Belaboured

Americans and Vacation: expatriated writer all worked up

Mark Ames WOULD speak with authority, but he hasn’t lived in the US for 12 years. Given that the subject doesn't have any actual impact on Guardian readers (virtually none of whom live in the United States,) one can only asume that it has the same purpose as most of the paper's content - to take a hack at something which they've convinced themselves is productive without leftism, positive without the approval of their "class", wrong to them, distasteful to them, or simply American.

And Ames misses the point when he complains about Americans not taking their time off which he otherwise paints as inadequate and bad for people as though they're incapable of thinking for themselves.
Virtually all American workers can take all the vacation they like. They’ll only get paid for 2 or three weeks of it. The ilk of Mark, apparently, feel that we all need laws and some guidance to lead our lives. Most of his countrymen, a nation of 300 million that he has lost touch with, seem to disagree. If this was an issue that mattered to Americans, it would have been raised decades ago. I wonder how he would explain that away - probably by calling us all sheep and zombies, regardless of the near even political divide that has maintained debate and discussion in America for the past centuries.

Back to our intrepid correspondent who while groping for a point came upon some satisfying class-struggle victim narrative padding that seems to satisfy the limits of what the garden variety Guardian reader can grasp:

As middle America's workers continue to see their leisure time stripped away from them, guess where that time, that scarce resource, winds up? You can find the answer in a Forbes magazine article, Billionaires On Vacation, dated September 19 2002:
"From the ski slopes of Aspen and Gstaad to the beaches of Mustique and the Hamptons, instead of staying at a resort many billionaires (and millionaires) prefer to own multiple homes around the world - partly because it's always nicer to sleep in your own bed and partly because, well, they can."
All of this might be infuriating, in a kind of white-collar, Wigan Pier sort of way, if it weren't for the fact that the designated victims in this drama - America's workers - are such willing collaborators in their own existential demise. According to a New York Times article, British workers get more than 50% more paid holiday per year than Americans, while the French and Italians get almost twice what the Americans get. The average American's response is neither admiration nor envy, but rather a kind of sick pride in their own wretchedness, combined with righteous contempt for their European worker counterparts, whom most Americans see as morally degenerate precisely because they have more leisure time, more job security, health benefits and other advantages.

Speaking to the point anyway, even though he may have never held down a conventional and real job, his problem is that he expects from society the benefit of something he isn’t generous about being willing to provide or understand. Aggregate the cost of 2 weeks of vacation into an annual salary, and then 4 weeks. It all comes from the same place, anyway.

Even a self-admiring liberal arts major and fake "exile" can figure out that this will cost 6 percent more of one’s annual pay.

This is where it gets unintelligible:

It's like a classic case of East Bloc lumpen-spite: middle Americans would rather see the European system collapse than become beneficiaries themselves. If there is one favourite recurring propaganda fable Americans love to read about Europeans, it's the one about how Europe is decaying and its social system is on the verge of imploding; we Americans pray for that day to come, with even more fervour than we pray for the End of Days, because the very existence of these pampered workers makes us look like the suckers and slaves we really are. This is why you won't see Bono or Sir Bob Geldof rallying the bleeding-hearts anytime soon on behalf of America's workers. They're not in the least bit sympathetic. Better to stick with well-behaved victims like starving Africans.

I’m not sure just who it is that carrying the spite around, but I know that Americans are more likely to work harder once they start having kids, and not being a branch of western civilization actively trying to exterminate itself.

The comparative GDP figures, the rates of unemployment, and especially the optimism shows that American workers are clearly more economically literate when it comes to when it’s the right time to “shut down the bosses” and all the rest of the fantasist trash European leftists repeat to themselves while rocking in the fetal position in a cold, damp corner of what was a sustainable society.

Kudos to the Guardian nonetheless – for getting writers to do commercial puff pieces on behalf of long unseen celebs selling stuff with all the dignity of an infomercial. It has the appearance of the most unethical sort of unbridled commercialism without actually having an understanding of it’s Amorality, and it’s utility to reduce poverty, as well as its’ secondary utility to fund the doing of sincere good initiated by individuals, and not the betters of government from whom Ames imagines he can get something ‘free’ from.