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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Commitee Member

Published: September 15, 2011 1 minute 6 comments

Big nate
Having proposed a new mural for the school, Big Nate is now getting a lesson on art and the real world. Nate, the lesson you are learning will follow you for life. Kind of like "Groundhog Day," only, while it keeps happening over and over, you'll keep getting older as it does. Much older much faster, in fact.

Swing Nate's actually getting a lesson on everything and the real world, starting with the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, or that cartoon that used to get photocopied and passed around in the days before the Internet, showing a swing in its various forms, depending on where it is in the bureaucracy.

(Click for a legible version, and note that the final picture has multiple exclamation points. The committee decided it was important to indicate that this was the punch line.)

Having good ideas is a very bad idea, but some of us take forever to learn this.

In Nate's case, it falls into the category of "be careful what you wish for." He volunteered to do a mural and they've accepted his idea. Sort of. Subject to a few minor adjustments.

As I understand it, the difference between William Faulkner's experience in Hollywood and Scott Fitzgerald's is that Faulkner was more aware of the fact that he wasn't there as an artist and Fitzgerald actually thought they wanted him to help them make better movies. Fitzgerald was overthinking it.

The trick is to not put anything you care very much about into the meat grinder, and that's a hard lesson.

I enjoyed writing for newspapers, but I did find it easier to write up the news stories I didn't care about, because I wasn't as invested in what came out at the other end. It didn't mean I didn't try to do a good job, but, to quote yet again another old joke, "we've established what you are; we're just haggling over the price," and, in fact, we weren't even haggling over my price anymore.

I was able to live with that reality, except when it came to stories I actually cared about, and then it was agonizing. And, truth be told, I cared about most of my work. My kids really got sick of hearing Dad throw the newspaper across the kitchen three or four mornings a week.

In fact, this story arc touches on a particular nerve for me: In second grade, we were doing a mural for Christmas. (One advantage of living in a town with a paper mill is that you get great roll ends for making murals, covering tables or decorating the gym at prom time.)

Since I had been drawing horses for several months and feeling pretty good about my growing skills, I volunteered to do the reindeer, but Mrs. Nolan gave the job to a kid who drew reindeer as boxes with sticks for legs. It was many years before I figured out that she was attempting to motivate a poor soul who not only couldn't draw reindeer but wasn't clear on the alphabet, either.

Second grade was not a meritocracy. Who knew?

Someday Nate will figure out that it isn't just the students who have to put up with committee mentality combined with a vertical power structure.  It can be disheartening for anyone — student, staff or parent — who approaches it with an F. Scott Fitzgerald attitude rather than as Faulkner.

It varies from school to school, but there are still way too many places where being on the PTA means baking cookies and agreeing with the principal. And, while things are really improving in this area, there are still too many schools where a faculty hiring committee is put in place to guess which of the candidates the administration has already decided on.

Much of school reminds me of the Officers Training Corps section of "Catch-22." Then again, much of everything reminds me of Catch-22, and this particular connection isn't just about schools: There is a big difference in any organization between having them ask for your input and having them actually want it, and woe betide anyone who doesn't instinctively see this:

'I want someone to tell me,' Lieutenant Scheisskopf beseeched them all prayerfully. 'If any of it is my fault, I want to be told.'
'He wants someone to tell him,' Clevinger said.
'He wants everyone to keep still, idiot,' Yossarian answered.
'Didn't you hear him?' Clevinger argued.
'I heard him,' Yossarian replied. 'I heard him say very loudly and very distinctly that he wants every one of us to keep our mouths shut if we know what's good for us.'
'I won't punish you,' Lieutenant Scheisskopf swore.
'He says he won't punish me,' said Clevinger.
'He'll castrate you,' said Yossarian.
'I swear I won't punish you,' said Lieutenant Scheisskopf. 'I'll be grateful to the man who tells me the truth.'
'He'll hate you,' said Yossarian. 'To his dying day he'll hate you.'

I don't know how far Lincoln Peirce plans to carry this story arc, but it is potentially a heart-breaker. And I plan to relish it!

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Comments 6

  1. I was smiling until I got to this: “…there are still too many schools where a faculty hiring committee is put in place to guess which of the candidates the administration has already decided on.”
    If my monitor had been a newspaper, I would have thrown it across the kitchen this morning. In fact, depending on how the current hiring committee I’m on turns out, I may still do so some morning not too far down the road.

  2. I noted that it was getting better because my granddaughter is on a hiring committee at her high school, and when the so-far-favorite candidate for one position kind of waltzed through her interview with the students, they reported that back to the committee as a whole and the principal literally tossed that candidate’s resume over her shoulder.
    However, her father and uncle were at a high school where the faculty interviewed three candidates, made their recommendation and the board said, “Nope! You guessed wrong! It’s this guy!” Faculty morale at that school was somewhat low — it would have been better if nobody had asked them.

  3. Riddle:
    “How do you get your drawing skills rejected from the mural project?”
    “Practice practice practice!”
    I hated school. Actually, trying to motivate the low-skills-and-confidence kid is a good thing. When our “class” wrote a song, it was a combination of the 2 star-girls’ poems, and we’d pretty much all known that’s how it would go down the minute the teacher gave the “Everybody write a poem and we’ll combine them into a song!” assignment. But a mural has enough features for a bunch of kids to truly participate, and for her to assign him something that does not penalize someone else’s skill acquired through practice. Teaching’s hard. She meant well. School bites.

  4. Careful, this way lies /The Fountainhead/.
    I think the swing cartoon is less about the hijacking of creativity and more about failing to communicate customer needs through a large organization. (That’s certainly the way it was taken as it passed around in the Large Organization I worked in for 30 years.)
    On the other hand today’s pop-corporate hero seems to be Steve Jobs, precisely because he drove the development of products that met no requirements that customers could articulate, since they didn”t know they had them until they saw the product. Creativity, not focus-group data analysis.
    Whether *this* is why Paul Krugman thinks Jobs is Esther Williams is another question:
    http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/396583/september-13-2011/paul-krugman

  5. No, no — The Fountainhead was yesterday when I was talking about eighth graders being so full of themselves for having read Camus. The difference is that kids who read Camus outgrow Camus.
    And I think Krugman misspoke and meant to say that Steve Jobs is Busby Berkeley. Esther Williams came along well after the Depression had ended.
    This would have been a more incisive discussion if they could have incorporated choirines carrying giant coins. I think that’s the kind of imagery that we need to frame this debate in a way the American people can appreciate.
    Meanwhile, I’d buy an iPad if it could do a reasonable impersonation of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

  6. “There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: /The Lord of the Rings/ and /Atlas Shrugged/. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.” – Raj Patel (possibly – the Internet provides assorted attributions)

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