Gene Bellinger wrote:
> So it would seem that American Corporations are driven by
> profits + other things!
Gene I just came across this review on the net and since it treats the
issue on a very personal level I decided to sent it to you and the list.
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What Caliber Is Your Parachute? A Career Fable
THE AX
By Donald E. Westlake
273 pages. Mysterious Press/Warner Books. $23.
Here's a chilling little fable for the end of the millennium. Burke
Devore, the 51-year-old protagonist of Donald E. Westlake's grim new
thriller, ''The Ax,'' has been downsized by Halcyon Mills, the paper
company for which he has been product manager for 16 years.
Burke knows paper, even the kind you eat: as he explains, ''a special
kind of paper-source cardboard is used in many commercial ice creams, as
a binder.'' He could ''take over almost any managerial job within the
paper industry, with only minimal training in a particular specialty.''
But with downsizing general all over America, there are too few of
those jobs for too many people. And Burke is really not quite the most
qualified of candidates, not even for the job with the mill in Arcadia,
N.Y., that is starting up a line in which Burke specializes. Ralph
Fallon already holds that position. And if anything were to happen to
Ralph, there would be others who would probably be hired ahead of Burke.
So Burke -- increasingly worried about the mortgage on his
Connecticut home and the welfare of his wife, Marjorie, and their
teen-age children, Billy and Betsy -- decides to take extreme measures.
He writes an advertisement for a trade magazine announcing that B.D.
Industrial Papers of Wildbury, Conn., is looking for a manufacturing
line manager. As the resumes pour into the post office box Burke has
given as the address of this
phony company, he winnows them in search of his most qualified
competition.
When he has narrowed the candidates down to six, he packs a Luger
pistol he has found among his father's World War II souvenirs and sets
out in his Plymouth Voyager to visit the home of the first one, Herbert
Coleman Everly. When Everly comes out to get his mail, Burke aims the
Luger at him and pulls the trigger. ''The Luger jumps in the window
space and the left lens of his glasses shatters and his left eye becomes
a mineshaft, running deep into the center of the earth.''
This leaves five competitors to go. Then Burke will kill Ralph
Fallon, and the Arcadia job will be his.
You find this hard to believe? So did I at first. So does Burke
himself, a basically decent man whose eyes begin to sting with tears of
pity when a police detective investigating the murders shows Burke
photographs of two of his victims.
But as Burke proceeds with his awful plan, he keeps tightening the
screws of his logic. ''The equation is hard and real and ruthless. We're
running out of money, Marjorie and I and the kids, and we're running out
of time. I have to be employed, that's all. I'm no self-starter, I'm not
going to invent a new widget, I'm not going to found my own paper mill
on a shoestring. I need a job.''
And as he turns the screws, they bite deeper and deeper into the
framework of these times. It all began with automation, Burke reflects.
Automation attacked blue-collar workers, but because they were unionized
''the pain of the transition was somewhat eased.''
But now ''the child of automation,'' the computer, was attacking
middle management, the white-collar workers, the supervisors, ''and none
of us are unionized.'' Burke continues: ''This is a transition we're in
now, where middle management will shrink like a slug when you pour salt
on it, but middle management won't completely disappear. There will just
be fewer jobs, that's all, far fewer jobs.'' And Burke will have one of
them.
With such irrefutable reasoning, Burke gradually seduces the reader,
and you find yourself almost rooting for him as he works his way along
''the learning curve'' of murder. Besides, his bleak philosophy actually
proves constructive, in a perverse sort of way. When his son, Billy, is
arrested for robbing a computer
store, Burke uses his new-found cynicism to get the boy out of trouble
and thereby wins back the affection of his wife, who had been
threatening to leave him because of his growing remoteness since
becoming unemployed.
Will Burke succeed at his gruesome project, or will the bloody mayhem
he's committing eventually catch up with him? To answer this question
is, of course, what ultimately keeps you devouring Mr. Westlake's taut
prose. And in the process you can't help being infected by the biting
anger of a book whose deeper message really transcends its story.
As Burke muses when approaching his final crisis, ''Today, our moral
code is based on the idea that the end justifies the means.'' He
continues: ''The end of what I'm doing, the purpose, the goal, is good,
clearly good. I want to take care of my family; I want to be a
productive part of society; I want to put my skills to use; I want to
work and pay my own way and not be a burden to the taxpayers. The means
to that end has been difficult, but I've kept my eye on the goal, the
purpose. The end justifies the means. Like the C.E.O.'s, I have nothing
to feel sorry for.''
Jonathan Swift would have been delighted with Burke Devore's modest
proposal. And readers of ''The Ax'' will be darkly entertained by the
way he goes about, uh, executing it.
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Just some more food for the psycho-pathic gene-pool. As you note, I am
sure, you find a validation for most of the ethnic over-groups that
protect their people against the police and powers that be. Today, the
stockholders and BODs may very well be becoming one of those "powers
that be." This is what I call "decadence" when referring to the various
Western economic ideologies that are creating versions of the genocidal
nightmare as we approach the millennium. By the way, it isn't my
calendar so the millennium itself is not poking my psychological
buttons. But all those stories on TV about how it is affecting the rest
of the West is beginning to freak me out a bit. This is how the Aztecs
called Cortez. Oh for a little real Self-Actualization. I would settle
for Maslow, McClelland, Senge or Schon (Schoen) or whomever.
Regards,
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>