I had computer problems last week. I had trouble getting online or staying online, which precluded me from contributing even a syllable to my blogs, satisfying my online news addiction, and keeping up with my Rosetta Stone lessons. After some investigation Dell determined it wasn't a computer problem but rather a software issue for which I could pay about $150 to fix, despite my warranty.
I called Verizon next. They provide my phone line and DSL service. After several days days and many several conversations with their technicians, the issue was said to be escalated and someone from Long Beach called and said they could send someone to me next week.
Now, all of these phone calls to technical assistance were made to various 800 numbers, but were routed to someplace in India. After several long days and many, many calls, the issue was only escalated after I had one of my tantrums, threatened to change DSL service (Verizon has a monopoly on phone lines in Long Beach (score Capitalism!) but not DSL, and demanded to speak to a supervisor, who was also in India.
The tantrum came not so much from my own problem. The tantrum came as the dimension of this phenomenon dawned on me.
I have nothing bad to say about these Indian technicians. They were very polite. They kept apologizing for my inconvenience and each, in turn, assured they'd fix the problem. A few of the guys gave good phone voice [wink]. But only able to keep to their script, they guided me through the same, inconsequential steps. After a single day, I knew the script. But to call them technicians is a misnomer, because they were anything but.
How did we get to India and what does our 11.6% official unemployment say about the canvass of this sort of civilization?
India has a strange history as it relates to the West. It had been settled by various imperial powers up to the mid 19th century, the most famous of these settlements was the East India Company of Great Britain.
Then, the US had what Gore Vidal calls our own Trojan War: the US Civil War. This shut down textile exports from the US South to Great Britain. Britain had to turn to a reliable new source, since the Confederacy would not be recognized by the British government.
Britain solidified its hold over all India, drafting it into its world empire, and making Victoria an Empress. It found its new supplier of textiles and lit a fire to India's own tantrums.
With Britain's imperial decline and the colonies insurgencies toward independence in the 20th century, India not only gained independence, not only rejected the monarch as head of state as many former colonies, like Australia continue to do, but it veered sharply left, allying itself with the Soviet Union.
With the Soviet Bloc gone, India was ripe for re-conquest, and the sole superpower - a term I use with deep reservations given our finances - has taken up the task, in spades.
This is why my calls for technical assistance are routed not to my former students who are technological whizzes but are underemployed, but to India, to workers bestowed the title technician rather like the Queen bestows earldoms on the establishment.
Paying my bill to a US company who employs India's proletariat is yet another canary felled in the mine shaft, or, to horribly mix my metaphors, a bird's eye view of where we are.
When playwright George Bernard Shaw spent a month-long visit to South Africa in the 1930's, the British government and Royal Family were firm supporters of the apartheid system. Shaw gave his warning calls, which we might learn from.
Michael Holyroyd's excellent biography chronicles this trip and what Shaw assessed of these white British subjects and the civilization they had awkwardly constructed in Black Africa:
"One of the first things I noticed when I landed was that I immediately became dependent on the services of men and women who are not of my color. I felt that I was in a Slave State, and that, too, the very worst sort of Slave State.
"If you let other people do everything for you you soon become incapable of doing anything for yourself. You become an idler and a parasite, a weakling and an imbecile, and though you may also become a very pretty lady or gentleman you will be helpless in the hands of your slaves, who will have all the strength and knowledge and character that come from working and from nothing else.
"The colored man is terribly dangerous in this way. He can reduce you to a condition in which you cannot open a door for yourself or carry a parcel.
"If white civilization breaks down through idleness and loafing based on slavery, then, as likely as not, the next great civilization will be a negro civilization."
That last line says much to why the Christian West (Team Capitalism) lost its moral authority some time ago, and the East beckons at our door.
Shaw's prescription was simple enough, but I doubt if we follow it, since we've had about 2,000 years and failed. The prescription might have been just as easily said by the Christian prophet, the Jew named Jesus: "What you have to do is abolish your slums, for which, let me tell you, Cape Town deserves to be destroyed by fire from heaven."
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