Take a listen, study the lyrics.

Tumble outta bed

Dolly in "9 to 5". Her fellow secretaries were played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, at the time two of the most politically progressive actors in Hollywood.

And stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a cup of ambition
Yawnin, stretchin, try to come to life
Jump in the shower
And the blood starts pumpin
Out on the streets
The traffic starts jumpin
And folks like me on the job from 9 to 5
Chorus:

Workin 9 to 5
What a way to make a livin
Barely gettin by
Its all takin
And no givin
They just use your mind
And they never give you credit
Its enough to drive you
Crazy if you let it

9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that i
Would deserve a fair promotion
Want to move ahead
But the boss won’t seem to let me in
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me
Mmmmm…

They let your dream
Just to watch ‘em shatter
You’re just a step
On the boss mans ladder
But you got dreams he’ll never take away

On the same boat
With a lot of your friends
Waitin’ for the day
Your ship’ll come in
And the tides gonna turn
An its all gonna roll your way

2nd chorus:

9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life
And you think that I would daunt you
Its a rich mans game
No matter what they call it
And you spend your life
Going funny if you want it

3rd chorus:

9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
Theres a better life
And you dream that I would daunt you
Its a rich mans game
No matter what they call it
And you spend your life
Going funny if you want it

It’s a song about unfounded hope, and unblinkered reality. It’s a song about exploitation, expendability, and redundancy. It’s a song about a system that’s trapped us, a system that as recently proved simply doesn’t work.

The Reagan Revolution didn’t just change our economic priorities. It changed us philosophically and spiritually, Americans, too. We became more shallow, more individualistic, more selfish, more interested in conspicuous consumption and less interested in the communitas and its welfare. We decried the social contract as a burden on our freedom, and saw poverty as weakness.  Now, in these dark times,  we may be suffering from the hubris of our arrogant wilfullness, succumbing as we did to easy credit, and simplistic marketing, and believing that those prettly little kleenex and spit houses we bought with money we didn’t have were actually worth what we were told they were worth.

The movie “9 to 5″ came out in 1980, the year that Ronald Reagan was elected on a promise to bring “morning to America” Nearly thirty years later, that morning has turned into something darker, more determined, more malicious than we ever imagined. Will today’s new reality shift our priorities, and make us realize that the behemoth of growth, progress and wealth was founded on very little, and has perhaps been fundamentally punctured? Will reality change us, will it make us reflect perhaps on how easily we allowed ourselves to be led?

I doubt it. But if we don’t, we may not learn the lesson that may be the only path to recovery. The need to recognize our weaknesses.

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it ain't easy to kick the habit

You gotta love economists. In way more complicated language than is necessary, they tell us the party’s over for our free spending ways. It’s time to save. We leveraged ourselves up to the eyeballs for a flat screen TV. It’s time to save. We bet the housing market would go up forever and we were wrong. It’s time to save. We’re all broke. We’re worried about our jobs, we’re upside-down on our houses, our retirement plans are in tatters. Winter’s coming and the recession’s on. The economists tell us it’s time to save.

Of course, that makes fabulous sense economically, but it doesn’t add up spiritually. Did the consumer boom of the last twenty-five years truly change us? I think so. I think it’s in our blood. I think it’s the reason we’re more obese than ever and only as green as is fashionable. Can we go back to our parents’ thrifty ways, when polyester was where it was at, and Wham! a really big deal. I think not.

Too much has happened to us, and most of it is bad. A new generation is in charge, and it’s been brought up on buying crap we don’t need. The teenage offspring of that generation know nothing else. Marketing is everything. We’re being sold all the time and we’re used to it. In fact we like it. Shopping has become recreation. Conspicuous consumption has become a religion. Our clothes and cars define us, our glittery trappings have become extensions of our out of control, avatar-driven, egos. All this and people are expected to save. What do the economists think we’re going to do, curl up with a second-hand paperback?

The crisis we’re about to face goes further than economics. It’s about who we are, and what we’ll do without those habitual strolls through the mall. Because saving means changing behavior, and not just a little either. It’s an open question as to whether our pampered, self-absorbed, media-drenched, lemming-like collective psyche can weather the storm without tumbling into an existential crisis. It’s easy to say, enjoy your children, or walk to work, or savor the sunset, but I doubt many of us, who weren’t that way inclined already, will truly adjust to the promise of a truly post-consumerist world. And then of course there’s the rather irksome fact that over seventy percent of the US economy is driven by consumer spending, so if too many of us did start browsing that second-hand bookstore, we’d only be making matters worse. Stimulus packages aren’t designed to encourage saving. They’re designed to feed the habit of crap junkies.

All those marketers, all that technology, all those developing countries making our ipods, need someone to listen and click, and sign up and most importantly buy. All those poor people who just want a piece of the fable knows as the American Dream need to spend. The pressure on us is just too much. The economy will demand that we cough up the dough as it comes in, and our materialist habits will come flooding back. The spend-it-all system was only perfected in the last few years. And it will be back.

It’s wishful thinking to suggest we can save, and save ourselves. More likely is in a couple of years we’ll all be crap junkies once more, leveraging ourselves like crazy for a wall full of hi-def imagery, and bragging about it to our neighbors, just like the good old days.

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