you want it cheaper

[metaphortunate]

In "Steer Your Way", the second to last song on Leonard Cohen's last album You Want It Darker, Cohen (the Jewish king of Christian allusions, always reminding me of Asher Lev) sings "As he died to make men holy/ let us die to make things cheap". Which, yes, irony, This Modern World, etc., but I also think about this statement which has been floating unattributed, yes I looked, around the internet:

If it’s inaccessible to the poor it’s neither radical nor revolutionary.

In my experience, the only real way to make things accessible to other than elites is to make them cheap. I'm not here to say that people should die to make things cheap, I find myself unqualified to say what people should die for, this is not a pro-Foxconn post, but it does seem to me that making the good things in life cheap is, in itself, a good thing. Worth pursuing, anyway.

Incidentally, I'd been worried that I had been losing some of my enjoyment in music, I'm sick of everything I've heard recently, and then I thought to pull up You Want It Darker on Spotify. It's wonderful. It's all I've wanted to listen to recently. The Junebug made me turn it off in the car because "It's too scary for me!"

Comments

Re: making the good things cheap & the cheap things good

[azurelunatic]

Oh, goodness, yes.

Every industry that needs serious attention and training in order to access means that there are gatekeepers; sometimes the gatekeepers are expensive and/or abusive.

Attention means energy; if you're exhausted from whatever job, you may not have the energy.

Attention means time; if you're spending more than 35-40 hours a week working, you've still got housework and such, and time you spend to understand things is time you're not actively earning, even if it may pay off later.