981, when I moved to Baltimore and got a job working for Mister Len at the Bi-Rite, on my very first day on the job, I came into contact with the retail food caste system. I was hired as a grocery clerk. But when the meat room clerks got backed up running trash for the meat cutters, I and the grocery manager were detailed to sort it out. The grocery manager, a man named Larry, known to one and all as ‘Cigar Face,’ a fellow who had worked as a line cook onboard a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Pacific, bitched a blue streak about “doing the goddamned meat room faɡɡots' work.”
Easily overhearing Larry rant on the meat dock below his accounting office, Mister Len paged me to his office after the work was done. He turned in his swivel chair, took off his glasses in his sage way, and said to me, “Jimmy, I apologize for that. It is no fun to do another man’s work just because the other man is not up to it and then not be rewarded. Don’t mind Larry. He has a brain like a sieve and will be drunk when he comes back from lunch. I pay those meat men twice what I pay you, because the things you put on the shelf can be had anywhere. But if my meat cutter cuts a better steak, I get the customer. You understand? So when I need cardboard mashed up in the bailer, do I pay a butcher ten dollars an hour to do it, or you five?”
The old man then directed me to go up to the diner and buy him a bacon cheese burger. He gave me enough money for two and told me to buy one for myself and keep the change.
I learned that lesson. But some lessons become hard to swallow, especially when someone tries to jam them down your throat sideways.
I sort the frozen and dairy orders at my workplace. Since the store has picked up business due to Wal-Mart not staying open past midnight and Giant Foods no longer cutting meat, but using a central cutting location in Pennsylvania, I have been running behind. The frozen order is no longer sorted when Joe gets in to work at 5 a.m. I’m usually just dragging it out of the box. Being a Frozen clerk makes you a part of the grocery crew, but responsible for sorting bakery, deli, seafood and meat room stock as well.
The meat room has traditionally been the high paying department, and in union stores even has its own separate union and shop steward. I accept the fact that sometimes I sort more meat room stock than my own, and that the meat room personnel never say thanks, and that the meat manager snarls under his breath at how I sort his freight even though he has never lifted a box off of a pallet. It is my lot in life. They are the first born and I am the red-headed step child.
Recently, as Joe and I toiled through a massive order, the meat manager, and his first cutter, and his clerk [who should be working with us] repeatedly walked by us and even stopped and observed us doing their work. We even had to stop doing their work so that they could pass a total of 11 times with three non-working bodies. Then the first cutter watched us work for a full 15 minutes as he texted on his smartphone. This is classic female style passive-aggressive behavior, the kind of behavior our society is structured to cultivate and tolerate.
Without enough carts to sort the order properly, necessitating double work, and with the order beginning to thaw, we were at a frustrating impasse.
Joe likes having me as a helper, because the guys he works for respect me a lot, as I used to manage a store and have done them numerous professional favors without charging for my time. In the back of all their minds they suspect I might someday be in a hiring position again in this ever-shifting industry and be able to extend a helping hand to them.
My word means something to these men, particularly since I don’t complain.
Joe looked at me as the meat manger and his boys strolled on by, two hours into their shift without a drop of blood on their aprons, drinking coffee and waiting for us to finish doing their work.
Way back in the 1990s, Joe and I both had experiences with insulting coworkers who threatened to get physical. We both made a reputation for ourselves as guys that would take you out on the parking lot and leave you there. Although that is totally beyond the pale today, phony men at work still harbor a physical pecking order in their mangina mind, and they fear real men. The American man in the workplace is now degraded to the point where just standing in front of him and telling him the truth is an equivalent to a body punch.
Joe looked at me as the men without merit, but with the pay rate and social status, sauntered on by, earning money for nothing, and said, “Are you with me?”
I said, “It’s about time you asked me that.”
He then unloaded the carts of meat room stock on the floor. The clerk walking by staggered as if hit, actually flinching as he stepped back, and Joe snarled to me, “What must it be like to be a gutless coward?”
I nodded to the meat room clerk, who was now scampering away into a non-working zone and said, “Ask him. He should be able to write a doctoral thesis on it.”
Unable to make eye contact with either of us, the meat manager walked by numerous times, a tear wetting his eye, not man enough to lift a box of meat or to negotiate a reasonable solution, like forbidding his sissies from watching us work and, instead, having them goof off elsewhere. We were not looking for equity, but merely insisting that we not be made fun of while we worked.
As predicted, our department manger came to us—it just so happens, sick to death of having work billed to his department transpire in another without a written transfer—having been approached by the mangina meat manger about our lack of subservience. Confident that I would best articulate our case, Joe pointed to me and I hung the meat room staff on the mangina petard in five lines.
The grocery manager said, “That’s it. I’m going to the wall over this.”
For the past two weeks the meat room personnel have been casting their eyes to the floor when we walk buy, like peasants before a knight. This was, and is, a truly ridiculous set of circumstances for adult men to be engaged in. It stems from the replacement of merit by status and money, and the utter discrediting of the term honor. This is due to the fact that physically fighting between men is now criminalized, so that there is no longer a masculine leveling mechanism outside of combat sports and gang activity.
Merit has been bought and paid for.
Honor has no place in civil society.
What we are left with is an utterly feminine workplace.
If one speaks to women in all female work places, they find out that their life is a constant misery, unless they are the top girl, with constant infighting and back stabbing going on. The supermarket business is essentially run on a feminine model. Only night crews offer a masculine culture in retail food. As recently as 10 years ago I refereed night crew fights. But, most always, we just settled things through pure tests of character. Would you stand behind your words and go to the boss with this, stand next to me, and state your case? If not, shut the fuck up and go rotate the baby food.
The threat of parking lot justice is still there in some venues. But predominantly, all you have on the night crew is a hierarchy of merit where the man who does the most gets considerations, and the guy who will stand up to outsiders, and management, and not screw over his crew mates just because he can, is awarded defacto leadership status outside of the hierarchy. I missed this so much when I was a store manager that I scheduled myself to work with the night crew once per week.
The fact that even the lowliest wage slaves in a base line business can salvage elements of masculine culture in a functional context, when cast together as a working unit of men, shows me that when this feminine society of ours finally implodes, men will naturally pick up the pieces and force those pieces into their rightful places.
