Makers of Things

Woody Guthrie would surely have been pleased with this line from President Obama’s inaugural speech yesterday:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given.  It must be earned.  Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less.  It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.  Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

 

How true, though that common sense history has been largely ignored in the economic policies that have existed throughout most of my adult life, a reality articulated well by the union boss in season two of The Wire:

 

You know what the trouble is…? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.

 

Indeed. Remind me again how that’s worked out.

 

So let’s invest in making things in America, green things, and restore a measure of prosperity to the many, rather than the pick-pocketing few.

 

More Real Than Real

The Times today has an impressive obituary of Andrew Wyeth, who died yesterday in Pennsylvania at age 91.

 

His work has always hit me in the existential gut and seems to capture my childhood ennui growing up in the rural Midwest, feelings I can’t easily articulate but recognize when I see them on his canvas.

 

Of his work, Wyeth said:

 

“Let’s be sensible about this. I put a lot of things into my work which are very personal to me. So how can the public feel these things? I think most people get to my work through the back door. They’re attracted by the realism and they sense the emotion and the abstraction — and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.”

 

For me, that “eventually” has always been immediately and I feel many must get to his work like that, right through the front door, which he seems to have left so invitingly open.

 

RIP Andrew Wyeth.

 

[And PS to MoMA: please find a better place for Christina’s World, than the cramped exit to the fourth floor gallery. It’s an inhospitable place to appreciate such a profound work.]