“The Jungle” was to be Upton Sinclair’s masterwork. He spent six weeks working undercover in the deep muck and horrors of early twentieth-century Chicago meat-packing plants to research it.
Awful stuff. As a journalist, a human-rights advocate and a bit of a provocateur, Sinclair hoped to expose the horrendous working conditions of American urban poor, the abuses of time and health and law alike. Maybe wake folks up to how bad things really were for these wage-slaves? Maybe lead to some real changes and, yeah, maybe kick off his political career in earnest? The guy went on to run for Congress or governor unsuccessfully more than a few times. Sinclair poured all that work into a well-researched tome of barely-fictionalized truths on the subject. Hunter Thompson may’ve called it proto-gonzo journalism. Upton hoped he’d change the world with it, and he did!
It didn’t change the world in any of the ways he hoped, though. The world followed every word and was indeed horrified beyond belief… that the origin of their dinner was so unsanitary. Few gave one flying fuck at The Moon how the working poor were being abused or exploited or that the rich were getting even richer off those unimaginable sins. This was America, after all, we’re supposed to hate poors for not being born-rich. Horatio Alger and all that Protestant Work Ethic nonsense. If you’re holy, God Lordly Jesus will make you rich and everyone else deserves Hell. Just pull yourself up by your boot-straps, even though simple physics make that phrase literally impossible. Capitalism as a divine magic and Poverty, merely our richly-deserved punishment!
But they sure as hell were concerned that their steaks might give them tummy-aches, you know? Somehow, that’s what they walked away with from a story about a boot stepping on the nation’s throat forever in the form of a bunch of rich old bastards, there might be rats in our hamburgers!
Like Elon Musk watching “Bladerunner” a film masterpiece about the value of empathy, of all life, anyone’s life, the short, beautiful glitch that is getting to be a person and thinking “Wow! I love those ugly flying cars! I need a car that looks like that!” Missing not only the point but the entire fucking pencil. And it did spur on all kinds of change in the meat-packing industry, leaps and bounds worth of food-safety regulation. And the poor just kept on dying, making a slightly safer product for everyone to stew up. Even people just slightly-less poor only cared about that.
It was the most American thing that ever happened. It was all of American History in one neat package, how we didn’t learn any of the right lessons from “The Jungle”. And as the airplanes fall out the sky from lack of regulation and oil wars burn the world down, I can only reflect on the words of our more contemporary provocateur, William Axl Rose. “Y’know where we are? We’re in the jungle, baby! We’re gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie.”
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