The word is "crafter". At first I was thinking of "craftsman", which is the more familiar usage, but that's too gender specific. My dictionary says that the female version is "craftswoman" and the gender neutral version is "craftsperson". Both of those sounded too politically correct for my taste, so I kept looking. There are several definitions of "craft", and they all seem to involve some kind of skill. As a verb, it means "to make or produce with care, skill, or ingenuity", and a person who does that sort of thing is called a "crafter". I like it because it neatly nullifies the gender issue without making a public spectacle of itself.
There are also several definitions for "art", and one of them is synonymous with "craft", but I don't think an artist and a crafter are exactly the same thing. The difference is largely subjective. If you call a crafter an artist, he will likely take it as a compliment but, if you call an artist a crafter, not so much. Sometimes it's a fine line between arts and crafts, which is why events that display and sell such things are usually called "arts and craft shows". There is at least one show in our region, however, that is reserved for arts only, no crafts allowed. What they say is the difference is that a craft is something that can be put to a practical purpose, while art is something you just hang on the wall and look at, or words to that effect. If we buy into that, it would seem that the difference between you and I is that you are an artist, while I am a crafter. An artist paints a picture of a house, while a crafter paints a house. Truth be known, house painting is not a craft of which I am particularly fond, but that's not the point.
Be that as it may, I think we can agree that both artists and crafters fall into the category of cruisers. When either of them is working on a project, they might have some notion of how their efforts fit into the grand scheme of things, but their primary focus in on the task at hand. That's what I meant by "the job comes first". Of course, if an emergency arises, we will drop what we're doing and attend to it. Other than that, we all have our priorities. Sometimes it's better to leave a project and do something else for awhile than to keep slogging through it till it's done, which is a judgment call. Some projects will never be done anyway, at least not in our lifetimes, but that doesn't mean we can't keep working on them, however intermittently, till someone pulls the plug on us.
When you think about it, talking and writing can be considered crafts unto themselves so, when we sit here discussing matters of deep political or philosophical import, we are still crafters. If we thought for a moment that any of our permutations were going to result in mankind actually being saved from its own folly, we might be considered questers or warriors. Meanwhile, we're just "shootin' the shit", as we used to say in the army.
World War II was the last of the old fashioned wars, the ones that had a beginning, a middle part, and an end. Since then, each conflict seems to be just another chapter in a continuing saga, like the soap operas on TV. Nobody in his right mind would enlist in a war that had no foreseeable conclusion. Even a career soldier does not expect his career to be one long continuous battle. With troops stationed all over he world, and some assignments more desirable that others, it makes sense to rotate people through them on some kind of regular basis. I could believe that the whole thing was deliberately contrived to insure that we would never actually win a war again, but that would be just paranoid.
I remember registering for the draft. I had to hitch hike about 80 miles and, since traffic was almost non existent in Alaska in those days, it took me the better part of the day to get there. I decided that you needed your own car to live in Alaska, so I bought an old clunker and drove it back to the lodge in an hour and a half. Big Red, the lady who registered me for the draft, also handled the transfer of title and plates. She was also ran a store and a post office, and I later found out that she was the coroner. Big Red was an interesting woman, but I think I've told you about her before.
No comments:
Post a Comment