[Milton-L] Milton and Marx

[Nancy Charlton]

Hello all --

David Brooks has a provocative column in today's New York Times, 
"Truck Stop Confidential."  Unfortunately it is available online only 
through their subscription service so the URL may lead you only to a 
sales pitch, and I can't legitimately copy it in toto, so I'll urge 
you to look for it in the print edition.

Brooks reflects upon his conversation with a trucker he met at a 
truck stop in VA, describes his dedication to his work, and uses this 
as the point of departure for a look at the values that determine 
social class in the USA. What is called (in varying tones of 
derisiveness) the "working class," concludes Brooks, defines itself 
by "the moral centrality of work" (term from sociologist Michele 
Lamont). They do "hard things," as opposed to those who must persuade 
and hence work with words, whom they regard as lying and 
manipulative. They see social class in moral rather than economic terms

To exemplify further--and this is why I'm sending this to 
Milton-L--Brooks observes:
Karl Marx once observed that "Milton produced Paradise Lost for the 
same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his 
nature." Here was a guy that had found in trucking the activity of 
his essential nature.
Why silkworms? Exotic and precious, perhaps; but did PL flow from 
Milton's gut like material to enclose a pupa?  Was he a hard worker 
or a manipulator?  Intriguing questions, but add the social class 
question to the mix, and here is a topic for us during the dog days of August!

Nancy Charlton

P.S. the URL, FWIW: 
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/opinion/14brooks.html?th&emc=th
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