Good long interview with a striking actress and a striking writer for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Pittsburghers have put together their own Strike Paper where they can continue practicing their craft, but for some reason they haven’t DIVORCED themselves from the paper. They already have the new marriage with their CUSTOMERS, so they don’t need the marriage with the tech tyrants and LBO monsters.
When a real marriage goes sour, you keep wanting her back, and then finally you throw the switch. She doesn’t want me, so it’s irrelevant whether I want her or not.
One of my old Enid friends was a serious Christian who believed in permanent marriage. When a disloyal woman dumped him, he insisted that the marriage was still there, and refused to move on. She didn’t just reject him, she rejected all men and switched to women. It wasn’t personal.
LBO monsters have rejected ALL workers and ALL real business. They’ve switched to pure tax evasion. It’s not personal.
The actress in the interview has already crossed the line into the proper divorce attitude. She’s moving on to other PAID ways of using her skills.
She offers one extremely wise observation: The bosses have trained workers to survive in a strike by depriving them of fulltime work for many years. Now they expect the workers to maintain the marriage, but the workers have already found other ways to work. The bosses don’t have much leverage.
Writers have always been able to practice their craft for pay, as I’ve been pointing out lately. Digital structures like Substack and WordPress make it easy, but presses and mimeographs and troubadours and local theatrical productions have been around for centuries.
Pittsburgh steel workers and Detroit auto workers weren’t so lucky. Those industries necessarily require massive capital expenditure.
In a world where ALL loyalty is one-way, loyalty is lethal.
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Tech sidenote: The Pittsburgh strike paper is based in WordPress. Substack does a much better job of assisting writers, and several popular and profitable “newspapers” are already running inside Substack. Taibbi and Bari Weiss have larger daily readership than most metropolitan dailies. If Pittsburgh decides to divorce from the old system, the path is established and proven.
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