Short Story: Negative Selection Has Gone Global, My Friend

It’s 1974, and you’re a fac­tory worker in the For­mer Yugoslavia.  You’re a highly skilled mechan­i­cal engi­neer, no less: a mem­ber of the the intel­lec­tual and trained elite.  The clock on the fac­tory floor strikes 11 am and you go down to the cafe­te­ria to grab some musaka, a swig of yogurt and smoke a few cig­a­rettes.  The foreman’s called a lunch meet­ing, which means you can just sit there, smoke and listen.

Min­utes later you’re in your seat at a round, blue metal table.  Your chair is made of alu­minum and uphol­stered with some sort of brown poly­ester mate­r­ial.  Every­one has food in front of them, and every three peo­ple share an ashtray.

“Our coun­try,” the com­pany fore­man starts, “is not like any other coun­try in the world.  Every­one else is evolv­ing, but here we prac­tice neg­a­tive selec­tion.”

Every­one around you, all men and women with advanced degrees in engi­neer­ing and the hard sci­ences, turns in the direc­tion of a pri­vate room on the far side of the mess hall.   You turn, as well.  It’s the big bosses door, a room apart from every­one else.  Inside it sits a round, snot nosed, and communist-magnolia red adult man who has no idea what this com­pany even does.  He has a pot­ted fern in there.  You saw it through the crack of the door once, and there’s whis­pers about him har­bor­ing a huge col­lec­tion of French porn in his desk. Nobody knows for sure.  Usu­ally, you only see him a few times a year when he parades other, higher-up com­mu­nist offi­cials around your fac­tory.  Oth­er­wise, the only way you know that red-faced pig is even at work is if you walk by his car on the way home.  His car is parked inside the fac­tory gates.  You and the rest of the fac­tory employ­ees have to walk much far­ther to the offi­cial fac­tory park­ing lot.

That fat fuck­ing pig. What a waste of life, you think.  He hasn’t even fin­ished  high school but because his father was a high falutin party mem­ber,  that ass­hole got to become the com­pany man­ager.  Your cousin’s wife in Amer­ica talks about their being a glass ceil­ing for immi­grants and women.

“At least, Krushka” you’ll tell her next time, ” in Amer­ica you can see and touch the ceil­ing.  Here the fac­to­ries have no ceil­ing to touch, and it’s hard to sim­ply find room enough to walk for­ward a few steps with­out pok­ing into a sharp­ened sickle or slam­ming into a locked door that smells of stolen money and pig shit.”

What a waste. You turn back around.

“The rea­son our car indus­try can’t get past the Yugo,” con­tin­ues the fore­man “is because our dumb­est peo­ple are the ones we put into lead­er­ship posi­tions.  Here we make elec­tric motors for indus­trial machines, and that cunt-lick over in that room doesn’t know his Tes­las from his Jules.  But he’s the one who decides how many peo­ple we get for a job, and how much time we get to do it.”

You feel the urge to inter­rupt.  You’ve been lis­ten­ing to this crap for years now, off and on, about var­i­ous bosses that have sat in that one-fern, French pussy cov­ered room.  When you were younger, you were sur­prised to have a boss who was incom­pe­tent and who no one respected.  But with each suc­ces­sive ass­hole you’d accepted that things just worked that way.  Cor­rup­tion, nepo­tism, thiev­ery.  Who knows.  But today, it’s dif­fer­ent.  You’ve been here for fif­teen years now, and it’s struck you that you really want to know.

“But let me ask you some­thing,” you say.

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