New book reveals slackers throughout history

An author works hard to show us that some heroes were great loafers

BY TOM BEER | Special to Newsday

June 19, 2006

We Americans are uniquely obsessed with our work lives. Think of the welfare reform debate of the 1990s, of the outrage in some political corners that a class of people - popularly known as "welfare queens" - might be sitting on the couch collecting government checks while the rest of us slaved 60 hours a week to make ends meet. Or think of the current anxiety, fueled by the proliferation of WiFi, BlackBerrys and cell phones, that we're all essentially working nonstop: at home on the weekends, in our cars during the morning commute, even at the beach while on "vacation." Or the popularity of TV shows like "The Apprentice," in which an assortment of hapless souls compete to prove their mettle to the ultimate boss man, Donald Trump, only to merit the ultimate comedown: "You're fired!"

"We live in a world in which you have to work at something in order to be considered a good person, and that drives everyone in the entire culture," says scholar Tom Lutz, who has spent the past few years researching the topic for his new book. "And along with that belief in the value of work comes this nagging sense that there are lots of times when we would rather not be working at all."

Lutz's book, "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America" (FSG, $25), is an exhaustive and entertaining account of our attitudes toward work and its opposite: slacking. He traces the history of slackers back to the 18th century and British writer Samuel Johnson, who published a series of essays called "The Idler." Far from finding inherent meaning in work, Johnson advised working as little as possible: "The Idler who habituates himself to be satisfied with what he can easily obtain, not only escapes labours which are often fruitless, but sometimes succeeds better than those who despise all that is within their reach, and think of every thing more valuable as it is harder to be acquired."

While Johnson, in London, was formulating his slacker's credo, across the Atlantic Benjamin Franklin was piously extolling the virtues of frugality, industry, order and resolution: the good old-fashioned American work ethic.

Slacking works (or not)

"Benjamin Franklin's talk about the work ethic and Samuel Johnson's invention of the Idler happen at the same time, and they happen for a reason," says 53-year-old Lutz by telephone from his home in Los Angeles, pointing out that both men were writing in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. "Before you had the industrial work ethic, everybody agreed that work simply ... was something you did if you were unlucky enough not be to be born an aristocrat. If you didn't have to work, you didn't work."

If Johnson and Franklin have a mutual, yin-and-yang interdependence, Lutz complicates them even further by seeing Johnson as a "busy idler" - he gave us the comprehensively researched "Dictionary of the English Language," after all - and Franklin as the "industrious dilettante" who took nude "airbaths" and flitted about Paris like a social butterfly. Like most of us in contemporary American society, both Johnson and Franklin had complex, sometimes contradictory and ever-fluctuating associations with work. "They had love/hate relationships with their own personas," says Lutz.

"Golden age of the slacker narrative"

"Doing Nothing" ambles on through the 19th and 20th centuries, introducing a colorful gallery of characters who styled themselves as loafers, loungers, flâneurs, tramps, playboys, beatniks and, yes, slackers. (The term dates not to Richard Linklater's 1991 cult film, but to 1898, when it first turns up in the "Oxford English Dictionary"; "slacker" became common usage during Word War I as a derogatory name for draft dodgers.) Lutz investigates historical figures such as Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell and Jack Kerouac, all of whom wrote slacker manifestos, or lived slacker lifestyles. Women make appearances as flappers, gold diggers and feminists, but the story of slackerdom, as Lutz tells it, is primarily a male one.

As for the present day, Lutz says he believes we're living in the "golden age of the slacker narrative," when countless movies (such as "National Lampoon's Van Wilder" and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle") and TV shows ("The Office"), along with books such as David Gilbert's "The Normals" and Ben Kunkel's "Indecision," testify to our culture's unease with work. Though Kunkel himself isn't so sure that his protagonist, Dwight Wilmerding, is a slacker per se - "He could also be called a superfluous man," the author says by e-mail - he concedes the powerful appeal of the narrative: "If we like to read about slackers or superfluous men, I think it's because in a negative way they hold out hope of a satisfying life: Here's someone who could only be roused to action if there was something worth doing." Director Kevin Smith, whose 1994 "Clerks" was one of the quintessential slacker films of the '90s, is even revisiting his snarky, undermotivated characters in "Clerks II," out next month. Twelve years later, his protagonists have progressed - to dead-end jobs at a fast-food franchise.

Perhaps most telling about our times, Lutz suggests, is that we have the first-ever slacker in the White House. "Bush has taken off more time than any president in history, has the shortest workday of any president in modern times, doesn't like to read the newspapers, has the shortest attention span. He's a highly functioning slacker. He clearly has a deeply ambitious strain in his makeup, but also a real commitment to this lackadaisical self-presentation as someone who takes it easy: 'Now watch this drive.' It's a deep part of American culture to announce that you hate work."