I’m a Little Slow

I love Michelle Obama, but I recognize that her ordering a vegetable garden for the White House lawn is not a progressive move. In fact, it is almost so safe as to make me suspect it is insincere. SLOW FOOD. Yeah, I get it. Americans want to eat food made from locally grown ingredients. We want our houses built with locally grown and reclaimed materials as much as possible. We want our clothes, well, perhaps we haven’t gotten that far yet. We will know we have gotten that far when we favor clothing from local manufacturers and designers—or rather, since we already do favor them, when they can find a way to produce affordable clothes.
But many communities have been toying with the whole general SLOW MONEY thing for over a decade now. By issuing local currency, for example, a community can slow the egress of its resources. Imagine the practice of businesses honoring the coupons of their competitors extended across industries. Imagine “store credit only” applied to an entire community. Shop at the bodega instead of driving out to the big box in Jersey. But even on a larger market scale, slow money suggests we invest in long term, slow dividend stocks. Still I think we favor the local twist on our slow forms of exchange.
I have been trying to convince my wife, who is a financial planner, that microfinancing is the only ethical form of banking. It’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” year round. Since the economy has turned everyone into entrepreneurs, instead of hedge funds and corporate shell games we should be investing in the skills, talents and services of our neighbors. This requires the observance of what I like to call the SLOW NEIGHBOR movement. Imagine a mafia don whose influence is based solely on his or her ability to mediate disputes, introduce potential mates, and to connect people with complementary resources. Disputes between communities would be battled out using a few square feet of cardboard and a boom box, representatives from each group demonstrating the moral superiority of their arguments by spinning on their heads.
In our homes, of course, we must practice SLOW LOVE. I’m not making this one up. In March, the Times reported on the “One Taste Urban Retreat Center” in San Francisco, a sort of collective that “places a near exclusive emphasis on women’s pleasure.” They practice what the founder of the center calls “slow sex,” which is entirely centered on physical pleasure to the exclusion of romance, foreplay and pillow talk. Arguably, however, the slow love movement is more accurately represented by Prince’s eponymously titled song and focuses on shared, or rather, distributed pleasure—something more decadent yet nonetheless local.

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