Whistle while you work
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK Mickey & the bottom line It does seem fitting that Ted Koppel should work for Mickey Mouse. Still, the fact that ABC News is now in the hands...
...he brought Joyce's Ulysses to America and defended it against obscenity charges in court...
...The argument against them isn't merely pragmatic (we won't have enough product competition) or political (the news won't be reported honestly or objectively...
...In fact, ABC has done serious and critical reporting of the Disney company...
...This worry is well-placed: the country is becoming more and more like a middle-sized city with one or two newspapers, which depend on advertising revenues from one or two department stores...
...No matter what the bosses of the department stores do to their wives, no matter what odd, destructive habits their children have, no matter how vicious they are to their employees, no matter whether they engage in human sacrifice in the hills outside of town, it is a good bet little of it is likely to make the papers...
...And when profit becomes everything, good work becomes nothing...
...What bothered me then and bothers me still is the way in which work is corrupted when it is moved away from the love of work, which is always something very specific, like the smell of good bread, toward the more abstract notion of profit...
...That sense of "should" is there only when you love the work itself more than the profit you might make from it...
...But my wonder was this: Cerf had all the money he needed...
...I am sure he was not the first person to do this, but he was the first I noticed and wondered about...
...When you have publishers who care only about the bottom line (because they are owned by larger companies which aren't at all concerned with books), and they sell to "superstores" which care only about the bottom line, you are less and less likely to find a book that was made by someone who loves books for the magic that might be there...
...He loved books-he was the man who had bought the Modern Library from Horace Liveright and kept a wonderful series alive, expanding it...
...Still, the fact that ABC News is now in the hands of the Disney corporation has led to a lot of talk about this concentration of power over news and entertainment in a comparatively few number of hands...
...There is no greater change-agent than the instant creation and satisfaction of appetites, something unnoticed by those free-marketeers who bemoan that decline of traditional values...
...I know that it is now unfashionable to be critical of capitalism, given its obvious and deserved victory over communism...
...At one level, the answer was obvious: money...
...I remember, decades ago, wondering why Bennett Cerf sold Random House to RCA...
...Combined with the one-party state our poll-chasing politicians have given us, this is a depressing prospect...
...There is another and, I think, more important aspect of this glob-like accumulation of power that also ought to concern us, and it has to do with the way in which capitalism can corrupt the nature of work itself...
...I don't mean to romanticize work...
...There is a kind of law here: the farther you move away from love of the work, the worse will the work be...
...But at the end there is a product that (if you love or at least like what you are doing) makes sense to you, beyond the question of whether you can make money with it or not...
...The freedom that capitalism represents shouldn't obscure for us the fact that it is often terribly destructive at the cultural level...
...Attaching the possibility of profit to work makes more sense than most alternatives (which is why you will seldom see me writing letters to the editor-they don't pay you for them...
...At the same time, laws against monopoly or even the tendency toward monopoly, the concentration of too much power in too few hands, make good moral sense...
...What will it mean for the objectivity and independence of news organizations...
...I am as lazy by nature as the next person, and I know that some parts of even the most interesting work involve drudgery...
...And that magic is all that ever brought any of us who really love them to books in the first place...
...Where there is no attachment or love greater than the love of profit, when this is finally all that drives our economic life, the soul goes out of a society...
...This is why so many of the greatest publishers were willing to publish mediocre books to subsidize books that should have been published, even if they lost money...
...It is what these acquisitions say about the way every entrepreneurial endeavor seems to be tending these days that depresses me...
...It goes to the heart of what culture and work are about...
...He knew and loved books and publishing, and he sold a major publishing company to people whose only concern with it was how much money it could make for them...
...this obviously won't happen any more, and if, as it might be, CBS is bought by Westinghouse, you will not see CBS critics bemoaning the vapidity of the fare offered on Westinghouse radio stations, or criticizing its appliances...
...I think the Left has been particularly bad at appreciating the creativity of the person who wants to sell a good idea or a better product...
...I have worked as a writer and editor, and enjoy some parts of the process and loathe others...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 15
