A Love Letter from Fromm

When I was in high school, Erich Fromm was all the rage. A serious psychologist and philosopher, he did, for a short time, enter popular culture and become the man to read for “relationship” advice. Girls were delving into his book, The Art of Loving, seeking some affirmation of their feelings. Boys could also occasionally be found paging through the book, but clearly because they were misled by the title into thinking the book might be some modern Kama Sutra.

I was grateful for the book because it was the only writing I ever found that articulated my distaste for all the assumptions that people were bringing to the dating/marriage scene. Unfortunately, Fromm didn't seem to have much impact on how people actually behaved when seeking a mate. And now, his wisdom seems to have been forgotten altogether. I never hear any modern relationship gurus even remotely acknowledging his insights. In fact, most of the advice currently being dispensed on how to find a man, a woman, a soul-mate, etc. - actually ends up flying in the face of all of Fromm's recommendations.

Current relationship counsel is often based on how to more effectively act on attraction. Most of our discourse seems to legitimate attraction as the primary motive force in establishing a relationship. But it was precisely this kind of involuntary attraction that Fromm made a case against.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by a set of magnetic dogs my aunt had on her knick-knack shelf. When you positioned the dogs a few inches apart, facing each other, you could feel the space between them taking on a strength of its own. As you brought the dogs closer – WHOOSH! Their pull towards each other overcame my feeble attempts at keeping them apart. They mashed together, nose-to-nose. However, when you turned one of the dogs around, you got the opposite feeling. It was as if there was an invisible fluffy pillow between the dogs, rounding them, spilling them away from each other.

It's just that sort of force that people use as a criterion for engaging romantically with someone else. If that feeling of attraction is there – they approach. If it's not “Don't waste my time.” They feel attraction as something pushing them from the outside. It happens to them. They have nothing to say about it. “I can't help it. I like bad boys.” “And there she was. I saw here across the room in that tight red mini-skirt – and I was gone.”

People declare these reactions proudly, as if it were laudable to be out of control. They entertain, encourage, and lose themselves to these transports. They are driven and are not the drivers. They revel in being relieved of all responsibility for the outcome. They “fall in;” they “fall for” - as if love were a ditch they skidded into. But that kind of compulsive, addictive response was the very thing that Fromm fought against our using as the basis for long-lasting relationships, for real love.

Yes, it's true that we perhaps can't really help whom we are initially attracted to – for whom we feel a frisson of excitement, whether it's sexual excitement or the excitement of inspiration – or just a plain feeling of WOW! But then after that first moment of involuntary thrill, something more wholly at our discretion should operate. Contrary to the often-heard powerlessness of the statement, “Well, you can't help who you fall in love with” - there should come the empowerment of a recognition that you CAN help whom you love. Even more to the point, you CAN help with whom you maintain a loving relationship.

I never had much patience with the “I couldn't help myself” approach. I was especially puzzled by the kind of involuntary abandonment I heard people idly effecting in the wake of their pronouncements that, “I'm sorry. I just don't love you any more. I'm sorry, I've just fallen out of love with you.” I have even gone so far as to be puzzled by people of one sexual orientation leaving a partner in order to “hook up” with people who match some newly liberated sexual quest.

So what if you're not sexually attracted to someone? That doesn't mean you can't thrillingly, profoundly love that person. That's because love, according to Erich Fromm and according to my sense of things, is not a compelled response to sexual excitement or to the excitement generated by a charismatic character. It's not a response to any kind of compulsive force acting outside ourselves and beyond our control. It's the opposite of the kind of involuntary action featured in romantic fiction and assumed in TV/Internet counseling sessions. It's not being swept off your feet. It's not getting hooked or having your attention grabbed. It shouldn't be like the plot of one of those horror movies in which a hanged criminal's hand is transplanted onto a good man's arm and then takes over the man's personality – maniacally pulling its new possessor into frenzied displays of genius and diabolism – pulling him to commit murder.

Along with Fromm, I revolt at the notion that love is a switch – snap it on – snap it off. I rebel against justifications such as, “I just wasn't that into her” - “He just didn't turn me on” - “He just didn't grab me” - “She just wasn't my type.”

In other contexts, being a type is recognized as something undesirable. Actors bemoan their fate when they have been typecast. Once that happens to them, they can't any longer portray a full range of emotions. They are forever confined to producing duplicates of the man you love to hate, of the sex kitten, of the smart-Alec, of the ditzy blonde, of the loner – of whatever type brought them to their first fame. Similarly, it's recognized that being stereotyped or, in turn, of stereotyping people is a bad thing. But strip these words of their prefixes and suffixes and you are left with “type.” Then somehow it becomes, not only acceptable, but understandable, and even advisable, to operate on the basis of types.

But having such specifications is not only superficial, it can actually be the perverse of love. When you look beneath the assembly line surface of these specifications, you often find what are in fact, not only prejudices, but the even more confining strains of fetishes. When I read the love-match ad of a man looking for that “sassy brunette who will challenge me and put me in my place” I catch a whiff of someone who is bound to bondage. The woman who writes “I'm looking for an exciting, take-charge guy” seems bound to be someone who won't have the freedom to walk away from abusive, demeaning treatment. She'll be stuck there, pegged to the excitement, unpredictability, and drama, of whatever awaits her.

However, having said all this, I do have to acknowledge that there can be an argument made for following one's impulsive, compulsive attraction to someone. A study done years ago found that marriages triggered by some instant attraction to some superficial feature – lasted as long or longer and were as happy or happier than marriages that had followed long, laborious explorations of compatibility.

I hear about marriages that resulted from that sort of instant Romeo and Juliet attraction all the time. These types of relationships are most often instigated by men who, as the cliché goes, fall in love with their eyes (while women fall in love with their ears). For men, it's often a mere glimpse at a distance that does it. It's the sight of a Bo Derek 10 that captures them. So I hear over and over again some version of, “I saw her walk by wearing one of those fuzzy Lana Turner sweaters that were so popular back in the day – and I knew she was the one for me.”

My own grandfather was launched into marriage by just such an attraction. He owned a market in Chicago and would look out his big plate glass window at the people on the street. Once, twice, he saw a girl walk by on her way to work. (As it turned out, she was going to her job as an assistant to Oscar Meyer, who was just then starting up the ladder of success to what became his meat processing empire.) This was well before the era of Lana Turner sweaters. My grandmother was walking along in an ankle-length dress with a foundation of crinoline. She was always starched and laced and frilly. My grandfather saw this vision of “the perfect lady” wafting by his store window. Without ever having said a word to her, he pointed and declared to his workers, “That's the girl I'm going to marry!”

And so it was. Their way of getting together is considered a romantic idyll, an allowing of an instant, fated moment to take hold. In actuality, while I think they had a happy enough marriage, I sense it was one of separate lives. My grandmother fulfilled her role, cooking and cleaning. My grandfather came home from his meat market and sat in the parlor smoking his cigar. There was a certain prescribed estrangement to their relationship. However, one could call it a “good” marriage.

Many couples have gotten together based on such instant presumptive decisions. There are famous couples whose lives together clicked in one such moment of initiating attraction. One example that stands out in my mind is that of Will and Ariel Durant, the couple who “made” history together, collaborating on writing prize-winning history books for almost five decades. On a talk show late in his life, Will Durant confessed that it had been love at first sight for him. He was a teacher in a New York middle school when he'd been taken by one of his students. She was fourteen, he was twenty-seven. She sat in the front row of his class looking up adoringly at him. But it wasn't so much her adoring presence in his class that had first attracted him. He had seen her walking across campus, lithe and long-legged, like the “Ariel” he eventually re-named her – and wearing a fetching little red cap. It was those legs, that cap that had snagged him.

The two were married the following year, with the girl's mother standing by to attest that she'd given permission for “her child” to be wed. Today of course that sort of relationship would be deemed highly inappropriate, tantamount to pedophilia. But the union became one of the most enduring and inspiring ones on record. Will and Ariel collaborated on their writing and on making a life together for over sixty years.

So yes, I have to admit, such involuntary attractions can be successful – if the one to whom a person is attracted turns out to be relatively sane and congenial, and if the one who was attracted is similarly on an even keel, and if both have the ability to stick by that initial attraction and make it the spark that lights an eternal flame (if I might be allowed a bit of purple prose).

One of the positive aspects of acting on and sticking to some such initial attraction is that it isn't the result of a chain of assessments that then drags on into the indefinite future. It isn't judicial, causing the person to sit on high and issue an unending series of opinions about the case the person is presenting as a potential mate. Someone who has truly been ignited by some detail of another person doesn't behave like the people in the Seinfeld sitcom.

I enjoyed the Seinfeld series more than anything, but it's true that most of the time, the Seinfeld gang were assessors. They would constantly register the pros amd cons they were finding about people they dated, delivering a ticker tape update on their findings. “Well, she's pretty, but she eats her peas one a time! I can't be with someone like that.” “Or, she's smart, but she has such big man-hands!.” Or “Can you imagine? She actually likes the Docker commercials!”

By contrast, the Will Durants of the world are all-in from the start. Will had been instantly, irresistibly taken with that little girl with the red cap, and that was it. Case closed. What's appealing and positive about that approach is that it's unconditional. It can come closest to being like a mother's love – a love that says you're mine, and therefore I love you, no matter what – forever.

Ariel Durant's legs surely stopped being so long and unblemished as she approached her nineties. And she likely never wore a red cap again in her later years. But it didn't matter. That first image of her walking to her classes was indelible in Will. It was the lighthouse that stood over all the cragginess of decades of marriage, shining out over the waters, calm and rough. (A bit more purple prose.)

The Durants' way of getting together was more like Joe E. Brown's unconditional enthusiasm in the movie Some Like It Hot. The classic last line of that film illustrates the appeal of instant attraction. There's nothing Jack Lemon could do to kill Brown's ardor for him. Even after Jack Lemon said that he smoked all the time, smoked like a chimney, Joe E. Brown wasn't fazed. Even after Lemon sighed that he “could never have children – Joe E. Brown wasn't dissuaded. Finally, when Lemon delivered what he considered would be the coup de gras to Brown's ardor, when Lemon revealed that he was actually a man – Joe E. remained breezily, blithely committed, because after all, “Nobody's perfect.”

How wonderful to be married to someone like that – someone who couldn't be moved off the mark of their affection, no matter what - someone whose first impression had locked them in. So, I guess like a proper Oxford debater, I have prepared a case for both sides of the issue. Conscious decision versus chemistry. That instant chemistry side of the debate is certainly appealing, with all of Hollywood backing it as the way people should get together.

And yet, and yet, my heart still sides with Fromm – with self-determination. I want the freedom of nurture to win out over the force of nature. I want a slow growth of affection to win out over the unreasoning rush of Romeo and Juliet.

As per the title of Fromm's book, I feel love should truly be an art. It should be a decision we consciously make, not a reflexive reaction. Take the example of a painter. We wouldn't want his works to be the result of uncontrollable spasms of his arm. We want and assume his creations to be the result of some thoughtful, controlled expression of himself. Through training, skill, practice, and talent – we want him to give tangible form to some emotion or thought that was profoundly personal but previously inchoate.

So like Fromm, I want love to be an active process, not passive submission to some impersonal force such as magnetism, propulsion, or gravity. I agree with Fromm that true love is a decision that is within the power of each of us to make and to maintain. Without meaning to sound too Nietzsche-like about it – I want love to be a supreme act of the will.

I want love to be based on an art we develop rather than on an artifact that arrests our development by snagging our attention – an artifact such as a red cap on a passing teenager. Loving is best when it's a matter of listening, taking an interest, discovering a person anew each day, taking pains with her when she needs help, affiliating with him because of a reasoned, whole-hearted commitment to his essential goodness and to the goodness the two of us can build together.

The Lost Loves of Suzanne Lenglen

I recently saw a PBS airing of the "American Masters" documentary about tennis champion Billie Jean King. The biography naturally leads up to her "Battle of the Sexes" match with Bobbie Riggs in the 1960's. In the course of recounting all the hoopla connected with that match, the film writers/directors (of which King is herself one) repeatedly suggest that the match served to finally bring women's tennis to the forefront as an interesting, box-office-worthy sport. They imply that always before, women's tennis had been in the shadows, a poor second cousin to men's playing. There had never been much interest or legitimacy granted to women's tennis before King's match with Riggs put it on the map.

What!!? That kind of amnesia, especially on the part of King herself, astounded me. Because of a personal association I’ll tell more about later – I was fairly certain that women's tennis had in fact been one of the most wildly popular spectator sports in the early part of the 20^th century, outstripping the men’s activities in many ways. To confirm my impression on this score, I bought a book entitled The Goddess and the American Girl by Larry Engelmann. That sounds a bit like a comic book title, but it’s actually a very good, authoritative account of the careers of 1920's tennis champions Suzanne Lenglen (pronounced like a nasalized "long-glong") and Helen Wills.

The author didn’t himself know who Lenglen was much before he got drawn into the project of chronicling her life. He tells how in his 1960’s college English class, he had been assigned Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as reading homework. In those pages, he came across a line describing one of the protagonists as "wanting to win as hard as Lenglen." Engelmann asked the teacher who or what a "Lenglen" was? The teacher had no idea. Other students had also vaguely wondered - but none of them had the slightest idea either, and no one was then inspired to research the matter. It remained a mystery until some years later when the author of the eventual "Goddess” was re-reading Hemingway. He came across the passage again and this time his curiosity was really piqued. He looked up "Lenglen" - and this whole treasure trove of history was opened up to him.

Lenglen was the French/European star who drew throngs of fans to all her matches. She was a sort of female Michael Jordan. Her leaps, pirouettes, and dancing returns, were said to be superhuman, beyond belief. Helen Wills was America's champion. Both of these women had followings that exceeded those of the male tennis stars of the day, such as Bill Tilden. Screaming, imploring fans dogged their every step.

The real worldwide hysteria started to build though as everyone anticipated a match between Lenglen and Wills. This was more than a "Battle of the Sexes." It was a "Battle of the Nations" - a "War of the Worlds." People everywhere saw it as a pitting of the old European Machiavellianism against the common, steady, democratic decency of America. Notables came from all over to cover the event. James Thurber and a myriad of other writers and reporters came from the U.S. Spain sent their most popular, award-winning author, Vicente Ibanez (of Blood and Sand fame). Hemingway was probably there, although he wasn't yet such a notable.

When the two women faced each other in Cannes, in 1926 - crowds queued up around the block hoping to wrangle a seat inside somehow. People climbed the palm trees outside the court to get a view, and gendarmes comically (and generally unsuccessfully) climbed up after them, trying to grapple-hook them down to the ground. Residents of the surrounding villas rented their premises to eager gawkers. Some homeowners removed the tiles from their roofs so they could jam more paying customers in to poke their heads out, like gophers, between the beams of the attics.

To sum up - Lenglen won. But it was a hard-fought, brilliant game - rightfully dubbed "The Game of the Century." Newspapers all over the world, from London to Melbourne to Timbuktu, and everywhere in-between, carried the headline on February 16 - "Lenglen Wins!"

But it seems that now almost everyone has forgotten about Lenglen and Wills. The success of these two women and numerous other female tennis stars of the 20’s, has faded into history. Billie Jean King is now considered the one to have broken the gender barrier – to have made women’s tennis a media-worthy event. Well, I myself would have been oblivious to the earlier pioneers of women’s sports - if it hadn’t been for a personal experience my mother had with Suzanne Lenglen. My mother was one of the very few people, and probably the only tennis novice, ever to beat Lenglen.

It happened in the early 30's, after Lenglen had gone professional. My mother and her first husband, Norman, were in Canada to view some motor boat races on Lake Ontario. Norman was an executive with Valvoline then and in fact had invented the advertising slogan the Company used for decades for their motor oil - "Valvoline - Friction's Foremost Foe."

While they were there, Norman saw an opportunity to enter a charity tennis match that was being held. It was one of those “All-Comers” matches that gives average men (or women) the chance to get bragging rights. “I went a round with Joe Lewis; I pitched to Ernie Banks.” In this case, Suzanne Lenglen had consented to be one of the superstar champions to play against plucky amateurs.

Both my mother and Norman had been dabblers in the game. Neither one ever practiced or had any serious ambition to win at anything. However, Norman had in fact often won, even some of the more official games he’d played in in the past. He’d won without much trying, largely on the basis of height. He was 6’4” and fit.

Just as a telling digression - I oddly enough don’t think I heard any talk about the advantage that height gives a person in the game of tennis when the King/Riggs match was pending and people were debating whether or not women could seriously play against men. All my feminist friends stoutly maintained they could, that it was only the world’s naysaying that deflated women’s aspirations and their willingness to even try. As much of an advocate for women’s rights as I have always been though, I somewhat doubted that appeal to the power of pumped-up self-confidence. My mother had told me about the easy advantage Norman had gained just by being tall. He could slam down his serves with shattering impact from a promontory that is just not available to an average woman standing not much over five-feet. So Norman held his serves – and won game after game.

However my mother had nothing going for her – neither hubris nor height. I’m sure she must have rued her husband’s signing her up for what would surely be an embarrassing trouncing. He had likely done so without her knowledge. But the day came, and her turn came – to face the mighty Suzanne Lenglen, the unbeatable "Goddess" of the Riviera, of Wimbledon, of the Olympics, of all she surveyed. My mother padded out onto the court to what could only be swift defeat and dispatch.

Indeed the first few points did go easily, automatically to Lenglen. It was obvious that my mother was out there unarmed - without any native ability, any plan, any practice. Lenglen must have wondered why such a complete tennis nonentity was wasting her time - even for charity.

But as the result of a fluke here and there, or perhaps as the result of Lenglen’s over-confidence -my mother made a couple of fairly decent returns in succession and actually pulled ahead in the score. Then the miracle. Lenglen sent an angry, seemingly unreturnable ball spinning over the net. My mother fell toward it, making one last-ditch effort. She stumbled, lurched – and with her racket being used more to break her fall than to attempt a return, the extended paddle actually made stunning contact with the ball. Pursuing some incalculable trajectory, the ball went flying to the far corner of Lenglen’s court. Lenglen couldn't get it. My mother won the game.

Lenglen threw her racket to the ground, and yelled, “Well I’ll be God damned!” Known for her diva fits of temper, she glowered frighteningly at my mother, then stalked off the court to regroup before meeting her next challenger.

My mother had won a rare triumph. Surely though, that one misstep in an obscure charity game could in no way have tarnished Lenglen’s reputation as a superhuman star. Her name continued to be bruited about for a few more years – but then she oddly disappeared from the public mind, as suddenly as if she and all her Olympian accomplishments had dropped off a cliff - as if she and her co-stars had become the targets of the kind of erasure and historical eradication committed by the minions of Orwell’s 1984 regime. While most people who have even the remotest interest in sports continue to recall the names of male sports greats of the early 1900’s – figures such as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey – virtually no one recalls Lenglen. None of the commentators who surrounded the King/Riggs match, and none of the participants themselves, as far as I could hear - brought up her name. So it seems that even when women win – they lose – or, at least, people lose sight of them.

However Lenglen’s name remained alive in my house as I was growing up. We were a tiny island of remembrance of her.

The financial trials of the Depression took a toll on my mother’s first marriage. She and Norman divorced. A decade or so later on, my mother met the man who would be my father. After they married, her life veered too much into drudgery, far away from the golden days of motor boat racing and suites at Toronto’s Royal George Hotel. Now she became melded into my father’s dream of owning his own mailing/printing business. With hardly any starting capital, they bought machinery that even in the 1940’s was already antiquated. My mother became tied to operating these machines – typing, addressing envelopes, stamping, stuffing – through long nights. She had Franklin McCormack and Jack Eigen to keep her company on the radio.

But sometimes, even when the radio was silent and there was nothing to entertain my mother, I would see a secret, slightly triumphant smile spread across her face. I thought then that perhaps she might be casting back in time, away from her present tedium - back to that startling, unimaginable dash of a day – that day she beat the unbeatable Suzanne Lenglen.

Wage Slaves: The Case Against Raising the Minimum Wage

There’s been a lot of campaigning lately to raise the minimum wage, both at the Federal and State levels. In Illinois, there has been a drive to almost double the minimum wage for those working in larger industries. Many politicians might be afraid to oppose these initiatives, for fear of appearing hopelessly reactionary, for fear of alienating working families who are struggling to make ends meet. But I think there are a number of good reasons NOT to raise the minimum wage.

Conservative opponents of a rate hike in the United States usually argue that it will increase unemployment, particularly that it will make it more difficult for people to find entry level jobs. I agree with that. But I oppose an increase in the minimum wage for other reasons, for reasons that are hardly ever advanced – for reasons that those along the whole political spectrum from conservative to liberal could identify with and possibly support.

For one thing, I oppose higher wages because they are not good for the environment. That might seem like a non sequitur, but the connection was brought home to me in a conversation I had with a structural engineer from Mexico not long ago. He had trained and worked in Mexico for a few decades, fleshing out the plans that architects make. Like structural engineers everywhere, his job was to translate the architect’s plans into actual building specifications. He figured out how much concrete would be necessary to support the loads, how much steel would have to be imbedded to support the concrete. He had to make sure all the pipes and wiring and other utilities were accommodated. You would think that he’d be working with the same equations no matter where he did his job.

But he said that when he came to the U.S. to work, he had to radically change his approach. In Mexico, building has been done in such a way that a maximum number of laborers are used, and a minimum amount of material. That’s because labor has been relatively cheap in Mexico, while concrete, copper, steel, porcelain, and almost all materials are expensive. In the U.S. though, the situation is reversed. Because wages are already so high here, structures have to be built using a maximum of materials, and a minimum of labor.

My acquaintance had a hard time switching gears in the U.S. He came close to being fired from several engineering firms because he couldn’t bring himself to specify so much material. The waste! The waste! If they could just employ slightly larger crews. But here in the U.S., that wouldn’t have been economically feasible. The man eventually learned to do what was demanded here, but it continued to pain him.

Once I was alerted to this consequence of our high wages, I saw the waste it led to everywhere. It struck home again when I went in search of “caviar,” or more precisely “roe,” from fish other than sturgeon. I thought if fish eggs from those few rare and expensive fish are so delicious and so prized, why not try eating the fish eggs from all sorts of species? A firm in Chicago that had specialized in selling fish eggs from whitefish, trout, and some other species, was just closing its doors when I started my search. So the next time I vacationed in a shoreline town, I went along the piers, stopping at each of the five or six fish processing centers which provided the area with the “catch-of-the-day” fish. At each stop, I asked if I could buy any fish eggs there. After the initial blank looks and the need to repeat the question several times, I got an education in the realities of the fish trade.

I was told that if I wanted fish eggs or fish sacs, I would have to look among the whole fish for sale to see if I could discern a “pregnant” female fish. But my choice would be very limited. The vast majority of fish caught were sent through filleting machines, and these machines were not geared to save egg sacs. The smallest operation on the pier told me that until just six months before, they had employed a couple of workers to do some of the filleting by hand. It would have been possible for them to have saved the fish sacs. But especially since the fishing industry has been hit by such hard times with the depletion of fish from all waters, this one last company doing some hand processing had eliminated such labor intensive refinements and had transferred those employees to more mechanized sections of the operation. Now all the fish destined for filleting or other forms of dissecting were being sent through machines – machines that could not be adapted to save sacs, that could not do anything other than make standard cuts.

So where did all the fish eggs go? The owners told me that they just get dumped. They join the vast slurry of waste produced by all the fish processing plants along that pier and everywhere. What? The tastiest and most nutritious part of many fish species just gets dumped? Yes, that’s the way it had to be.

I realized then how much of most of the animals and fish we kill, how much of most of the plants we harvest – probably gets similarly wasted. Any parts that don’t lend themselves to being quickly processed by machine have to be thrown away.

And so it goes on all fronts. It isn’t just that jobs are eliminated when the high cost of labor pushes everything in the direction of machine processing. It’s that materials get wasted – the very life blood and substance of the earth gets wasted. We are all hit by the waste in all the little ways we lead our lives.

As most of us have observed, almost nothing ever gets repaired anymore, because the cost of the labor involved is prohibitive. It’s cheaper to get a new one. So throw out those printers, those cameras, those microwaves, those cell phones, those clothes, lamps, wash machines, and refrigerators. It’s not only that advancing technology has always made them obsolete and unusable. It’s that any little thing wrong with them would be too expensive to repair.

Recycling programs have a difficult time being cost effective because these projects tend to be labor intensive. Only human beings can judiciously sort and clean the mix of material that flows into re-cycling centers. So while most U.S. cities and towns pay lip service to recycling and while they dutifully distribute blue collection bags and bins along with exhortations to the citizenry on the importance of recycling – in reality, a large part of what’s collected under these auspices actually just gets dumped as part of the regular bulk of trash.

All this is taking a huge toll on the environment. We are sacrificing the long-term health of the planet in order to get a higher hourly wage and to make more money in the short-term. It isn’t even always that jobs are lost when wages are increased. As happened with the fisheries whose operations I learned a little about, many manual laborers are not fired. They are moved to “more productive” posts attending the automatic processing operations of machinery. But in the course of this transfer from manual to machine, the earth is being stripped of its resources at a much faster pace than necessary. More mines are being dug, more wells drilled, more rain forest acreage cut down – in order to get all that surplus material needed to accommodate the standardized operations which are the only operations machines are capable of performing. As the structural engineer from Mexico moaned, “Oh, the waste, the waste!”

But there are other reasons for rejecting demands for a higher minimum wage. What’s true at re-cycling centers, is true with so much of the economy at large. There is so much work to be done that is necessarily labor intensive, that can never be handed over to machines. While we do have a lot more stuff at our disposal than our grandparents had, we have also lost a lot of convenience as a result of making labor so expensive a factor in production. We’ve lost access to the kinds of services only human hands can provide. Public transportation is a prime example of the kind of service we have lost over the decades as wages and benefits have risen.

When my mother was a girl, there was a dense network of buses and trolley cars chugging through the streets of Chicago at all hours of the day and night. All the main arteries of the city had 24-hour service. Most of the elevated trains similarly ran at frequent intervals 24 hours a day. Even a lot of smaller streets had frequent service. Going to sit-up with a sick relative, my mother could stand on a wintry night at 1:00 A.M. by Devon Avenue, not a major artery, and expect a nice warm streetcar to come sparking along to pick her up in a few minutes.

The buses served other purposes than all-day/all-night transportation, as vital as that was to those working night shifts at the factories, to the elderly, to all those couldn’t or didn’t want to drive. The buses helped keep neighborhoods safe. Bus drivers provided monitory eyes-on-the-street as they threaded their way through different neighborhoods. “Watch out! I see you!” A street along which a bus could be expected to come rolling, not necessarily on any very strict schedule, was usually a street clear of drug-dealing, loitering gang activity, aggressive soliciting, and major violence. What’s more, no one was left to stand alone on any desolate corner of such a street for a dangerous forty-five minutes. You could always expect a bus to “be along” any minute.

The buses and els also helped weave neighborhoods together. They allowed senior citizens and children access to the whole city as long as they were able to “Step Up.” Public transportation kept the downtown area an active, vital place because it gave people a handy way to get there without the hassle of parking and confusing traffic restrictions.

Those days are gone. While Chicago still has what is considered to be one of the best public transportation systems in the country, this service is a mere shadow of its former self. A few els still run all night, but infrequently. A few of the largest streets still have some all-night service, but again, it’s usually too infrequent for many people to rely on. The vast majority of those other old routes have been eliminated, or service along them has been cut back so drastically that most people now have to go where they want to go in cars. There’s always the threat of still more service cuts and more rate hikes to come. One CTA Board Chairman after another has left office, if not in disgrace, at least under a cloud of failure – the failure to control costs and to consistently reduce the system’s budget deficit. All this happens against the backdrop of our heightened awareness of the important role public transportation could play in reducing reliance on private cars and the consequent consumption of gas.  

But the public at large, and even some insiders, are reluctant to recognize or acknowledge what’s at the root of the problem. A friend of mine took a typical approach when he announced he had the solution to any budgetary crisis in the system. He said that during off-hours, they should run, not those full-sized gas-guzzling buses, but small vans, like the Medi-Car vans that transport a handful of people at a time to doctors’ appointments. He was sure the use of these more fuel efficient vehicles would solve the problem.

Just off the cuff, I doubted that such a measure could contribute much to reducing the system’s budget deficits. Aside from the inconvenience of having strangers squeeze together into dark little vans at night, I mentioned that there would still be the expense of paying the drivers of these vans, and I thought that might be the system’s major expense. When I had a chance to actually study a CTA budget report, I saw that I was more right than I had suspected. Looking at the CTA’s budget report for the random month of August, 2013, I saw that all fuel, material, and power cost the system less than 8% of its total budget, while labor cost a whopping 70%. So clearly, reducing a few vehicles’ gas consumption would not make any inroads into budget deficits.

But the high wages and benefits that U.S. workers earn strike the average consumer in even more personal, vital ways. Almost all the people I know are either themselves in desperate need of some help in the home, or else they are close to someone who desperately needs such help. Many people are struggling with overwhelming responsibilities at both ends of the spectrum. They need help with child care and they need help caring for aging or invalid parents. But in most cases, there’s no help to be had. Most people simply cannot afford whatever in-home help might be available, at least not through normal channels.

Some resort to hiring immigrant home aid workers whom they pay under the table. Some just try to do everything themselves. Their lives consequently become hectic, over-scheduled, and stressful. Some simply do without altogether. They risk leaving their children home alone sometimes and they risk letting seniors fend for themselves.

An acquaintance of mine is a typical case. She is in her nineties and after a recent fall, has limited mobility. Full responsibility for her care has fallen on her daughter (it is usually the daughter, not any sons). Sometimes this daughter felt as if she was going down for the third time, weighed by the necessity of being in around-the-clock attendance on her mother on the one hand, and the responsibilities of her husband and still-demanding adult children at home on the other hand.

There seemed no way out. They are not a wealthy family. They couldn’t afford to hire a caretaker at the going rates, even for part of each day. Ideally, my elder acquaintance would have liked to have stayed in her own home. She had the mental acuity to enjoy all the books and other interests she was familiarly surrounded by there. But it got to the point that this wasn’t an option. She had to reconcile herself to going into a nursing home.

However that decision posed enormous problems of its own. Many good nursing homes charge residents thousands of dollars a month. That was way outside the range of what my acquaintance could afford. So she had to declare bankruptcy and apply for Medicaid in order to qualify for a nursing home that would admit residents in exchange for the monthly government support checks they could supply. All for the want of reasonable home care.

At this point, some might argue that maintaining the minimum wage at current levels, or even lowering that wage, wouldn’t help in such situations. Since home caretakers are already on the lower end of the pay scale, and since there is already such a shortage of them – maintaining their wages at relatively low levels would only exacerbate the problem. It would create even greater shortages of these workers. Yes, that’s true. But it’s even more apparent that raising general wage levels would only exacerbate the problem to a larger degree.

What’s needed is a re-framing of the problem. We have to stop defining the problem strictly in terms of adjusting wage scales. In order to come to terms with the exhausting need that so many baby boomers and others are facing, we have to recognize the larger disconnect that lies at the heart of our economic thinking. We have to see the irony inherent in the fact that so many people are complaining about the dire lack of any form of affordable help, while others are complaining about being chronically unemployed. With our emphasis on “creating” high paying jobs, we blind ourselves to the fact that there’s already plenty of work that exists out there. We might have to create "jobs", but we certainly don’t have to create any more work.

As one motivational guru put it – “Don’t ask what jobs are available. Ask what work needs to be done. Then go out and do it! Do it with all your heart.” More likely than not, some form of adequate remuneration will follow. If it doesn’t, you will at least have acquired some valuable experience and some widely applicable skills along the way.

If you live in a shabby place, you might not have a job, but you certainly have your work cut out for you sprucing it up. If you live in an apartment, get your landlord’s permission, get some library books, get some paint and plaster, and go to it. Do what you can, the best you can. If then, after seeing the improvements you’ve made, your landlord doesn’t hire you in a standard maintenance job, you will still come away with a nice living space to show for your efforts, and you will have acquired all kinds of do-it-yourself  skills. Similarly, if one of your neighbors needs child care and another needs help with an invalid mother, you have plenty of opportunities to work, with a good chance that the same sort of standard benefits will redound to you.

Elaborating on this “Look for work, not for a job” philosophy is outside the scope of this article. But the point is, as long as we stay stuck on the idea that we have to create high-paying jobs or immediately reward all effort with increasingly high wages - we’ll be stuck on an inflationary treadmill that lands us right back where we started. Consumers will be even less able to afford products and services, especially those products and services supplied by labor intensive industries, especially those services that touch people in their need closest to home. So beleaguered in their role as consumers, people will feel impelled in their role as producers to demand a still higher hourly rate in order to maintain a “living wage.”

But there’s still another reason for us not to waste ourselves in efforts to raise the minimum wage. By making labor yet more expensive, we will not only eliminate some jobs, but worse yet, we will make many of the remaining jobs more dismal, stressful, and inhuman. We’ll put intense pressure on those who remain on the job to be yet more productive, to perform more like automatons. More work places will begin to feel like modern sweat shops.

The sweat shops of the early 20^th century were possible because labor was so cheap and plentiful. If one worker dropped out of his place at the treadle, there were many others standing in line waiting to take the job for a pittance. Now in the United States and many other developed countries, the power relationship has shifted. Most citizens aren’t put in the position of having to stand in line in supplication for wretched jobs at slave wages. But employees’ work environment has eroded from an opposite cause – from the fact of wages being so high that employers feel compelled to squeeze every ounce of labor they can out of their employees every minute of the work day. With each new round of wage hikes, some employees do get eliminated, and those remaining have to bear a heavier workload, more rigid enforcement of workplace protocol, and more infringement on their personal freedom while on the job. Employees have to be continuously and maximally productive in order to justify their increased expense to the company.  

I can again cite changes I’ve been able to study first-hand in a typical work environment. That work place is a big branch of the U.S. post office right across the street from my house. My parents bought this building in the early 1950’s because it was so conveniently situated for the mailing business they started then. My father would carry customer mail over to the P.O. every day. These trips across the street would be occasions for conviviality. My father and the back room clerks would chat, exchange the news of the day. During their lunch hour, many of the clerks would in turn walk across and hang out here at our shop. There was more easy conversation that would often spill a little innocuously over the hour allotted for lunch.

Our mail carrier faced similarly relaxed and relatively free-wheeling days. He had time to really know some of the people along his route. He carried dog bones for our dog and other favorite pets. He served as the pedestrian version of the ubiquitous bus driver I mentioned earlier. He (it was almost always a “he” then) had time to take heed if any of his residents were in trouble, or if any of them needed a brief sympathetic ear in the wake of receiving some bad news. He had time to pause. He had time for humanity.

Yet through all this easy exchange, the mail got efficiently delivered. In the very earliest part of this period there were two deliveries a day to businesses. There were many more workers on the job, so the workload was distributed among more people in such a way that each worker had breathing room. What’s more, the workers were less strictly supervised. They could exercise more individual discretion as to how and at what pace they performed their work.

Most of that old convivial atmosphere has changed so dramatically now that the post office is hardly recognizable as being on the same planet we inhabited in the 1950’s. With each raise that postal workers got, there was a tightening of the corporate belt (as indeed the P.O. became a quasi corporate entity). That meant lay-offs and increased pressure on remaining workers. The last significant pay increase that came over a decade ago was followed by a serious transformation of the workplace. Work staff was reduced to a skeleton crew. Now, there are usually only one or two tellers available to serve the increasingly long lines of irate customers inside the post office. Carrier routes were re-mapped so each remaining carrier walks a longer route.

But the problem isn’t only the sheer increase in workload that each postal employee now has to live with every day. It’s the increase in the monitoring of their every move. Carriers have to “check-in” at set points along their route using GPS trackers, so their supervisors can be assured they’re moving along at the required pace and that they are where they’re supposed to be at any given moment. They have almost no time, no time at all for human interaction. Now if I want to say something to my mail carrier, it ought to be strictly business. No idle chit-chat. And even on the rare occasions when I have some specifically postal related matter to ask him about, he has no time to pause at my house. I often have to run after him, voicing my concerns on the fly. The carriers have all been turned into Mad Hatters with the imperative of “No time to say ‘Hello, goodbye.’ I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.”

Furthermore, carriers have very little discretion over even such minute details as how they sort the mail they carry out onto their routes. To cite one somewhat technical, but revealing example of carriers’ loss of control - when most Chicago mail carriers arrive on the job, they are faced with two separate trays of mail to deliver. One tray has come pre-sorted from the central distribution center. The other tray is what has filtered in directly for their specific zip codes. The carriers have to sort this latter bunch of mail themselves before they set off on their rounds. But the kicker is – once that second bunch of mail is sorted according to street address, the carriers are not allowed to merge the two streams of mail. They are required to leave the P.O. with two separately sequenced bunches of mail. They are expected to check each bunch at every address to see if there’s any mail here – any mail there – for the customer.

The carriers think it would be so much easier if they were allowed to merge the two bunches of mail before they hit the streets. But no. If they are caught merging in the back room of the P.O. they get bawled out. If they persist in merging, they might even get fired. For some reason, headquarters has determined that it’s more efficient for the carriers not to pause to consolidate the two packs of mail inside the P.O. itself, but rather to get out there immediately and start delivering. So it’s not only the carriers’ pace that is strictly dictated; it’s their methods as well. They are no longer independent businessmen, as many felt themselves to be back in the old days. Now they are the strictly controlled and dictated to minions of a higher power.

Under the pressure of these new time constraints and all this oversight, many postal employees took early retirement. Many more are wearily looking forward to the finish line. Going to work is no longer any fun. And what’s true of the post office is true of many workplaces all over, in every sector of the economy.

The typical modern workplace is hardly what’s depicted in TV sitcoms where no one seems to be under any great pressure to perform. In TV-Land, everyone has time to exchange witty banter and to have lively human interaction. Meanwhile, the reality is so much bleaker and more impersonal. After a grace period of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, in which a good percentage of white collar workplaces could be jovial meeting places – now it’s back to the old enslavement of “Tote that barge, lift that bale!” The only difference between the old slavish sweat shop days and conditions in these modern sweat shops is the shorter hours, and the relatively bigger paycheck that employees receive now. They can use that paycheck to go home, get a big screen plasma TV and vicariously project themselves into the cheerier workplaces depicted there. They can also use their higher wages to buy all sorts of other things that they can enjoy – after work hours.

But that’s the crux of the problem. The pressures that high wages have put on employees to perform at maximum speed on the job, have stripped many workplaces themselves of any possibility of enjoyment. The workers can use their salaries to enjoy life – somewhere else. Real living doesn’t happen in these boiler plate workplaces. Real life is pushed off into the future somewhere, apart from people’s daily workaday routines.

The eight or ten hours spent working and getting to and from work aren’t intrinsically interesting or worthwhile. These hours can only be tolerated for the paycheck at the end of them. A worker’s real existence is postponed. Then even home life often fails to be enjoyable now because by the time workers get home, they are often too tired and drained to fully appreciate all the things their paychecks have bought for them there.

Ideally, every hour of the day should offer an opportunity for “real life.” People should not have to slog through one set of hours in order to get to hours somewhere else. A true employee benefit would be to give employees back those hours of their lives that they are at work – to allow them to be as self-determining and free of pressure and regimentation as possible in the performance of their duties. Higher and higher minimum wages only militate against such an ability to live happily both on and off the job.

Higher wages, as we’ve seen, also will do little to enable people to maintain a “living wage” in the long run. Why is it so hard now to maintain a family on a salary of $30,000 a year? That’s because so many goods and services cost so much. And why do they cost so much? That’s because wages here are already so relatively high and labor costs account for the largest part of the cost of so much that the average consumer has to buy in order to lead a decently comfortable life. That’s not only true in the realms of public transportation and home health care that I cited, but it’s true across the boards. When examined from this perspective, the argument that higher wages are necessary to maintain a “living wage” is exactly the kind of circular reasoning that it sounds.

Finally, there’s all that damage that the environment sustains as the result of our need to automate and expedite every operation. We throw out the baby with the bath water in order to save the human time it takes to lift the one out of the other.

So a high minimum wage can generate a variety of negative effects. It’s not that anyone arguing on this side of the debate wants U.S. workers to be reduced to the wage level of Mexican construction workers or to the level of children working in Chinese toy factories. It’s that we need to consider balancing labor and material inputs in our economy. More affordable labor will mean the availability of more badly needed human intelligence aimed at our problems – whether we’re calling a bank, a phone company, or a computer service provider to straighten out our accounts – whether we’re trying to get a sofa reupholstered – or whether we’re trying to find a plumber or a carpenter to investigate the cause of some rotting floor boards. We shouldn’t be slaves to the idea that high wages are the royal road out of subsistence living. My current high wages become some senior citizen’s skimped living conditions, and likely one day – my own meager circumstances.

We can’t afford to lose any more of the human touch in our daily lives. We can’t afford to let materials substitute for human spirit. To the extent that high wages make so many grace notes as well as so many near-necessities unaffordable, we should not make raising the minimum wage a priority. As the cliché goes – instead of making a living, we should concentrate on making a life.

Waging War with Flying Pandas

Over the years, I've heard a couple of creative suggestions for dealing with our nation's enemies. One of these suggestions in particular has stuck with me as a real possibility for making a different sort of attack against those who pose a threat. This suggestion was made in jest. But the more I've pondered it, the more I think it might hold real promise as a strategic/tactical measure in times of war.

The suggestion was made by Andy Rooney during one of the commentaries he'd deliver at the end of every 60 Minutes TV program. He proposed that, instead of dropping explosives on our adversaries - we should carpet bomb them with all kinds of material goods. We should drop load after load of all the kinds of commodities that American families are famous for having in such plentitude.

We could of course drop the necessities of food and clean water. However, Rooney also proposed that we drop objects that are essentially frivolous but that make for distracting good fun. We could parachute down house slippers that look like kittens, bags of potpourri, video games, crocheted Kleenex box covers, clocks that chirp the hours, coffee mugs dedicated to "The Best Grandfather in the World," butterfly hair clips, and on and on. We could drop whole Wal-Marts full of goods on our enemies, blanketing within their borders on and on, around the clock.

Rooney pointed out that a bombing campaign of that kind would really help maintain full employment throughout our economy. We'd need every worker available to crank out these goods and to package them for parachuting. At the same time, we'd catch our enemies completely off-guard. While they were geared up to strike back against machine gun fire, hand grenades, mortar shellings, and missiles - they would hardly know how to combat a 6-foot stuffed panda come flying at them. What's more, they'd be completely disabled trying to store all these possessions in their homes. We'd make them as glutted as we are. With their living spaces chock-full of Elvis-on-velvet paintings - they'd be too bogged down to come out and fight.

Rooney signaled how truly he was saying all this in jest when he ended his commentary by reflecting, "On second thought, we really shouldn't bomb countries with all our stuff. That would be too cruel." Better stick to TNT.

But wait a minute! Why does that suggestion of a way to wage war have to be a joke? Couldn't some version of that approach in fact work a lot better than conventional bombings? Since people so often become soldiers in order to escape poverty or boredom, wouldn't a barrage of delightful merchandise occupy them in less destructive ways? Not that most of our current terrorist foes necessarily come from poor families. It's been shown that many of them actually come from supportive, middle-class families. But their anger often stems from a more general sense of privation and humiliation. So a judicious supply of some of the goods necessary for them to start their own all-consuming businesses could perhaps deflect them and their likely supporters more than gunpowder has been doing. People seeking ways to express qualities of dedication, commitment, and zeal, could find outlets other than religious fundamentalism.

But if we were to seriously adopt such a strategy, there would be many other things to consider about the nature of the products we deployed. We'd have to be sensitive to the cultures of the countries into which we dropped our goods. No liquor on Muslim countries. No milk products on populations that generally couldn't digest lactose. Nothing so chauvinistically American or in such quantity that it played into resentment against what's been perceived as U.S. materialism or paternalism. Also, we couldn't launch so many free goods into a country that the influx would destroy what was likely their already fragile economy. Nor could we drop stuff in such a way that our largesse would give rise to cargo cults among any receiving tribal peoples below.

We could perhaps include some whimsical, purely frivolous items such as those cuddly kitten house slippers. But in reality, we shouldn't drop an indiscriminate mix of goods. Most of what we drop should be genuinely useful in the context of the countries where we drop it. In addition to dropping laptops, radios, books, illustrated how-to guides, and other means of self-learning - we'd want to drop practical self-help things, especially when fighting against poorer nations. Some possibilities might be biogas ovens, water purifiers, pumps, antibiotics, insecticides, bicycles, baskets, jars, coolers, ice, tents, anti-bacterial soap, spackle, batteries, pens and paper, incidental spare parts and nuts and bolts and nails of all kinds, basic tools, saws, and stepladders. When doing this as a serious stratagem, we'd probably want to represent the shelves of Home Depot more than those of Wal-Mart.

Then just because we'd be bringing bounty rather than devastation to the enemy, we shouldn't assume our soldiers would be in any less danger making the deliveries. Our pilots would probably be subject to as much or even more repulsive force than when they were dropping bombs over their targets. This has frequently been the case whenever any country has tried to deliver humanitarian aid to combatants. The heads of State, the heads of the different fighting factions, are fierce in trying to prevent anything helpful getting through. Such outside help diminishes the leverage and overall power they exert. So as a simple self-defense measure, our soldiers might still have to pack plenty of TNT along with their chemical toilets.

Another problem that might arise if we were to deal with our enemies this way is that we might risk seeing The Mouse That Roared scenarios develop in countries all over the globe. In that Peter Sellers movie, the officials of a (fictional) small, bankrupt Duchy decide to wage war against the U.S. Their plan, after what they assume will be their inevitable defeat, is to sit back and collect the reconstruction aid that the U.S. can be counted on to rain on its former foes. But if the worst we have to fear from a beneficent approach to battle is a declarations of war against us from the Grand Fenwicks of the world, it will certainly be worth the risk.

In spite of all the danger and in spite of all the diplomatic difficulty we'd face in finding the right mix of goods with which to bombard our enemies, the results could hardly be worse than the destruction and loss of life that current methods deliver to both sides. If I were President. I would seriously attempt this radical new approach to combat. Instead of dropping bombs on al-Qaeda and ISIL strongholds and all the surrounding population and terrain, I'd drop carefully considered care packages on much of the host territory - day after day, relentlessly. I'd turn that old saying into literal fact - I'd kill them with kindness. What Andy Rooney proposed in jest, I'd execute in earnest.