It took me thirty minutes to drive a mile and a half to work today. Why? Because downtown was flooded with traffic for the Get Motivated! business seminar. My supervisor and coworkers all got stuck in the same jam, so no harm done. But still, if thousands of people are driving into my little city for an event, I wish it was for something more worthy than some system-supporting, cult-of-corporation, YOU CAN DO IT bullshit. Apparently seminar attendees will get to listen to Rudy Giuliani, Steve Forbes, and Colin Powell share their success stories and reveal their secrets for developing discipline and perseverance, taking charge, maximizing potential, and, of course, getting–and staying–motivated.
You know what doesn’t motivate me? A mostly white panel of politicians and entrepreneurs perpetuating the notion that the system can work for everyone if we’d only just get effin’ motivated. Why pay to listen to a bunch of neo-con cheerleaders help us navigate our way to financial stability? Why aren’t we instead demanding radical re-appropriation of assets and resources? Why should any of us be motivated to increase someone else’s profits at the expense of our very lives? Perhaps the near-total alienation from the fruits of our labor coupled with the ever-present expectation of increased productivity while serving capitalist interests are interfering with our ability to “get motivated.” Perhaps the utter unlikeliness that the majority of the population will ever earn in a lifetime even a small percentage of what the top 1% makes in a month is slowin’ us down.
My BF recently forwarded this article to me: “Quitting the Painting Factory” by Mark Slouka (Harper’s, November 2004–thanks to Adamantne for generously posting it). Slouka historically connects the acceptance of near-perpetual work to fascism, and he does so pretty convincingly too. Slouka reports that the Futurist art movement in turn-of-the-20th-century Italy had a manifesto that stated, “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited by work.” Sound like George W? Slouka thought so too.
Slouka also writes:
Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic.
That distinction between leisure and idleness is an important one. It supports the system if we golf, travel, dine out, etc. It doesn’t if we stay home and read, or create, or rest. Of course, abandoning a comfortable, often-white, upper-middle-class lifestyle in favor of a simpler existence probably takes proper financial planning. It’s also pretty hard to eat and be clothed and sheltered without any income. Working so hard for the basics (and the not-so-basic) prevents us from challenging the economic and political climate–and that’s exactly what the 1-percenters require to keep the cycle of exploitation in tact.
As someone whose date of birth places her firmly within Generation X, I’ve been called a slacker on more than one occasion–even though I’m well-educated and self-sufficient (the behemoth unpaid balance on my student loans notwithstanding). I remember being 21 and working at Sears in display and merchandising because I couldn’t find a “real job” back in 1990. I was sitting on the floor in the children’s department; I had just pulled up some carpeting where we were gonna build some shelves. I was scraping at the bits of glue still stuck to the floor when the general manager, a white man in his 40s at the time, loomed over me and laughed. “I’ll bet your parents are glad they sent you to college so you could scrape floors,” he wise-cracked as he walked away. I’ve never forgotten that moment–in fact, that guy made my already pissed-off-at-the-system politics even more crystallized.
It wasn’t my lack of education that bothered my baby-boomer boss; it was my lack of anything to show for it by way of a hot job or stock portfolio (It obviously didn’t occur to him that I took out student loans and worked every weekend my entire four years at URI, so maybe I lacked the family connections to land a Fortune 500 gig right out of school–not that I would have taken it, even then). Later in life, my decisions to not marry or have children have often gotten me labeled “immature.” The same is true with my decision to support myself as a food server. Any practice that challenges the frenetic uber-success ethics or gender expectations of our times is also seen as “unconstrained” and “anarchic.”
So be it. Now that I’m home from work today, I’m motivated to sit at the kitchen table with my gorgeous BF, eat fresh veggies from the garden, and daydream. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty idle plan.
