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Gary Kamiya's book review was stimulating in a manner that is in no way antithetical to slacking (which should be about enjoying yourself). I've often told my wife, when she complains at my lying down reading on some beautiful afternoon, that what I really would have loved to have been was an aristocrat. The slacker is the needy, pleading stepchild of the English gentry, who used to eat, walk, read, experiment, go down to London, or any other damn thing, WHEN THEY FELT LIKE IT. What full-bore capitalism and the Puritan ethos did was contaminate this lovely lifestyle of pressureless choice so that even the upper class eventually felt that they had to be doing something all the time. Thomas Frank gets at this upper-class mania for activity in his book One Market Under God, where he trashes the dot.com millionaires for thier 14 hour days followed by manic snowboarding or other "extreme" sports, followed instantaneously by more work. Such feverish activity is a weapon in the class war, a way of saying, well, I play on a computer all day, or trade stocks around, or invent weird derivative products, but I deserve 80 times the salary of a working man or woman! The sad fact is, it's almost impossible to escape work either by going up the ladder, or, like the modern slacker, descending it. We have largely lost the ability to socialize ourselves or our children to eating when we are hungry or working when we either have to (people like me) or want to (people with money). We have lost the knack for pleasure.
