Living in the Wallace & Gromit Economy

Wallace unleashes his newest invention, NORBOT, on his hapless pooch Gromit
in the new film Vengeance Most Fowl, now on Netflix

I’m a fan of Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit films, since I first discovered the original short films on grainy, probably bootleg VHS in the 1990s. The humor operates on the same principle as Mr. Bean or Red Dwarf: a well-meaning but incompetent protagonist bumbles into situations far above their heads. Wallace, Bean, or Rimmer are momentarily embarrassed, but consistently come out ahead, without really learning anything.

The films present Wallace as a garage inventor and shade-tree mechanic. Though the first short film has him successfully build a moon rocket in a weekend, subsequent films consistently harp on the same theme, that Wallace’s inventions create more problems than they solve. They require added steps, break down frequently, get sabotaged by rascally varmints, and otherwise create needless kerfuffles. All just to less efficiently butter his breakfast toast.

Though that theme runs through nearly every film, short or long, I don’t recall it looming as large as in the latest entry, Vengeance Most Fowl. Throughout Act One, Gromit, the wordless dog character who’s secretly the brains behind the operation, keeps indulging Wallace’s invention mania. However, he longs to complete his necessary tasks and switch over to the activities which give his life meaning: gardening and knitting.

Wallace, however, persistently misunderstands Gromit’s need for meaningful work. He sees both gardening and knitting as repetitive work, which automation can eliminate. Therefore he introduces his newest invention, NORBOT, a self-actuating garden gnome that literally takes jobs right out of Gromit’s hands. Though wordless, Gromit’s Claymation facial expressions make clear the disgust he feels without tasks to occupy his hands and brain.

Thing is, I understand, somewhat, Wallace’s motivation. For years, advocates of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism have claimed that technology will render work obsolete a week from next Tuesday, and we’ll have limitless free time to… well, to do whatever. More recently, TechBro types have extolled what they falsely call “Artificial Intelligence” to take writing, music, and art away from the nerds by strictly automating it.

Such advocates see work as burdensome, something to outsource. Socialists have historically considered work as something imposed by the economic order, something we can abandon because our high-tech do-funnies will absorb the tedium. TechBros, by contrast, see workers and their jobs as an undesirable sunk cost that they’d rather abandon. Either way, work becomes something to abolish, replacing ordinary humans with machines, computers, and heuristics.

NORBOT represents only the comical reductio ad absurdum of this mentality. It snatches the pruning shears from Gromit’s paws and, in mere seconds, transforms his lush English garden into a topiary extravaganza completely devoid of character. It subsequently steals Gromit’s yarn and knits Wallace another outfit exactly like the one he always wears. NORBOT works fast, cheap, and efficiently, but without personality or meaning.

Socialist writer Barbara Garson admits she thought the capitalist class forced workers to work. Only after visiting workplaces and watching the ways employees extract meaning from standardized work, did she realize that work said something about workers’ souls. People don’t work because overseers and debt collectors force it. They work because what we do with our hands, what we create with our brains, defines who we are.

Economist John C. Médaille similarly observes that, if you watch how people spend their free time, it frequently resembles work. Left to their own devices, people might grow vegetables, build Shaker furniture, write novels, perform home improvement, rebuild classic cars, or paint. Although some people certainly drink beer and watch television, complete forfeitures of experience, most people, given the opportunity, seek work to define themselves.

To a limited extent, advancing technology has made such meaning easier to create. Inventions like the steel plow and combine harvester meant that growing crops required fewer workers. In former days, most peasants farmed from sheer necessity. Now, most people can choose whether they want to cultivate the earth, or whether they’d rather make meaning elsewhere. Therefore I’m no absolute Luddite, and embrace technology to a point.

However, I’d contend we’ve surpassed that point. Early Twentieth Century inventions made work more productive, and homemaking more efficient. However, as Research and Development has superseded invention, most “new” technologies simply complexify existing machines. I struggle to imagine any technology that’s improved our lives in the last thirty years. Made us more productive? Sure. But happier, healthier, better developed? I got nothing.

Watching Gromit get his hobbies stolen, I felt the pang of familiarity. We’re all watching capitalists extract meaning from our lives, sometimes without malice. We’re all Gromit now.

Bishop Budde and the Prophetic Tradition

The Rt. Rvd. Marian Edgar Budde
(Washington National Cathedral photo)

Over a week ago, Episcopal Bishop Marian Edgar Budde gave President Trump the gentlest, most benevolent scolding in recent political history. She simply urged Trump (a notoriously inattentive churchgoer) to remember all Americans when governing, not only those who resemble himself. This was too much, not only for Trump’s political supporters, but for conservative religious leaders. Trump’s supporters described Budde’s benign concerns as “the radical left just spew[ing] hate.”

Smarter theologians than I have written extensively about the foolish anti-Budde diatribes. Budde’s exhortation to look after marginalized and disadvantaged peoples comes directly from the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Any familiarity with Christ’s message emphasizes that Christians have a God-given responsibility to care for poor, marginalized, and immigrant populations. Not because they’re especially holy, but because they’re poor.

I’d rather contemplate where Budde’s message situates her. In Budde’s willingness to address Trump directly, and speak explicitly to Trump’s attitudes toward American citizens, I’m reminded of three other prophets: Nathan, Elijah, and John the Baptist. All three had specific, conflicted relationships with Hebrew political leaders, and named specific sins each performed by name. Heavily churched readers might know that, for the last two, this challenging didn’t end well.

The prophet Nathan lived in King David’s palace and served some undefined advisory role. His only recorded act of prophecy comes after David steals Bathsheba, a married woman, and sends her husband to die in battle. Nathan spins a parable of a wealthy man abusing his poor neighbor; only after David answers the parable with a demand for retribution does Nathan reveal the parable refers to David himself.

By contrast, Elijah condemns King Ahab from outside the palace walls. When Ahab marries a foreigner, Jezebel, and adopts her religious practices, God sends punishment upon Israel. (In Hebrew scripture, all Israel is judged together; it isn’t a religion of personal righteousness, but a moral backbone for the entire nation.) Elijah and Ahab battle for Israel’s soul for years before the unrepentant Ahab dies and Elijah ascends bodily into heaven.

John the Baptist, though a Christian figure, is similarly Jewish. He condemns the priesthood—which, never forget, served as proxy government for Roman dominion in Judea, and therefore was more political than religious. Like Elijah, he condemned King Herod from outside the palace; unlike Elijah, Herod survived this criticism, and ordered John executed. Where Jesus preached an alternate Judaism, John continued the state-based tradition of Elijah, Amos, and Samuel.

The Hebrew prophetic tradition opposes the inclinations of power. In recent years, we’ve questioned who has the authority to “speak truth to power.” Remember a few years ago, when Republicans went berserk because Michelle Wolf took pokes at the administration at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? Her defenders insisted that court jesters had a history, even a responsibility, to mock powerful people in high places with uncomfortable truths. But, comedians? Really?

No, historically, comedians entertained; if they made political points, that came only incidentally. Indeed, in Shakespeare’s day, public performances were heavily censored, and comedy, like all performance, trended significantly conservative. Comedy only criticizes power in societies where criticism is deemed, a priori, acceptable. In coming years, as the administration promises to become increasingly authoritarian, pointed comedy, like protest songs before it, will become risky and rare.

Instead, religion has the unique capacity to challenge power in its seat. Especially in an administration that uses the forms of religion, but largely ignores its substance, as Trump does, religious leaders can tell politicians and oligarchs the truths that nobody else dares speak. To the extent that Americans generally, and the administration particularly, believe God and capital-T Truth exist, religion has the privilege to speak it.

This doesn’t mean prophets live safely. Nathan dwelt inside the palace, but Elijah spent his career living as a fugitive. The Northern Kingdom chased Amos out altogether. Jeremiah lived in perpetual fear of crowds, even as he tried desperately to convey the message they needed to hear. John the Baptist died violently, and if Christianity shares the Hebrew prophetic tradition, Jesus and his disciples (except John) all died violently.

If we believe authoritarians need somebody to “speak truth to power,” let’s start with the people who believe Truth exists. Not the people Jeremiah disparaged as “prophets of peace,” either, a category that definitely includes Trump’s so-called spiritual advisers. Rather, let’s find the holy lunatics and angry prophets camping outside the temple walls, shouting. Get ready to eat locusts and wild honey.

Building New Houses Isn’t the Solution

This is what it usually looks like when Americans just “build houses.”

Supposedly, many Americans voted Donald Trump back into the presidency, in part, to protest the continuing rise in housing costs. Despite promises from both parties, housing prices continue outpacing household incomes, and the ratio of price to income is now worse than it was before the 2008 market collapse. Several pundits, including many I respect, have emerged to repeat the same mantra: let’s build more housing units.

The logic seems facially robust. Presumably, most readers learned the “supply and demand” principle in high school, that price emerges from an equilibrium of how much buyers want something, and how many units sellers have available. Therefore, if prices rise, it follows that supply is scarce—and it is. But this overlooks what forces rendered housing scarce, and what measures markets can take to counteract this scarcity.

Consider, for instance: hedge funds and other financial instruments have purchased private housing as investments. These homes nominally exist, and nominally have value. However, to work as investments, their value must constantly increase faster than the overall market, which, as we’ve seen, they do. If these funds sold their holdings, they’d flood the market, driving prices down. Therefore they must continue hoarding housing off the market.

This interpretation, however, is stacked. Many cities which create significant employment exist with ready-made limits to physical growth. New York is built mostly on a series of islands; Chicago is built on reclaimed swampland; San Francisco is built on a rocky peninsula. Even if BlackRock and other funds divested their holdings, these cities can only grow so big before hitting physical boundaries that choke their growth.

Other cities have policy-based growth limits. Many cities built on abundant flat land, like Omaha, near where I live, have urban design based on R1 zoning, the principle of favoring freestanding, detached houses on separate lots. Fully eighty percent of Omaha’s land area—and comparable amounts in similar cities like Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Tulsa—are legally restricted from building mixed-use developments or multifamily housing.

Therefore, building more houses in America’s heartland will require either changing the law, or building more urban sprawl. Despite cities having a reputation for car dependence, as Jeff Speck writes, most cars driven in the cities commute in from suburbs and R1 neighborhoods. And that’s saying nothing about the virgin prairie, swamp, or other ecologically valuable land that developers must destroy to accommodate R1 construction.

And where geography or policy don’t limit development, there’s economics. Eastern Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Gary, and Cleveland grew rapidly, infused with Marshall Plan money, following World War II. But when government money retreated, and precious supply lines moved to Asia, the cities dwindled again. These cities actually have plentiful housing, most of it rotting, because there’s no employment or other development to generate demand.

Different conditions in different cities reflect the diverss influences that cause cities to develop, or shrink. I’m reminded of James C. Scott, who analyzed means by which centralized development plans have created inequality, environmental devastation, and social collapse. These redevelopment schemes have shared an imposed quality: scholars, bureaucrats, or well-meaning but purblind revolutionaries thought they knew better than local communities, and simply issued demands.

Scott contrasts centralized planning with “local knowledge.” Old, unplanned cities, like central Bruges, Belgium, or Manhattan south of Houston Street, are so intricate and winding that only lifelong locals understand their street layouts. Yet these unplanned developments reflect regional geography, community, and economics. What seems sloppy and chaotic to the government planner, actually serves local needs to a T.

America’s federal government has a history of funding dystopian development projects. Rapid expansion in the Rust Belt, for instance, led directly to the same cities’ abandonment. Levittown-style suburban sprawl has always required transfusions of government money, only to create joyless “communities” that young residents aspire to leave. Now advocates call for “building more houses,” heedless of local need, planning regulations, or regional economy.

Well-meaning advocates, and their government allies, want to offset harsh economic conditions. But they impose one-size-fits-all policy recommendations that don’t reflect local needs. In some cities, there’s no more land for construction, while in others, new construction will create sprawl that leaves residents isolated and strands the aged or disabled. And aggressive construction, fueled by diesel, will inevitably create environmental devastation.

Creating decentralized, regionally specific solutions is time-consuming, expensive, and difficult. But cleaning up the devastation created by mass-produced central policies has already created messes we aren’t prepared to repair. We won’t fix the consequences by doubling down on the underlying problem.

Rich Men and Their Misshapen Brains

Elon Musk

Watching the eagerness with which American billionaires have rushed to pay obeisance to President-Elect Donald Trump has been a real education. Not in the sense of realizing that America’s rich are venal—that’s hardly news. But the haste they show in showering Trump’s planned inauguration with money and other resources speaks volumes to what these men want. They’re pouring million-dollar investments into an inauguration that threatens to become a coronation.

I’ve often wondered what makes men (and it’s indeed mostly men) want that kind of money. Oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have more money than they can possibly spend. And more than money: as Giblin and Doctorow write, half of Earth’s online advertising revenue flows through two companies, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook). Half of Earth’s online commercial transactions move, directly or indirectly, through Amazon or an affiliated company.

In other words, these monumentally rich oligarchs, some of whom command wealth exceeding the GDP of entire nations of the Global South, have not only money, but enough power to make medieval potentates blush. These financial superstars have become so powerful that, like real stars, their very presence bends time, space, and the value of a buck. Yet they pay homage to the political candidate who promises them ever more.

They cannot spend that kind of money. It cannot buy them any more comfort or security than they already have. Indeed, they need to employ cadres of guards, managers, and other functionaries to protect their wealth, making holding the money a financial burden on their bottom line. Paradoxically, having such money and power makes them poorer and more vulnerable. Therefore they must want something else, something non-monetary, from their investments.

Mark Zuckerberg

My mind returns to two prior authors I’ve reviewed. Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté writes that substance abuse patients choose their various addictions according to whatever traumas they suffered in childhood. Children who endured chronic physical abuse, become adults who abuse painkillers like alcohol. Maté writes that one heroin addict described the feeling of shooting up as receiving the warm hugs she never received as a child.

Business executive Joe Plumeri describes himself as a “workaholic,” whose social worth derives from his time spent working. In his memoir, Plumeri describes not only putting himself through punishing hours, but demanding his subordinates do likewise, sacrificing personal time, family, and sleep in favor of making money. Though a billionaire himself, Plumeri clocks less than one percent of Elon Musk’s wealth, too little to crack the Forbes 400 list.

The two most prominent relationships in Plumeri’s memoir are his father, and his son. In an early chapter, Plumeri describes his father showing him around the better-off neighborhoods of Trenton, New Jersey, showcasing the splendor available to those who achieve worldly success. By his own admission, Plumeri put everything else behind achieving the worldly success that, he learned early, would make his father proud.

That “everything” includes Plumeri’s relationship with his eldest son, whom Plumeri describes struggling with alcohol and drugs. Christian Plumeri destroyed himself on substances, seeking the validation and happiness that his distant, workaholic father couldn’t provide. Notably, he completely fails to notice the parallels between his own work addiction, and his son’s substance addiction. Both Plumeris wanted their father’s love, and couldn’t do enough to earn it.

Jeff Bezos

One wonders, reading these accounts, what comparable relationships men like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos lack. Musk seeks extremes of wealth and political power, arguably to find the acceptance and love he increasingly doesn’t receive from his numerous children and ex-wives. Other billionaires hoard land, build spacecraft, and otherwise perform spectacles to receive adulation from shareholders and the public.

Because deep down, I propose, they’re lonely.

These men started off rich: Zuckerberg was a Harvard legacy admission. Bezos received seed capital from his parents. Musk has tried to bury the emerald mine story, but his own family confirms it. Given the crazed, excessive lengths they’ve travelled to become even richer, it seems likely that they, like Plumeri, inherited the myth of personal worth having a dollar value. They hoard resources because, basically, they need a hug.

Consider all they acclaim they’d receive by dedicating even a portion of their wealth to improving society. They have money enough to end famine, conquer homelessness, or halt global climate change. Instead, they’re donating millions to Donald Trump’s inaugural extravaganza. Because despite everything, their brains are already adapted to loneliness, rejection, and isolation. They’ll never make friends like ordinary humans.

And that’s why peons like me will never become rich.

Horror, Romance, and the Wrong Kind of Love

H.D. Carlton, Haunting Adeline: Cat & Mouse Duet, Book 1

Adeline Reilly has just inherited her grandmother's old house, a Victorian-style manor knockoff overlooking the Washington coast. The house might be cursed; Addie certainly thinks it resembles a horror movie set, but that doesn’t discourage her from moving in and updating the interior. But somebody else has noticed Addie’s arrival. A nameless hacker, vigilante, and apparent superhuman begins stalking her, entering her house silently and with apparent impunity.

I became interested in this novel because author H.D. Carlton became a runaway bestseller without backing from a Big-Five publisher. Maybe, I thought, she tapped some unrecognized reservoir of readership the algorithm-driven mainstreamers ignored. Having read this one, I suspect that her magic must be her willingness to air Freudian linen, because I don’t recall a more bog-standard psychological tapestry recently outside an undergraduate psych textbook.

Like Carlton, Addie is an independent novelist, and therefore has remarkable time liberty. She apparently has freedom to supervise the professional restoration of Parsons Manor, while also having lunch dates with her best friend, and live author appearances. Despite her freedom, though, she has no ability to supervise her house, so her stalker has an unimpeded ability to enter, leave flowers and letters, raid her liquor cabinet, and escape unseen.

And what a stalker. He has time enough to haunt Addie’s romantic life, including torturing and humiliating her dates. But he moonlights as a vigilante, hunting a national human trafficking network. This secondary plot is tonally inconsistent with the Gothic main plot, resembling an unsold Hollywood treatment. He’s also able to follow Addie from the city to her isolated country house, commit crimes, and destroy the evidence, remaining constantly invisible.

Adeline’s support network apparently consists of two people: her mother and her best friend. Daya, her best friend, has one role: try to get Addie laid. That’s her response to everything. Excessively ambitious house restoration project? Let’s get drunk and laid. Stalker somehow entering Addie’s locked house and leaving tokens? Let’s get drunk and laid. Describing Daya as Adeline’s Freudian id is, frankly, generous.

Her mother, therefore, is her Freudian superego. She exists to warn Addie against anything risky, chaotic, or fun. She appears when necessary to provide dire, sepulchral exposition, and to urge Addie to assume more socially acceptable adult responsibilities. At one key juncture, she drives an hour to give Addie a warning she could’ve conveyed in a text message, because fundamentally, she isn’t a rounded person, she’s a narrative device.

H.D. Carlton

If we understand Addie’s supporting cast in Freudian terms, then her nameless stalker represents both Eros and Thanos. He selects Addie entirely because she’s beautiful, which he expounds in lush detail. But, without speaking to her (or reading her prose) he declares himself “addicted” to her. Then he proclaims: “All I want is to break her. Shatter her into pieces. And then arrange those pieces to fit against my own.”

Yikes.

Carlton manipulates the story to ensure that Addie’s stalker remains, for narrative purposes, blameless. Sure, he’s a violent torturer, but it’s okay, because the people he hurts are QAnon-style human traffickers. Sure, he captures and murders any man Addie attempts to hook up with, but it’s okay, because she brings home abusers and criminals who deserve being hurt. Violence winds up being protective, nurturing, even benevolent. Brutality as romantic desire.

Okay, this character is an unrefined fantasy of male domination. Some women find violence the ultimate expression of masculinity; I’m reminded of the women who sent Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, love letters during his decades of incarceration. I can only imagine the women who entertain these fantasies haven’t survived an abusive relationship, because this character isn’t sexy, nor even particularly frightening; he’s just disgusting.

Yet Addie romanticizes him, finding parallels with her great-grandmother’s juicy personal diaries. Like Addie, Genevieve Parsons had an enigmatic admirer who haunted the margins of her forested Gothic gingerbread house. We await how these two stories will converge. But until they do, Addie increasingly sees her violent stalker as a dangerous boyfriend like her great-nana’s dangerous, shadowy love. She sees both as frightening and titillating.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

This glorification of violence, as an expression of love, frightens me. Not in the good frightening way that draws audiences back to horror literature and novels, I understand that. Rather, this novel elevates violence as romantic desire, repeating the myth that, if he loves you, he’ll hurt any rivals and dominate your time. I suppose this might seem erotic and exciting, if you haven’t been through it.

The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy, Part Two

This is a re-review of a prior book. The original review appears at The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published this book in 2023, it seemed reasonable to discuss the Trump Administration in the past tense. The once and future President lost his midterm election overwhelmingly, then became the first sitting president to lose his reelection bid in nearly thirty years. He left office with the lowest approval rating in polling history. Although Trump retained a loyal following, reasonable observers and political pundits assumed history had passed its final judgment.

The forces Levitsky and Ziblatt describe have, unfortunately, become relevant again. A plurality of American voters compared Donald Trump to an accomplished, eloquent, public-spirited Woman of Color, and decided they wanted Trump back. At this writing, Americans prepare to see which of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian promises he intends to follow through on, and which will fall victim to sectarian infighting. American democracy really depends, now, on how incompetent the incoming administration actually promises to be.

Our authors describe how prior democracies shuddered and died. Their descriptions of France between the World Wars, and the anti-democratic forces that halted the legislature, seem chillingly like the swarms of angry insurgents who invaded and vandalized the Capitol Building on January 6^th, 2021. The Peronists’ inability to comprehend their electoral loss in Argentina in 1983, despite their concrete pro-worker platform, remind readers of the Democrats’ inability to comprehend their loss in November of 2024.

But it’s difficult to avoid noticing that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t delve much into the strong anti-democratic tendency in American politics. Not that it’s absent: they do mention, say, Joseph McCarthy, who would’ve gladly overturned the entire government to purge Communist influences. They excoriate the filibuster rule, which allows only one or two Senators—in a legislative house that already protects poorer, less populous—to stop debate and kill bills with just a quick email.

But America has always had an aggressive anti-democratic contingent in its electorate. Around the same time Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote this book, Rachel Maddow wrote that a number of non-profit and civic organizations took money from the German government before World War II. These groups campaigned actively to weaken America’s small-D democratic institutions, bolster White supremacist government, and join the wrong side of the looming war. As with Trump himself, most pro-Reich conspirators went unprosecuted.

Steven Levitsky (left) and Daniel Ziblatt (via Harvard University)

It’s not that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t address anti-democratictendencies preceding Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, they run out quite a laundry list. The way that, for instance, the Klan arose in direct opposition to the Reconstruction effort to enfranchise newly freed Black Americans. The way White leaders in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrew the city government and installed their loyalists, the only successful coup d’etat in American history so far. Our authors acknowledge these happened.

Rather, they treat these events as atomized, existing within their own sphere. They don’t go beyond events to draw conclusions about why this happens, why every attempt to increase American democracy consistently generates violent resistance. Whenever Americans have attempted to give People of Color the right to vote, we’ve witnessed a countervailing move to make voting harder and more exclusive. It keeps happening, because it represents something deeper and more fundamental than the event itself.

In no small part, it represents a deification of the past because it’s the past. As Jason Stanley writes, great thinkers of prior eras—including the authors of America’s Constitution—have much to teach us. But we can only learn when we regard them as askers of important questions. When past masters become too important to question, their accomplishments sacrosanct and beyond the domain of doubt, a different dynamic sets in. We ourselves become fossilized.

America’s Constitution is approaching 250 years old, and at this writing, hasn’t been amended in 32 years. It’s become an artifact, something that demands preservation simply because it’s old, not because it provides us meaningful guidance in answering today’s questions. A major contingent of American lawmaking believes we need to preserve the vision of White slaveholders in powdered wigs and knee breeches simply because that which is older is necessarily more valuable than the present.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are responsible social scientists, limiting themselves to what happened, and what they can quantify. They trust readers to draw conclusions. But the 2024 electoral results, when a plurality of Americans chose the anti-democratic Presidential candidate, demonstrate that Americans broadly can’t identify patterns and draw conclusions. Real-world evidence shows that Americans don’t need scientists, we need pop philosophers, like Tocqueville and Burke, to go beyond the evidence and draw out the deeper story.