United States harmed by death of the ‘job well done’

The Foreign Exchange: Replace pro bands with student ones

It's old news that the Student Activities Funding Committee (SAFC) is hurting for money: The WBOR concert has been canceled for somewhat dubious reasons and clubs on the whole are having their budgets slashed. Clubs are responding by inflating requests for funding, creating a vicious cycle that will only result in the poor allocation of money. And yet, the Entertainment Board (E-Board) is still bringing three acts to Ivies. Granted, it's too late for any of this to be changed, but clubs have been hurting for funds since before the beginning of the year. Considering the huge wellspring of musical talent at Bowdoin, it seems ridiculous that we should use so much money to bring in three artists when we could make use of local talent, thus saving money and building interest in local bands.

The Foreign Exchange: Town politics should learn from student governments

Recalling the political fervor surrounding the gay-marriage issue last autumn, and with no desire to wait in a long line again this year, I requested that a Brunswick absentee ballot be sent to my Smith Union box early this year. Because I did not grow up in Maine, some would argue that it's undemocratic for me to send in my ballot to the town clerk. Perhaps they have a point, since it's true that I won't be paying taxes in Maine in the foreseeable future. Yet at the end of the day, the basic reason we have a republic—and that is what we have, democratic pretensions aside—is to the let the people decide who makes decisions on their behalf. However we define "the people," it is still the decision of whom to elect that matters.

The Foreign Exchange

United States harmed by death of the ‘job well done’

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Benjamin Ziomek

Columnist

September 24, 2010

Friends, take a moment to look around you. Scrutinize your surroundings: the buildings, the objects, and most importantly, the people. In almost every case, you will see evidence of a scourge that, like some Gothic horror, is gradually spreading its unsightly tendrils across America, turning the landscape bleak and gray. It has been growing worse over time, and seems to have quietly infiltrated most of the once-great cities that adorn this continent, escaping the notice of all but a few. I do not speak of unemployment, and the problem is not limited to the hate-filled miasma that oozes from television and radio speakers of late. While such phenomena feed the blight, and are in turn fed by it, they are distinct entities. The horror, of course, is the toxic indifference that has besieged the nation for far too long, wilting the country's confidence and trust in the power of a job well done.

The plague of cookie-cutter blockbusters and prefabricated retail outlets is not just a symptom of aesthetic regression, but a window into the death of the well-done task. The off-the-shelf, just-good-enough mentality that has replaced pride in one's work is culpable for many of the ills of our time. "One Size Fits All" is the modern mantra, one that is echoed in battle cries from "Deregulation!" and "Stimulate!" to "Financial Innovation!" and "Always Low Prices(r)." In the Great Depression, aesthetics were reborn from the ashes, plans laid to not just recover, but to do so in style, through organizations such as the Federal Art Project. These days, in the depths of our pre-fabricated, easy-iron recession, we get a failed attempt to fund shovel-ready projects so that pickup trucks can speed to the nearest mall quicker.

In the Great Depression, the last time there was such an economic drawback, the government embarked on a bold plan to revitalize a nation. But don't take this to mean that I'm asking for an identical response; I will be the first to admit that a new New Deal isn't what we need. What we lack isn't merely government effort or intervention, but a general lack of engagement. Examine the trappings of the Roosevelt era and contrast them to our own. The 1930s gave us fireside chats: a president who explained exactly what was wrong and what he was going to do about it. In doing so, he asked an avidly listening public to engage in the reconstruction of society.

Today, a quick glance at the news will betray how pitiful such efforts have become. Instead of critical engagement, we have blind rallies where emotion and quasi-religious fervor blossom into asinine hatred. The calm, crackling contemplation of radio airwaves has been replaced by supersaturated high definition television. The faux tears on ideologues' faces are broadcast to the world. The job well done, the pedagogical aspects of leading, have been replaced by get-rich-quick promises.

Don't mistake this sentiment for the foolish blathering of a neo-Luddite. Technology and progress are not the culprits, but the saviors. Text messaging is no more to blame for the lack of detail in discourse than the machine gun is for the atrocities of World War II. The new is not to be feared, but neither is the old to be thrown out simply because it is last year's model. We need to look behind us to truly move forward, but not with classical conservative blinders. The past has a lot to teach us, but the gift of the present is that we can pick and choose what we revive from it. The honored work ethic of the Greatest Generation is something we could start with, if we can somehow fit it into our busy schedules.

Sitting here at Bowdoin, we seem isolated from it all. Political news hardly seems to impinge upon our lives, and our professors enforce strong work ethic. We work hard to stay on top of our classes and our activities; certainly we epitomize what goodness there is left? Perhaps.

But before you impatiently move on to the next article, consider the thoughtfulness that we put into all of our work at Bowdoin. After all, in the words of Hemingway, "easy writing makes hard reading." Doing things well takes time and effort, and as anyone who has turned in a paper knows, writing well takes even more. What does it mean for the now that we hardly have time to live in it? As someone taking five classes, I know all too well how time can slip away and how attractive the allure of the shoddy, unimaginative essay can become.

So, what to do? We cannot hope to defeat the scourge by ourselves. But we can try, and our own actions will decide whether we contribute to a future that returns to hard-working ethics, or one that continues its decline to the territory of the easy way out. The problems of the future are too large to overcome with the ennui that infests the now, and who really wants a "One Size Fits All" life anyway?

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