CHUMMING

Taking a well-deserved breather from blog-trolling and applying for jobs such as Chum Reintroduction Coordinator (who says that there aren’t any government jobs to be had these days?); while I’ve been put in mind of the atrocious employment situation, which I can hardly avoid, Chris Hedges administers the coup de grace, at least for today. He’s talking about his former bosses at The New York Times, but it’s far too easy to see the universality of his words:

When you allow an institution to provide you with your identity and sense of self-worth you become an obsequious pawn, no matter how much talent you possess. You live in perpetual fear of what those in authority think of you and might do to you. This mechanism of internalized control -- for you always need them more than they need you -- is effective. The rules of advancement at the paper are never clearly defined or written down. Careerists pay lip service to the stated ideals of the institution, which are couched in lofty rhetoric about balance, impartiality and neutrality, but astutely grasp the actual guiding principle of the paper, which is: Do not significantly alienate the corporate and political power elite on whom the institution depends for access and money. Those who master this duplicitous game do well. Those who cling tenaciously to a desire to tell the truth, even at a cost to themselves and the institution, become a management problem. This creates tremendous friction within the paper. I knew reporters with a conscience who would arrive at the paper and vomit in the restroom from nervous tension before starting work. If Rossi had examined the effects of this institutional hubris and the pathology of the paper’s self-infatuation, if he had looked at the paper’s large and small failures as well as its successes, he would have pushed past the myth of the Great Oz, peddled to him by the paper’s editors and minions like Carr, and uncovered its troubled core.

Now, that’s what I call motivational.

Back to the darkness.