Subcontinental Divide

The Managers and the Managed

The Loss of Pride and Rise of Prejudice

Subcontinental Divide by Ahsen Jillani

The other day my daughter sent me a dinner food delivery. By the time I saw her text message that it was at the front door, raccoons had eaten it. What surprised me most was that the delivery was just in a fast-food type cardboard box. What the raccoons didn’t eat was full of ants. I have discussed over the years that we may exclusively be a service industry now. Maybe we are nothing.

Maybe we all want to manage Chinese labor now. Even pre-pandemic, I was starting to see cracks in how America defined its economy. The roofing guy would charge me hundreds, and the roof would leak the same during the next storm. The A/C guy would sign me up for a quarterly maintenance contract and not show up at all. The tree cutting guys would leave 2,000 pounds of stumps in the back yard and disappear in their rusted pickup truck because it was too hot a day.

During the pandemic, I would think I was generous to people who were working the front lines and keeping me alive and feeling normal. If I got a $6 chicken sandwich, I sometimes gave the drive thru workers a $20 tip. But the order was usually wrong anyway, like it was usually wrong before the virus hit. I am now puzzled about where we are really going.

During the Reagan presidency, the Made in the USA stickers became a thing. Chrysler/Dodge and indeed most American automobile manufacturers were making almost garbage cars. I know because I owned two. They were ugly and uninspired designs with horrible engines and transmissions. But we were all trying to salvage Detroit CEOs and the auto industry stockholders by driving around in cars that overheated and rattled just going across town.

So today, we have grown up and moved on to Make America Great Again. We blast the Chinese everywhere from the White House to the local pub, and fly American flags on our Harley Davidsons that have a distinct Made in China sticker on them. Other than agricultural products and a few car components, we are hardly manufacturing much of anything. If China suddenly stopped exporting to the US, Amazon would probably collapse in a few weeks.

This xenophobic patriotism has become the hallmark of administrations on both sides of the isle in the last four decades. We want Americans to pick up their lunch boxes, prepared by beautiful and smiling wives, and leave for work to make us great again. The problem is that that was probably a public relations sexist fantasy to begin with. Few people came home to well-behaved kids in ironed clothes and a roast in the oven.

We were all just working. Like the rest of the planet, we were all just working — with the problems associated with managing bills and lives. Women managed the US economy through WW-II. They

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