Breakin' It Down...Rethinking the Economy (generation, Christmas, parties, financial)

[Evenstar51]

The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America? - TIME


This is the cover article of the April 4 issue of Time magazine, and is an essay by Kurt Anderson. The piece is thought-provoking and, to my initial surprise, reassuring.
I found myself remembering my childhood: we posters "of a certain age" are able to remember a time when "making do" actually wasn't a bad thing. We played Kick-the-Can, softball, traded Barbie clothes and nurtured one Tiny Tears doll instead of receiving three or four new dolls every birthday and Christmas.
There is something to be said for simplicity, mending, handing-down, etc.
I thought it might be interesting to see what memories and ideas other posters could add. Anderson seems to have caught the mood of where we as Americans could go, in keeping with the global economy. It's a sensible mood, indeed.
Your thoughts?

BTW, if the link doesn't work, mea culpa.

[brubaker]

Yin and Yang
You know the story of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant is disciplined, the grasshopper parties as if the good times will last forever — and then winter descends. Americans are, bless us, energetic grasshoppers as well as energetic ants, a sui generis crossbreed, which is why we've been so successful as a nation. Our moxie comes in two basic types. We possess the Yankee virtues embodied by the founders: sobriety, hard work, practical ingenuity, common sense, fair play. And then there's our wilder, faster and looser side, that packet of attributes that makes us American instead of Canadian: impatient, hell-bent, self-invented gamblers, with a weakness for blue smoke and mirrors. A certain fired-up imprudence was present from the beginning, but it required a couple of centuries for the most extravagant version of the American Dream to take hold: starting with the California Gold Rush in 1849 — riches for the plucking, with no adult supervision — we have been repeatedly wont to abandon prudence and the tedium of saving and building in favor of the fantastic idea that anybody, given enough luck and liberty, can make a fortune overnight.

It's time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant, to be more artisan-enterpriser and less prospector-speculator, more heroic Greatest Generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based again.

Not older but I esp. liked this part.

Also the part about how 'America as we know it (may) end but the world won't'.
...something like that.

[OneDayAttaTime]

Check out: A Recession Only Steinbeck Could Love by Rachel Dry
To see whole story go here: John Steinbeck Would Love This Recession - washingtonpost.com


Steinbeck would think that we're getting just what we deserve. And he'd like it. Because, first of all, he romanticized the essential moral goodness that springs from adversity, and second, because he hated the material bloat of postwar America. He just didn't like stuff. And now that we are brought low by stuff, acquiring it without really paying for it, devising complex financial instruments to get more of it, he'd think that maybe we're ready to learn a lesson or two.

If only we'd listened to him, we might not have spent our way in to the current crisis.

Steinbeck on the American obsession with things: "If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick."

That sentiment, written in a 1959 letter to his friend Adlai Stevenson after the Charles van Doren "Twenty One" scandal, expresses Steinbeck's outrage at a world so morally bankrupt that people were cheating on television game shows. As the years progressed -- and he watched more television -- he got even angrier that everywhere he looked, people needed some purchasable product to validate their position in society, to fortify their stomachs, to coax their hair into looking its shiny best.

At the end of his career, Steinbeck's main subject was his extreme distaste for materialism in America, which he explored in a novel and two works of non-fiction: In 1961, he published a postwar morality tale called "The Winter of our Discontent," in which fraud rocks a family ensconced on the ladder of suburban ascension.

Shortly after he finished it, he set out across the country in a specially outfitted camper truck, accompanied by his French poodle, for the trip that became "Travels With Charley in Search of America." He followed that with a 1966 book of essays called "America and Americans."

"Grapes" might have the economic hardships, but these titles have it all: apathy, greed, moral decay, a dissection of an America gone soft.

To really understand how Steinbeck would feel about the Great Recession go straight for the sea coral and Steinbeck's writings on his travels with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, a lifelong friend.

Steinbeck's impressions of the community born of devastating poverty in the 1930s primed him to disdain the scattered, competitive nature of life in postwar America -- were purely academic. Steinbeck was fascinated with marine species that are the most "survivable". He liked the ones that were "battered by waves." Even in the ocean, Steinbeck thought, if you are "too soft, if too much is given to you too easily, it leads to corruption".


Steinbeck himself expressed that view in 1960, when he wrote to his friend and editor Pascal Covici from the road with Charley: "Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great."




"Travels with Charley" (a road-trip book -- like "Grapes of Wrath") : "As I passed through or near the great hives of production -- Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Pontiac, Flint, and later South Bend and Gary -- my eyes and mind were battered by the fantastic hugeness and energy of production."

Now, not even 50 years after his journey with Charley, those great hives of production are mostly silent. And if any reasonable person were to use the term "fantastic hugeness" to describe anything related to our current economy, it would be the stimulus bill or the deficit.


David Kipen, director of the NEA's "Big Read" programming, thinks that if the author retraced his route today, seeking once again to "listen to what the country is about" he'd find both the nation's economic predicament and the resilience of its people familiar.

"There are enough Joad-like families here in America that I don't think he'd throw in the towel," Kipen says.

Steinbeck's book "America and Americans" describes the domino effect of materialism, the way "having many things seems to create a desire for more things." And it culminates in the disaster that Santa hath wrought: "Think of the pure horror of our Christmases when our children tear open package after package and, when the floor is heaped with wrappings and presents, say, 'Is that all?'" Steinbeck surveys the country and concludes: "We are trapped and entangled in things."

Steinbeck's observations are worth listening to at this moment: Untangle yourself from things.

[GregW]

The consumer economy would, and maybe should, completely collapse if people bought what they needed instead of what the advertisers have taught them to want. This would be worse if folks ignored the Jones’s. It would also be a lot less expensive way to live and allow for more savings.

I have always been told that hard work was good for me. I learned, before I was 10, that my hard work let my step father have more time to drink, and was not good for me at all. I also learned that hard work could be reduced to a bare minimum if I though about making my chores easier and quicker to do. I never told my stepfather about these because I knew he would only add more chores to keep me busy and out of trouble. I liked being in trouble (a kid with a machine shop can lead to experimenting with rockets and other things that go bang) and spending my time on things I wanted to do.

I do not consider myself lazy just because I figure out ways to get my work done quicker and spend the remaining time doing what I want. I do what I have to then do what I want. This works for me.