James Lileks explores for National Review Online a Slate writer’s unusual suggestion about rethinking the week.
It would appear that writers for Slate wake, stretch, yawn, and think: What comfortable, familiar, harmless aspect of life can we destroy today? What means of arranging society, accumulated over the centuries, can be torn asunder by whelps hungry for novelty? Latest case: the need to rethink “the week.” Ben Schreckinger writes:
The case for the week was never airtight. It’s now weak and getting weaker.
Having never thought about “the week” needing a series of postulates and proofs, I found this line alarming. All these years we’ve accepted the week, but without sufficient evidence? Duped by Big Calendar! Year after year, we’re sold more pro-week propaganda with pictures of puppies, and we accept the week as an unalterable fact of life, when in fact it’s one of those certainties that can be redefined, must be redefined, like gender or marriage or which Dr. Who was the best. …
… Great! Let’s do it. Let’s remove the past’s dead hand from the controls. Let’s rethink the public schools. The ruinous effects of regulation. The obese VA bureaucracies that result in six-month wait times for a hemophiliac bleeding out in the ER. The notion of federal rules for school sandwich composition. The idea that cities exist to transfer money from residents to the pensions of public workers. All the century-old ideas that have turned into rusty, ossified chains, trailing behind the withered corpse of 20th-century progressivism like Marley’s cash boxes — well, the case for managerial collectivism was never airtight. It’s weak and getting weaker.
