I Was a CETA Goldbrick
Kunstler, James Howard
"stones" encircling China and Chinese "stones" hopefully to be played in the counterencirclement, that is, the political and diplo- matic isolation, of the Soviet Union. And an earlier Chinese...
...1 ~ 0 ~ Q ~ O I m OOOOOOOQOIOOeOOOOOeOIOOOOOleOOOOOODOOOeeOOOOOOeOOOQODOQOOO James HowardKun~stler 1 Was a CETA Goldbrick Put a little social welfare in your life...
...he who sets the danger of disorder before him is he who will maintain the state of order...
...After a final cursory "interview" with Bungler at his office, I was hired as a Recreation Assistant...
...Bungler took off...
...Weunderstand, they said...
...With one novel sold and in production, the penurious advance long since spent, and no ABC mini-series in the offing, I began to do what's known as a"hurt dance" and was constrained to look for work...
...Nobody seemed to be doing anything...
...Call him Bungler...
...Had I been out of work for six months...
...Sure...
...Therefore, the superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that . danger may come...
...And an earlier Chinese hubris gives way to more tempered ambitions...
...He had an 9opening there, a CETA position...
...For some, there is the temptation of outright crime, like dealing drugs, but this has its drawbacks--e.g., a life sentence under the penal codes of the state where I live...
...The oldest of the ancient Chinese classics, the I Ching (The Book of Changes), is more than two millennia old...
...I was having a hard time while waiting for my six-figure paperback sale, I explained...
...Charles San has written that the central idea of this opaque book is that "good fortune and misfortune are constantly overcoming one another...
...Dumdum, the only other male in the office, was reading People magazine...
...Dodo, a chubby girl, was reading The Amityville Horror at her desk..Screamer, a woman in her 30s, was cutting "autumn leaves" out of construction paper and taping them to the wall behind her desk...
...It was a "final report," he explained, compiled by my predecessor, and since I was "a writer," would I please look it over and edit it...
...Clearly, an older, more measured Chinese orthodoxy is in control today, but how deeply has it buried apocalyptic passions...
...The next day I chanced to be in the YMCA locker room and was telling someone about my flame-out in the orchard when another guy overheard it and said, "Hey, you need a job?I got a job for you...
...Anyway, new at the job and eager to please, I edited the report by detaching the last 25 pages and chucking them into the trash basket...
...The first five pages were a simple budgetary report...
...Terrific...
...Sprout, an earth-mother type who moonlighted as a clerk in an organic food store, was perusing a wholesale catalog...
...Americans, whose history teaches them that the stream of life moves in one direction only, are not given to such introspection, but to near-spontaneous enthusiasms~including the prospect for permanent harmony between the United States and China...
...a shirker," "a liar...
...But this has been the Chinese view of i i i ~I~~O~0~~~Q~~O~0~I~Q~B~0~Q~0Q~B000o0~IQ00Q~I such changes across the centuries...
...The job paid $120 a week, net...
...I told him...
...In this endless ebb and flow the superior man (i.e...
...The next time I saw Bungler, which was not that day or even that week, he said, "Swell job...
...No problem...
...A rising young administrator on the state payroll, Bungler ran a department called Recreation Services at the regional office of the state Parks Commission...
...stones" encircling China and Chinese "stones" hopefully to be played in the counterencirclement, that is, the political and diplomatic isolation, of the Soviet Union...
...A mong the vicissitudes in the life of a young novelist is the need to resort to unwholesome ways of getting by...
...Provoked to the point of imprudence by the desire of Lin and Mao to drown the West "in a sea of people's war," we are now reassured by the words of Teng and Hua that our enemies have since become theirs: The Chinese have embraced this transformation with apparent ease...
...While we wondered whether the recent Chinese invasion of Vietnam would occasion a third world war, they treated the "reversal of alliances" implicit in the invasion as all part of a day's work...
...There were five of us in the office, a scabrousroom furnished with cast-off desks and odd-lot crates of fossil paperwork from the previous, Republican, administration...
...Who knows...
...I found it quickly in the nearby apple orchards, but after the first arduous and demoralizing day of picking, I quit...
...I'm your boyW...
...I have dug ditches, humped around quarter-ton sections of iron fencing, scraped paint from porches...
...He had some papers in his hand...
...I didn't enjoy it very much, but it was necessary at the time...
...Had Bungler troubled himself to read this, I wondered...
...For the less adventurous there is often only the moiling drudgery of brute labor...
...the man of many qualities) seeks to find out when to be aggressive and when submissive, when bold and when cautious, when proud or humble, when to move, when to stand still in the great spontaneous stream of life through which all things are produced...
...Instead, we now find a seemingly more limited objective, pale perhaps when compared with exhortations for vast upheaval but, once again, more understandable to the Western mind...
...I knew things were going to be weird within my first hour on the job...
...he who keeps ruin in mind is he who will preserve his :interests secure...
...For twO days I ran Chinese fire drills between the Department of Labor office and the county CETA office, Where they checked my qualifications...
...Lin's glorification of the purifying role of war is redolent of the memory of that older millenarian vision~the "cosmic holocaust," the "terrifying prophecies of catastrophe and destruction" which would create a new order for all men...
...Later that morning, Bungler came into our room from his suite down the hall...
...The rest, about 25 pages, were an angry indictment of Bungler's performance, calling him by turns "an oaf...
...a foot-dragger," "a crook," and "a delinquent...
...Now this was a very curious document...
...Well, yes, James Howard Kunstler is author of The Wampanaki Tales, a humorous novel of summer camp life to be published by Doubleday this month...
...The American Spectator May 1979 technically, since I had collected the advance from my publisher the previous spring...
...And he meant it too...
...An ancient commentary on The Book of Changes provides the necessary caveat: "He who keeps danger in mind is he who will rest safe in his seat...
...Then, for a brief and shining season, CETA came into my life--or rather, I came into its life, since it seems to have a life of its own...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
