Homeowner Forum / Lawn and Garden / March 2008

Charlie, Listening to an old one, 1978.....Tim Blake  ....Blake's New
Jerusalem

QUITTING THE PAINT FACTORY

On the virtues of idleness

By Mark Slouka - Harper’s Magazine ? November 2004 issue

"Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy;
you’ll be safe, then."

-Ovid, Remedia Amoris

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones
spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones,
grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They
are the soul-eaters.

When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the
Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the
sum?mer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow
formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the
grasshopper, who hasn?t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K
is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying
his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was
singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that
effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.”
And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find
me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my
antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my
well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many
a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill
inundated under the golden rain of my pee.

I was right.

In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech
to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously
proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is
business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about:
The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the
buyers and the sellers never stops; the term “workaholic” has been
folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our
families, no time to think or to make a meal. We’re moving product,
while the soul drowns like a cat in a well. [”I think that there is far
too much work done in the world,” Bertrand Russell observed in his
famous 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” adding that he hoped to
“start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing.” He failed. A
year later, National So?cialism, with its cult of work (think of all
those bronzed young men in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will
throwing cordwood to each other in the sun), flared in Germany.]

A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules
the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its
image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the
great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” the
continent of invisible possessions from time to talent to contentment,
been either infantilized, ren?dered unclean, or translated into the
grammar of dollars and cents. Thus has the great wilderness of the
inner life been compressed into a median strip by the demands of the
“real world,” which of course is anything but. Thus have we succeeded
in transforming even ourselves into bipedal products, paying richly for
seminars that teach us how to market the self so it may be sold to the
highest bidder. Or perhaps “down the river” is the phrase.

Ah, but here’s the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity,
requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes
as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings
of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By
allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by
allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about
it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves)
its due. Which is precisely what makes idle?ness dangerous. All manner
of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our
mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They
knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to
each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always
known: that trouble - the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a
well-ordered garden - needs time to take root. Take away the time,
therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience
reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work -
which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they
once aspired to a personal knowledge of God - be, at base, an
anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that
nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is
no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving
it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a
de?mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and
steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current
administration has so am?ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind
requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to
develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness,
objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s
leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected
captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the
iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to
think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden
associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of
independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily
manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

But I have to be careful here. Having worked all of my adult life, I
recognize that work of one sort or another is as essential to survival
as protein, and that much of it, in today’s highly bureaucratized,
economically diversified societies, will of necessity be neither
pleasant nor challenging nor particularly meaningful. I have compassion
for those making the most of their commute and their cubicle; I just
wish they could be a little less cheerful about it. In short, this
isn’t about us so much as it is about the Zeitgeist we live and labor
in, which, like a cuckoo taking over a thrush’s nest, has
systematically shoved all the other eggs of our life, one by one, onto
the pavement. It’s about illuminating the losses.

We’re enthralled. I want to disenchant us a bit; draw a mustache on the
boss.

INFINITE BUSTLE

I’m a student of the narrowing margins. And their victim, to some
extent, though my capacity for sloth, my belief in it, may yet save me,
Like some stub?born heretic in fifth-century Rome, still offering gifts
to the spirit of the fields even as the priests sniff about the tempa
for sin, I daily sacrifice my bit of time. The pagan gods may yet
return. Constantine and Theodosius may die. But the prospects are bad.

In Riverside Park in New York City, where I walk these days, the
legions of “weekend nannies” are growing, setting up a play date for a
ten-year-old requires a feat of near-Olympic coordination, and the few,
vestigial, late-afternoon parents one sees, dragging their wailing
progeny by the hand or frantically kicking a soccer ball in the fad?ing
light, have a gleam in their eyes I find frightening. No out?stretched
legs crossed at the ankles, no arms draped over the back of the bench.
No lovers. No be-hatted old men, arguing. Between the slide and the
sandbox, a very fit young man in his early thirties is talking on his
cell phone while a two-year-old with a trail of snot running from his
nose tugs on the seam of his corduroy pants. “There’s no way I can pick
it up. Because we’re still at the park. Because we just got here,
that’s why.”

It’s been one hundred and forty years since Thoreau, who itched a full
century before everyone else began to scratch, complained that the
world was increasingly just “a place of business. What an infi?nite
bustle!” he groused. “I am awaked almost every night by the panting of
the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would
be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work,
work, work.” Little did he know. Today the roads of commerce, paved and
smoothed, reach into every nook and cranny of the republic; there is no
place apart, no place where we would be shut of the drone of that
damnable traffic. Today we, quite literally, live to work. And it
hardly matters what kind of work we do; the process justifies the ends.
Indeed, at times it seems there is hardly an occupation, however
useless or humiliating or downright despicable, that cannot at least in
part be redeemed by our obsessive dedication to it: “Yes, Ted sold
shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no surname, but he worked so
hard!”

Not long ago, at the kind of dinner party I rarely attend, I made the
mis?take of admitting that I not only liked to sleep but liked to get
at least eight hours a night whenever possible, and that nine would be
better still. The reaction - a ‘complex Pinot Noir of nervous laughter
displaced by expressions of disbelief and condescension - suggested
that my transgression had been, on some level, a political one. I was
reminded of the time I’d confessed to Roger Angell that I did not much
care for baseball.

My comment was immediately rebutted by testimonials to sleeplessness:
two of the nine guests confessed to being insomniacs; a member of the
Academy of Arts and Letters claimed indignantly that she couldn’t
re?member when she had ever gotten eight hours of sleep; two other
guests de?clared themselves grateful for five or six. It mattered
little that I’d arranged my life differently, and accepted the
sacrifices that arrangement entailed. Eight hours! There was something
willful about it. Arrogant, even. Suitably chastened, I held my tongue,
and escaped alone to tell Thee.

Increasingly, it seems to me, our world is dividing into two kinds of
things: those that aid work, or at least represent a path to it, and
those that don’t Things in the first category are good and noble;
things in the second aren’t. Thus, for example, education is good (as
long as we don’t have to listen to any of that “end in itself”
nonsense) because it will pre?sumably lead to work. Thus playing the
piano or swimming the 100-yard backstroke are good things for a
fifteen-year-old to do not because they might give her some pleasure
but because rumor has it that Princeton is interested in students who
can play Chopin or swim quickly on their backs (and a degree from
Princeton, as any fool knows, can be readily converted to work).

Point the beam anywhere, and there’s the God of Work, busily trampling
out the vintage. Blizzards are bemoaned because they keep us from
getting to work. Hobbies are seen as either ridiculous or
self-indulgent because they interfere with work. Longer school days are
all the rage (even as our children grow demonstrably stupider), not
because they make educational or psychological or any other kind of
sense but because keeping kids in school longer makes it easier for us
to work. Meanwhile, the time grows short, the margin narrows; the white
spaces on our calendars have been inked in for months. We’re angry
about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything
anymore? There are those reports to re?port on, memos to remember,
emails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow.

The alarm rings and we’re off, running so hard that by the time we stop
we’re too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV,
which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our
exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its
little trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction
that not only is this how our three score and ten must be spent but
that the transaction is both noble and necessary.

KA-CHINK!

Time may be money (though I’ve always resisted that loath?some
platitude, the alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is
transformed into the base lead of commerce), but one thing seems
certain: Money eats time. Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the
view from the deck in St. Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the
price.

Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of
the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way
to bankrupting us. We’re impoverishing ourselves, our families, our
communities ? and yet we can’t stop our?selves. Worse, we don’t want
to.

Seen from the right vantage point, there’s something wonderfully
animistic about it. The god must be fed; he’s hungry for our hours,
craves our days and years. And we oblige. Every morning (unlike the
good citizens of Tenochti?tlan, who at least had the good sense to
sacrifice others on the slab) we rush up the steps of the ziggurat to
lay ourselves down. It’s not a pretty sight.

Then again, we’ve been well trained. And the training never stops. In a
recent ad in The New York Times Magazine, paid for by an outfit named
Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc., an attractive young woman in a
dark business suit is shown working at her desk. (She may be at home,
though these days the distinction is moot.) On the desk is a cup, a
cell phone, and an adding machine. Above her right shoulder, just over
the blurred sofa and the blurred landscape on the wall, are the words,
“Suc?cessful entrepreneurs work continuously.” The text below explains:
“The challenge to building wealth is that your finances grow in
complexity as your time demands increase.?

The ad is worth disarticulating, it seems to me, if only because some
ver?sion of it is beamed into our cerebral cortex a thousand times a
day. What’s interesting about it is not only what it says but what it
so blithely assumes. What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to
be successful, we must not only work but work continuously; what it
assumes is that time is inversely pro?portional to wealth: our time
demands will increase the harder we work and the more successful we
become. It’s an organic thing; a law, almost. Fish got?ta swim and
birds gotta fly, you gotta work like a dog till you die.

Am I suggesting then that Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc. spend
$60,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine to show us a
young woman at her desk writing poetry? Or playing with her kids? Or
sharing a glass of wine with a friend, attractively thumbing her nose
at the acquisition of wealth? No. For one thing, the folks at Wealth
and Tax, etc. are simply doing what’s in their best interest. For
another, it would hardly matter if they did show the woman writing
poetry, or laugh?ing with her children, because these things, by virtue
of their placement in the ad, would immediately take on the color of
their host; they would simply be the rewards of working almost
continuously.

What I am suggesting is that just as the marketplace has co-opted
rebel?lion by subordinating politics to fashion, by making anger chic,
so it has qui?etly underwritten the idea of leisure, in part by
separating it from idleness. Open almost any magazine in America today
and there they are: The ubiq?uitous tanned-and-toned twenty-somethings
driving the $70,000 fruits of their labor; the moneyed-looking men and
women in their healthy sixties (to give the young something to aspire
to) tossing Frisbees to Irish setters or ty?ing on flies in midstream
or watching sunsets from their Adirondack chairs.

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. Leisure ? particularly if it involves some kind of
high-priced technology ? is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue.
Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s
not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks
too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be
ostracized.

[Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we
read, for example, is one of the world’s great domains of imaginative
diversity: a seedbed of individualism.

What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a
personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or
improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say
you like to read? Then don’t waste your time; put it to work. Order
Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on
the Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on
the cover.]

With idleness safely on the reservation, the notion that leisure is
neces?sarily a function of money is free to grow into a truism. “Money
isn’t the goal. Your goals, that’s the goal,” reads a recent ad for
Citibank. At first glance, there’s something appealingly subversive
about it. Apply a little skepticism though, and the implicit message
floats to the surface: And how else are you going to reach those goals
than by investing wisely with us? Which suggests that, um, money is the
goal, after all.

THE CHURCH OF WORK

There’s something un-American about singing the virtues of idleness. It
is a form of blasphemy, a secular sin. More precisely, it is a kind of
latter-?day antinomianism, as much a threat to the orthodoxy of our day
as Anne Hutchinson’s desire 350 years ago to circumvent the Puritan
ministers and dial God direct. Hutchinson, we recall, got into trouble
because she accused the Puritan elders of backsliding from the rigors
of their theology and giving in to a Covenant of Works, whereby the
individual could earn his all-expenses-paid trip to the pearly gates
through the labor of his hands rather than solely through the grace of
God. Think of it as a kind of frequent-flier plan for the soul.

The analogy to today is instructive. Like the New England clergy, the
Religion of Business ? literalized, painfully, in books like Jesus,
C.E.O. ? holds a monopoly on interpretation; it sets the terms,
dictates value.

[In this new lexicon, for example, “work” is defined as the means to
wealth; “success,” as a synonym for it.]

Although to?day’s version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a
host of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to
corner the market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of
our hands will save us. And we be?lieve. We believe across all the
boundaries of class and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we
believe in numbers that dwarf those of the more con?ventionally
faithful. We repeat the daily catechism, we sing in the choir. And we
tithe, and keep on tithing, until we are spent.

It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and
appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully
counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn
them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you
hardly knew, and the days you sim?ply missed altogether watching the
sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the
rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of
simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach
your children to do the same, and then ? because even this is not
enough ? you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of
your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be
saved.

The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do
not go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of
subordinating all that matters to all that doesn’t. Eventually, of
course, sitting in their cubi?cle lined with New Yorker cartoons,
selling whatever it is they’ve been asked to sell, most come to see the
advantage of enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for
their illusions. It’s a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The
generations before us clear the path; Augustine stands to the left,
Freud to the right. We are born into death, and die into life, they
mur?mur; civilization will have its discontents. The sign in front of
the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Work confirms it. And we believe.

- - - - - - - - - - -

All of which leaves only the task of explaining away those few
miscreants who out of some inner weakness or perversity either refuse
to convert or who go along and then, in their thirty-sixth year in the
choir, say, abruptly abandon the faith. Those in the first category are
relatively easy to contend with; they are simply losers. Those in the
second are a bit more difficult; their apostasy requires something more
?.. dramatic. They are considered mad.

In one of my favorite anecdotes from American literary history (which
my children know by heart, and which in turn bodes poorly for their
fu?tures as captains of industry), the writer Sherwood Anderson found
himself, at the age of thirty-six, the chief owner and general manager
of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. Having made something of a
reputation for himself as a copywriter in a Chicago advertising agency,
he’d moved up a rung. He was on his way, as they say, a businessman in
the making, per?haps even a tycoon in embryo. There was only one
problem: he couldn’t seem to shake the notion that the work he was
doing (writing circulars extolling the virtues of his line of paints)
was patently absurd, undignified; that it amounted to a kind of prison
sentence. Lacking the rationalizing gene, incapable of numbing himself
sufficiently to make the days and the years pass without pain, he
suffered and flailed. Eventually he snapped.

It was a scene he would revisit time and again in his memoirs and
fic?tion. On November 27, 1912, in the middle of dictating a letter to
his secretary (”The goods about which you have inquired are the best of
their kind made in the…”), he simply stopped. According to the story,
the two supposedly stared at each other for a long time, after which
Anderson said: “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are
wet,” and walked out. Outside the building he turned east toward
Cleveland and kept going. Four days later he was recognized and taken
to a hospital suffering from exhaustion.

Anderson claimed afterward that he had encouraged the impression that
he might be cracking up in order to facilitate his exit, to make it
compre?hensible. “The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a
little in?sane they would forgive me if I lit out,” he wrote, and
though we will nev?er know for sure if he suffered a nervous breakdown
that day or only pretended to one (his biographers have concluded that
he did), the point of the anec?dote is elsewhere: Real or imagined,
nothing short of madness would do for an excuse.

Anderson himself, of course, was smart enough to recognize the
absurdity in all this, and to use it for his own ends; over the years
that fol?lowed, he worked his escape from the paint factory into a kind
of parable of liberation, an exemplar for the young men of his age. It
became the cornerstone of his critique of the emerging business
culture: To stay was to suffocate, slowly; to escape was to take a stab
at “aliveness.” What America needed, Anderson argued, was a new class
of individuals who “at any physical cost to themselves and others”
would “agree to quit working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try
to get on in the world.”

“To refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.” It sounds
quite mad. What would we do if we followed that advice? And who would
we be? No, better to pull down the blinds, finish that sentence. We’re
all in the paint factory now.

CLEARING BRUSH

At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we’re attached to, this
mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such
magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its
shape and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney’s Invisible Man, by its
effects: by the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of
discarded notions it leaves be?hind. What we’re leaving behind today,
at record pace, is what?ever belief we might once have had in the value
of unstructured time: in the privilege of contemplating our lives
before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted conversation,
in the beauty of play. In the thing in itself ? unmediated, leading
nowhere. In the present moment.

Admittedly, the present ? in its ontological, rather than consumerist,
sense ? has never been too popular on this side of the Atlantic; we’ve
always been a finger-drumming, restless bunch, suspicious of jawboning,
less likely to sit at the table than to grab a quick one at the bar.
Whitman might have exhorted us to loaf and invite our souls, but that
was not an invitation we cared to extend, not unless the soul played
poker, ha, ha. No sir, a Frenchman might invite his soul. One expected
such things. But an American? An American would be out the swinging
doors and halfway to tomorrow before his silver dollar had stopped
ringing on the counter.

I was put in mind of all this last June while sitting on a bench in
London’s Hampstead Heath. My bench, like many others, was almost
entirely hidden; well off the path, delightfully overgrown, it sat at
the top of a long-grassed meadow. It had a view. There was whimsy in
its placement, and joy. It was thoroughly impractical. It had clearly
been placed there to encourage one thing ? solitary contemplation.

And sitting there, listening to the summer drone of the bees, I
sud?denly imagined George W. Bush on my bench. I can’t tell you why
this happened, or what in particular brought the image to my mind.
Possi?bly it was the sheer incongruity of it that appealed to me, the
turtle-on-a-lamppost illogic of it; earlier that summer, intrigued by
images of Kaf?ka’s face on posters advertising the Prague Marathon, I’d
entertained myself with pictures of Franz looking fit for the big race.
In any case, my vision of Dubya sitting on a bench, reading a book on
his lap ? smiling or nodding in agreement, wetting a finger to turn a
page ? was so discordant, so absurd, that I realized I’d accidentally
stumbled upon one of those visual oxymorons that, by its very
dissonance, illuminates something essential.

What the picture of George W. Bush flushed into the open for me was the
classically American and increasingly Republican cult of movement, of
busy-ness; of doing, not thinking. One could imagine Kennedy reading on
that bench in Hampstead Heath. Or Carter, maybe. Or even Clinton
(though given the bucolic setting, one could also imagine him in other,
more Dionysian scenarios). But Bush? Bush would be clearing brush. He’d
be stomping it into submission with his pointy boots. He’d be making
the world a better place.

Now, something about all that brush clearing had always bothered me. It
wasn’t the work itself, though I’d never fully understood where all
that brush was being cleared from, or why, or how it was possible that
there was any brush still left between Dallas and Austin. No, it was
the fre?netic, anti-thinking element of it I disliked. This wasn’t
simply outdoor work, which I had done my share of and knew well. This
was brush clearing as a statement, a gesture of impatience. It captured
the man, his disdain for the inner life, for the virtues of slowness
and contemplation. This was movement as an answer to all those
equivocating intellectuals and Gallic pontificators who would rather
talk than do, think than act. Who could always be counted on to
complicate what was simple with long-winded dis?cussions of complexity
and consequences. Who were weak.

And then I had it, the thing I’d been trying to place, the thing that
had always made me bristle ? instinctively ? whenever I saw our
fidgety, unelected President in action. I recalled reading about an
Italian art movement called Futurism, which had flourished in the first
decades of the twentieth century. Its prac?titioners had advocated a
cult of restlessness, of speed, of dy?namism; had rejected the past in
all its forms; had glorified busi?ness and war and patriotism. They had
also, at least in theory, supported the growth of fascism.

The link seemed tenuous at best, even facile. Was I serious?ly linking
Bush ? his shallowness, his bustle, his obvious suspi?cion of nuance ?
to the spirit of fascism? As much as I loathed the man, it made me
uneasy. I’d always argued with people who applied the word carelessly.
Having been called a fascist myself for suggesting that an ill-tempered
rottweiler be put on a leash, I had no wish to align myself with those
who had downgraded the word to a kind of generalized epithet, roughly
synonymous with “ass-hole,” to be applied to whoever disagreed with
them. I had too much re?spect for the real thing. And yet there was no
getting around it; what I’d been picking up like a bad smell whenever I
observed the Bush team in ac?tion was the faint but unmistakable whiff
of fascism; a democratically diluted fascism, true, and masked by the
perfume of down-home cookin’, but fascism nonetheless.

Still, it was not until I’d returned to the States and had forced
myself to wade through the reams of Futurist manifestos ? a form that
obviously spoke to their hearts ? that the details of the connection
began to come clear. The linkage had nothing to do with the Futurists’
art, which was notable only for its sustained mediocrity, nor with
their writing, which at times achieved an almost sublime level of
badness. It had to do, rather, with their ant-like energy, their
busy-ness, their utter disdain of all the manifestations of the inner
life, and with the way these traits seemed so organically linked in
their thinking to aggression and war. “We intend to exalt aggressive
action, a feverish insomnia,” wrote Filip?po Marinetti, perhaps the
Futurists’ most breathless spokesman. “We will glorify war ? the
world’s only hygiene ? militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture
of freedom-bringers?.. We will destroy the muse?ums, libraries,
academies of every kind?.. We will sing of great crowds excited by
work.”

“Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,”
“a feverish insomnia,” “great crowds excited by work” … I knew that
song. And yet still, almost perversely, I resisted the recognition. It
was too easy, somehow. Wasn’t much of the Futurist rant (”Take up your
pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities,
pitilessly”) sim?ply a gesture of adolescent rebellion, a f.ck YOU
scrawled on Dad’s garage door? I had just about decided to scrap the
whole thing when I came across Marinetti’s later and more extended
version of the Futurist creed. And this time the connection was
impossible to deny.

In the piece, published in June of 1913 (roughly six months after
An?derson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that
Futur?ism was about the “acceleration of life to today’s swift pace.”
It was about the “dread of the old and the known… of quiet living.” The
new age, he wrote, would require the “negation of distances and
nostalgic solitudes.” It would “ridicule . . . the ‘holy green silence’
and the ineffable land?scape.” It would be, instead, an age enamored of
“the passion, art, and idealism of Business.”

This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the
crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The
wor?ship of speed and business would require a new patriotism, “a
heroic ideal?ization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic
solidarity of a people”; it would require “a modification in the idea
of war,” in order to make it “the necessary and bloody test of a
people’s force.”

As if this weren’t enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently
clear, there was this: The new man, Marinetti wrote - and this deserves
my italics - would communicate by “brutally destroying the syntax of
his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and
the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise
subtleties and nuances of language.” All of his thinking, moreover,
would be marked by a “dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and
detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbrevi?ation, and the summary.
‘Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!’”

Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and
be given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the
resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the English
language to his well-documented impatience with detail and analysis to
his chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack
jokes about Aileen Wuornos’s execution as well as mug for the cameras
minutes before announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was
Marinetti’s “New Man”: impatient, almost pathologically un?reflective,
unburdened by the past. A man untroubled by the imagination, or by an
awareness of human frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one
doubted he could ever articulate it) to “today’s swift pace”; to the
necessity of forging a new patriotism; to the idea of war as “the
necessary and bloody test of a people’s force”; to the all-conquering
beauty of Business.

~

Mark Slouka is the author, most recently, of the novel God’s Fool. He
teaches in
Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His last essay for Harper’s
Magazine,
“Arrow and Wound,” appeared in the May 2003 issue.