A Lazy Worker is a Productive Worker

Could this be the seminal economic text of our time? 

In 1880, Paul Lafargue wrote a 40-page pamphlet that defended the “right to be lazy.” If his name doesn’t ring any bells, he was the Cuban-born son-in-law of Karl Marx. Lafargue’s slogan was later picked up by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”), especially in Australia. Aussie Wobs reprinted Lafargue’s pamphlet in 1917, and the right to be lazy soon became an IWW catch phrase. As the Wobblies saw it, humans were not born to toil. The ultimate goal of labor is to produce more free time; in fact, a life devoted to work was simply slavery under a different guise.

It turns out that Lafargue and the Wobblies were on to something. In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, Edward and Robert Skidelsky reveal that obsession with hard work played a big role in precipitating the current financial crisis. They’ve looked at the emphasis capitalist economists from Adam Smith (conservative) through John Maynard Keynes (liberal) placed on leisure, and argue that theories of economic growth without a corresponding focus on leisure trap economic systems into endless cycles of boom and bust. They also found a historical correlation between healthy economies and leisurely workers–GDP rises hand-in-hand with increased leisure time. This is because mere growth divorced from purpose is inherently alienating–we don’t know why we’re working. Ultimately, labor separated from leisure becomes irrational. We might work harder, accumulate more material objects, and (in theory) create greater social and cultural opportunities, but we don’t have the time or the ethos that allows us to enjoy them. Without time off or a leisure mentality, we drive ourselves in the purposeless task of seeking wealth, a pursuit that leads us to attempt to increase output long after it is useful or possible to do so. In other words, we work until we break the system! The Skidelskys’ remedy for boom-and-bust cycles isn’t likely to taught at the Wharton School of Business in the near future, but maybe it should be: demand less of workers and channel them into more leisure opportunities. When workers know why they work–to gain access to leisure and the fruits of their labor–they become more productive and efficient on the job.

So there you have it–listen to the Wobblies instead of the capitalists. You’ve got a right to be lazy and asserting that right will make you happier and more productive when you do work. The next time the economy starts to falter, prop your feet up and take a snooze. When you wake up, head for the beach. You’ve got better data on your side than the venture capitalists, so do your bit for the Dow Jones by basking in the sun.

Boy an Offbeat (and uneven) Delight

BOY (2010)

Directed by Taika Waititi

New Zealand Film Commission, 88 minutes, in Maori and English

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The lovable James Rolleston in the title role of this offbeat New Zealand film. 

1984 turned out to be the year the world danced to Michael Jackson’s Thriller  instead of cowering in fear from the arrival of George Orwell’s dystopia. Jackson eventually became a self-parodying cartoon character dogged by allegations of drug use, pedophilia, and botched plastic surgery, but in 1984 his dance moves and cultural clout made him an inspiration to people of color around the globe. Even impoverished Māori kids in a remote New Zealand pa (village) knew of Michael.

Or perhaps I should say especially Māori kids. The early 1980s were an important time for Māori identity. By then, protest movements aimed at reversing second-class citizenship had begun to bear fruit. North Americans generally know little about events and agreements such as the 1971 Waitangi Day protest, the 1975 Land March, the Waitangi Tribunal, or the 1981 Springbok protest, but each was a signal event for Māori wishing to claim their place at the New Zealand table. Think of the 1980s as akin to the sort of racial awakening experienced by African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, or the Négritude movement among French-speaking colonials.

Do you need to know any of this to appreciate Boy, a film that had the highest opening gross of any New Zealand-made film in the nation’s history? It wouldn’t hurt, but you could just enjoy it as a quirky coming-of-age film in the tradition of Whale Rider (2002). Boy isn’t as polished, gripping, or packed with symbolism as Whale Rider but it is, in places, wildly imaginative, offbeat, funny, and poignant. Boy, its eponymous central character, is an eleven-year-old who lives amidst the stark contrasts of the storied beauty of the New Zealand coastline and the grinding poverty of the pa. Things are changing, but mostly on the inspirational level rather than the material. People in the pa are more likely to sport names such as Rocky, Chardonnay, Dallas, Weirdo, or Ju Ju as anything traditional, and they speak Māori as their second language; after all, the schools, TV shows, and advertisements are in English. Like kids everywhere, Māori youngsters live in a world that’s shaped as much by pop culture and fantasy as by reality. Boy’s brother Rocky, for instance, thinks he has superpowers, though they’re defective and only occasionally work. He also draws his sorrows–including the fact that his mother died giving birth to him–and those drawings (and Boy’s imagination) come to life–one of the film’s more clever devices.

Boy and Rocky live with a herd of cousins with their grandmother–Dad was sent to prison for petty theft when each was too young to remember him clearly, but not long ago enough to prevent Boy from constructing fanciful images of the old paterfamilias. The film follows a single week, when Gran leaves the kids alone to attend a funeral and Alamein, the father, unexpectedly appears at the pa. How much damage can he do in a week? Quite a lot as it turns out. Alamein–named for a World War II battle and played by director Taika Waititi–is a perpetual adolescent. He dresses like a mash between Super Fly and a dime-store Michael Jackson, and fancies himself the leader of Crazy Horse, a two-person posse that’s possibly the most incompetent group of criminals in New Zealand history. Alamein has enough flash to dazzle amidst the poverty of the pa and to give a to Boy glimmer of exotic hope, but he lacks the intellect or substance to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes for very long.

The film’s strengths are its fine performances, especially by the thoroughly lovable James Rolleston in the title role, and of Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu as younger brother Rocky. Waititi is also delicious fun as the father–who wouldn’t love getting to chew as much scenery as he does? Like Waititi’s previous film Eagle vs. Shark  (2007), the movie’s plot can best be described as a likable, often predictable mess punctuated by periods of occasional genius. I’ll merely note that a goat, a village idiot, an offbeat aunt, buried loot, and marijuana factor in. For all of the film’s obvious flaws, it is often reach-for-the-tissues sad, laugh-out-loud hysterical, and thought provoking. Moreover, it’s the best kind of coming-of-age film in that it offers no easy answers or cheap resolutions, but leaves you with just enough insight into Boy and Rocky to give you hope that they will escape both Jackson’s 1984 and Orwell’s. --Rob Weir  

  

Leave It to Beavers

Building better ecosystems--one beaver at a time! 

I live in an expanding western Massachusetts town that’s short on available housing stock. As in all such towns, this has sprouted new developments on lands that for centuries have been meadows and forest, many of which are bounded by wetlands. New suburbanites generally like the idea of living in sylvan developments, but they often have trouble with the reality of deer munching their rhododendrons, foxes carrying off Fluffy the cat, or black bears taking down bird feeders and frightening little Joey. But nothing seems to inspire their ire quite like beavers, those buck-toothed, pancake-tailed varmints who build domed dams that  (very occasionally) cause water levels to rise to the point where suburbanites living nearby get wet basements. God forbid the trunk of a prized magnolia–a non-native invasive species–ends up on the dam. That leads to demands for poisoning the beavers. (Note to complainers: Install a sump pump or move to an in-town condo!)

I live on a street that was once woodlands, so I steadfastly refuse to sign all neighborhood petitions for any sort of wildlife control. That certainly extends to beavers. Hell’s bells, developers cut down thousands of trees to build the houses on my street and those that adjoin it, so it would the height of hypocrisy to get bent out of shape by a few rodents taking down some saplings. Courtesy of the Spokane-based Lands Council, I now have ammunition at my disposal other than principled crankiness the next time the Beaver Posse comes to my neck of the (radically thinned) woods.

These days we speak of the “environmental” movement. I’m fine with that, but back in the late 1960s the term of choice was “ecology.”  Ecology is a stronger word in that it sees the earth as a series of interconnected systems, not merely a mindset about nature. Ecological research shows that each species–plants and animals alike–live in interdependent relationships within specific natural environments. Those of you who are science fiction fans (or anthropologists) have no doubt encountered some variant of the “butterfly effect,” which derives from ecology. In simplest terms it says that you can’t change one thing within a system without inadvertently changing a whole lot of other things. To boil it down ecologically, you shouldn’t mess with Mother Nature, and Mom likes beavers.

The Lands Council has pretty convincing data–some of which goes back to the 1920s–that shows that removing beavers from an ecosystem increases the likelihood of erosion, drought, and floods. The latter was an eye-opener. To put it in suburban terms, all those wet basement homeowners who want to run Bucky the Beaver off the pond are actually increasing the odds of devastating floods. Beavers not only prefer wetlands, their dam-building activities build and preserve them. Those wetlands, in turn, retain rainwater and snow melt, and give them somewhere to go when they come in abnormal amounts. They also raise the water levels that sustain vegetation. Therein lies the irony; remove the beavers that are chewing your trees and you’ll eventually end up with fewer trees, not more. Your grass, bushes, and flowers won’t grow as well either, and your soil will deplete its nutrients. Shrink the watersheds and all that water once absorbed in them will find a new home. Ask Smith College, which responded to beaver damage by cutting down hundreds of trees along Paradise Pond, which is now silting at alarming rates due to bank erosion. Ask New Orleans, which drained wetlands decades ago that would have diverted much of the floodwater unleashed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Idaho is embarked on a project that would cause some of my neighbors to see red: it’s parachuting beavers into ecosystems in an attempt to rebuild colonies. Washington has reestablished 50,000 beavers in the eastern part of the state. Mountainous areas of New Mexico hope to do the same. My town recently had the good sense to build a few water-diverting culverts that appeased the Beaver Posse at one of the new developments. Let’s hope that practice continues here and everywhere else; the fate of our ecosystems rests (in part) in the paws of Castor Canadensis.  

Okay for Now: A Teen Novel, or Just a Good Book?

Okay for Now.

Gary Schmidt

New York: Clarion Books, 2011.

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Joe Pepitone, Aaron Copeland, and James Audubon are three names that are unlikely to occupy a lot of space in the average teenaged consciousness. Given that all three are major tropes in Gary Schmidt’s Okay for Now, one wonders whether it’s accurate to call it the “young adult” novel it’s marketed to be. I’d say probably not, but it’s a pretty gripping story no matter how one labels its genre.

The novel is set in 1968, the year fourteen-year-old Doug Swieteck and his family are uprooted from their home on Long Island by their shiftless father and plunked down in the hamlet of Marysville in the Catskills. Doug’s old man is a violent, hard-drinking, no-account loser, as is his bad boy middle brother, a petty thief and fulltime sadist. Older brother, Lucas, is in Vietnam–one of the many working-class poor kids sent as jungle fodder for American imperial ambitions. Relocation to “stupid Marysville,” as Doug calls it, removes him from two of the three things he loves: his closest friends, and the hope of attending a game at Yankee Stadium. Young Doug is a diehard Yankees fan whose one moment of glory in an otherwise dire teen life was a chance encounter with first baseman Joe Pepitone, who gave Doug his hat. (Which his brother stole and destroyed.) Call Doug’s worship of Pepitone a metaphor for Doug’s life–the chronically underachieving Pepitone was the face of the franchise of really, really bad Yankees teams of the mid- and late-60s. (He hit just .251 with 13 homers and 64 RBIs in 1967, the year of his fictional encounter with Swieteck.) The other thing Doug loves is his mother, a kindly woman who tries her best to insulate Doug from his father’s wrath and bears the marks of his violence. Doug also literally bears a cruel stigma of his affection for his mother, not to mention the scars of delayed educational and social development.      

It would be a gross understatement to say that Doug doesn’t have much going for him. As it turns out, though, “stupid Marysville” has some surprises in store. Despite his father’s brutishness and class-based oppression psychosis, Doug will encounter some people who will change his life–his father’s paternalist boss, a gym teacher with demons of his own, an eccentric writer with a fondness for art and music, and a caring teacher. Above all, he’ll find Lil Spicer, who becomes a serious 7^th grade crush, and a librarian who introduces Doug to the works of John James Audubon. In sketching Audubon’s birds Doug finds hidden talents, a positive outlet for his long-suffering patience, and metaphors for his life.

As I said, not exactly the sort of fare one would expect the average young person to consume.  I would, however, expect teens to relate to Schmidt’s prose. He simply nails the attitudes, language, and carriage of burgeoning adolescence. Schmidt’s ability to paint a portrait of the interior of teenaged minds rivals that of novelists such as Mark Haddon, Muriel Barbery, and Nick Hornby. He also describes Marysville and the Audubon prints with such clarity that they animate and become characters in their own right. This would be a wonderful book to read and discuss with a young person. It would take some adult input to explain (and perhaps mutually explore) some of the references in the book, but adults will also admire this book and parts of it will take them back to their own frightful junior high days. (The junior high principal alone will make your skin crawl.) High marks for Schmidt for writing a book that’s equal parts tough and hopeful, smart and easy to read, compelling and real. 

Flynn Cohen Guitar Album Strikes the Right Chords

FLYNN COHEN

Fierce Modal

Deadstring Music

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Flynn Cohen’s nine-track guitar solo project is a true delight. Cohen, perhaps best known for his work with Annalivia, is a man of many influences, including progressive rock, medieval dance tunes, bluegrass, and Celtic. But rather than trying to force fit his loves into arrangements, he has the good sense to let the proper mood dictate style rather than vice versa. “The Good Part,” for instance had a decided Celtic flair with just a hint of old-time music peeking through the seams. “Poor Micheál,” has a bridge inspired by Yes, but it’s a march in the style of the man it honors, the late Micheál o’Domhnaill. When it’s appropriate, as on “Don’t Spare the Horses,” he lets loose with a galloping pace that evokes a field of wild stallions. (He also showcases his mandolin prowess on that one.) But he also knows when to slow down. The next track, “Crop Circles,” is mysterious and dreamy, as befits a tune named for such unexplained phenomena. He follows with two galliards–16^th century Renaissance dances–the first with ambience of something arranged for a recorder consort, the second in tribute to the newborn son of friends Matt and Shannon Heaton and thus more lullaby-like. And what better to finish than with “Dougie’s Trip to Heaven,” a bluegrass tune supplemented by Duncan Wickel’s fiddle? Overall a crisp album that hits all the right notes, sets all the right moods, and it exactly the right length to keep us fully engaged.-- Rob Weir

Check out some samples at http://www.flynncohen.net/recordings.cfm  

Bad Math: Why Obama Is Unlikely to Win Reelection

It’s late June, the economy remains stuck in low gear, and the only thing edging upward is Barack Obama’s job disapproval rating (49%; just 43% approve). With each passing day, a Mitt Romney presidency appears more likely.

Forget Obama’s foreign affairs triumphs, Bill Clinton got it right: it’s the economy, stupid. There are 19 weeks left before Election Day (November 6) and Obama would have to break with conventional economic wisdom to eek out victory.  Pundits generally say that an incumbent is in trouble if the economy hasn’t rebounded by March of an election year; 2012 figures were dismal. Unemployment stood at 8.2% that month, and it remains mired there, despite Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that the private sector “is doing fine.” Even worse, it’s .6% higher than when he took office.

The odds are increasingly long that Obama can beat Romney, which places the president in the uncomfortable position of hoping that Romney beats himself. That’s not out of the question; Romney is an arrogant, unprincipled flip-flopper whom people tend to like less the more they get to know him. He’s also the sort of greedy and rapacious investor who caused the current financial mess. That said, Obama was elected to clean up Romneyesque-like messes and has failed utterly to do so. As the man in charge, he (rightly or wrongly) gets pinned with the blame for bad news. Liberals are simply delusional if they think the American Heartland is going to overlook the tepid economy and applaud symbolic triumphs such as the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Shepard-Bryd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, or the repeal of DADT. His key domestic achievement, health care reform, stands a good chance of being shot down in a few weeks. Unless something truly unforeseen happens, a Romney meltdown is Obama’s most hopeful road to reelection.

If we go beyond the surface, the electoral math is in Romney’s favor. Latest polls reveal that Obama has a solid 198 electoral votes to Romney’s 133. That’s not as good as it sounds. It takes 270 to win and the remaining 72 will be as elusive for Obama as economic recovery. A mash of the six top polls breaks down the 207 electorals that remain in play. Of these, 42 are considered “likely” Democratic states. That still leaves Obama 30 votes shy. The same polls note 39 “barely Democratic” states. If Obama holds on to those, he wins, but only a fool would guarantee an Obama victory in the latter states: Colorado (9), Oregon (7), Wisconsin (10), and Virginia (13). Obama clings to a 1% lead in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker is back in the driver’s seat, and less than 1% in Colorado. Count me among those who’d call his 4% lead in Virginia “soft.” In fact, I’m not terribly convinced that his 8% lead in Michigan or Pennsylvania is solid either. I just returned from a visit to Pennsylvania and I’ve got to think that Obama must be very popular in the greater Philadelphia area, as I didn’t hear a single positive word about him from anyone living west of Lancaster County. I should also point out that Romney’s father was a popular governor in Michigan and that the Wolverine State has a higher unemployment rate (8.5%) than the US average.

Romney, by contrast, has strong leads in states offering 58 electorals, and is leading in those accounting for another 39. That puts him at 224. The only state showing a tie is–gulp!–Florida, with 29 votes. For sake of argument, let’s say those go to Romney by hook or crook. Suddenly, he’s just 17 votes away from the White House. Boil it down and it means that Obama must run an error-free campaign; one slip in a state in which he’s currently leading, including those he leads by 4% or less, and Romney wins.

The math looks bad–very bad–for Barack Obama. I’ll grant that a lot can happen in 19 weeks, but right now I’d say that those on the East Coast can make the following plans for November 6: if Obama loses any one of the following– Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Wisconsin–you can go to bed early as it’s all over except the weeping and gnashing of liberal teeth.

The Rocket Must Dock in the Hall of Fame

I spy the neon glow of self-appointed sports writer "saints" like Jeff Passan.

In 1919, a jury acquitted “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of conspiring to throw the World Series. Nonetheless, the following year Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned Jackson from the game and he remains ineligible for the Hall of Fame. Both decisions rankle diehard baseball fans and the second is considered a travesty. Why bring up ancient history? Because we may see something akin to it next year when Roger Clemens becomes eligible for induction to Cooperstown.

On June 18, a criminal trial jury handed down not-guilty verdicts on six counts relating to Clemens’ alleged use of steroids. Already, sportswriters such as Lew Carpenter, Jeff Passan, Wally Matthews, and Tom Verducci have insinuated that they and their peers hold higher standards of innocence than the jury. In their minds, Clemens’ name in the discredited Mitchell report trumps the findings of the jury. In other words, they’re prepared to play the modern-day Landis role and deny Clemens election to the Hall of Fame. To this I reply, who died and made you guys Pharisees? By what objective standard can they deny him? To mangle a phrase form the O. J. Simpson trial, if the jury acquits you must elect.   

Is Clemens worthy? Well, if 354 wins, 7 Cy Youngs, a MVP award, an ERA of 3.12, election to the All-Century team, and 4,672 strikeouts aren’t enough, nothing is. No one will ever get the warm fuzzies when they think of Clemens, but the man’s practically a saint when compared to his chief accuser, Brian (“The Juice”) McNamee. Besides, if being a nice person was a criterion for the Hall of Fame, they could clear the joint and rent the space to U-Haul. There is far less reason to deny Clemens than Shoeless Joe, who actually admitted he took money from gamblers (though he didn’t throw the World Series). The goods on Clemens are even shoddier than those attached to Pete Rose (who should also be in the Hall of Fame).

It’s beyond risible that a group of sportswriters would set itself up as moralists and judges. I double-checked; there are no baseball writers–an aggregate known to contain quite a few substance abusers–who have attained sainthood. If there are any former Eagle Scouts among them, they outgrew those virtues long ago. Want to talk about being morally compromised? Every sportscaster attached to an affiliated network swallows truth on an everyday basis because he (or the occasional she) knows that being overly critical will result in dismissal. Beat writers covering teams also follow restraints, lest they be denied easy access to the players and other sources necessary for them to file stories. Are we to believe, for instance, that no New York sportswriter ever saw Mickey Mantle or Whitey Ford drunk? Would Jeff Passan, in his Kansas City days, have written a slam piece on George Brett? Do you expect the Boston press to spill the beans on how thoroughly unlikable Ted Williams or Carl Yaztremski were? What passes for “tough” reporting is a shadow of what is actually witnessed.

So spare me all that “integrity of the game” nonsense, and stuff that “Clemens is a cheater” mantra. No–he’s not; a jury has ruled on that. You may have your private suspicions, even your deep-seated certainties, but there is no objective basis upon which Clemens can be denied entry into the Hall of Fame. Maybe the dude did steroids; maybe he’s as pure as Snow White. All we know for certain is that a lot of guys did use steroids between the 1980s and 2002. Most of them were hitters. Only one pitcher, Clemens, won 354 games. Sounds like an even match to me. Like it or not, a jury says that though his name appeared among the 47 steroid users listed in the Mitchell Report, Roger Clemens is an innocent man. The Rocket must go to the Hall of Fame. To keep him out would be worse than Shoeless Joe’s ban; it would be ideological- and innuendo-based persecution analogous to McCarthyism.