In the 1970’s you had to take industrial arts, really, just a fancy name for shop. It was something every boy did1. The reasoning is that they wanted us to learn to make widgets. The whole problem with teaching kids to make widgets in 77 was that widget making was gone by 87.
The widget factory owners, don’t really care, because rapaciousness is hidden as corporate duty, board justified greed.
This isn’t the only place we chase lunacy, though building widgets is far less controversial than burning coal. Sure, at the turn of the twentieth century, there was the extinction of buggy whip makers. It is coal however that has remained dominant in economic conversations over the past century. Even now, the pernicious image of the long suffering coal miner needing support remains2.
For a generation of people that yearn for widget making, it feels foundational. Daddies built stuff and pointed them out with pride to their children as they drove through town and then daddy’s widget making job was offshored.
We left behind those sunlight tinted, gold edged Kodachrome photos of the indelible summers of youth when we caught Dad crying in the dark. It was replaced fertile ground to be tilled with both hopes and grievances, forever promising the widget making jobs3 were always coming back, real soon.
Really, this nostalgia is for a time when they weren’t the widget makers, rather recipients of that fleeting largesse. When they made a footstool in shop, which was presented proudly to their daddies.
Because we all had to take industrial arts.`
- And it was boys. Just as strict social norms of the time would forbid a boy be in home economics, nary a girl was caught dead in the room filled with machines that no children should have access to. Seriously, who gives a twelve year old a piece of wood and a table saw? ↩︎
- Clean coal was the latest promise, a lie from the coal mine owners and perpetuated by politicians, left and right. AI may be coming for all the white collar jobs, ironically recreating the crucial jobs of the 1900s, the LLMs energy greed as insatiable as the venture capital driving it. ↩︎
- Not them personally, they already work hard and will tell you all about it. To be clear, no one wants to be a widget maker. Everybody pretending that widget making is the solution, is as silly as pretending black lung isn’t a thing. ↩︎
Remain Lost 