The Comeback Kid’s Comeback Kid

OK, what did you expect? James Carville, the political Yoda, CNN talking head and oddball nonpareil, did not come here to depress us. That’s not how you make it on the lecture circuit. That’s not how you earn the nickname the “Ragin’ Cajun.”

Carville, specifically addressing students in the UWT crowd last week — but hitting home with non-students too, this writer included — spoke a lot about failure. About failure and overcoming it.

“You are not going to succeed unless you’re willing to risk and sometimes accept failure!” he intoned.

Just look at Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, according to Carville, is both the biggest success and the greatest failure in U.S. history. (I’d say Steve Martin, but why split hairs?)  No leader has lost more races or battles; yet, none has won more momentous victories or garnered more accolades.  His record, depending on how you view it, can make W. look like a genius and FDR an underachiever.

When you get knocked down, stand up — that was Carville’s refrain. If you stand once more than you hit your can — the way Lincoln finally did — you win.

What Carville largely left out was his own romance with failure. Carville, who abandoned a career in law to eventually become a political consultant, lost his first two campaigns. At age 41 he was desperate for work, knocking on doors in Washington, D.C. 
The doors weren’t opening.

He was down to his last $36 and didn’t even have a credit card.

“I was standing on Massachusetts Avenue — I can show you the exact spot — holding my garment bag in a hard rain when the strap broke and everything I owned fell into a mud puddle. I sat down and started to cry,” he recalled in Esquire magazine.

But he stood up. In 1986, he guided Robert Casey to an improbable victory in the Pennsylvania governor’s race. By 1991 he was managing the presidential bid of a dark horse candidate named William Jefferson Clinton.

Collapse of the Coop

Carville is a model free-range worker. “What’s a free-range worker?” you ask. A free-range worker, as defined by me (free-range eight years running), is anyone unconventionally employed: freelancers, contractors, temps, consultants, creatives, and entrepreneurs. Carville was smart; he was tough; he survived, and he succeeded. And to hear him tell it, so can you.

Free-range, nontraditional workers comprise a third of the U.S. workforce, according to a recent study by the Human Capital Institute, a human resources think tank. And that number is growing at five times the rate of traditional employment. Newsflash: Workers are being dumped like     Morgan Stanley stock, and fewer companies are hiring. Hiring firms are offering fewer and fewer permanent jobs. Hiring independent contractors and short-term temps as opposed to full-time payroll employees allows companies to save on overhead while maintaining a flexible, adaptable workforce.

Free-range workers enjoy more flexibility too, and many like the sense of ownership working for oneself provides. But they also may face more challenges than their clock-punching counterparts. While they often can choose their hours and work from home and take Fridays off and drink before lunch (Did I say that out loud?), they also may lack health care and retirement plans, not to mention a regular paycheck.

As the U.S. workforce moves out of the coop and onto the open range, the nation struggles to accommodate this shift. Let’s face it, the 40-hour-per-week, 40-years-till-Winnebago, company man days are mostly over, but the government seems oblivious. The biggest issue by far is health care, which as a nation we depend on employers to bankroll. It’s become nearly impossible for an individual to afford, or even find, coverage on his own. And the free-range worker, the very backbone of the new economy, is left reading Time in the urgent care lounge and putting the tab on his VISA.

But enough on that. That’s an article, a book, all its own. I’ll just say this: write to your fully insured legislators, governor and president and complain. Stand up.

Born to Range

Derek Young is not complaining when I meet him at Maxwell’s for an afternoon drink. He looks exceedingly content, in fact, sipping a martini at a back table in the shadows of four o’ clock. This is why he left a stable, good-paying gig at REI to try his luck on the range — for the freedom. The freedom to push his potential to its fullest. The freedom to step out on a warm spring Friday. The freedom to have a drink and a laugh while the cubicle droves watch the clock.

Many of you kind readers know Young, or at the very least his byline. The founder of Exit 133, the super-popular all-Tacoma blog, is a civic institution. Whether it’s entertainment, politics or urban planning, chances are Young is somehow involved, either making the news or writing it. When I walk into the Carville press conference, who do you suppose is in the front row with his hand raised? You guessed it: Young. And when his phone beckons at Maxwell’s, Young looks at the screen amused. “Ron Sims now follows me on Twitter,” he announces.

While working at REI, Young was always doing something on the side. Gradually, “The side companies eclipsed the job.”  He couldn’t keep doing both. A self-described entrepreneur at heart, he did the only reasonable thing. He flew the coop.

“I had to get rid of something,” he explains. “So I got rid of the income.”

His advice to someone considering the same (or fearing the worst) is to get your ducks in a row; pull it together financially and mentally before waddling away from the farm. And then it’s pretty simple: “If you don’t like what you’re doing, go do something else.”
In addition to Exit 133, Young is part-owner of the IT consulting firm Seasonal View as well as Suite 133, a co-working space in downtown Tacoma designed for free-range workers. While some free-range workers like to stay in their jammies and stab at the laptop on the couch, Young knows that for many getting dressed, getting out and being around others is key. Suite 133 provides the place and the people for a fee far lower than rent on an office.

“You’re going to see much more of this contract-working, job-to-job lifestyle,” Young says. And, I would venture, more related businesses like Suite 133.

Daughter of the Evolution

While Carville and Young actively chose the free-range lifestyle, local polymath Angela Jossy was chosen. And no one embodies Carville’s “stand up” mantra quite like she.

A few months back, a post on the TacomaArts Listserv caught my eye. A woman was offering her services as an artist, designer, writer, singer, songwriter, PR specialist, and events planner for $100 a day. How intriguing! How inspiring! As the newscasts quaked with gloom and doom, this woman was going pioneer. Right here in the digital age!

Angela Jossy.   

A few weeks, or perhaps months, later (it’s easy to lose track of time on the range), I came across another post, this one with the subject: “Does this exist in Tacoma?” Four women and their children were searching for a place where they could live, make art and sell their wares — maybe teach and host performances too. How intriguing! How inspiring!

Angela Jossy.

Jossy, you might recall, was the associate editor of the Weekly Volcano until laid off in February 2008. (The parting was amicable, and she remains close to the paper today.) She loved the job and hated to lose it; still, getting laid off was not all bad. “I felt like a bird let out of a cage,” she tells me over the phone.

“The artistic brain tends to not like the nine-to-five,” says Jossy. Out on the range, nine-to-five free, she could put her talents and wits to the test. The single mother mined her Rolodex and went online, using e-mail, TacomaArts, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter to network, market and hunt for jobs. She now does contract work much of the year — including directing local events such as Winterfest, Glass Roots and Point Defiance Music Fest — and fills in the gaps with her hundred-buck crusade. 
 
And she might soon realize her dream of a live-in commercial space. She and artist-friend Desiree Flerchinger are working toward leasing just such a space near the Dome.
Asked if she’d want a traditional job after a year outside on the range, she says sure. But only if it’s part time. Really part time. Like maybe two days a week.

Only if the cage is left open.

Happy Trails

Finally, I give you Sean Alexander. Because there are free rangers, and there are free rangers. Dude makes Carville look like some tool from The Office. 

I spoke with the Helm co-owner recently about the intrepid gallery’s imminent demise. Smoking Pall Malls on the sidewalk out front, he said he’ll turn off the lights regret free. He and partner Peter Lynn never gave in, never sold out, never abandoned their “100-percent punk” ethic. Galleries that compromise breed artists that compromise, according to Alexander. The Helm let artists do what they wanted, commercial concerns be damned. And the gallery turned down money from the car company Scion even though it was desperately broke, because it would have had to pimp Scion’s shit on Helm promotions. Because who wants the free range cluttered with billboards?

So what’s next? Well, stand up. The Squeak and Squawk music festival, which the Helm co-presented along with the New Frontier Lounge last October, will live another year, perhaps morphing into a house crawl. Alexander’s planning an artists’ co-op too on his mom’s place out in Longbranch. He envisions vegetable gardens, work and living space, an ever-evolving unplanned sculpture and, if he can pull it off, an all-glass, gallery-like enclosure in a field, right out there on the range. 

One can’t help thinking of it as a coop. A transparent, pervious, miniature coop — part parody, part elegy — marooned in the realm of pure possibility.