The Harness Salesmen

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Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns . . .

Dylan Thomas wrote that, in Fern Hill.

He might have written, "under the apple trellises", but he was born too early for that.  Those days, trees were still trees, and technology had not yet put its cotton pickin' hands on apple trees.

Born in Tacoma, in Western Washington, I was young and easy under Douglas fir boughs, and it was years before I realized that east of the Cascade Mountains, there were apple orchards and apple towns, and eastern farther than that, the State stretched into wheatland all the way to Idaho.  But Idaho was forever far.

Since, the apple towns have, in their hunger for calloused hands, become home to Hispanics who came to pick apples, and sometimes stayed, the way generations of other immigrants--my family forbears, for instance--came to work, and stayed.  Politicians, hungry for attention and as tense as Dylan Thomas was easy, want to throw the apple pickers, like hay bales,  back across the big, beautiful wall on our southern border, but politicians are not used to manual labor or thought:  technology will do the job for them, just as technology is doing for steel workers, and coal miners, and cotton pickers, and men with pitch forks in the hay fields, and threshers tossing wheat into the threshing machines.

We pride ourselves on "having the most productive workers on earth".  That means we produce goods with fewer hours of human labor that other nations do.  And how do we do that?  Partly, only partly, because we are stingy about vacation time, and maternity leave time, and the relative level of pay, but mostly because we automate our production.  Blowing off the top of a mountain, and shoving the overlay into the river valley, to expose the coal, is cheaper than boring shafts and tunnels, and digging the coal out by hand and sending it up in little coal cars.

Now we are inventing machines to pick apples; machines with three fingers, machines that will vacuum the apples off the boughs, machines that cost a lot of money, but that will pay for themselves in maybe three years of unnecessary immigrant labor.  The apple trees will have to be modified, too, of course; taught to grow on trellises instead of standing up as trees used to do; trees like grape vines.  

Now as I was young and easy under the apple trellises . . .

And that does make sense, just as it made sense for cotton, and wheat, and cars and coal and steel.  

What does not make sense is that we refuse to think about what else has to change, then.  It is not just that burning coal does not make sense, anymore; that it will kill the planet as we know it.  It is that we refuse to ask ourselves what kind of an economy we need to shape to take that into account.  The coal miners and steel workers are not going back to work as coal miners and steel workers, and not as apple pickers, either!

They might not find work, at all.  But they are people, with children, and bills, and a need for the things everybody needs.  

Donald Trump does not understand that, but he did tap into the terrible fear that millions of people have who may not themselves understand the root causes of their fears, but they do know that the jobs in the coal mines are gone.  The steel mills are gone.  The auto plants are gone.  Their food comes from Mexico and their clothes come from Thailand.  Not because it all ought to come from Cleveland or Akron, but because our whole system of producing goods is substituting machines for human labor, and as that happens, demanding that the machines stop is a Luddite fantasy.  

We need to design an economy that recognizes that human labor is something like using horses to pull plows.  When the tractors came, the harness salesman's job ended, too.  The point is not to focus on harness sales:  it is to focus on Willy Loman.  Lots of Willy Lomans.  All of us as Willy Lomans.