But at least the original had something approximating efficacy in mind—votes, after all, deciding the actual outcomes of elections, which in turn direct billions of dollars towards all the precious causes rattled out by the celebrities. By contrast, the logic of Senior Gift is impenetrable. Last year, they note, over 1,000 seniors contributed. That’s, like, almost as many people as showed up to Lamont that one time to get free snacks! But you only have to donate $10—something about the price of burgers or condoms or whatever. Let’s be charitable and assume some people donate more, and put the mean contribution at $20. So Senior Gift raises $20,000.

Which, apparently, is enough to somehow fund:
— Financial aid
—Renovations to the MAC, Hemingway, and QRAC
—Making Harvard accessible to anyone regardless of their economic background
—Improving art spaces
—Improve advising programs
—The Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub
—Online registration and the course shopping tool
—Freshman seminars
—Study abroad
—Gen Ed

Let’s break that down in $20,000 chunks:

—Tuition for a single student for less than 2/3 of a year

Eh, whoops, looks like we’re already out of money. Looks like we’ll have to forego such things as 1/1500th of the cost of renovating the MAC, the salary of twenty Peer Advising Fellows, one two people studying abroad for a summer, or all the other great things that should be important to me than burgers or condoms or whatever.

But, yeah, you know, give! Have at it!

By building taller and taller buildings, the Once-ler was proving himself to be the real environmentalist.

All told, this is nothing more than a cute little nose-rub between Glaeser and the Times‘s urban identity caucus, along the lines of an article in Ebony on the dynamism of African-American culture or one in O about how taking kids to soccer practice is the bedrock of the American dream. It would be innocent fluff were it not taken seriously by a lot of people yoked into the gospel of New Urbanism.

There’s no disputing that city living, on the margin, demands less resource use than suburban or rural life. A lot of this, though, has to do with the way that cities are set up in relationship to the countryside. Farmers have to drive long distances and practice unsustainable industrial techniques because the city is far away and exacts huge commodity demands. And that’s always going to be the case given the globalized, neoliberal commodity production networks which high-density urban life dictates by its very nature. So while a single urban dweller may produce fewer emissions, the system which he props up produces a lot.

So we do need to think creatively about the way cities work in the national landscape. For the most part, though, New Urbanism is little more than a thinly-varnished attempt to backpedal on a lot of progressive urban democratization by turning the same corporate interests which created suburbs inwards and making them look different. Economically and socially, there’s not a lot of difference between Levittown and Celebration, one of the poster projects of New Urbanism. It astounds me that so many progressives have caught on with it—often, I think, because they live in cities and like to go to Starbucks and live what amounts to an upper-class bourgeois¹ life. They’ve then backfilled quantitative analysis to justify this lifestyle. I don’t begrudge them the lifestyle they lead—which at its core is more about theaters and clubs and bars and museums than it is about sustainability—but when you’re talking national policy, you need to talk about what people are actually going to do. And regardless of whether it is a good or a bad thing, urban suspicion remains a deep current of American thought that has a centuries-long history. Rather than just wishing it away, we ought to turn our planning powers to ways of making non-urban places sustainable as well.

Also, whenever I read something like this …

many environmentalists will still prefer to take their cue from Henry David Thoreau, who advocated living alone in the woods.

… I know I’m reading something by somebody who’s never actually read Thoreau.

¹ A word which, let’s not forget, means “city dweller.”

* Cf. title

Cost of printing out nine copies of this chart and mounting them with tape above the sinks in freshman common rooms: $0.50

Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844 – 1921)

I reemerge from my long Legion hibernation with this quote.  For one, because I  think it is wonderful and wise, summing up a lot of my worldview.  But two, because it gets at the heart of a matter that’s been troubling me as of late: senior thesis culture.

What is this Harvard culture that tells us a senior thesis is the be-all-end-all, the trump card over any previous commitments and a most legitimate of excuses?  Our house library is a mess of books and trash, but we seniors implore the rest of the dorm to forgive our sins for the next few weeks.  Friends (acquaintances?) have insisted they haven’t time to head out for a run together, or to go to an interesting talk, or to meet and discuss details of an upcoming spring break excursion, but insist that this will change “post March 19.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I myself am guilty of this to some degree, in recent weeks reluctantly sacrificing some other parts of my life to work on “The Big T.”  But that we as seniors feel justified in using thesis as an excuse to skip everything else in life—meetings, meals with friends, casual strolls between classes, classes themselves—must mean we don’t hold these other elements of our lives in particular regard.  We still need to eat!  We can’t  work all the time!

I guess what I really fear is that thesis crunch time exposes a more fundamentally troubling fact about Harvard:  the superficial nature of many of our commitments and relationships in this ambitious, Type-A-filled place.  Don’t get me wrong, I adore (most of) Harvard.  But I’m troubled by the culture that has emerged as of late, both for what it indicates about my own priorities and what it demonstrates about the value we have learned in this institution.  Because truly, where there is love, there is time.  And surely we love more than just our latest academic endeavors.

[The capitalist] will do the same for American and international education as he did for the meatpacking industry, the automobile industry, and the pharmaceutical industry.

So, let’s see, that would be the meatpacking industry whose employees fingers’ “might be eaten by the acid, one by one”, the automobile industry which is about to go insolvent save a massive government intervention, and the pharmaceutical industry which is at the avaricious core of our failed health-care system?

Um, ok. Sign my kids up for that!

From a column titled “Elvis Has Left The Mountain,” a headline that most meth addict home diarists can only dream of having published in the New York Times.

The Bernard Madoff scandal, of course, has only reinforced that loss of trust. His degree of betrayal — his alleged willingness to embezzle the life savings of people whom he had known his whole life — is so coldhearted that it charts new territory in human behavior.

Tom Friedman: Holocaust denier?

“Dr. Todd is a comely man to look on, and dispu’t pretty. How well he seems in spectacles! I declare, they give a grand look to a body’s face.”

“… Och! Sargeant, sure it’s a great privilege to go to a mateing where a body can sit asy, widout joomping up and down so often, as this Mr. Grant is doing the same.”

“… Not that a body cares much for’t, as there’s more houses than one to live in.”

And so on. You can find plenty of other instances using the demon-magic of Google Books to pluck them out. Why is it, though, that our language has incorporated “somebody,” “nobody,” “anybody,” and “everybody,” but not “abody”? It would be such a useful replacement for the ostentatious “one”! Witness again:

Watching Obama’s inauguration reminds one that myth and symbol are not so far from reality.

… becomes …

Watching Obama’s inauguration reminds abody that myth and symbol are not so far from reality.

Consider this post first, final, and formal notification that I will be evangelizing the use of “abody” as a commonplace, and plan to use it in my own writing without any further explanation.

A new Democratic regime can institute progressive policies, but that won’t change conservative attitudes that are still alive and well. Just as everyday volunteers convinced the nation it was time to elect Obama, they must promote acceptance of views that are currently disdained as “liberal” by many Americans. Cries of “Yes we did” make it too easy to forget the groups and causes that continue to struggle.

In short, yes, we did nothing except get our foot in the door.

First, this is eerily like a post that I was going to write on the night after the election but held off for fear of seeming like a party pooper. So congratulations to Nathaniel for once again having the guts to say the things I don’t have the courage to say (his “Reverse Elitism” being another prominent example).

In either case, Nathaniel gets it exactly right, and what this article points out reveals exactly why I have been so ambivalent about Obamaism since it started converting over from plucky idealism to rather mushy and dilute sloganeering copped from the mushy and dilute campaign of Deval Patrick. The items of the past few months which will be picked up by the magnet of history—the crowds, the Hope poster, the ‘yes we can’ chant—are all nice mementos of what is justifiably a historic event. The texture of everyday life, however, responds very slowly to the stimuli of spectacle. A very reactionary strain of conservatism still courses strongly through Americans’ political veins. Pundits all of a sudden seem to be talking about America becoming a ‘center-left’ nation. Would that this were true. We need every day to be thinking, writing, and talking about the material change that constitute a leftward shift. I want nothing more than for this to be true. But it has not happened yet.

I think Obama himself knows this better than most. He ought to be commended for diving in head-first into the day-to-day work of creating a new liberal consensus. Picking somebody other than Summers for Treasury and making a few other daring moves would move him a long way in this direction, but, so far, his effort has been admirable. Hell, I’d have taken a two-week nap if I were him.

The people who are hopped-up about ‘change’ but couldn’t even begin to tell you what they think about health-care mandates or education funding, on the other hand, need to start putting their heads together in the business of politicocultural transformation. Redemption of the past and construction of the future are processes that happen always at the knife-edge of the future. Looking at the facts of the past and saying that the work is done is bad faith.

I know of no better call to this constant commitment than the final passage of Camus’s The Plague, in which Doctor Rieux does not remember the plague which he and his allies have finally conquered, but rather keeps his sleeves rolled:

[Rieux] knew what this happy crowd did not know, but what it could have learned from books: the plague baccilus never dies nor disappears for good, that it may rest dormant for dozens of years in furniture, in furnishings, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day will come when to the misfortune or enlightenment of humanity, the plague will again bestir its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Of particular note in the initial issue is Spencer Strub’s “Shade to Shade.” As I am not a formal literary critic, there is no point in me describing it here, and, at any rate it is short enough to read quickly. So read it.

The only slight criticism I would make proceeds out of our own convictions here at the Syndicate, and that it is the description of the pamphlet as an “arts publication.” I question whether there can really be such a thing, and, if so, whether it is a desirable label. One of our axiomatic principles here is the indivisibility of the liberal arts, and a rejection of the arbitrariness with which the humane studies are cloven into ‘arts,’ ‘politics,’ ‘culture,’ ‘society,’ and the like. To parcel off the ‘arts’ in a walled kingdom is of both questionable utility and questionable ease; that is, even if one wanted to do it, I don’t think that one could.

That said, only good things can come out of more voices (and proportionally less Voices) on campus. We—both the immediate ‘we’s of this syndicate and the general ‘we’s of Harvard—are lucky to have one more.