Equivalency Exam: Soybeans and Labor

Strong societies form, grow and improve through capitalistic activity. Up to a point.  A point Western society passed 20 years ago with the Internet’s arrival.

We’re now one global economy, people.  Mourn the atavistic American Dream all you want, but crying won’t change a damn thing. (I’m sad, too. But I’m a capitalist who hates delusional thinking more than I fear change.)

Modern capitalism mystifies. Owning the means of production no longer puts you in charge of your economic destiny. Being a worker – whether unskilled or multi-degreed – puts your labor on the global market to be priced, diced and sliced as a commodity. It’s galling. It’s also reality. Many of us have yet to accept this fact.

I winced while reading the August 17 NYT story about union workers fighting wage cuts at the highly profitable Mott’s factory:

Tim Budd, a 24-year employee who belongs to the union’s bargaining team, said he was shocked by one thing the plant manager said during negotiations.
“He said we’re a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities go up and down,” Mr. Budd recalled. “He said there are thousands of people in this area out of jobs, and they could hire any one of them for $14 an hour. It made me sick to have someone sit across the table and say I’m not worth the money I make.”

I empathize with and share Mr. Budd’s plight. But so does the lawyer whose practice competes with Mumbai attorneys; the North Carolina chocolate artist whose livelihood is threatened by one guy, Anthony Ward, who’s managed to corner the world cocoa market; the sick-making Mott manager whose job can end any time the Dr Pepper Snapple board decides to shutter his plant.

We are all at the mercy of this merciless system. I don’t see how individuals can win within its confines. And I don’t know what will happen next. Revolution? Maybe.

Or maybe we’re asking the wrong question.

Mr. Budd laments having his worth diminished via lowered wages. True, in economic terms. But what if we started asking ourselves about worth-metrics outside the capitalistic system? Could societies improve through people uniting to increase worth that cannot be measured in dollars? It’s difficult to wrap our brains around the concept, so entrenched are we in money-minded methodologies.

I believe we should try. If global capitalism is a game we cannot “win”, let’s find another. I’ll play if you will.

Southern Comfort

Inscription on an old federal building in Asheville, North Carolina.

Amen.

See Something (Nice)? Say Something.

Talking with strangers is a neglected free entertainment, requiring only curiosity and nerve. When initiated with a compliment – and without any agenda material, sexual or political (tough to imagine, right?) – such conversation is bound to lead somewhere interesting. Even a simple acknowledgment of someone’s existence can make that someone’s day.

It’s easy. Why don’t we do it more often?

A recent encounter had me renewing my vow to say something nice when I see something nice.

I went shopping for NYC postcards to send to Australian friends. Just outside Time (sic) Square Convenience on 42nd St. were two racks to twirl through. One featured cheap snaps – 5 for $1 – of landmarks. The other offered fanciful pictures of Gotham graffiti, open fire hydrants and street vendors – 2 for $1.

A thin woman with graying curly hair crouched near the second rack, refilling slots from an open briefcase.

“Do you work for this company?” I asked, searching the back of a card for a name. It was a woman’s name. “Are you the photographer?”

She looked up and slowly stood. “Yes, I made these pictures,” she said.

“They’re fantastic. Great work, Genevieve Hafner,” I said.

She smiled. “Oh, thank you very much.”

I bought six.

I wondered how she made ends meet as an East Village artist. I didn’t ask. But now I look for her each time I pass the shop. She’s known.

[Three pics above are my photos of the postcards created by G. Hafner; poor quality is my fault, not hers.]

Pondering Squandering

A howl from the bowels of nonprofit development, The Ask by Sam Lipsyte is a perverse heist-movie of a book. Coen brothers funny, it offers poignant humiliations and not-quite redemption.

A scene on page 270 between narrator Milo and his preschooler, Bernie, struck me dumb. I’ll spend the summer mulling over this Lipsyte insight.

“Listen,” I said.
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Squander it. Always squander it. Give it all away.”
“Give what away? My toys?”
“No, yes, sure, your toys, too. Whatever it is. Squander it. Do you understand?”
“Not really.”
“Don’t save a little part of you inside yourself. Not even a scrap. It gets tainted in there. It rots.”
“What does?”
“I can’t explain it right now. Someday you’ll know. But promise me you’ll squander it.”
“I promise. What’s squander?”
“You don’t need to know that yet. Here’s what you need to know:  The boy can walk away from the ogre’s castle. He doesn’t have to knock. Some people will tell you that it’s better the boy get hurt or even die than never know whether he could have defeated the ogre and won the ogre’s treasure. But those are the people who tell us stories to keep us slaves.”
“Daddy?” said Bernie.
“Yes?”
“Can I have a stegosaurus cake for my birthday like Jeremy got?”
“Yes, of course. For your birthday.”
I yanked him to me, buried my face against his strong, tiny neck.
“I love you, Bernie.”

Lines to Admire

In The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis sweeps us off to an Italian idyll circa 1970. Idle thinking is not featured in its prose. Here's an exemplar, from page 310 in a chapter called "Coda. Life."

The Italian summer – that was the only passage in his whole existence that felt like a novel. It had chronology and truth (it did happen). But it also boasted the unities of time, place, and action; it aspired to at least partial coherence; it had some shape, some pattern, with its echelons, its bestiaries. Once that was over, all he had was truth and chronology – and, oh yes, the inherently tragic shape (rise, crest, fall), like the mouth on a tragic mask: and this is a face that is common to everybody who doesn't die young.

But it turns out that there's another way of doing things, another mode, another genre. And I hereby christen it Life. 

Life is the world of Well Anyway, and Which Reminds Me, and He Said, She Said.

Life has no time for the exalted proprieties, the ornate contrivances, and the intense stylisations of kitchen-sink.

Life is not a court shoe, with its narrowing heel and arched sole; Life is the tasteless trotter down there at the other end of your leg. 

Life is made up as it goes along. It can never be rewritten. It can never be revised.

Life comes in the form of sixteen-hour units, between waking up and going to sleep, between escaping from the unreal and re-embracing the unreal. There are over three hundred and sixty such units in every year.

Gloria Beautyman, at least, will be giving us something that Life needs badly. Plot.

Dead Guy as Life Coach

Gurus with respectable intellects are a tough get. I found mine in Irwin Edman, Columbia University philosophy professor circa 1929. He may be dead, but he’s good.

His essay “On American Leisure” resonates now as much as it likely did for folks in flapper gear who were failing to embrace joyful, spontaneous experiences.

Seized by the American compulsion to be all you can be, they had turned leisure into another opportunity to pursue excellence, not happiness.

Here he schools me on how to put a cease-and-desist order on anxiety.
*
Why is it so difficult to relax and take pleasure in a moment?

The desire for speed, the desire for luxury, the desire for first place – these are indeed three deadly enemies of leisure.

As a knowledge worker, I find I can’t shut all the input valves, not because I desire all that data, but because I fear if I don’t “keep up” I will be left behind.

We have turned our idle hours into the hurried business of getting short cuts to knowledge. Outlines simply are a way of applying efficiency to culture as well as business.

You suggest that our whole culture has a means-to-an-end tinge. We read to have something clever to say at the next party, not for our own silent pleasure. We go to parties to meet superior business connections or romantic partners, not for conviviality. We see classical concerts not out of a love for the music, but to reinforce our identity as educated, classy people. What gives?

We flee to society, dull though it be, through the fear of the greater dullness of being alone.
We hurtle along at a breakneck speed, physically and spiritually, for fear of the drabness and futility we might feel if we slowed down.

What are we supposed to do then? Become hermitic monks?

One need not follow Thoreau into the wilderness to practice his isolation, nor Buddha into the desert to achieve his mediation. There is peace in a city apartment if one will but stay at home an evening to find it, and Nirvana to be found at home in one’s own mind.

What about other people?

Good conversation is certainly one of the most enlivening ways of leisure, and good conversation is something between solemnity and absurdity.

And it cannot happen when the time is structured by means-to-ends dynamics, right?

In America, of late, we have had to choose between talking on ‘subjects’ solemnly and schematically, or babbling nonsense, doing anything rather than talk. We have grown a little weary of talk that is all smart and burnished; we have grown tired, too, or talk that sounds like the overflow program of a literary club.

We are, I think, beginning to learn again the joy of conversation, a light and easy play of minds and tempers over common human themes.
Wish I knew where your acolytes hang out, sans MeetUp agendas or other overweening frames. Why is a return to reflection and genuine engagement so important?

We may talk much about the future of America, and think to measure its destiny by statistics of its educational, economic or political changes. But the outlook for our country lies in the quality of its idleness almost as much as anything else…We may still find time to live rather than time to kill.

For if we do, we shall have learned what the spiritual life really means.  For it means nothing more than those moments in experience when we have some free glint of life for its own sake, some lovely unforced glimmer of laughter or reason or love.

Cuddly Ambiguity?

While trawling for opportunities, I’ve repeatedly encountered a trendy new job requirement:  Must be comfortable with ambiguity.

What an admission for companies to make!

If they are using the correct term [a big IF, but that’s another post], employers are giving applicants fair warning:  You are about to enter a land of inexact language, indecisiveness and nebulousness.

The honesty is refreshing. The implications are terrible.

I can understand wanting people to be equipped to handle uncertainty, change and shifting priorities. The stiff, the stodgy and the stubborn don’t find favor in any successful business today.

However, being comfortable with ambiguity implies that one is OK with not having a clear ambition/product/process. It implies that vagueness, double-speak and evasive behavior are acceptable. Isn’t ambiguity part of the problem, not an attribute we should be proud to contribute as part of the solution?

What if employers instead sought out the individuals who can lead with intelligence, care and clarity?
Such people do not have all the answers; the best ones would unambiguously admit the same.
But then they’d grab their chisels and start chipping away at the challenges confronting the business.

I’d put my money on action-Jacksons over ambiguity-cuddlers any day.