In a bookstore the other day I picked up G.K. Chesterton`s story, ”The Club of Queer Trades,” which, although first published in 1905, anticipates the problem of the modern American service economy. Chesterton caricatures a society so rich and so empty that it has begun to feed on the delicate fruits of its exquisite boredom. He imagines a club in which each of the members invents a new trade providing a preposterous service to a clientele that can afford an equally preposterous price.
A Major Brown, for instance, sets himself up as ”an Adventure and Romance Agent.” For people who complain about the lack of excitement in their lives, the major arranges a schedule of heart-stopping events bound to engage (at least for a moment) their lanquid attention. The client sets out for the opera and suddenly the carriage horses run wild in the streets, killing a few chimney sweeps and inciting a riot in Fleet Street. The client takes the night train for Dover and finds himself attacked by a Turkish assassin with a dagger or accosted by a wolfhound and a mysterious Russian woman wearing sables and a veil.
To his fellow club members the major explains that he`s in the business of staging exclusive melodramas-limited engagements for small and discerning audiences at truly frightful expense.
Eighty years later the major`s trade has been superseded and much expanded by the Department of Defense. Making the service available to the middle classes, the Pentagon arranges a ceaseless round of heart-stopping events in Central America, Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. Just as any citizen aspiring to the greatness of the great Gatsby can buy Ralph Lauren clothes, so also any taxpayer who watches TV news can buy into the romance of World War III.
Another of Chesterton`s queer trades, that of the Organizer of Repartee, also has been carried well beyond its point of origin by the technology of the 20th Century. An artful gentleman capable of wearing many disguises, the Organizer of Repartee accommodated clients wishing to dress themselves up in the finery of wit. Before going off to a dinner party or diplomatic reception the client (invariably wealthy but a dullard) memorized 20 or 30 clever ripostes guaranteed to impress the presiding gentry. The Organizer of Repartee accompanied the client to the evening`s entertainment, casting himself as an ambassador, a Lord or a literary critic-but always as somebody who laughed (very loudly) at the client`s jokes or applauded (also very loudly) the client`s solemn opinions about Germany.
Again, as with the Adventure and Romance Agency, the business of organized repartee has evolved into a large technocracy. The public relations firms manufacture images suitable to all occasions, and the publishing trade furnishes ghost writers for automobile magnates, presidential candidates, Hollywood actresses, Wall Street tycoons and anybody else who can afford the price of a hired personality.
Given the trend of the American economy away from the making of goods and toward the supplying of services, the concerned citizen at a loss for anything else to do over the Labor Day weekend might give some thought to the invention of new trades likely to become major industries. I can think of three professions that are suitably absurd:
1. The Pillow Thrower: In New York and Beverly Hills the owners of expensive homes never know how to arrange the pillows in their public rooms. They acquire the right paintings and the right furniture, even the right pets and celebrities, but somehow their stately rooms look too contrived, too formal, too perfect. Enter the pillow thrower. The pillow thrower wanders from room to room deftly tossing his pillows with a musician`s accuracy of touch and phrase, placing them just precisely so, illuminating the rooms with a feeling of color and light.
2. The Menu Reader: In the new and trendy restaurants dense with potted ferns the management garnishes its menu with an arrangement of adjectives far more subtle than the arugula and the sun-dried tomatoes. But the waiters who announce the good news all too often make a mess of the prose. They spoil the transitions between the shrimp and the veal, hurry too clumsily into the desserts, mispronounce the names of the 47 Italian white wines. Enter the menu reader, somebody with a distinctive voice who can extract from a list of vegetables the poetry of an Elizabethan sonnet.
3. The Defender of the Dead: Harried by the incessant demands for myths and profits, the mass media over the last generation have debased the coin of history into the alloys of docudrama, fairy tale and geopolitical romance. Fiction becomes so mixed with fact that in two books published during the same week Joseph Stalin appears as both hero and villain. William Safire and Gore Vidal present portraits of Abraham Lincoln so different from one another as to be scarcely recognizable as the same apparition escaped from the same 19th Century. Enter the Defender of the Dead, an attorney working for a contingency fee who brings libel suits on behalf of often-maligned historical figures.
Let other citizens think of other trades equally as refined, and within a year the country might recover its place as the world`s supreme economic power and the epitome of Western civilization.
