Douglas Barone

I learned a decade or so ago that no one is irreplaceable, regardless of their talents, native abilities, passions, certainly not in something as prosaic as a business organization, or as it turns out, in a political system, not even in the art world.

But this morning that day-in and day-out truth seems so hard to bear. There is such a haze of loss I’m fighting today over the news of the death of Steve Jobs.

Separating yourself from the idea of ‘the irreplaceable’ is not to say that some lives, Steve’s in particular, do not have overwhelming impact, that they are not filled with extraordinary meaning. On the contrary, it’s just the opposite. The individual, driven by nothing more than passion, utilizing the talents they have, and the ones they’ve developed, applying them against the vagaries of the world around them, this is the base of a society many of us still believe in; one founded on individuals, not on the collective, one that grows through personal responsibility, not through entitlements, that becomes better through commitment and a drive to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” and to hell with the institutional oppressors that tell you to, “get back in line.”

I’m sorry if this seems like an overtly political statement at the time of one man’s death, but I’m not sure how else to deal with the news of his passing, this man just a few years older than me, while I’m reading about it on the tech devices he made possible, over the networks he made usable, on the applications that he demanded were designed to allow me to focus on ideas and not on production. What tinges the air with political tonality today, the way Charles Baxter and John Barth used to say the air of the prior generation was tinged with the smell of Berkley tear gas, vintage 1968, is that on a day when organized labor (or more precisely, the most radicalized few unions of the worst of organized labor) co-opted the Occupy Wall Street kids — a frustratingly dysfunctional narrative of a protest so hollow of purpose and void of meaning that it makes the Obama presidential campaign of 2008 look like a paragon of forthright honesty — we are struck flush with the contrast of what Jobs created versus the vapidity of ideas put forward by the American political left.

Here’s the contrast: Maker vs obscurer. Creator vs sneak. The comparison could not be more stark.

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