The American people have shown insufficient gratitude toward Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa for the compliment he has paid them, perhaps because compliments were not his intention when he proclaimed that Americans no longer like ”to live by the sweat of their brow.”
Yer derned tootin`, Kiichi, ole boy.
Because it is not part of his cultural and religious tradition, Miyazawa can be forgiven for not knowing that this brow-sweat business was not a blessing. It was a punishment. See Chapter Three of Genesis for details. Ever since, the aim of intelligent people has been to finesse the punishment by living as well as possible while sweating from the brow as little as possible.
In fairness to the prime minister, neither he nor his countrymen are alone in urging Americans to increase their facial perspiration. The same advice is regularly prescribed by Americans, many of them professors, columnists and commentators.
Disloyal as it may be to divulge professional secrets, candor requires revealing that these are not jobs which require a whole lot of sweating from the brow. Furrowing of the brow, yes, and pacing the floor and getting another cup of coffee, all in order to gain sufficient insight to urge all you clods whose parents couldn`t afford to send you to college to work harder so we can keep up with the Japanese.
Brow-sweating is also the constant suggestion of bankers, financiers and chairmen of the boards, whose work consists of going to meetings, dictating memos, reading reports and giving orders. Lifting heavy boxes is rarely part of their day.
Besides, they are the very people (aided and abetted by some of the professors, etc., mentioned above) who support the low-tax policies that have further enriched them and further impoverished the public coffers, thereby reducing both the quantity and quality of schools, roads, trains, airports, hospitals and the like.
More Top Picks Best Pilot Watches For Men
What ensued was a less healthy, less qualified work force using less efficient machinery to produce products that take too long to get from here to there, a situation that inspires bankers and columnists to lament the decline in productivity and gives them another chance to urge the hired help to work harder, preferably for lower wages and fewer benefits.
Like Miyazawa`s fulminations, none of this need be taken seriously, especially now that it turns out that Americans are working harder than they used to. Such, at least, is the premise of a new book, ”The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” by Juliet B. Schor, and if she overstates her case slightly (who doesn`t?), she has solid evidence that more people are working longer hours and taking fewer or shorter vacations than they were some years ago.
Too bad. In a society this rich, people ought to be spending more time on pursuits more important and more rewarding than work, which embraces just about anything. A very partial list would include bowling, fishing, bird-watching, playing the saxophone, traveling to such fascinating places as Florence or Rapid City, planting flowers, building a car, composing a symphony or taking a walk.
No doubt there are many reasons why people work more and do these things less, starting with the reality that because real (inflation-adjusted) income has been stagnant for most folks, they have to work more in order to afford any free time at all. But before letting the public at large off the hook, consider another finding of Ms. Schor`s book, this one amply confirmed elsewhere: When people do get time off from work, their favorite
”recreation” is . . . (are you ready for this?) shopping.
One must beware of busy-bodyness. So what if people like to shop? It doesn`t hurt anyone. And there is something unseemly about someone who earns more by furrowing his brow than most do by the sweat of theirs telling them what they should do with their spare time.
But none of this precludes observing that people who would rather walk around a mall than play the saxophone or plant flowers either live rather empty lives or are excessively enamored of the goodies in the stores. If the American people are to be criticized en masse, it is not for being disinclined to earn through the sweat of their brow, but for not knowing what to do with their rewards after the brow has been wiped dry, and for being so taken by designer rags and electronic doo-dads that they refuse to put aside enough of those rewards for the future.
Hence the next generation will have to engage in prodigious brow-sweating just to eat and pay the rent. A little less shopping and more gardening and investing now might enable the grandchildren to do even more gardening and symphony-writing later. In short, it would help build a civilization, not just an economy, which ought to be the purpose of all that brow-sweating, of which the less the better. That would teach the Japanese a real lesson.