What are you going to do with this downtime, the holiday season, a time that, in truth, usually comes with added hustle and bustle?
Pandemic or not, the injunction that hangs over us, as the Holidays approach, always remains the same: “Rest! Take some time for yourself ! In truth, the tensions and displacements of the end of the year never lead to peace of mind. Everyone knows it. However, it is as if the course of real life tries to redeem the agitation it creates for us, by making believe in the reality of its opposite, by the pretenses of the speech. Why ?
“Buy more and save more!” To relax, in preparation for the celebrations, you are first urged to consume more than you need to. How do you carry the burden of your accumulated debts? At worst, you’ll be wondering in January, eating your frozen turkey leftovers, while happily talking about the scale discounts you’ve gotten at various supercenters bent on making your over-eating easier.
The Christmas celebrations are indeed a time modeled in advance, granted to society, to its rites, to its obligatory reverences, to serial trips in all directions, to conveniences made of forced smiles, with a few pinched beaks, in the midst of fragile moments of happiness with these sometimes distant people who are nevertheless close to us. However, at a time when it is more difficult than ever, because of the pandemic, to live such habits, even the most unpleasant of them now appear to us to be lacking.
Everything goes so fast apparently that it is understood, it seems, that we no longer even have time to read. Yet everyone finds the time to type long TV series, one after the other. How long did you agree, over the past year, to be the consenting captives of series of which, in the end, you only have a vague memory to display in your fragments of conversations disseminated on social networks?
In his scathing critique of a Quebec which is blind as to the appropriateness of a “third link”, this expensive bridge-tunnel to be dug between the old capital and Lévis, the essayist Simon-Pierre Beaudet proceeds as a bonus to a lateral strafing of several societal traits. On the subject of our collective infatuation with television series, he writes: “the children of the suburbanites have become precarious intellectuals too in the juice to read a book, but who find the time to ‘binge-watcher’ the last season of n ‘any fantasy neo-black dystopian, as long as it’s on Netflix ”. We agree that this is not entirely false, like a good part of his remarks elsewhere.
The arrival of two and then three television sets, starting in the 1960s, ensured that the whole of society would henceforth be illuminated, in the evening, by the same bluish light. Television appeared to be the common continent of humanity. It will in fact become the perfect witness, writes Beaudet, of the drying uniformity of our Americanized way of life. Are we richer now to have gone from the register of three channels to that of one, called Netflix?
The omnipotence of financial capitalism convinced us that we were all now potential millionaires, able to smoke the big cigars of success. Do you want a cigar? Among the most famous brands figure prominently the Montecristo. These chair bars owe their name to the fact that at the time of their creation, Cuban workers demanded that books be read to them while they rolled their thin tobacco leaves. They were so passionate about the novel by Alexandre Dumas that they asked the writer, in homage, for permission to baptize the fruit of their labor with this name. Thus were born the Montecristo cigars.
In At the line, “factory sheets” signed by Joseph Ponthus, a writer who died prematurely this year at the age of 42, the worker he was helps us to grasp a relationship to the world that we too easily forget, except maybe -be when, suddenly, we are reminded of the lives of slaughterhouse workers, SAQ handlers or the little hands of child support services, to give just a few recent examples.
In the early days of the rampant expansion of capitalism, the workers in the workshops were billed until the light which shone weakly. Their bosses were not going to pay to lighten the darkness of their conditions! We have the impression of having freed ourselves completely from these miserable conditions where each body was only a simple living annex of machines of all kinds. Yet hasn’t the pandemic underscored how the new reality of work sends us back to worlds of yesteryear? The bonds between each of us are broken. The production tools are again provided by the employees. It is no longer even possible to appropriate, not legally, but symbolically, a workspace within the company. The worker, seen as more and more autonomous, is he not in fact more servile than ever?
It is not without reason that waiting and hoping remains the lot of a large part of humanity, recalls Joseph Ponthus in his book. These are, moreover, the last words of Monte Cristo: “Hasn’t the count just told us that human wisdom is entirely in those words: Wait and hope!” “. Let’s be wise. But not too much. Good year. I’ll talk to you again in January.