Doing the Dishes

To paraphrase US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the dishwasher has "rendered quaint" the old-fashioned chore of doing the dishes in many households.

Now you just load, run and unload. Repeat. No scrubbing, no wave-toss'd scrum of decomposing peas and feta cheese, no struggle to maintain the soap/water balance throughout the job.

For generations of housebound domestic partners — typically wives — dishwashing has been anything but quaint. It's tedious. It's unpleasant. And, in the worst-case scenario, it's dehumanizing.

You can practically see the unbreakable chains that bind the wrists to the sink until the work is done.

The frustrated housewife, slaving away on the remnants of last week's tuna casserole is an American icon. An object of fun to men ("Ha! Not us!") and sympathetic pity and or scorn for women, she scrubs away at the messes that hubby and kids have left obliviously in their wake.

Even worse, domestic dishwashing carries its own metaphor for a decaying relationship. No matter how often you scrub away the filth and the rot, it comes back. It always comes back. It wears you down, it taints your nostrils, batters your self-respect, and makes your fingers all pruney. If you're in a failing marriage, it's the domestic manifestation of the Chinese water torture that life has become.

Even if you're not, there's an emotional price to be paid for dish-washing. Perhaps much of the angst comes from where dishwashing sits on Norton's Imaginary Hierarchy of Labor, a descending ladder that stretches from sexy prestige to humiliating drudgery:

Creating — This is the top of the heap. Creators are pathblazing scientists, successful musicians, sculptors, college professors, novelists, creative architects, popular historians with new ideas — those who live by refining and popularizing the outer reaches of their own imaginations. Nothing's sexier than turning the contents of your own head into a blueprint for strangers.

Building — If you can't create, build. Put together a building, business, organization or club — bring people and materials together to make something that has lasting value to the community. So you're not Joseph Ellis, the author of "Founding Brothers"; put together a workmanlike history of Polish immigrants to Milwaukee, and you're still doing something useful and admirable.

Hunting/Gathering — Ironically less productive than farming (harvesting a recurring resource), hunting and gathering has its own sort of sex appeal. You're out in the mix, foraging amid the elements. Whether you're a corporate headhunter, a stock-picker, or an unshaven guy mumbling to yourself as you pick Fanta bottles out of a wire basket down on the avenue, you're testing yourself against the vagaries of the world.

Farming — More productive than hunting and gathering, but duller. Plant, nurture, harvest, repeat. It's no accident that farms have gotten more mechanized and computerized over the years; many of the tasks are repetitive and tedious to the extreme. Many office workers or clerks "farm" — they perform repetitive tasks that glean productive value from an established system or place.

Maintaining — Can't think of (or build) your own livelihood? Can't stand the rough elements, or get your hands on a patch of land (metaphorically or literally)? Welcome to the world of maintainance. Here you clean up the messes left by the creators, builders, hunters, gatherers and farmers. Here you tinker with (but not build or create!) the machines and tools. And here you wash the dishes.

Dishwashing, then, isn't just a boring task — it drains status. The more of your identity that is wrapped up in washing the dishes, in general, the lousier society says you should feel.

And yet — and yet! — it has a positive side, too, particularly within the domestic sphere.

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