Poor Jobs is Dead

Poor Jobs is Dead

by Pam Green, © 2011

to tune of "Poor Jud is Dead" ("Pore Jud is Daid") from Oklahoma ! by Rogers & Hammerstein

Discussion :

Much of the factual information on which some verses are based is taken from "Insanely Great" by Steven Levy and from the Wikipedia article on Steve Jobs, plus the 60 Minutes interview with his biographer , Walter Isaacson.

The heroic and mock heroic imagry from Greek tragedy is my own concept. Job's heroic virtue was his unshakable belief in his own vision and opinion ; his tragic flaw was likewise his unshakable belief in his own opinion.

• "Co-Father Wozniak" : Steve Wozniak, "Woz", unquestionably provided all of the engineering genius for the Apple I and Apple II. His participation in the creation of the Mac was cut short by his plane crash in early 1981, but his influence in attracting and inspiring other hardware and software artists and engineers to join the project. Without his contibutions there would have been no Apple and no Mac.
• "iPhone 5" : at the time of Job's death , the 5 had not yet been released but was eagerly anticipated
• Mozart's Requiem : it has the grandure and drama appropriate. Jobs himself would probably have chosen something by The Beatles or Bob Dylan (possibly sung by Joan Baez) ; but it's not clear to me which of their songs might be appropriate for a funeral ("A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" ? "Desolation Row"? ).
• "his parents were unwed" : indeed they were, and Jobs was given up for adoption. He credited both adoptive parents with raising him kindly and well, and particularly credited his dad with teaching him to work with his hands and never to be satisfied with less than perfection.
• "Lisa lacked support" , "I cannot procreate" : Lisa Brennan was born in 1978, at which time Jobs was already quite wealthy, yet for two years he refused to acknowledge her or provide financial support, leaving Lisa and her mother, Chris Ann Brennan, to live on Welfare and food stamps. In his response to the paternity suit, Jobs claimed that he was sterile and therefore "unable to procreate".
• "Lisa" was also the name Jobs gave to the precursor of the Mac, but the Lisa failed due to over-pricing and lack of supporting software.
• "demi-deified", "wasn't god begotten" : references to the classic Greek concept of a man of heroic achievement being readily attributed to parentage by a god (or less often a goddess). To make the rhyme scheme work , "god begotten" and "O S Ten" have to be treated as rhyming trisyllabics.
• "he fleeced gold at Xerox PARC" : as just about everyone knows, the concept and first prototype for a graphical user interface navigated by mouse was the Xerox PARC Alto. However Xerox at the time had no intention of developing this into a commercial product or personal computer. They traded the right for Jobs and his team to visit PARC and see an Alto demonstration for a valuable chunk of Apple stock. So let's not cry for Xerox.
• "he created the New Ark" : the Macintosh project developed a core Toolbox and set of rules for how the interface for the OS and all applications should appear and work. This was openly refered to as the Mac's "religion". So the "Ark" imagry, while hyperbole, is not inappropriate.
• "hurled him out", "Second Coming" : Apple's board threw Jobs out of power in 1985, at the behest of John Scully, who Jobs had brought into Apple by asking him if he wanted to spend his life selling sugared water or would he join Jobs and help him change the world. By late 1996, Apple was close to bankrupcy, so around Christmas time, they bought Job's company Next and got Jobs back in the bargain. From that time on , Apple's revival began and Jobs gets some and much of the applause of the credit for that as well as for the increasing success and innovation thereafter.
• the cancer story : in October of 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, still very small and not yet metastasized. Doctors urged immediate surgery as being very likely to result in a total cure. Jobs "thought differently" about treatment and wasted the next 9 months pursuing alterate treatments. Meanwhile the cancer went ahead and metastasized.
• "his Maker turned his Page" : the application PageMaker was the "killer app" that put the Mac and desktop publishing into the serious business world.
• "in what Avatar might Apple get him back" : Jobs professed to be a Buddist (though he certainly did not follow the Buddist 8-fold way in his activities, including his legendary unkindness to subordinates, and his attitude was far from that of "non-attachment"), thus he might have expected to be reincarnated, unless of course he was vain enough to think he had become an Awakened One entitled to exit the wheel of re-birth and enter Nirvana.