Why the Great Resignation is the Great Reawakening, by Rip Van Winkle
The Boothbay Winter Fair is timed just right to be the harbinger of a new world order rising from the roots.
This weekend we participated in the first annual Boothbay Winter Faire on the Commons, like pagans and gypsies emerging from the mists of history, taking back the town, giving new life to a long tradition that is the milieu of the designer craftsmen movement going back to Medieval times when the first Town Fairs were filled with makers before the emergence of merchant importers.
Contemporary scholars debate whether traveling craftsmen of the Bronze Age were free men or could only exist under the yoke of powerful financiers of the elite classes, a debate that continues in contemporary times, as makers and creators share common interests in the emergent economic negotiations around the future of work. Coronavirus and climate change unrelentingly pinprick the overblown balloons of global social-political-economic social systems. The winds of change blow in many directions these days and rearrange the world order. We are in a state of rapidly moving perpetual becoming.
In the early twentieth century archaeologists considered craft-making merely as a result of economics until the 1930s when Australian archaeologist, V Gordon Childe presented his theory about the metal-smiths of the Bronze Age and their relationship to the power elite. Childe identified the role prestige goods played in the early development of craft specialization connecting the emergence of craft specialists with an itinerant metallurgist culture in prehistoric Europe. The social and political role that specialized craft production played in the structuring of prehistoric culture became a subject of intense debate.
In Rooted in Movement, Aspects of Mobility in Bronze Age Europe, an introduction published by the Jutland Archaeological Society, Constanze Rassmann quotes and contests Childe as he hypothesizes that the traveling metal smiths enjoyed a great deal of individual freedom:
“But if they were detribalized they were ipso facto liberated from the bonds of local customs and enjoyed freedom to travel and settle where they could find markets for their products and skill” (Childe 1940, 163).
Rassmann dismisses Childe’s interpretation, implicating that there is nothing to support it except for the evidence that metalsmiths traveled around Europe during the Bronze Age. Rooted in Motion (the introduction), as the title suggests, develops a theory that the craftsmen were not free agents but either attached to elites who financed the crafts productions or other social structures “rather than being socially independent, as suggested by Childe (Childe1940, 163).
Continue reading here:
Archeologists Look At Bronze Age Craft Production in a New Light
Looking beyond the economic realm and examining the sociopolitical role played by specialized craft production
by Mackenzie Andersen on Medium
The historical beginnings of economic development are within the culture of makers. That hasn’t changed, it has just been obscured by the financial sector, but without producers, there would be no financial sector, still true today, as Rip Van Winkle realizes as he wakes up from his two-hundred-year sleep. It’s not the Great Resignation, it’s the Great Reawakening. It’s a new spin on an old story that has been playing out since the beginning of human civilization. It is centralization versus interactive complexity, control versus acceptance, the command economy versus free enterprise. The voice of scholars debating is audibly clear. No!, they couldn’t have been free men operating in a free enterprise economy, they had to have been vassals of corporate control by the wealthy elite!
From the perspective of a contemporary crafter, they were probably both. It's always possible to make a trade if one has a skill. Have craft, will travel., and it has always been true that in the centrally managed society, tending toward totalitarianism, Central doesn’t tolerate the existence of freemen.
The Boothbay Winter Faire, produced by Lester Spears is an event that supports grassroots entrepreneurialism, a welcome change in this town. We have Paul Coulombe and now we have Lester Spear. Spear financed his own event. Coulombe came to town as a private financier but is moving with the wealth concentration and redistribution network these days.
The Community Navigator is another local support organization that came into being after Industrial Partnerships was enacted in Maine in 2013. The Industrial Partnerships Act further codifies public-private relationships. The Community Navigator is the local face of the public-private centrally managed corporate complex.
I believe that those that serve as an interface between the organization and the public entered the profession for the best of reasons, but the public face of many organizations must also interface with boards that are opaque to the public, who likely care mainly about money, boards in high castles, having no face to face contact with the community that the organization purportedly serves. The board pulls the strings. It is no wonder that the public faces change often. Negotiating between two different sets of interests can be very stressful.
I had to coax the Community Navigator to provide the contact information for Coulombe. I became aware that apparently independent local organizations are controlled by the hierarchical order. Wendy Wolf of the JECD voiced the corporate attitude forthrightly with the words “go get help from your own peer group”, a mindset that totally misses the connection between using public money and serving the public. One of the tendencies in public-private relationships is for each side to take on the role of the other as a matter of convenience, and so the JECD was a public-private relationship existing as a culture of shapeshifters. Similar psychology was at work within Community Navigator but expressed through action rather than word. It took many months to get the navigator to provide the Coulombe contact information so I could send one letter of introduction. I did not expect a response from Mr. Coulombe but I needed to give him half a chance before dismissing him as I did not want to judge by preconceptions and decide by foregone conclusions.
Like the defunct JECD (Joint Economic Development Council (code for spending organization) of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor), Coulombe wouldn’t give me the time of day when I approached his organization about the Museum of American Designer Craftsman. There was no response forthcoming.
The JECD spent 79000.OO of taxpayer money for a Town Plan created by New York consultants. The plan recommended museums, promoting local history, and emphasizing what is unique about our region.
I made a presentation to the JECD and Mr. Coulombe about the advantages of a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen for the region as a complement to the other major institutions in the area, conjuring up an image of the museum situated at the Commons. which hosts craft fairs and farmers’ markets.
Neither gave an iota of acknowledgment that I had presented them with an economic development concept, or for that matter that I had presented anything at all. W. Wolf, speaking for the JECD, told me that the JECD couldn't do anything to help individual businesses leading me to believe that so accustomed was she to inhabiting a world of shapeshifters that she was not able to distinguish between Andersen Design, the private enterprise, and a museum, structured at that time as a fiscally sponsored non-profit project of Fractured Atlas. Wolf told me to go get help from my own peer group, code for I was not wealthy enough to be in her peer group, as she was busy spending my taxpayer dollars on advertising for Boothbay Harbor businesses during Gardens Aglow, oblivious to the fact that when you hold a public position financed by the public’s money that you are expected to serve the whole community, not just your personal clique and to the fact that the community to which she was so generously donating public funds for advertising, is composed of individual businesses.
This did not surprise me. Small businesses share the cause of the Great Resignation, aka the Great Reawakening, we are just as tired of the hierarchal so-called economic development grid that treats small businesses with a different set of rules than large businesses, as those working for the large businesses are tired of the psychological environment of the hierarchical corporate order with its extreme divide in the way that the executive and workforce classes are compensated.
At least I do not have to deal with the hierarchy daily. Extrapolating that thought I can totally understand why the Great Resignation movement is so strong and does not appear to be losing any steam.
Some say that the workers will be forced to return to the hold of the corporate grid because they will need the income but with the new corona variant looming, that is even less likely to happen than it already was. Instead, it is time to do the work of reimagining our world without central management yoking the people to its will. What will it be?
Lester Spear is not a part of the wealth concentration complex. Spear is financing the Winter Faire on his own dime. It is quite remarkable. I want to interview him and find out what motivates him. Spear is like an artist whose medium is economic development. He goes above and beyond average expectations, financing additional Christmas lights, an ATM. outdoor heaters. wooden sheds and security, and more. Spear contracted with the Japanese to create a unique and wonderful neon sign for the Winter Faire and placed it in the middle of the Commons. A visitor to our booth commented on how classy the event is. Yes, it is. Did I, mention that Spear also has the Kettle Corn booth that offers out-of-this-world homemade hot chocolate?
Hours of the Winter Faire are 4-8ish on Thursday and Friday and noon to 8ish on Saturday and Sunday up to the New Year.
Last weekend Saturday and Sunday was very slow but the daylight is a good time to stop by and see our booth filled with mostly vintage work, cards. prints and paintings so please stop by and spread the word.
While I was sitting in the booth on a very slow Sunday I had the opportunity to read many stories by knowledgeable content creators. I am not accustomed to reading on the phone. The screen is very small. I have not yet found my way around it and so I have no idea how I arrived at the place on Medium where every story was fascinating and relevant. Perhaps If I learn to sync my phone and my PC, I will find the stories I saved that day.
A news story had a simple title, something like “The Failed State”. The story wove many current events together in such a way that one could see the forest through the trees, not recommended for someone suffering from depression. We live in interesting and dangerous times.
I read Dave Troy’s latest Situation Report that introduced a piece by Monique Camarra, that is very informative about Putin’s aggressive military preparations that have the West wondering if Putin is preparing for a real invasion of Ukraine or is it only a show.
A story about Canada’s summer of intense heat and heavy rains that knocked out a significant portion of Canadian product delivery capacity enlightens why we see so many disruptions in product availability locally.
Stories on Frederick Douglass are really important in today’s social dialogue. Here and Here are two excellent ones.
These stories paint a view of what is occurring around the globe, important to be aware of since it affects us all but most of us have only a local point of power, as interactive as the elusive butterfly that flaps its wings and has an unpredictable far-reaching effect.
I read pieces by Michael Langford, a woodworking artisan who prefers to use hand tools, who says “What I wanted to do was build for my peers, the folks who inevitably turned the mill that ground the grain. Those were the people in need of decent housing, the so-called American Dream that appeared to be moving further and further out of reach. How to bring it back?”, resonating with the founding philosophy of Andersen Design, “to create a handcrafted product affordable to the middle class”.
I read a story written so well that I was fully engaged in the mundane acts of daily chores that the writer used to evade writing.
Last but not least, the title of this story by Lucy Socha may lead those unfamiliar with this talented author to believe it is an X-rated story but it is an utterly charming story that you can read to the delight of your kids.
I took a journey around the world and back to the local world.
Small matters.
At the local level, people are just saying no to the corporate yoke of control. If a critical mass of the population says no to large-scale central management of our lives, the next step is to develop new small-scale solutions and square them. While each individual may not see themselves as a significant cultural influence due to the scale that they chose to engage, a critical mass of small choices makes a significant cultural change. We do not need corporate overlords to provide us time and space for working teams. We can do that ourselves!
Suddenly in the last week, a new more contagious coronavirus string has emerged in South Africa where only 23% of the population is vaccinated. The virus continues to deliver the message to humanity that we are all in this together, rich and poor nations alike. Change is not an option so let’s do it!