Sweet-smelling Giant

America, according to some sources, has a $14 trillion economy. That's our GNP, or GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as it's now called - "the total value of all a nation's goods and services produced during a specified period". But does a $14 trillion GDP make the United States a "strong" nation? No.

GDP alone doesn't make a nation "strong". A nation that produces $14 trillion in straw hats will be less strong than one which produces half that dollar figure in locomotives. The complexities of a locomotive industry assumes railroad technology, engineering, and manufacturing feats unknown to the straw hat kingdom.

Heavy industry which can be converted to war production - in a world that still goes to war - or other tangible national goals is potential strength. The economic conversion which supposedly put the screws to doctrinaire Marxism - the rise of the service industry - is also the crow on the cradle of American industrial power. We've narrowed our industrial shoulders; we're rich, but we can't buy security. Don't even ask where "green jobs" fit into this puzzle.

One of my former lives was in manufacturing; manufacturing of the kind that was done in the 18th and 19th centuries and survived almost unchanged into the middle 1960's. Foundry work with hot metal. We exported these miserable, hot, dirty and dangerous jobs to Asia, beginning in the 1940's, and only continued the processes here in the US that could be automated or made acceptably safe. We stopped manufacturing a lot of stuff here in the US, and that presents a supply problem.

Remember when the US oil patch tipped over in the 1980's? One of the ancillary problems of a defunct user of heavy durable goods like those used in the oil-extraction business is that the remaining US suppliers of these items simply go out of business. When they do, the pipes and impellers, shackles, swing arms, valves and chains and hundreds of other drilling-rig systems are gone from inventory, maybe forever. Drill now, drill here makes sense, but there are logistical limitations. You just don't start pumping. You have to re-build the industries that build the pumping equipment.

There probably isn't a major sand-casting foundry in this country that isn't already flush with defense contracts and automotive work. We don't have enough of them, I'm sure. If you've ever seen one of these places or worked in one, as I have, you'll understand the modernist's urge to do away with them, along with drop forges and rolling mills and steel furnaces - the dark satanic mills of Blake's imaginings - the places where hot metal was manipulated, poured, hammered and machined to produce heavy goods.

It's said that no one wants to do that work anymore. It's certainly true that the mush heads under the mortar board hats in the current and previous administrations do not consider those jobs "good jobs", due to the dumb confusion that dignity is something that is hung on the outside of the man by a government agency and a labor law. But contending with an 80-pound ladle of 1400-degree molten aluminum, to pour a mold for a water-pump housing is a damn sight better than standing in line for Obama Money.

Somewhere we went wrong, and we took the first steps a generation ago. We thought we could be strong and still have clean fingernails. We argued that education makes the person whole and muscle applied to real labor only employs half a human being, that knowledge of Karl Jung was more valuable than the ability to sharpen a drill bit, that our men should pump iron in a glass storefront rather than in a place that had a noon whistle and a loading dock. The world of solid objects isn't kind to the effete. We'll learn.