From 'The Progressive'

Lazy Men
By Ruth Conniff
August 1, 2006

On Monday, The New York Times ran a fascinating front-page feature on a new trend: men who won't work. The article focused on a couple of men who represent a new trend in widespread, prolonged unemployment. The men featured—an ex-steelworker and a formerly six-figure-earning electrical engineer—are using their savings and second mortgages to fund an inactive lifestyle. They are reminiscent of the character in Herman Melville's Bartelby, the Scrivener who did less and less, saying only of his withdrawal from life, "I prefer not to."
Despite The New York Times article, most of the male unemployed are not lazy or lacking in "personal responsibility.”

The article makes some interesting cultural observations. For example, that not working is heavily celebrated as "the good life" in a culture that touts millionaire retirees in their 40s and 50s. That women's entry into the workforce has reduced pressure on men to find their whole identity in wage-earning. And that Americans generally have the aspirations and habits, but not the funds, to be the idle rich. The future doesn't look bright for the nonworking middle class men in the story, but for now they prefer to defer it.

Alan Beggerow, the former steelworker who lost his job in 2001, has an almost Buddhist present-focus. He is enjoying reading, writing pulp fiction, and getting a lot of sleep. He says he no longer dwells on the future much. Since he doesn't have much money, all that retirement planning and worrying he used to do just doesn't seem relevant anymore.

A common thread among the men the Times interviews is their unwillingness to take low-paying, no-benefits jobs, or jobs that just seem distasteful to them. They are pessimistic about the idea of continuing to improve their lives through work: The most they could hope for is subsistence, and degrading work, in their estimation. They'd rather stay home and read.

I suspect this story will fuel an outcry among conservatives. A particular target will be the news that men like Beggerow are able to maintain themselves in part because of Social Security disability payments and Medicaid--two government programs that are already under assault by would-be privatizers. The idea of lazy stay-at-home husbands disdaining a hard day's work is just what the privatizers need to cut the last legs out from under the social welfare system.

That's a shame, because a closer look at the statistics the Times presents shows that most of the male unemployed are not lazy or lacking in "personal responsibility," to borrow a phrase that fueled welfare reform's undoing of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

At the very end of the long article, which spends a lot of time on displaced dot-comers and other highly skilled and once highly played workforce dropouts, the Times covers another group that makes up a large portion of discouraged workers--men who have been released from prison, and can't find a job. Odd jobs, off-the-books part-time work, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens make up the web of supports that hold these men's lives together.

In total, of the 13 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 54 who are not working, 43 percent have a household income of less than $25,000, and 71 percent have less than $50,000 a year. Only 24 percent have any college education at all.

So the large photo the Times ran of Christopher Priga, 54, the former electrical engineer, sitting in a trendy cafe reading a book, is hardly representative.

An accompanying bar graph that charts the trend since the 1970s is striking. Less than 6 percent of 30-to-54-year-old men were not working then, compared with more than double that number today.

The big story of this time period is the rise of the low-wage, no-benefits work force, the decline of union membership and manufacturing jobs with family-supporting wages, and the grim outlook of men whose fathers had lifelong careers without lay-offs and plant closings. These are the factors that are driving the insecurity of today's workforce. Instead of delving into them, the Times focuses on the personal quirks of a few men who could easily be transformed into the apocryphal Cadillac-driving welfare queens the pundits and politicians derided when the assault on welfare began.

In his book "All Together Now," Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute--writes about what he calls the YOYO mentality in America--You're On Your Own. It eschews common solutions for a radical individualism that threatens to tear apart our social fabric. He calls for an alternative perspective he calls WITT--We're In This Together--as the only solution to the economic problems that threaten to undo opportunity and fairness in American society.

It would be a shame if Social Security and Medicaid--two programs that still embody the nobler communal values of the New Deal and Great Society eras— fell prey to the You're On Your Own mentality. The concept of social insurance still enjoys widespread support, and keeps alive the sense that we are in this economy together. But the folks who are fueling the worship of wealth that skews our culture and those who would like to keep heaping tax cuts on the rich would like you to think that a few lazy men want to suck up your tax money to fund their idleness.

You can just imagine the outcry on rightwing talk radio--send these guys to work at Wal-Mart! As if all of us should be dedicating ourselves to round-the-clock, low-wage work so the owners and big investors can fund their own idle lifestyles.

The Times piece was interesting from a cultural and existential point of view. But politically it could have some really negative effects. We live in such demoralizing economic times. With high-income tax cheats costing the government between $40 and $70 billion a year and opportunities for hardworking lower and middle income people disappearing, we should focus on these larger conditions instead of blaming discouraged workers for losing faith.

From Edward Winkleman

A comment about the article byDavid Brooks that can be found here

The "Productive" Class

Back when I was blogging politics day and night (when Bambino, a notorious blog widower, coined the term "bullsh*t websites"), I had exhausted the contempt-conveying phrases in my vocabulary throughout a series of ultra-shrill tirades against New York Times columnist David Brooks. He remains my first example of a thoroughly loathsome pundit, displaying all the integrity of Vidkun Quisling, but none of the charm.

Today, however, Brooks entered the realm of surreal self-parody (must be slow in the pundit world as well, although none of the pundits not working hard to deflect attention away from the Administration's accelerating spiral down past the nethermost position in American Presidential history seem to have any trouble finding topics to write on).

Anyway...The New York Times has deemed such drivel worthy of payment and hidden his column behind their "Times Select" firewall, so I'll have to retype the choice passages from the copy I purchased from my local vendor.

With the Middle East peace process in tatters, Iraq a literal hell on earth, killer heatwaves scorching the planet, and bin Laden & Co. still trotting the globe plotting, what does our Mr. Brooks decide his readers have to know he thinks? Why that rich people are overworked and horribly put upon and poor people are lazy, of course.

Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class ---devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disabilty payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.

Brooks' alarm over this was spawned by an article the Times ran earlier. That one is still free:

Millions of men ... men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s. [...]

These are men forced to compete to get back into the work force, and even then they cannot easily reconstruct what many lost in a former job,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor and management expert at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So they stop trying.”

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

Now I'm a workaholic, so I'm not sure I can relate to those following this trend, but to leap from this article to the conclusions Brooks makes reveals a classic case of fitting the data to support a predisposed position. Again, from Brooks:

Buy I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. [Gee, I'm glad he didn't judge them harshly.] But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Throsetin Veblen's "The Theory of the Lelisure Class" defined theirs.

They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or cumpulsory.

GRRRRR.... One of the examples Brooks uses to make his case is that of Alan Beggerow, who got laid off at age 48 from the steel mill he worked in. That's right, Davie...steel workers typically have lofty delusions and distaste for menial work. Beggerow worked there until he was forty-eight! If, as my father did, Beggerow entered the steel mill about age 23, that means he performed a truly grueling, very physical job in hellish conditions for two and a half decades. Further, like my father, he most likely left that job with a series of serious health problems and a badly bruised, if not broken, body. After he got laid off, Beggerow taught math for a while at a community college, but when that ended he decided he'd rather live off what little he had accumulated than take a job he felt was beneath him. For Brooks to challenge that choice suggests he's never spent a day working in a steel mill, let alone 25 years.

What Brooks is really getting at here of course is why the uberwealthy are better than the poor (and you can bet this article about the "willfully" unemployed will weasle its way into some future column defending the tax cuts for the upper 1% of Americans). He's so remarkably deluded he actually laments:

[The lives of t]oday's super-wealthy...are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled "Beyond Unipolarity."

Ahh...those unfortunate souls, jetting off to Aspen, celebrity panels and conference calls. Yeah, that's much tougher than filling out job applications at the local McDonald's when you're in your fifties. Why it's just not fair, I tell you. Let's not make them pay any taxes whatsoever. Clearly they're suffering enough already.

Brooks is working here, actually, off a myth that's been gaining ground among conservative bloggers. Its spin is that the wealthy are the "productive class," suggesting they do all the work and hence deserve the lion's share of the government's consideration. It's a notion I find so insidously mendacious, that it's hard not to punch someone offering it.

Then again, with the current Adminstration and its rubber-stamp Congress stacking the deck so heavily against the poor (slashing entitlement programs, refusing to raise the minimum wage, and passing truly evil bankruptcy legislation), is it any wonder that the poor take the advice offered in "War Games" that since you can't win, the only reasonable response is not to play? I mean, I know the Bush & Co are hellbent on creating a permanent indentured servant class, but they can't be surprised that folks aren't happy to both join it AND still have to clean their toilets.

One more aspect of Brook's article should be noted. It reeks of the foulest form of misogyny. Focused on the importance of the traditional role he feels men should play in society (ignoring working women in total), he ends his column on the following enlightened note:

The only comfort I've had from these distrubing trends is another recent story in The Times. Joyce Wadler reported that women in places like the Hamptons are still bedding down with the hired help.

He's attempting, one assumes, to be satirical. But who can tell, really?

A Different Spin On The NY Times Article

For The Undocumented, Irony At Work As Jobs Go Unfilled
By George Diaz
Published August 13, 2006 in the Orlando Sentinel

Juan was an excellent "prep chef" -- a guy who did grunt work like marinating -- for the primary chef at a Central Florida Cuban restaurant. Juan, from Mexico, was employedfor a couple of years before a payroll company running the books for the restaurant noticed a discrepancy in his Social Security number.

It was bogus.

He was fired immediately.

Juan, his wife and two kids have since vanished.

"I don't even know where he is now," said his former employer, Ruben Perez.

Alan Beggerow, from Rock Falls, Ill., is happily unemployed. Now 53, he hasn't worked regularly since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed five years ago. He spends his days playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, although he makes sure to get in enough nappy time every day. He wakes up around 11 a.m.

"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me," he told the New York Times recently. "If things really get tight, I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don't want to do that."

Beggerow was profiled in a story about millions of men in the United States in the prime working-age demographics between 30 and 55 who are turning down jobs they think are beneath them.

Juan is collateral damage in the immigrant crossfire as national and statewide agencies look to flush out undocumented laborers and come down hard on businesses hiring them.

Do any amigos appreciate the irony here?

I would think this puts a hole the size of a Big Enchilada in the patriotic rhetoric of "they're taking jobs away from honest, hard-working Americans."

Nobody is saying here that we need to give carte blanche immunity to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. The immigration reform bill sponsored by the Senate, offering balanced comprehensive reform, is a reasonable compromise in a contentious debate.

But it's obvious that many illegal immigrants are simply looking for economic opportunity and embracing low-wage jobs. The kind that Alan and his friends deem degrading.

The Times notes that the majority of these men fall back on a "patchwork system of government support," which includes federal disability insurance financed by Social Security taxes. More than 6.5 million men and women are receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990. In some cases, the only disability may be an aversion to low-paying jobs.

As money is drained from the U.S. government, federal and state officials have stepped up efforts to deter employers of immigrant laborers.

The Palm Bay City Council recently passed an ordinance authorizing $500 fines per violation on employers of illegal immigrants and imposing two-year bans from work in the city on violators.

Besides meddling in business belonging to the federal government, Palm Bay is simply feeding the prejudiced frenzy, much of it channeling the voice of former President Teddy Roosevelt.

"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism," Roosevelt once said. ". . . A hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts 'native' before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States."

But Roosevelt also said this:

"If an immigrant is not fit to become a citizen, he should not be allowed to come here. If he is fit, he should be given all the rights to earn his own livelihood, and to better himself, that any man can have."

From all indications, Juan was simply trying to better himself here, despite the legal entanglements.

As for Alan, TV Land has daylong marathons of those wonderful sitcoms from another generation. Green Acres starts at 11 a.m. today, assuming you're awake.

Another Opinion...

OnThe Continuance of Glaring Omissions

After reading the New York Times online version for the last two to three weeks, I have come across to articles about the state of men in the United States that I just can't let pass by without a few remarks.

First, and most recently, is a story in the National news section entitled, "Facing Middle Age with No Degree and No Wife" (NYT 6 August 2006). The story discusses the situation of a growing number of American men who are remaining single well into their 40s, and their inability to find a wife. The article links this trend to various other phenomena, including the fact that these single men are most often not college graduates, usually blue collar workers (although some are thoroughly entrenched in the middle class), and afraid of alternatively divorce or committment. The article also blames the higher standards of single women, who are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men and who seek men with higher degrees, and "hence better financial prospects." The NYT also cites some "experts" who claim that "the greater economic independence of women and the greater acceptance of couples living together outside of marriage" have contributed to the declining marriage rate.

The rate in question, according to the Times, is "about 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college." The article goes on to argue that "That is up from about 6 percent a quarter-century ago. Among similar men ages 35 to 39, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time." And to add icing to the cake, the Times notes that "even marriage rates among female professionals over 40 have stabilized in recent years." Even older professional ball-busting career women can get married, why can't these dopes?

There are many aspects of this article that make my stomach lurch, but of course, that lurching has to do more with what the Times didn't say or didn't bother to factor into their analysis, rather than what was actually included in the article. Although, the article itself is pretty bad.

Firstly, the four page piece fails to acknowledge how many of those 18 percent of men who are still single in their 40s are, in fact, not interested in marrying a woman because well, they just don't swing that way. No where does the Times account for how many of these men might be gay, transgendered, queer, celibate, or otherwise not invested in the Christian dictum of marriage. These men, assuming that some of them might actually not be heterosexual, would have been coming out in the 1970s and 80s - arguably one of the most importantly visible times for the LGBT community. But the Times refuses to acknowledge this possibility. If you will induldge some highly suspect number crunching, if 18 percent are still single, and roughly 6 to 10 percent of the population is gay, this means that there are possibly only 8 to 12 percent of heterosexual men who are still unmarried.

If you consider this configuration suspect, as I myself do, let us take another step back and ask why this matters? Why should we be concerned that people aren't getting married as frequently as they used to? If you listen to Pat Robertson, or even George W. Bush, this lack of married people contributes to the degredation of the US's moral fiber. But then again, so do gays. And feminists. And pro-choice activists, intellectuals, liberals, welfare queens, immigrants, environmentalists, socialists, and communists. Apparently the only people who don't contribute to this decay are white, middle class, married Christians - but don't they have some of the highest divorce rates in the world??

This article confuses me, and I don't know why the NYT insisted on devoting four pages to the declining marriage rates of older men. But in this article contributes to the spectre of fear of disappearance that haunts the heterosexual white male in US culture. A continuing backlash and anxiety attack over what is to become of red blooded American men, now that they are being displaced to the peripherals of society (apparently). Funny, when women and people of color were pushed to the periphery, we didn't have articles debating why they didn't get married with as much frequency as their hegemonic counterparts.

Perhaps these unmarried men should exchange their unworthy jobs for wives and a comfortable life of leisure, as the men in "Men Not Working and Not Wanting Just Any Job" did (NYT, 31 July 2006).

In this article, reporter Amanda Cox profiles several men in their forties and fifties who are currently unemployed and are not actively seeking work because they cannot find a job that is neither "demeaning nor underpaid" and instead rely on disability payments from the government, taking out multiple mortgages on their homes, or relying on their (female) spouses for financial income. Instead of working or looking for work, they spend their days playing piano, reading books, doing crossword puzzles, or sitting at cafes.

Unlike the women (most likely their mothers) who have the luxury or ability stay at home while a spouse works outside of the home, these men do not take up domestic duties, preferring to spend their time with hobbies. Apparently, laundry and cleaning is also demeaning and underpaid - who knew?

Most of the men profiled in the article are without children, or more accurately, are not required to support any children. Most of them are also white. The NYT calls them "America's Missing Men." Huh? They're not missing at all. Chances are they're still in bed (if it's before 11 am) or sitting on their ass somewhere, probably in close proximity to a television.

Loquacious gems from these missing men include:

“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” says Alan Beggerow, 48, of Illinois, who draws his standard of living from the second mortgage on his house and his family's savings. Yes, but Mr. Beggerow, how much is it worth to your wife and your child? His wife used to do factory work, until an accident forced her to leave. She now takes on freelance seamstress and baking work, as well as selling items on Ebay for a fee. She is looking for a clerical job, in order to earn a steady paycheck, as the money she receives from her disability payments cannot support her and her husband. “The future is always a concern, but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it,” Mr. Beggerow says. Huh?

"To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” says Christopher Priga, 54, of California. His income also comes from drawing money against his house in Los Angeles. After being let-go from Xerox in the blow up of the dot-com bubble, Priga is tired of grunt work and prefers to spend his time reading at local cafes.

Near the end of the article, the focus turns to those men who are excluded from the jobmarket because of felony convictions and jail time. But this avenue only affords half of the last page. Rather than draw attention to the systemic discrimination in the prison system and how any links to serving time can severly hinder an applicant's chances in this racist and classist jobmarket, the article spends most of its time profiling men who have been let go from their employment because of economic shifts. Since the 1980's, the American economy has moved away from industrial processing and factory work, and thereby making many men and women redundant and unemployed. This is a tragedy and an immense diservice to the working class of the US, prioritizing high profit margins over community sustainability, but this aspect is also absent from the article's analysis.

What really gets me, though, more than anything in this article, is the extremely gendered representation of work in this country that is reflected in these men's choices to abstain from work. Women have been in support positions and are continually forced to engage in unpaid labor in the form of housework and family care, and now more than ever, women are taking on work outside of the home in addition to this support/domestic work. Beggerow's wife takes care of the home, and her husband, and also manages to do freelance work and search for a clerical job. Additionally, it is her disability payments that keep the household running. Why can't Mr. Beggerow or Mr. Priga flip burgers? Why can't they wash dishes? Drive a taxi? Sell groceries, waitress (intentionally gendered), babysit, do laundry, pick up garbage? As someone who is about to approach the job market once again after having taken a year off to complete a master's degree, I am desperate for any job. The social regard for my degree does not place me above doing whatever work I can find. The only job I won't do is clean the floor of a nightclub with my tongue on Monday morning...but that's a whole other set of issues. Perhaps my perspective is a little different, being in my twenties, having mounting school debts and the prospect of marriage and family on the very near horizon. I've worked nearly continuously since I was 17, and I'm terrified of starting my career. But that won't keep me from working.

These men have worked, have spent twenty and thirty years working. And everyone is due a break at some point. But being able to not work because of retirement and pension is a whole hell of a lot different than refusing to work because you can't find a job that you don't feel is demeaning or beneath you. And being retired is a whole hell of a lot different that drawing on public disability and social security funds to avoid having to pay child support (which one would have to do if one had a paycheck) or to avoid working a job that isn't exactly what you want. I applaud Mrs. Beggerow for having the personal strength to scour the classified/help-wanted ads while her husband reads another history of the crusades on the front porch. I personally would have launched a crusade of my own to kick him out of the house.

The Four Agreements

The Four Agreements

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Robert Switzer's Opinion About David Brooks

David Brooks, Why Must You Be So Mean?
August 6, 2006

Rite-Lite New York Times columnist David Brooks recently punked a group of unemployed middle-aged men, giving them the full-bore Bobos In Paradise treatment.

David Brooks seems decent and likeable. Those Bourgeois Bohemians he wrote about in ‘Bobos In Paradise’ made great fodder for humor. That whole book was screamingly funny, though I’m not sure the people he lampooned actually exist.

Bobos are like Welfare Queens and Limousine Liberals, great rhetorical devices with little basis in reality. I’m a liberal. Most of my friends are liberals. We’re small businessmen, convenience store clerks, library directors and construction laborers. We’re not Volvo Liberals. We’re Piece-Of-Shit Used Car Liberals.

The unemployed middle-aged men were very real, however, and profiled in a New York Times article called ‘Men Not Working and Not Wanting Just Any Job’. The men profiled include a former steel industry union representative, and a six-figure electrical engineer, formerly employed by Xerox.

The steel industry guy, Alan Beggerow, now 53, fills his days playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing Western novels in the Louis L’Amour style, and writing book reviews on Amazon. Beggerow spent 30 years working for Northwestern Wire and Steel in Sterling, Ill., from 1971 until it closed in 2001. During the last three of those 30 years, Mr. Beggerow worked as a union representative on union-management teams that assessed every aspect of the plant’s operations.

There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Beggerow will find another job in central Illinois even remotely comparable to the one he had with Northwestern Wire and Steel, a company to whom he gave the best years of his life. In return, Northwestern Wire and Steel discarded him a dozen or so years short of retirement.

When the best possible outcome of a job-search is casual labor, fast-food, or retail, I don’t think it should come as a shock that people will opt out and try something else, even if it’s a long-shot. Mr. Priga, the electrical engineer, calls it ‘looking for the home run’. Christopher Priga is an electrical engineer by training who worked in software engineering. A divorce in 1996 left him with custody of his three children. One of them had behavioral problems and to care for the boy he dropped out of steady work for a while, mortgaging his house to raise money and designing Web sites as a freelancer.

He re-entered the work force in 2000, joining Xerox at just over $100,000 a year as a systems designer for a new project, which did not last. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Xerox downsized and Mr. Priga was let go in January 2003.

At 54, it is extremely unlikely that Christopher Priga will land another six-figure software engineering job:
“I’ve been through a lot of layoffs over the years, and there is a certain procedure you follow,” he said. “You contact the headhunters. You go looking for other work. You do all of that, and this time around it didn’t work.”

A geek joke goes like this:
“What happens to engineers when they turn 40?”
“They’re taken outside and shot.”

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the pitfalls of attempting to re-enter the white-collar workforce in late middle-age. Her book, Bait and Switch bluntly details the scams, humiliations, and disappointments that confront people over forty who find themselves back on the job market, usually against their will.

I don’t know the specifics of David Brooks’ background, but I’d be willing to bet that someone who grew up on Manhattan and attended the University Of Chicago knows little or nothing of what life is like for the working poor. For the working poor, the absence of job security and autonomy of any kind is absolute. You are literally out of control, buffeted by circumstance.

For Mr. Brooks, I recommend another book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, or if TV is his thing, the episode of 30 Days in which Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend do the minimum wage shuffle for a month.

For Mr. Priga and Mr. Beggerow, life among the working poor is both the best and the worst that the job market can offer them. So who can blame them for looking for something else, another way out?

Meanwhile, Brooks is at his most tight-assed and nasty with this:

“Many readers no doubt observed that if today’s prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.”

Or perhaps they should have had the foresight to grow up on Manhattan and attend the University of Chicago. Brooks, after all, managed to lift himself by his bootstraps all the way from Manhattan to The University Of Chicago.

And then there’s this:

“What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory Of The Leisure Class defined theirs. They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.”

From where I sit, Mr. Beggerow is taking some lemons and making lemonade. He’s working hard, has accomplished quite a bit, and he remains self-reliant. First and foremost, he’s survived 30 years in a steel mill, which, I’ll remind Mr. Brooks, involves surviving considerable physical risk. Second, he’s taught himself the piano as an adult. And third, he’s written two novels. Two more than Mr. Brooks.

Sure, it’s a long shot, but who knows, one of those two novels may sell. Or he may write another one that does. Piano lessons go for $45 an hour, and people look for piano lessons everywhere, even central Illinois. When the sure-thing and the worst-case are the same, why not go for the long-shot?

Mr. Priga may never earn a corporate salary again as a software engineer, but he is a man with considerable experience and intellectual resources. For him, the home-run he’s looking for may be a technology startup that would be lucky and thankful to have him.

The tone of Brooks’ column on the article tried for funny but came out nasty. The article itself is also puckered and acerbic. It’s almost like the authors are jealous of these middle-aged dudes, the techie and the blue-collar who had the stones to stand up and say, “Fuck it, hell no. I won’t go to work at WalMart. I’m better than that.” And then these old dudes had the further audacity to spend their days reading, writing and playing music.

These two guys remind me of Travis McGee, the John D. MacDonald character. McGee worked only when he needed the money. Once he accumulated a chunk of cash, he’d take a corresponding chunk of ‘retirement’. His theory was why wait and retire when you’re old and sick? Why not take an installment of that retirement now, when you’re still young enough to enjoy it?

The sad truth is that both Mr. Priga and Mr. Beggerow will probably find themselves at WalMart or worse eventually. But these two men, like most men over 50 may be only a colonoscopy or chest-xray away from a death sentence. They have worked hard and played by the rules all their lives and a brief respite has presented itself. They are truly alive now and living as men, probably for the first time in their lives. So I’m with them. I say go for it. And fuck David Brooks.

Sitting On The Fence

I consider myself an agnostic. Many of the believers and non-believers look upon me as a theocratic fence-sitter, someone too weak to think things through and come to a definite conclusion. Both sides wonder, how can I sit on the fence without it poking me in the ass? If I am sitting on a fence, it isn't a picket fence, or a barbed wired fence. For me it's more of a comfortable vantage point to observe the ones that are on opposite sides of the fence.

I do not mean that I am on a moral high ground at all. I am willing to admit I do not know the answer to the question 'Is there a God?' I do not find fault with any who do have an answer to that question, regardless if it is yes or no. But as an observer, I have noticed that as I look out over one side of the fence and then the other, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. The rabid believers and rabid non-believers both condemn each other as if what they believed were a provable fact. The fact is that there is no solid, undeniable answer to the question. Either side operates from the side of faith. That statement no doubt brings smiles of agreement to believers, and scowls of disagreement from some athiests. Even a mention of the word 'faith' gets them going. But I don't want to paint all athiests with that brush. As with believers, the non-believers come in all different shapes, sizes and temperments.

As I sit on my perch, every once in a while someone tugs at my leg. Sometimes from one side, sometimes the other. And there are occasions when I hop off my perch and have a visit with some of the folks. But to date I have heard no convincing argument that would cause me to convert. This could be caused by my stubborness I suppose. It's not like I haven't tried. I've given much thought to both philosophies, tried to imagine myself as embracing either, but always there remains nagging doubt. A lack of faith that I readily admit to.

So I'll remain on the fence, thank you. Whether there is or isn't a God, maybe some day I'll know. If there is and it is merciful, or if there is and it is vengeful, either way I'll know. If there is no God, and death is but an eternal nothing, I won't know nor will it make any difference. Call me strange, but I find great peace in that philosophy.