WELCOME TO THE NINETIES
Memo to All Employees, by Daniel X. O’Nell. Juggernaat, P.O. Box 3824, Chicago, IL 60654-0824. Perfect bound with embossed cardboard cover, 46 pp.. $12. 1995.
While the Nineties did not invent alienation, they certainly are rapidly perfecting it. While Left and Right both scream for some notion of community upon which they can hang their hats, anger and frustration are shooting holes in the
Work, the meaning of work, and loyal. ty to one’s employer or workplace was once a linchpin of American community. But first the Iron and Steel belts rusted in the 70s and ’80s, and then in the ’80s and ’90s even white-collar workers. found out just how much loyalty meant. With a heaping measure of such loyalty to a corporation and a dollar, you can buy a cup of gourmet coffee.
And so one way of looking at the world is that we are either all employees, or we are all victims, and Chicago performance poet Daniel X O’Neil suggests in his new collection Memo to All Employees, most of us are probably both. Consider the raw but plaintive take on how we have become witnesses to our society’s self-destruction (“Boilerplate”): “Scrang the sirens go. We’re led from one crisis to the / next, whether it’s a hurricane or a foreign intervention or the dead at / Brown’s Chicken (you can kill 7 people before midnight and get away with it) in / Palatine, Illinois. Cop shows beat us in front of ourselves. / There is no time for reflection, only a stilted genuflection at each virtual funeral. Quiet contemplation is discouraged The images have become so common we are almost numb to them, but O’Neil’s concept “virtual funeral” is a. powerful one.
Tying the concept of survivors of crime to survivors of layoffs, in “Snakes and Fire, Snakes and Fire, Every Day for 8. Years. O’Neil writes of the real (not virtual) workplace. I bless you. I bless you. You’re fired. / Everyone here is / convinced that there is some glory attached to being the only one left in a room full of gunned down people. / This way we can look at our disgruntled / ex employees with such askance and surprise, like a beaten bird or a dog who bites. / Crying blood / grasping air.
These are some of the clues to what ail us. from an Irish Catholic boy, the youngest of seven kids, long transplanted here to Chicago from Pittsburgh’s housing projects. Traversing almost the entire Rust Belt westward, somewhere along the way he added a degree in English and anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Proving: you can take the boy out of the projects. but not the projects out of the boy, and if the collar somehow became white, the knuckles are here bared and the punches are telling.
O’Neil’s guiding insight seems to be: whether we are in the “loop” or “out of the loop, whether we wanted to be included, or we didn’t, we are all part of one giant corporation-if no longer cogs in a wheel, then chips in a worldwide computer. But people are more like flowers than like computer chips, reaching, as O’Neil does here, for the light. and, hoping, with him, that we don’t get our heads shot off in the process.
-Martin Northway
