American craftsmanship threatened by mindless consumerism

The "gurus" who debate our economic future have most of the puzzle right except for one thing -- America is full up and doesn't need "more." Our closets bulge with clothing, our garages are stuffed, and one in ten American homes has rented a storage unit. Friends visiting from Oslo, Norway, commented with the height of the automotive crisis upon us: "You have too many cars already."

We are stuffed with stuff -- derivative of "stuffa," that old Italian word meaning a cheap cotton cloth. We do need more cloth, but well-made fabric that gives pride to the owner and the weaver.

The economic gurus want the machines to produce ever more, when the real answer lies not in shutting the machines off, but in making better products. The government's response is to train more workers, when the real need is also to train better customers who buy the basics of food, fiber and shelter, to only accept the very best and in so doing build and share in the pride of their nation.

Let's start with shelter. I deliberately chose the life of a craftsman back in the 1960s when I received my B.S. in Rhetoric from the University of Wisconsin. It is a road that has allowed me to come to understand and master many of the building trades and more importantly what has happened to them as they have been steadily dismissed and degraded by the Industrial Revolution -- a revolution that inserted the "front office" between the craftsman and the customer.

We have 24 million lined up unemployed, many from that front office, who for the most part have no concept of how to produce the basics of life. This is not the future I want to leave my children and I have fought against it now for 45 years. I have not gained, nor sought riches beyond the skills I hold in my hands and the delight I grasp with my eyes. Not one Wall Street porker will be buried with his riches. It will only be his "creations" that are left behind that will remain or be carted off to the village midden.

The charge economic gurus have accepted goes beyond our nation's financial health; it goes to the very nature of what we wish our society to become. We need to create better things, not just more things.

Why is it that Germany can sell vastly superior wood-working tools by the boatload in the United States? It's their quality. The same is true of German autos and many other products that leave ol' Jim Bob's load of junk unsold in the back of his pick-up. If you want to close the trade deficit, make things people want to buy. And at the same time educate the consumer here and abroad as connoisseurs of the possibilities at hand.

Some new schools have accepted the challenge. In Charleston, the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) has taken on the challenge as have other schools such as the North Bennet Street School in Boston. ACBA is the first in the nation to offer four-year bachelor's degrees in blacksmithing, timber framing, carpentry, plastering, stone work and masonry.

It's new and has birthing pains. It stumbles on trembling legs and it has many young people who have placed their trust in ACBA's hands. But saying all this, one cannot say it is not alive. As a nation we are its parents charged with bringing this child to adulthood. Nobody can claim children will raise themselves, or that the task of this parenthood will be painless.

It is our task to plant the seed of a vibrant visual future this country so badly needs and to say of the Industrial Revolution, we reserve these things to ourselves because they are basic to the life of our society. No machine can duplicate them.

Over two centuries ago men from 13 colonies pledged their very being to bring forth a nation unique to the world. First, we cleared this land of its vast forests and prairies, and then we went on to pollute its air and finally to set aside the ageless skills settlers brought with them -- settlers who built beautiful cities and farmsteads. Are we, at the end of this quest for American greatness, going to set aside its very citizens and watch them slip into deeper economic and visual servitude? There must be more to the American Dream than the visual nightmare that engulfs our entire country.

None of us would be poorer if we were to give away our entire fortunes. There will be the day when we stand proud, perhaps in tatters, but proud of the birth we attended, and this will be long remembered as our legacy to this nation, and the economic puzzle that confuses us.

Find a place to help, not by buying more, but by giving hope to those who can create beautiful things we can all be proud of.

Richard O. Byrne

Fayette Street

Staunton, Va.