Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  I believe that Mr. Franklin would have enjoyed the small percentage of television programming that is not garbage, much as I do. Particularly if he had taken some beer onboard, transporting himself “halfway to Concord,” for he takes a very inspiring position on the topic of leisure versus laziness. Bear witness: “Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure. . . . Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never.”

  I believe the difference in the two conditions described above, leisure and laziness, is one of intent. Franklin is instructing us to live diligently, working at our vocations to raise an income in such a way as to leave a remnant of time for more leisurely pursuits. In my own life, these pursuits can include hiking, woodworking, television, reading for pleasure, walking by the ocean with my wife, playing with our dogs, listening to records, playing my guitar, etcetera. These are all activities for which I earmark periods of time, as opposed to just randomly thinking, “Hmm, I have three hours to kill; what should I do now?”

  Conversely, I feel like laziness requires a strong inclination to passivity. I know that among my human attributes I definitely have the potential for laziness. That’s when we think, “Ugh, this bed feels so nice. I don’t want to do anything.” The trouble with this human inclination is that, as Poor Richard says, “The sleeping fox catches no poultry.” A refrain I have heard from young people my whole life, usually delivered in a plaintive whine, has been, “I’m bored! There’s nothing to do!”

  Franklin’s guidance is precisely apposite to this particular complaint, as he is counseling us to fill our time with “something useful,” which to me means that, if I know I’m going to ride a train for four hours, I bring a book. If I finish a project at the woodshop a few hours ahead of schedule, I try something new on the lathe or ride my bike to Griffith Park, whose mountainous roads are a useful workout indeed. I have learned to use foresight whenever possible to preemptively fill my time so that none shall be wasted. Sometimes I stumble in this effort, but sometimes I am successful, and I know well by now that I will go to bed much better satisfied if I have filled the day’s time with productivity instead of the diversions of a lazy person.

  Positively occupying one’s time is also a matter of health, both physical and mental. We must avoid sloth, Franklin adds, for “Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright, as Poor Richard says.” When I have sometimes indulged in sloth, I can in hindsight identify how quickly I became depressed, which I “solved” by overindulging in intoxicants, namely, weed and bourbon. I have learned that by budgeting my “tavern time” just as punctiliously as I do my work and leisure times, then the libation of my choice (single-malt Scotch these days) becomes a temperate dose of medicine against the stress of the week rather than a constant dulling agent.

  There’s a great anecdote in Franklin’s autobiography about one of his first jobs working at a London printing press as a young man. The work was incredibly physical, as I would imagine, hauling heavy trays of type to and fro, upstairs and downstairs. Franklin explains that he drank only water, as he was quite aware of the strenuousness of the exercise involved, while the other workers, the Brits, guzzled beer all day. He was able to carry one tray per hand, while the Englishmen would bear only one tray in two hands, causing them to marvel and dub him the “Water-American”! They wondered how he could appear stronger than they, drinking only water, while they consumed strong beer. Our young American explained to them that there was far more sustenance in a penny’s worth of bread than in all that beer, but they would not be convinced.

  To give you an idea of the quantity and consistency of this consumption, Franklin wrote, “My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner [lunch], a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.”

  Using my ineluctable powers of arithmetic, I have tabulated that bar tab at six pints a day. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I’m working hard at physical labor, I can handle a refreshing pint with my lunch, so long as I’m not required to perform any activities requiring precision or finesse. That’s one pint. The second pint certainly feels good going down, but then the pleasing effect of the elixir’s alcohol turns the idea of going back to work to one of misery. That’s two pints. Six sounds like a possible problem was at hand.

  The periods in my life when beer at lunch was de rigueur included my work on a blacktop crew, framing houses, and building scenery for larger Chicago theaters. All jobs as a member of a labor crew, some requiring more skill than others but as much muscle as anything else. Frequently, some of my fellow laborers would consume beer (or weed or vodka or all three) with a thirst to match Franklin’s printing-house compatriots, which I found a bit alarming. Some of them were clearly alcoholics to the point where we’d stop at the bar on the way to work at six A.M. so they could slam a double vodka and fill a cooler with Miller Lite.

  I tried to join in on this apparent good time, and on much more than one occasion. We managed to get through those years without anybody losing a finger or an arm or a life, but that’s just luck and dumb animal fortitude. It turned out that I could haul plywood and framing timber and drive nails in a perfectly acceptable fashion after a couple of one-hitters or a few beers. It was also clear that I needed to lie down in my truck and sleep for three hours immediately after getting off work. I’d find a shady spot behind a barn, open the doors for the breeze, and pass out from exhaustion.

  This seemed fun maybe the first or even the second time it happened, before I slowly discovered that my days were, on the whole, exceedingly more enjoyable if I wasn’t shitfaced while performing extreme feats of physical strength in the hot sun for eight to ten hours. I suppose this was my first lesson in moderation, when I began to work sober and then enjoy the drinking only after work so much more. Youth was an important ingredient for me in this high level of consumption, and so as my years have progressed, so has my tolerance decreased, a statistic which I find to be comforting.

  One reason I was able to identify the folly, eventually, in such a lifestyle was that it occurred to me that my coworkers had given up. They had resigned themselves to the fact that they would be merely brute laborers for the remainder of their able-bodied lives. Now, this isn’t to say that one can’t have a rewarding and admirable life pouring concrete or shingling roofs; in fact, I know a great many such tradespeople to whom I look up for doing just that. I often envy these men and women their lives of staunchly task-oriented schedules requiring only a pickup truck, a set of dependable tools, and some quality materials. I find an undeniable nobility in the men and women who build our houses and buildings and roads and bridges.

  These particular fellows, however, had thrown in the towel, reducing their aspirations in life to simple dreams of a nicer, slightly less used Camaro or maybe an extra week at the Wisconsin Dells. I suppose what I’m driving at is this: If you’re having drinks on your lunch break from work, you might be in the wrong job. Or you might be in the best job you can lay your hands on, in which case you might be neglecting the time and love you could be spending on your spouse/kids/pets. Working as an artist onstage or on-camera or making objects of wood in my shop, I flatly need every bit of sharpness and focus that I can muster. When I am lucky enough to be engaging in the work I love, the last thing I want to do is put on a buzz, which would serve only to cloud my abilities and desecrate my experience.

  Ben Franklin wrote that “when men are employ’d, they are best content’d; for on the days they worked they were good natur’d and cheerful . . . but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, . . . which put me in mind of a sea-captain, whose rule it was to keep his men constantly at work; and when his mate once told him that they had done everything, and there was nothing further to employ them about, �
�Oh,’ says he, ‘make them scour the anchor.’” To clarify, scouring the anchor of a ship is a perfectly unnecessary activity, but given the choice between that and having a workforce stand about idling, a good administrator will always set the crew to a task. You’ll see this refrain again before my book is done: Find good work to do, and get to it.

  I mentioned earlier, you may recall, having two favorite statements from Benjamin Franklin. The second of the two is not funny at all, but it is the lesson of his that moves me the most to emulation. As a young man returning from England, he wrote out a moral code for himself, which included this: “I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever.”

  Among all of Franklin’s advice, I found this instruction to be the most profound, perhaps because it is the simplest. Of course, my mother had said to me as a lad, “If you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all,” and of course that stuck with me, as did a great deal of my mother’s beautiful teaching. However, since I can be described as the duplicitous mess known as a “human mammal,” my nature will, on occasion, steer me in directions that blatantly disagree with my parents’ gentle wisdom. Often, I am able to pull out the map that my mom drew and find my way through the underbrush of my ego back to the path of decency, but having that tutelage reinforced from out of the blue, by an American Founding Father no less, about whom I was reading simply because I knew there would be some talk of farting and electricity, has been stirring.

  Like anybody, I am susceptible to insecurity or paranoia upon any given day. When I examine my professional choices, for example, good or bad, or even just a quote in a magazine or a review, I can, if I’m not careful, dive down a rabbit hole of self-doubt. What did that reporter mean by “bravely quirky”? Was I wrong to have passed on that crime teen drama? Is ursine a compliment?

  But in the end, we’re all Americans, and it’s been said that we had better hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately, or something like that. Beyond that, even, we’re all earthlings. I’m afraid that eventually we’re going to have to admit that we’re all in that together as well and that Franklin’s words hold true on a worldwide level. He knew this when he penned a letter home from Paris in 1777: “It is common observation here [Paris] that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.”

  A Parisian contemporary of Ben Franklin’s paid him this compliment: “He knew how to be impolite without being rude.” I love that distinction powerfully. To me, that’s one of the most important aspects of working as a giggle-pusher, and I know my personal technique still requires some improvement. I hereby vow to maintain this course of study so that I may one day also aspire to “Fart Proudly.”

  3

  JAMES MADISON

  Beyond masters Washington and Franklin, the list of luminaries and firebrands comprising and surrounding the Founding Fathers is loaded with characters who exhibited a substantial deal of gumption: John Jay, of course, the “hot one”; John Adams, roundly admired for his marriage to Laura Linney; Alexander Hamilton, who famously attended every meeting with his fly “accidentally” wide-open; even the influential French aristocrat Gilbert du Motier, commonly known as the Marquis de Lafayette, or “Stinky Pierre,” incessantly suggesting that heavier sauces be served with meat dishes (to the great chagrin of colonial chef Dieter Puck, ancestor to Wolfgang); and let’s not exclude Thomas “Juicy Low-Hangers” Jefferson, whom I sincerely revere as a vocal proponent of an agrarian society (not to mention everyone knows he smoked a preponderance of his own homegrown “hemp”). These are just some of the marquee players on the scorecard of our nation’s formation, but the list of qualified personages goes on at quite some length, if the main qualification is gravel. The bench is awfully deep, as it were, with shrewd thinkers and irascible orators who each brought their own individual flavor packet to this ideological melting pot. That said, it may then come as a surprise to the reader that I have chosen one of the least outwardly colorful, or “pimpin’,” Founding Fathers to round out my initial threesome: James Madison, our fourth president, who is considered the father of the Constitution. He also authored a little brochure known as the Bill of Rights.

  The primary reason I am drawn to Madison is that, while all these other great scholars and elocutionists were battling out the issues at hand, he was the one writing it all down and personally weaving all these innovative philosophies into the documents that continue to shape and protect our rights as Americans today. Most of the other valuable players were brandishing a powerful complement of charisma in the meeting halls, expressing with eloquence and volume their opinions and policies, which James Madison would then fairly weigh and curate in his writing. To my way of thinking, it was his even-keeled approach and his consummate reportage that allowed the explosive and exciting ideals of our newly hatched country to be most effectively incorporated in a documented way—that managed to take root and blossom, even while withstanding the clamorous rancor of opposing viewpoints.

  A diminutive fellow, tipping the scales at a hundred pounds and boasting a mere five feet, four inches from crown to toe, Madison brings to my mind the legendary character actor Bob Balaban, who in every role seems quietly dismissible at the get-go but then proves to carry a presence of magnitude by the time the credits roll. Lacking the height and lung power to perform respectably in a shouting match with his contemporaries, James Madison instead relied upon an unwavering work ethic and commitment to neutrality in his summations.

  When the blustering had subsided at any constitutional meeting, and the participants, heaving from exertion, (undoubtedly) leaning upon a handmade walnut tea table with meticulously carved ball-and-claw feet, regained their respective winds enough to ask, “Did anybody write that down?,” Madison was able to relieve the room by reporting that yes, he had recorded every snatch and rejoinder, and then some. His participation went so far as to resemble that of the “great and powerful Oz,” navigating machinations from behind his “curtain” for some of our government’s greatest initial dramas. For example, when George Washington was elected our nation’s first president, Madison wrote his inaugural address, as well as the House of Representatives’ congratulatory reply to Washington’s address, as well as Washington’s reply to the House’s reply! (Imagine how much less ignorant so many of the Bush boys would have appeared if they’d only had “Jimmy Madness-son” spinning the rhetoric for both sides of their presidential debates!) In much the same sensibility with which they trusted only George Washington to steer the newly launched schooner of American government, the Founding Fathers preferred only James Madison to write up both the captain’s orders and the owner’s manual.

  Our fourth president, as we like to bandy in my scholarly circle, was “hella smart.” In layman’s terms this means he was smart as shit, “as shit” being rather incongruously employed here as a compliment. (Huh. That’s not very good writing. Let’s examine: Etymologically, I am inclined to think that this rather clumsy usage can likely be traced to the much more accurate phrase “slick as shit,” an apt simile comparing a given condition, object, or person favorably to the especially slippery lubricating properties of the digestive waste products of any critter that poops, but traditionally, that of the goose, as in: “Damn, playa, them Jordans are slick as shit,” or “Ryan, come and finish your Capri Sun! And don’t run near the pool, it’s slippery as goose shit!” As our collective human intelligence continues to erode in conversation, even while the sum total of our statistical knowledge on paper increases at an alarming rate, I know that I am certainly guilty of many such verbal lob shots, so that if I want to express an extreme of really any circumstance, I am prone to use “as shit.” This blacktop is hot as shit. These jalapeño poppers are tasty as shit. Mario Lopez’s abs are ripped as shit! And his teeth? Glory be, them pearlies are white as shit. You get the picture, I imagine, since you are likely perceptive as shit. I believe I commit these errors with some fr
equency, an indiscretion I would like to correct going forward, perhaps thanks to an historical vigilance installed in me by my mother and her mother telling me not to say “ain’t” enough times that it finally stuck. I love words and I want to use them positively, so I’ll need to police myself from here on out, as my grandma Eloise is gone, and I don’t see my mom frequently enough for her to save me, which is lame as shit.)

  As I was saying, James Madison was right intelligent. He graduated from Princeton in only two years’ time, supposedly subsisting on four to five hours of sleep a night. The man was a compulsive student, first in college and then in the halls of life. He was commonly described as a nose-to-the-grindstone worker, which is another attribute of his that gets me fired up. He saw the work that needed to be done, so he rolled up his sleeves and he did it. Madison understood inherently that men and women love being divided against themselves. In the Federalist Papers, he wrote, “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” In other words, if things are relatively calm, we the people will come up with any old bullshit to squabble about, because it’s in our nature, because deep down, we’re dumb as shit. James Madison “got it” because he was sharp in the noggin, or thinkin’ bucket, and so he went on to attest: “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.” By the way, he was about thirty-seven years old when he penned these notions, which might seem more appropriate coming from a wise old sage, like maybe a colonial Dumbledore. This young warlock of a man, one of Virginia’s finest minds, was so invested in his share of the responsibilities regarding the drafting of first the Articles of Confederation, then the Constitution, and finally his full authoring of the Bill of Rights, that he risked even life and limb to see them completed in a satisfactory manner.