Self Publishing - Part 1 - Selection

Like some 30,000 other people a year, I recently decided it was time to do more than write a book. It was time to be published.

Since I’m no longer affiliated with an academic institution and its hierarchy of snobberies that pass for tenure requirements, I didn’t care if it was an act of vanity. I soon discovered there’s a more dignified name these days: publishing on demand.

I noticed in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books that several of the major electronic publishers listed books in the small press advertisement. The books they selected, or, more likely the ones whose authors paid for marketing services, tended to be books I would actually want to read.

Something is obviously wrong with the publishing industry if the independents are more interesting than the commercial and the academic. We can all make educated guesses about the influence of conglomerate ownerships and books treated as cost centers. The internet, or more specifically computers, have reintroduced the diversity that existed in the past.

When I began, I wanted to know which company to use, and, more particularly, if any, or the industry as a whole, were a scam. I didn’t find much useful information on the internet. Since there were no reports from states’ attorneys general, I assumed the industry was legitimate. A friend gave me a writer’s magazine, but its article was promotion. It would never name names lest it offend potential advertisers.

I later realized these bastions of consumer protection couldn’t work. When I got angry at my publisher for its multiple near breaches of contract, I realized the cost to sue would be greater than the cost of the book. One appeal of the publishers on demand is their affordability, which means they attract customers who don’t have resources to fight back. The absence of legal actions means nothing.

When I was looking, I couldn’t find any comparisons on the web. I’ve since heard Mark Levine has published one that’s available for a small price. His focus is the legal contract and rights the author retains to his or her manuscript. Many web commentators made the same point: avoid any publisher who makes any proprietary claims to your work. You want to be able to change publishers quickly if you happen to be successful.

A year ago, only Morris Rosenthal made any recommendations for free. He lumped all the companies together, and said it didn’t matter which you selected because they all used the same technology. They made their profit from bogus services, and the main criteria should be price. He suggested their biggest snare was your Cinderella dream that someone would do what a commercial publisher had not, discover you were the next best seller or Nobel prize winner.

He is technically correct. But, it is a service you are buying, not a generic object in a plain brown wrapper. And there are very real differences in what you get.

The way to begin, at least for me, is to define what you need and what you expect. One publisher required a copy of the manuscript before it accepted it. While it suggested it was reading it, its main concern was eliminating pornography, libel and books that didn’t have enough sales potential. These included children’s picture books, religious testimonials, and some kinds of fiction. Some publishers don’t do poetry or cookbooks because of difficulties with formatting.

Even though I had jettisoned prejudices against vanity presses, I found I still cared about the company I kept, and thought I would be more comfortable with a publisher that was a little discriminating in what it accepted. I didn’t much want to show up next to a porn sight in an alphabetical list of authors, although it might increase my sales.

Other writers are interested in royalties and selling prices. There are differences between companies, but with a typical company, you need to sell at least 100 books to break even on a $500 investment in a 250 page book sold through the publisher’s website. It’s 200 books if you sell through other outlets, like bookstores.

Lest that sound easy, Lee Goldberg quotes some Publisher’s Weekly numbers that less than half a percent of the books put out by the largest self-publisher sells 500 copies in a year. My initial investment translated into 300 books sold through both kinds of outlets. Add-on costs took that to 450 books before I even had something to hawk.

I didn’t expect to break even on the project, and so did not worry about who had the best or most efficient royalty effort. I simply assumed picking a larger company might be a guarantee against the rapaciousness found in the music industry.

I wanted the book to have enough respectability to be acceptable to town librarians, a group I considered to be discerning about quality. That meant it had to have the attributes of a commercial book., an ISBN number, a copyright, and Library of Congress citation.

Everyone offers the ISBN, along with on-line availability through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders in a modestly priced package. They profit on your sales, and so they want to make sure it can be purchased. Cheaper options exist and are ideal for family, club or community projects.

The other items I valued were options, and not offered by everyone. One publisher said it didn’t bother with the copyright office or Library of Congress because you could do it yourself and gave web site addresses.

It’s true you can do the copyright yourself. The copyright office tells you the basic cost is two copies of your book plus a fee. I figured that came to about $100 for my book, if I did it myself. Anything in the option price above that was overhead and profit. If it was not exorbitant, I was willing to pay for the convenience.

The Library of Congress web site refers only to submissions by a publisher. Further it says that while it will provide a pre-publication control number for any submitted book, it will not consider it for inclusion in the collection and catalog card unless it’s a hardcover. That requirement narrowed my options to publishers who offered both the LC registration and a hardcover option.

My next decision was based on what was required to submit a book. I called or wrote to different publishers for specific information about formats. Some refused to send information without repeated requests; some sent advertising and not technical specifications. I decided how they responded to my questions was probably a useful indicator of the service I would receive and eliminated some more companies from my list.

I subsequently realized this is the single most important element in satisfaction with the publisher. I did not have a single customer service rep who answered email, and when I coerced them to answer, found none could implement my sanctioned requests with the production department.

If you don’t like the response from the sales person who handles your inquiries, do not expect things to improve, and don’t be surprised it things deteriorate once the company has your money, which most demand at the time you sign the contract.

Once I had my list of potential publishers winnowed to those who offered what I wanted at a reasonable price, I compared the available methods for submitting the manuscript. I live in a rural area with poor internet service and a manuscript that was potentially too big to transfer without corruption. Some companies would allow me to mail them the manuscript on a disc, some refused, and some wanted to charge a hefty fee for what is ultimately five minutes work transferring files from one media to another. That became my final criteria, and effectively narrowed my choice to one.

Sources:
Copyright registration, see copyright.gov.

Goldberg, Lee. Quoted by Morris Rosenthal.

Levine, Mark. The Fine Print of Self-Publishing, available at book-publishers-compared.com.

Library of Congress registration, see pen.loc.gov.

Rosenthal, Morris. 2005. Several columns at fonerbooks.com.

Dance - Part 1 - The Nutcracker

It’s that time of year again - pumpkins are replaced with sugarplums, and we get our annual dose of culture with the obligatory Nutcracker. For several years now, I’ve respond by choreographing a version in my head that abandons pandering to children and rescues it from the implicit association that art must be sweetened for the obese masses.

My premise is quite simple. Instead of one company, use a different troop for each dance. Eliminate the boredom of a single choreographer who can only identify different styles of dance with props like fans and chopsticks; replace it with the real thing. Every person on stage must be able to dance. No more cameos for patrons and their brats

It’s easy to see act two. Imagine, a flamenco company doing the Spanish dance, a group of belly dancers doing the Arab, a Ukranian folk troop doing the Russian dance. For the Chinese, I’d recruit one of those dragon dance groups I associate with New Year’s celebrations.

The snow scene is easy to visualize - a genuine full classical corps de ballet, with soloists, pas de deux, pas de trois, and other combinations, all in white tutus, all women. When the choral part begins, the singers enter in the rear. Of course the music is live. The women are in full length tutus and ballet shoes, the men in white pants, white turtlenecks, silver tunics and jazz shoes. The men are the ones who pull the ice sleigh at the end of the scene.

Staging the rest of the ballet requires thinking about the narrative. I would set it in contemporary times, and have four children. The curtain would open on a living room with Clara in jeans combing the hair of her younger sister Cora. Her older sister, Carla, would be on the sofa at stage left rear with her hair in huge curlers, talking on a phone with a long cord using moves reminiscent of those from 1950s Broadway shows. Fritz is dressed and playing with his truck.

The Drosselmeyer catering firm is finishing its set up to the right. The company sent two black dancers. The male rushes over to add finishing touches to a theater arch downstage left; the maid fusses over the small table with a punch bowl downstage right. Please, no complaints about racial stereotypes: this is a snobbish, upperclass home that hires the underclasses.

The mother comes in, shoos off Carla and Clara, sends the caterers to their places behind the table, then takes her position with Cora and Fritz. Guests arrive. The men gravitate to the drink table and demonstrate golf swings, the older boys upstage left feint basketball moves, the young boys downstage take turns showing off to each other, perhaps a clogger, a shoeplotten, a Michael Jackson imitation. Her husband joins the men, the daughters drift in when they’ve changed costumes. The women’s ritual of air kissing is exaggerated when each new woman and female child joins the reception line.

The guests would include one couple with two teen-age children, one a boy for Carla, the other Carla’s confidant. A second couple would have two boys, one for Carla’s confidant, one for Fritz. The third would have two young children, one for Fritz, one for Cora. No one for Clara.

The adults are professional ballroom dancers. After the initial formal circle dance, each would get a solo spin doing a different style. Some might not fit the music as well as waltzes, but I’m sure salsa or tango dancers know how to adapt. The teenagers could demonstrate what ever is the current teenage jazzy dance.

It’s while the teenagers are dancing that Fritz begins fighting with his two friends, and the male caterer rushes over to start the entertainment - the dancing dolls. The first is a native American for Fritz, maybe a Hoop Dancer. The second is a statuesque Martha Graham dancer for Carla, who uses Carla and her friend as assistants, all dressed in the flowing Greek gowns we associate with that style. The last is a Black tap dancer who does a Bojangles routine to Cora and her friend’s Shirley Temples.

Nothing for Clara. The caterer realizes the problem, and pulls the nutcracker from under the drink table. Fritz gets petulant, and breaks it. The guests realize it’s time to leave. While the caterers are removing the table, the mother walks off with Cora and Fritz making faces at each other behind her back. The father gives his arm to Carla and they do a high strutting cake walk off stage.

No one notices the child in the middle, Clara, who settles down on the sofa to repair her nutcracker.

When the stage is empty, the caterers do their mock minuet followed by jitterbug dancing of the kind seen in pictures of Negro dance troops from the 1930s and 1940s. Clara applauds; he gives her a huge hush sign and they exit. Stage lights come down, then blink on and off as the tree in the center rear grows.

When the lights come back on, there are two dolls in fluffy tutus by the tree, one on each arm of the nutcracker. The three dolls from the party scene are posed outside the arch. A troop of soldiers stands or kneels in rows to the right.

The mice begin sneaking in while the dolls do their mechanical toy pas de trois. They are acrobats who have all the best parts as they gambol, form pyramids and leap around the soldiers. When they get too near the doll arch, those dancers protect themselves with karate style moves; the mice roll around, play leapfrog. The toy soldiers start to move, but fall like dominos when the mice tease them. It’s the comedy of insouciance against rigid authority.

The mouse king enters to great bows by his subjects, strides over to the nutcracker, picks him up and starts to toss him about. At this time, the part is danced by a teenage boy. Clara fells the mouse king, the nutcracker rolls over, and the toy soldiers right themselves. They are male dancers recruited from Broadway. They use a high kick line to push off the mice, then get a full chorus line turn.

Clara repairs the nutcracker again, and the two young dancers get a short pas de deux before the exit for the snow scene. Clara must be old enough to wear pointe shoes.

The opening of the second act is always difficult. It’s now set in the tropics with a backdrop of jungle vegetation. Oil or candles burn on tall columns. The curtain opens with a troop of southeast Asian dancers in ornate golden, jeweled costumes. Everything is meant to contrast with the cold north of the first act. Clara and the nutcracker, now adult dancers, enter in a sleigh that’s been transformed into a golden gondola pulled by black panthers.

After the ritual four dances, a troop of Afro-Cuban or African dancers enter. No more Mother Goose. Towards the end, the candles burn out, and the sky begins to lighten for dawn. The dancers leave the pair alone on stage.

Then, the jungle comes alive. The waltz of the flowers is given to a mixed company that can do Balanchine romantic ensemble work. The women are jungle flowers, the men in greens. Then the sugar plum fairy’s danced by a jungle queen, and the pas de deux by the adult Clara and her nutcracker prince. Towards the end, the cats return, and the flowers retreat. The panthers are male dancers, modern or classical, who do the male corps work we haven’t seen before.

For the finale, the couple returns to the gondola which is moved to the far right, and selected members of each group return for the farewells. There’s no reason people from the first act can’t also join this scene. Indeed, a few mice tumble across and land at the feet of the panthers, look up, quickly assume a passive position on the floor. The caterer and maid appear last to let us know Drosselmeyer has brought us this entertainment. He brings back young Clara and her nutcracker for a final turn before the curtain closes.

This kind of dance extravaganza is only possible in a few places like New York where there are so many kinds of dancers or Washington where embassies send their best. They’re probably also the only places with enough wealthy patrons to pay the price of admission.

Realistically, the stage manager would need to be saint. The producer’s legal firm would have gargantuan headaches getting so many prima donas to come together for such small parts and accept a Les Trocs clause, no bows during the performance. Don’t think about dressing rooms. And, as I’ve said, many of the dancers would have problems fitting their work to the Tchaikovsky score. But that union of talents is part of the fantasy that makes this a celebration of the spirit of dance.

Language - Part 3 - Politics

Political discourse is all but extinct. This year, it has gone through three phases in election advertising in my area.

In the summer, commercials ran reminding voters that one of the candidates had given money to candidates in other parties to weaken the opposition. The political tricks had been well documented at the time. Still, people complained to the station who aired the commercials forcing it to explain it was required to carry any valid political announcement. It is not clear if the complaints actually came from offended listeners, or were orchestrated by the accused politician, as an attack on anyone who dared recall hard facts.

About a week ago, the political ads aired by that radio station descended to parody with outrageous accusations against candidates from an unknown environmental group, followed by a disclaimer by a better-known group. Since no reputable political group would accuse a politician of selling horsemeat to the French or playing tapes of wounded wolves, I suspect a Machiavellian stealth campaign to build sympathy for the attacked candidate and antipathy for environmentalists.

Now we’re in the final stage of campaigning, and the commercials never mention the party affiliation of the candidates and are produced by unknown organizations, identified only by web addresses. As I head for the poll Tuesday, my head is filled with names disassociated with any useful information.

When the public arena is filled with noise signifying nothing, disquieted voters are left in a state of ennui. Since I left the academic world, I have rarely heard a political comment from any but those who repeat their daily doses of blogs. No doubt, it’s a matter of politeness, an internalized belief that one does not discuss politics or religion in public.

This year it’s different. Several friends have brought up politics, not so much to promote a candidate, but to indicate they’re uncomfortable with what’s going on and really don’t know what to do. I even had a customer begin to express anxiety about the election, until she remembered her manners and apologized.

So far the conversations have gone no farther than initial expressions of anxiety, perhaps because I haven’t made encouraging noises. I suspect I would need to act as a therapist, encouraging them to talk, like the friend who listens to the abused wife or alcoholic grope for her or his first public confession. I’m not that patient about something I care about, and I know, if I said anything, I’d more likely lapse into a diatribe which would harm the friendship.

The destruction of political discourse has gone beyond the public arena to inhibit the private one. When language is neutered so people do not understand what is going on, when any attempt to speak the truth is brutally attacked, they fall back on pre-linguistic verbal tools that express their mood without putting anything directly into words. Unconscious concerns bubble up through the reserves of articulate people and what is alluded to is more potent than words would be.

But language is our means of understanding, and without it we’re incapable of rational acts.

Language - Part 2 - Art

In a recent essay about John Sell Cottman, Sanford Schwartz commented on the ubiquity of drawing masters in upper echelon homes in the early nineteenth century. Rather a commonplace, except he went on to suggest it was a tool for amateur historians and naturalists to record their explorations of the English countryside which were then an activity of the most advanced intellectuals.

When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.

The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.

Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.

Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.

Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.

Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.

I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.

I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.

Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.

This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.

I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.

The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.

I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.

The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.

I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.

The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.

My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.

I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.

With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.

The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.

Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.

Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.

Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.

Conspiracy - Part 4 - Cory Lidle

The recent crash of Cory Lidle’s airplane into a New York apartment building illustrates the dynamics and limitations of modern news.

By chance, I heard the first rumor like I did the one on September 11, from a woman who was sent a flutter by all the possibilities that drifted into her head. Last time, the Cassandra greeted anyone who came into the work area, with the latest news. This time, the magpie found a media outlet on her computer to listen to, at full volume, so we couldn’t miss a word of it or her commentary.

The thing that’s striking is how few people remain calm in the face of the unknown. From the beginning it was a small plane or helicopter and a small, unimportant apartment building. Common sense should have said it was not a terrorist attack.

But, of course, reporters had to ask the question. Denials by government officials sounded irrelevant since the known facts were still one plane, one small fire. No second plane, no architectural catastrophe, no gluts of dead or injured bodies, no missing persons with hysterical relatives calling the media for names. It didn’t really matter if they were informed or knee-jerk denials, there was nothing to deny and they sounded silly.

By the end of the day, editors looked lazy for retaining those paragraphs in every lengthening stories that
compounded knowledge rather than reporting it.

Police barriers kept journalists from the scene, so there were few to interview. Most were as unreliable as witnesses usually are. Some were minor celebrities who volunteered their names with information, a photographer, a novelist. Since they lived in the building, they inadvertently added contextual background, by placing the building in New York’s social structure as not one significant enough to attract the attention of a strategic bomber. The Trump Tower would have aroused my office mate.

When the fire was extinguished with no more crashes, the web-available stations reverted to their regular programming and the self-important woman returned to her work.

The other person in the office, the man who flies a small plane, and I continued to talk desultorily. I suspect that every crash awakens anxiety for him, the way serious accidents resonate with amateur race car drivers. The woman was only interested in anything about John Kennedy Junior’s death.

His interest increased when the name of the plane owner, Cory Lidle, emerged. None of us were big enough sports fans to know who he was or who are still playing in the off-season games.

At that time there was little information except Lidle either didn’t have a license yet or had just earned it. The danger of inexperience was important to my co-worker. We didn’t yet know the flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was only 26 years old, not the grizzled, war tested ace of movies who would have taken the controls and saved the day.

After work I went to the local wellness center, with its single, low volume television screen that the caretaker jocks had set to ESPN. The story had morphed into a human interest sports report with wannabe celebrities competing to inflate their importance by their near association with the slightly more famous. I heard about the normal guy who happens to play ball, the teammate who supported charities. The career cut short, the child who would never know a father. But no games were cancelled; there was only the obligatory moment of opening silence.

I heard nothing about why an athlete could cause an accident. Any possibility that drugs reduce responses will disappear into a hobbyhorse for someone, whose very predictable comments will render then worthless. Likewise, any penchant for gambling.

Certainly, nothing was said about how the arrogance of success might make a 34-year-old panic or refuse to turn over control to a flight instructor, or about the possible infatuation of a trainer awed by a client who babbled athletic skills could be transferred. No one mentioned the failures of Michael Jordan and Walter Payton when they tried baseball and auto racing.

Any deeper stories about the nature of sports were already gone. By the next morning, the official spokesman who confirmed Lidle’s death owned his ball club, not the fire department or federal government.

Only a few continued to discuss Lidle’s actual career, from the time he got his chance as a scab in the 1994-1995 player’s strike to the seven games he played for the Yankees who did not win the pennant. Some grumblings came out that he condemned his fellow players for not having his winning spirit and some complaints from the criticized that he never finished a game, left it to others to salvage his messes. All the usual drama of any small group of disparate people thrown together by chance job skills.

Of course, there were no comedic speculations about what kind of terror attack a ball player would engineer. Now, if they were still competing against another New York team, one could wonder whose apartment was hit, but that’s as far as that story could go. They weren’t in the series, and the attack wasn’t in Detroit.

No one tried to visualize a terrorist attack with small planes, each filled with explosives, flying a convoy up the Hudson, peeling off to take out individual buildings. We know the military responded, that jets from Selfridge were heard over Mount Clemens, no doubt headed for Dearborn. Again, visualize the damage if they attacked that hypothetical convoy of explosives, assuming they could get down to their level.

My office mate speculated on an angry man who’d lost his apartment in a divorce settlement who was going to get even, and didn’t care who got hurt. One could go farther, and postulate the man was so angry, he got the wrong building or so incompetent he couldn’t aim the aircraft and got the wrong apartment.

Comedy is possible, but the underlying anxieties run so deep, public humor is not permitted. The lone pilot is as dangerous as the bicyclists from Palestine, and not to be imagined. Neither is an exploration possible of the sociopath’s opposite, the normal individual grown desperate by circumstances. Only one person slipped the slightest hint about despair after defeat when he denied any suggestion Lidle committed suicide.

We’re left where we were in 2001. We have poor, vain local reporters, inexperienced editorial staffs, conventional bureaucrats, decently trained professionals and no political leaders until a story has developed. George Bush made no comment that afternoon that betrayed any interest in the possibility that gripped television watchers in the first minutes or any sympathy later. His stories stood: we wouldn’t invade North Korea and the acts of Mark Foley were reprehensible.

One knows Clinton’s political instincts would have driven him to make some comment that he had followed the story and shared the concerns of his fellow Americans. He would have learned who lived in the burned apartments and made some phone calls. Even Nixon had better instincts: he would have called the ball club, found Lidle’s most famous, closest teammate to commiserate with.

The story that didn’t develop is the canonical one about how we confront the world, our fears of the uncontrollable when comedy and despair are not permitted. Surprisingly, there were no calls by the on-line media to popular psychologists or therapists who would address these for us.

This time the underlying story that attracts the day late politicians who tap the latent fear of conspiracies and blame other jurisdictions is how is it possible small planes can get so near buildings in New York City. The answer’s simple: men with money buy planes, and, like Lidle, want to go sightseeing and there’s no reason, except paranoia, why they shouldn’t. Stopping all freedom of movement is probably as futile as preventing players like Lidle from playing badminton or getting pilot’s licenses.

The story that continues is the central mystery, what happened. There is still no reason people won’t trust findings of the NTSB. So far, the interests of those who would gut investigations or pervert them with coverups have been stymied by fear of lawsuits by corporations that own, maintain, manufacture or insure planes that crash. It’s just that the answers aren’t immediately obvious, and it takes time to reconstruct what happened. Political influence will play in how quickly the problem is solved. How many resources are available before the next crash could reveal the hidden costs of slashed budgets, lower taxes and deficits, but won’t.

No one yet knows who was at the controls, and some suggest we may never know. That question is the one most susceptible to corruption, since the name of the pilot will be important to the estates of two widows and myriad insurance companies. Friends of both were soon saying neither man would have been showing off, neither was a hot shot, quickly implying it was the plane or conditions that were at fault. Cirrus soon countered Lidle had never taken any of their training and more ominous adjectives appeared for the weather.

In the meantime, people like the man I work with are the ones to listen to. They are the ones who will continue to ponder the pragmatic and philosophical issues of flight.

North South - Part 1 - Traffic

Sitting at a traffic light is one of those times I can’t do much except stare ahead, so I let my mind wander. Instead of following the byways of Walter Mitty, I find myself pondering the ways traffic reflects the values of cities who install traffic lights.

The one thing all planners do is try to slow drivers to prevent accidents. Beyond that, they have little in common.
In Detroit in the early 1980s, legend held that lights were set so a driver, who went the correct speed, would never stop for a second light. Automobiles are the local economy, and no one wants driving to be a painful experience. The ideal speed for each town was passed on as covertly as the name of the local bootlegger in prohibition..

New Jersey in the mid-1970s was divided between traffic circles in the north and jug handles in the south. Both were attempts to engineer the roads themselves to control traffic flow. Circles were the more challenging. You entered on the edge, and by centripetal force ended in the center before trying to edge out to make an exit. If you failed, you simply went around again. It was all a bit of a carnival ride, an exercise in vertigo that made my favorite circle the one that emptied into a road with an overpass for horses leaving their barns for a racetrack.

In Georgetown in the mid-1970s, drivers simply ignored lights. Whenever traffic moved, people would charge into intersections, even though they knew they wouldn’t clear when the light changed. Gridlock was not just deliberate; it manifested that every single person was too important to yield or compromise for the greater good.
Abilene, Texas, came close to that attitude in the middle 1980s. Someone had installed a traffic circle, but someone else erected stop signs at two places. If you came from the south, as I did, you had to stop every few feet. If you came from the wealthy neighborhood, you never stopped, never had to yield, and certainly never experienced vertigo. The democratic forces of the one were overruled by the power elite of privilege. I admit, I used to fantasize dropping those drivers into northern Jersey.

In Dallas in the early 1990s, I used to imagine the drivers suddenly transported onto Telegraph Road or a Detroit expressway. They had no concept of fast lines to the left, slow lanes to the right. The three lane road north towards Plano were always stopped as slow cars filled each lane. Since the only shopping mall was miles up that road, I turned to mail order catalogs. E-commerce hadn’t developed yet, but it was an idea waiting to be born.

If the patterns in Detroit and New Jersey demonstrated efficiency which promotes egalitarianism and the Texas roads showed the elitism of the old south, the place I live now exemplifies traffic in a world where government either does not exist, or is directed by people who think it a costly luxury.

The place I live has never risen above family ties to organized government. I go through four lights to get to the post office. They not only are not consistent among themselves, they are not consistent to themselves. Sometimes, the left turn arrow is at the beginning of the cycle, sometimes at the end; sometimes both directions get the arrow, sometimes only one. When only one gets it, sometimes only turning traffic is allowed, other times through traffic is permitted. Then, since they are supposedly on demand, sometimes no arrow appears for several cycles.

The most accidents I see continue to be at the lights that were placed where there were the most accidents. People act on the patterns they expect, but haven’t learned to cope with no pattern. The only sure thing is someone will run the red light.

In the town where I work, it’s worse. The city planners seem to think the smooth flow of traffic is as dangerous as recreational sex. Folklore says the merchants don’t want traffic to move where the chains are building, and think making traffic bad will encourage people to continue to use them. I learned early to either do my essential shopping early Sunday morning, or get through the place as quickly as possible early Saturday to shop in the next city.

Even so, I often get stopped at every single light early Sunday morning, and marvel that people still have accidents at that hour. It got worse when they were widening the road near the area where the big boxes were building. The cops ran speed traps, ticketing anyone going more than ten miles through a construction zone when no men were working, no equipment was stored and the pylons had been moved.

I used to visit some of the stores in that area to see what they had; I haven’t been back since the road construction, except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m usually in such a foul mood by the time I get through the traffic, that I grab what I need and get out as quickly as possible, irritated even more by long check-out lines.

When one drives through cities on the interstate the landscapes look like the cities have been homogenized by government engineers. The persisting variations in surface roads may be as surprising as the discovery that red and blue states signify more than political preference. The roots of the differences are probably the same.

Back during the age of Andrew Jackson, politicians argued the function of government in encouraging economic growth. Northerners promoted internal improvements like turnpikes and canals, while southerners argued limited government. When automobiles appeared, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio built turnpikes; Detroit started it expressways. Folklore says North Carolina developed speed traps to fleece northerners headed for Florida and to harass and intimidate Negroes.

Enabling legislation for interstates depended a great deal on Eisenhower arguing the military necessity of moving materiel quickly. The first exit opened near by Michigan hometown in 1959 just three years after the act was passed. It took southern cities choked by traffic years to take advantage of available money.

Where I live, there still are no good roads. When I told a woman I work with that one deep ravine on a county road I cross to get to my house has no shoulder or guard rail, and that the dry river bed beyond my house has no bridge and at least one woman has flipped her car there during a storm, she dismissed the problems. She said, don’t you realize how much bridges cost?

Immigration - Part 4 - Fear

My boss’s family is from mainline Philadelphia. His mother’s father was a society doctor and they moved in the orbit reserved for hangers-on to the well-to-do. The family tree she chooses to remember is her mother’s from Virginia.

She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.

But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.

In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.

Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.

He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.

My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.

Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.

My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.

We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.

The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.

Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.

The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.

The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.

We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.

Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.

We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.

We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.

She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.

When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.

When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.

The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.

When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.

Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.

It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.

After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.

We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.

The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.

She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.

Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.

Language - Part 1 - Science

The fate of scientists like botanists, entomologists and astronomers is sad. They start as children awed by the wonders of nature, and end with methods that never allow them to look out the window.

The first thing they lose is language. Men concerned with precision have not only banished the poetic, but even the coherent. Much of the challenge of introductory college science courses is simply learning vocabulary, and graduate students know they must master arcane rhetoric to be published. I often wonder if they can even put statements into English like

Affected animals necropsied at time of death presented with hydrothorax with as much as 2 to 3 L of straw-colored thoracic fluid.

or

We also investigated the influence of different levels of N fertilization (1, 5, and 10 mM) on the modification of the allelopathic potential of amended soils, in terms of their effect on soil total phenolics and radish seedling growth.

Once scientists have their advanced degrees, many follow research into laboratories where machines do the looking and they do the writing. Genetics and DNA are answering important questions, but still you wonder if people despair when they spend months of their lives reducing morning glories to

The mutable allele is caused by an intragenic tandem duplication of 3.3 kb within a gene for transcriptional activator containing a bHLH DNA-binding motif.

The alternative for botanists and entomologists is research in how to kill what it is they loved. Instead of marveling that pigweed and horseweed have mutated to survive the active agent in Round-up, they’re paid to find something that will eradicate the survivors in cotton and soybean fields.

With the systematic separation of science students from their subject, it’s not surprising so much research has moved abroad. Why would someone who cares want to put the years of work into producing what seems inconsequential?

There are few independent seed companies left in the United States. Most have been bought by European conglomerates or chemical companies like Monsato. It’s easy for business students to say they are following the pattern of globalization pioneered by the steel companies.

Along with ownership we disdain anything that’s not immediately pragmatic. Along with the loss of seed companies has been the loss of breeders looking for new varieties. It’s the Japanese who’ve joined the Dutch and Germans as the leading breeders of new varieties of ornamental plants.

I’m not ridiculing the scientists I quoted. They are involved in things that matter. The agent in crownbeard that kills sheep and inhibits the growth of food crops like radishes is galegine, which has been synthesized into a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It may sound silly to learn sheep who die are ones who eat sweet things instead of nutritious ones, but the consequences of knowing a glucose chemical was involved could not have been anticipated by the researchers.

And those doing the various kinds of DNA research aren’t just looking for miracle cures. They’re also deepening our understanding of evolution. Morning glories happen to be interesting because new varieties are not hybrids, but spontaneous mutations. All the Heavenly Blues we see today probably came from one plant noticed by an amateur named Clarke in Colorado.

The chasm between passion and procedures is not unique to science. Many English professors have felt the same loss when their love of literature is channeled into formal literary criticism. Historians may want to know why and how something happened, but they’re forced to use statistics or other standard methods that deliberately eliminate the special so they write without biases.

Amateurs have options. They buy popular historians or read historical fiction or watch documentaries. People who love novels or poetry don’t even know professors write books. But for those of us interested in natural history, the barriers are greater. There are no ways to surmount the language barrier except by trying to comprehend the technical.

Perhaps the rigors of professionalism have had the unintended consequence of making outsourcing technology easier, for when people cannot read or write about things they care about the formative culture that produces innovation is destroyed. When that’s gone, outsourcing is only a cosmetic term for having to buy what we once created.

Sources:
Description of research at Division of Gene Expression and Regulation I, headed by Shigeru Iida, on internet .

Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of Botany 7:1419–1424:1999, abstract on internet.

Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992, abstract on internet.

Competition - Part 1 - Brand X Telephone

My telephone company just changed hands, and it looks like things are going to stay bad. I had hope a few years ago when the company that owned our company got bought by a major utility that we might finally get some genuine service. But, as part of the deal, they sold us off, to maintain competition.

What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.

Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.

I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.

But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.

When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.

Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.

Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.

When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.

I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.

I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.

While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.

Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received

They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.

Where’s the competition for the customers?

Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.

I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.

The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.

The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.

Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.

Tolerance - Part 1 - Dell Shannon

Liberals constantly face the Skokie conundrum, what to do when one’s belief in tolerance requires allowing people so intolerant to exist they would rewrite the constitution if they could. At what point is it necessary to become intolerant to preserve an environment of tolerance? Or in that 1977 case, how does one separate the right of a group to request a parade permit through a Jewish neighborhood, from their right to receive that permit?

Liberals flock to the cause of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe who’s shows are censored by people who dislike the subjects. But what does one do with a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Céline who’s accused of supporting the Nazis in France in world war II?

Elizabeth Linington poses such a problem. At the same time she wrote mystery stories under the name Dell Shannon that glamorized the Los Angeles police force, she also supported the John Birch Society.

At the time I wondered if I bought one of her books, was I was making a contribution. My immediate solution was to buy books from used book dealers. Unfortunately, that meant enjoying her work without paying her for her effort.

Her anomalous position became more obvious when O. J. Simpson’s lawyer dramatized general incompetence and brutality of her force. She was often accused of not knowing much about police procedures, so did she deliberately romanticize the authority figures as ideology?

Since I didn’t remember a strong streak of propaganda in her books, I decided to read some to see. By now, of course, they’re only available from used book dealers and she’s been dead since 1988.

First, let me say she’s a decent story teller with an ability to pace her narrative. She usually has one major plot that alternates between a number of minor tales, some resolved, some not. Her aim is to dramatize the work flow in a large organization.

Most of the minor plots are the humdrum of daily police life, the routine accidental homicides and thefts. Some accuse her of lifting them from police blotters. It’s probably what she meant when she said she did extensive research.

She also tries to portray a functioning bureaucracy with a number of people working on multiple problems, able to still concentrate on a few, but realizing many simply must be ignored. The idea of a functioning civil service is anathema to many conservatives today, but was not necessarily a tenant of the John Birch group.

Her selection of crimes and creation of undifferentiated policemen represents the realism in her work. There’s nothing about the view criminals are either stupid or ordinary people that is characteristic of a conservative ideology.

Her weaknesses as a writer leave her more vulnerable to political criticism. She has no ear for dialogue. When she portrays confrontations between suspects and police, she has them mouth polite euphemisms, especially for black cops. When the police are looking for suspects, they call them fags.

The one represents isolation, the other homophobia. Neither are representative of the John Birch society, but may be reasons one would not read her book.

She also has no ability to develop characters. Her black, hispanic and white cops, suspects and victims are interchangeable. When she tries to characterize individuals, she falls into stereotypes. The black policeman, Jason, is the son of a doctor who is an expert at everything. Lieutenant Mendoza inherited money from his grandfather and plays poker without being a gambler.

While there’s no malice in her limited imagination and writing skills, there’s a more subtle class bias. The policemen are all working class men with families, who worry about mortgages. Luis Mendoza doesn’t need his salary, has married an artist and lives in a renovated hacienda with horses and sheep. No alcoholics, no divorces, no wild bachelors.

Mendoza falls into the tradition created by Dorothy Sayers with Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn. Unlike many of her contemporaries who also create well-to-do, intelligent heroes, she does try to provide the more realistic background of the typical police force.

Readers of genre fiction accept a number of conventions in exchange for a realistic portrayal of problem solving. However, her uneducated portrayal of the Los Angeles police force could not survive the reality of the O. J. Simpson case, when no one showed the skills and tolerance of her most minor police inspector.

She’s also been done in by advances in technology. Her books were written before DNA testing and computerized databases. The best she can do is match blood types and fingerprints. With no ability to gather evidence, she can only solve many of her crimes with suspects willing to confess as soon as policemen ask the correct questions.

Her estate and publisher don’t mention her political interests, probably because they don’t want to alienate potential readers. Her most ideological comments in the books I recently read occur in The Motive on Record (1982) when Mendoza’s wife visits travel agencies and is upset when they offer the newly available tours of eastern Europe. She constantly frets, why would anyone want to support a communist country with tourist dollars.

I wonder what a John Birch mystery would be. Someone who wanted to use fiction to spread a message would be more likely to choose the genre of Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. Within the context of a city police department it’s impossible to have authority figures who are always right.

The kind of policing we hear about with helicopters patrolling the slums of LA would not be used by burglary-homicide, despite the example of Simpson. The closest she comes is an interrogation in Death by Inches (1965) that inadvertently shows the fine the line between questioning and torture.

If the police can’t be John Birch heroes, then the villains must be communists. Starting her career in 1962, she would have needed murders in labor unions or anti-war groups, either communist infiltrators of legitimate groups or agent provocateurs in Marxist groups. Instead of religious zealots who kill infidel children, they would kill them when they became college atheists.

Those aren’t her plots. They don’t fit her vision of the daily routine of a city police force.

Without the plots, villains, heroes, or political vision she is simply a limited writer with an interesting vision of solving murders, hampered by her gentility. One can boycott her works for economic reasons, but there’s no reason to keep them away from innocent children who might be corrupted by her propaganda. She tries to dramatize a kind of tolerance with her diverse police force, and her writing requires readers exercise the same tolerance.

Disliking or liking them for aesthetic or emotional reasons is altogether another matter.

Religion - Part 5 - Elmer Gantry

I finally read Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, promoted as "the greatest, most vital and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since Voltaire." It was a hard slog, with the depth of a case study rather than a novel, marred by predictable plotting and undeveloped characters.

As I read, I kept wondering, why were people so angry when it was published in 1927? Gantry was more a man with ambitions and some charisma limited by poor education and small town upbringing than a dangerous demagogue. He certainly is no where near as interesting as Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker, and had none of their influence.

Billy Graham’s career is closer to Gantry’s. Both were associated early with women with greater credentials in evangelism than they. Graham married Ruth Bell, the daughter of missionaries to China. Gantry toured with a woman modeled on Aimee Simple McPherson. She died early, leaving the reader to wonder if his life would have been different had she lived.

Both changed churches. Gantry began as a Baptist, but was expelled for seducing a woman, then refusing to marry her. He joined the Methodists when they offered him new opportunities, but he continued to be haunted by the doubts of salvation planted by his mother’s church. Graham was born a Presbyterian, but changed to the Southern Baptist Convention. While he maintained that affiliation, his children were baptized as Presbyterians.

Most important, both mixed religion and politics as the pawns of more powerful men. Gantry discovered the value of politics when he supported an underdog mayoral candidate. He became friends with the movers and shakers of his community, and asked one for help when a woman tried to blackmail him. Lewis treats the relationship as one that normally arises in a small town, and only faults Gantry for his ambition when he conspires to lead the National Association for the Purification of Art and the Press.

Henry Luce and William Randolph Hearst promoted Graham’s first revival in New York as a deliberate attempt to scare people into anticommunist crusades. With fame, came prestige which politicians exploited by appearing with him. With time, Graham himself became seduced by them, and slowly became their spokesman. Most see him less as a grasping Gantry, than as a tragic figure caught in the consequences of his own successes.

So, what is it that separates these men, makes Graham a hero, condemns the others as hypocrites?

The obvious answer is sex. For Swaggart, sex was central to religious experience. It represented the devil that must constantly be wrestled with: sometimes faith triumphs; sometimes man weakens and must reestablished his link with God through begging for forgiveness and repentance. The struggle is as constant as breathing.

Jim Bakker’s wife, Tammy Faye, dramatized the choices for women born since Henry Miller and Hugh Hefner who wanted sexual freedom within the shelter of the Assemblies of God that fostered Swaggart. Unfortunately for her, Bakker’s interest could not be sustained, and her struggle for faith degenerated into progressively more ludicrous make-up.

Elmer Gantry didn’t treat women as either sirens or sources of pleasure. He preferred women who doted on him. Unlike Swaggart who frequented prostitutes, Gantry maintained long time relationships with his mistresses. He broke with them for the same reason he tired of his wife; when his social world improved, they could not change, and no longer glorified his ego.

Lewis made a mistake when he introduced infidelity into his plot if he wanted to show a truly dangerous man like his religious contemporaries, Robert Shuler and J. Frank Norris who were broadcasting racism, nativism and homophobia in Los Angeles and Dallas. Lewis wasn’t interested enough in sex to create a sensual man. But his readers were interested enough to read more into his circumspect account of adultery, and looked no deeper into Elmer’s character.

It’s also possible sex was easier for them to discuss than the fact Gantry never met a single admirable clergyman among the Baptists and Methodists who ordained him. Those with genuine faith were ineffective. Most condemned evolution and higher criticism of the Bible, but less from belief than as received wisdom of their seminary training. Most voiced platitudes without understanding, and certainly none, but the marginal, ever had doubts.

In one scene, Gantry hosts a luncheon for the clergymen of Zenith to promote a united crusade against prostitution. As the men chat, Lewis shows each refusing to join, not because posse justice was wrong, but because each was too jealous of the potential success of Gantry.

Greed or the lust for power that characterized Gantry and many of his fellow clergymen still provokes many of the biggest church scandals. A woman set out to blackmail Gantry. Methodists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson attacked Bakker and took over his ministry when Jessica Hahn accused him of adultery. Another revivalist, Marvin Gorman, hired detectives to spy on Swaggart.

People are not interested in recognizing an institution has failed. When they are confronted with wide scale duplicity, they search for the one person who can redeem their faith in institutions, who can reassure them a bad person does not contaminate all they’ve lived by. Billy Graham’s website recounts the downfalls of Swaggart, Bakker, and Falwell, then trumpets his compassion when it lets us know he visited in Bakker in prison. It goes further and tells us "Graham maintained his own integrity and the sincerity of his message."

Lewis wants us to think Elmer Gantry has that ability when he asks his parishoners if they believe in the "fiendishness of my accusers," then promises to lead them in a crusade "for complete morality and the domination of the Christian church through all the land."

Lewis put too many characteristics of powerful ministers into one person to show the dangers of ambition alluded to with the luncheon. Gantry combines the weakness of Jimmy Swaggart and the fecklessness of Tammy Faye, who divorced her jailed husband, with the charisma of Graham and the media savvy of Jim Bakker. He has the opportunism of Norris and Shuler, but lacks the discipline to become Charles Coughlin.

When confronted with would-be heroes, people search for evidence of human frailty, and once that is exposed, no longer care. In real life, that concern destroys the power of men like Swaggart and Bakker. In the novel, it limits the dramatic impact to tawdry affairs. The truly dangerous man either disciplines himself to overcome his urges or sublimates them into his ambitions. One simply doesn’t worry at the end when Gantry is poised to take over napap, because one knows he’ll destroy himself.

Sources:
Graham, Billy. "Televangelist Scandals," at
unctv.org/ruthandbillygraham.

Lewis, Sinclair. Elmer Gantry, 1927; cover blurb from Literary Review on cover of 1958 Dell paperback edition.

Religion - Part 4 - Doubt

Some religions admit doubt while others deny it exists. Calvinists argued God’s grace was absolute, but no man could know if he was among the elect. Doubt drove searches for evidence of God’s favor.

Later Protestants argued from the evidence backwards. If you spoke in tongues, if you had a conversion experience, then you were in a state of grace. Good works, public service, wealth all became tokens of sanctification.

At every crisis in our past, we’ve taken the absolute over the unknown. Within a generation, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony abandoned their requirements for membership and adopted the half-way covenant that allowed children of church members to join without proof of grace. Election was transformed from personal experience to a collective family legacy that could be inherited.

Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush were both schooled in southern religion, but the one was raised a Baptist, the other converted to Methodism. The first historically divided into warring sects while Methods hewed to central authority. The one group constantly argues theology, the other debates social issues. Both divided over slavery, but only the one still has northern and southern conventions; the other united its conferences in 1939.

Doubt survives among Carter’s Baptists, but not among Bush’s Methodists. One of the earliest, popular country songs illustrates the difference. Ada Ruth Habersohn, who worked with Methodist gospel musician Ira Sankey, wrote "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" around 1908.

In 1935, A. P. Carter rewrote the lyrics for the Carter Family as "Can the Circle Be Unbroken." The reason for the change was probably quite simple: record companies wanted artists to avoid copyright payments by writing their own songs, and artist obliged.

The nature of the change is speculation. It could be as simple as the preference for the sound of the hard consonants (can the circle) over the internal rhyme of the vowels (will the circle). Or, it could reflect the more Calvinistic theology of the south. A. P. was raised in a Methodist community, while his sister-in-law, Maybelle, was from a Baptist communion in southwestern Virginia.

Will, with it’s implied allusion to free will, assumes ascension to heaven, and the only issue is if an individual has taken the actions necessary to ensure a family reunion. Can invites speculation about what’s possible, introduces doubt.

Since outsiders started listening to the Carter Family, their descendants changed the keyword back to "will," probably because they were told they had made a silly error and should correct themselves. It certainly isn’t the only case where they changed one of their songs to fit the expectations of different audiences.

Still, "can" is the version that people with little money bought in the 1930s, and "will" is what the mainstream expects today.

Our public Protestant tradition continues to edge towards the moral certainty that prefers "will" to "can," and eventually recasts all received texts. Once I was told God tested Job to the point Job despaired of God. Some time in the late-1980s, I heard a radio preacher say that was wrong, that God would never toy with a believer. Instead, Job was in the hands of the devil, and his error was not recognizing the wiles of Satan.

As a child, I was also told David defeated Goliath, with the implication that the weak can prevail, that brains can triumph over physical bullies. A few months ago, a woman told me her minister had given her new insight into the story. Goliath lost because he doubted God.

When the woman started to retell the story she almost said Goliath denied his savior, but then realized that didn’t sound quite right. She kept rewording it until she could retain that interpretation with words that fitted the Old Testament.

New interpretations of traditional stories signal changing values. Voters who accept doubt will have different expectations for leaders, for novels or films than those who want absolutes. The trials of Job speak to a different audience than the travails of Goliath. The Godfather and The Sopranos are different narratives.

When we were faced with difficulties raised by racism, poverty, dependence on petroleum, many found austere Goliath more comfortable than tormented Job or complex David. Since Jimmy Carter was president, men who have been willing to negotiate, the peacemakers blessed of old, have been ridiculed as weaklings.

The cultural preference for uniformity that spreads change from a country song to the entire Bible, leads vocal shareholders to eliminate unknowns and demand boards replace CEOs who still believe they should work with their employees and political leaders in communities where they have plants. The same absolutism informs commentators who criticize parents who share child rearing responsibilities, because two decision makers in a family introduces an element of chance.

Self-help consultants tell people, when in doubt, do something, anything. A leader always acts. We’re told Goliath would never form a committee. Job does not grapple with a crisis in faith, he dithers. Even the Southern Baptist convention today seeks the hegemony of Methodists, the theological purity of Presbyterians.

Takeover - Part 4 - Count Down

Almost exactly one year has passed since the crisis first brewed where I last work, and things continue to deteriorate. There were 15 people in the accounting department then, and 15 people have quit, been fired or laid off since. Two clerks remain from the contract turnover, and one other was there last summer.

The customer began to raise problems about a month before its contract with the government expired, and another company was scheduled to assume the business. It needed a hard financial close, and the people responsible were not comfortable with what they thought was going on.

One member of their financial group met with the subcontractor CFO and his assistant comptroller late one week. When she didn’t hear the answers she needed, someone apparently talked to the CEO. On Monday, the two men were fired.

That left the department with one remaining assistant comptroller and a new GL manager who had been hired to replace the one demoted back to her last assignment. Rumors say the new woman aligned herself with one of the budget analysts who had not been hired for the assistant comptroller’s job, and they spent more time undermining their acting boss than doing their jobs.

Just before the customer’s deadline, the man who handled the reports sent to the customer sent his significant other in with his resignation. He finally decided what to do after 28 years: he put his health and aging parents first.

Now there was no one left who had ever reported to the customer at fiscal year end. The customer had to send back the whistle blower it had saved in December, and instructed him to do what it took. He booked a $14 million dollar loss.

As soon as the close was complete, the last assistant comptroller walked out.

Two months later, the woman who always handled the subcontractor’s invoices at the customer’s has a new job, and her supervisor has transferred elsewhere with their new employer. Neither wish to deal with my old company anymore. The CFO may have disparaged her because she was a woman, but she was the only person who understood how to retrieve the necessary financial information from the customer’s databases to do any kind of cost tracking or reconciliation.

The whistle blower is telling her replacement and his new boss he doesn’t want anything more to do with his old employer. He noted in his last visit they had changed so many things he no longer could act effectively. So far, everyone promises to honor his request and let him get on with his new job.

That leaves the contractor department responsible for releasing work to the subcontractor to deal with the now 17 million dollar loss. They know the contract requires them to make up the difference, so they’re cutting back spending to hoard enough money.

So far I haven’t heard of any layoffs among the skilled crafts. More likely, the decrease in business means less overtime and fewer men hired for the summer. The lost take home pay has now spread from the accountants who caused the problem or were the first victims, to the men who generate the revenue to cover everyone’s paychecks.

The CEO is well aware of the problems. He’s gotten rid of the man he replaced, and the man who was the contract liaison last year. The head of human resources has also been demoted and the engineering manager left. The contract has devolved back to the man who handled it before the takeover and no one has taken over the day to day operations from the previous engineering manager he fired last winter.

The CEO’s apparently made it clear to whoever is left in accounting they will be fired if they don’t find the 17 million before the end of the fiscal year. No one yet knows where the 3 million went last year, and many people have spent hours trying to find it.

The new accounting team is headed by the treacherous GL manager who’s now the acting finance manager. The equally untrustworthy budget analyst is now the GL manager. She considers it a demotion because the person who had the job a year ago didn’t have any formal training in accounting, indeed didn’t have a four-year degree. Apparently, she still thinks she should be at least an assistant comptroller, even though she didn’t meet the minimum requirement that she be a CPA.

They’re aided by the woman who’s been responsible for developing rates. She demanded she be considered for the GL manager when it opened, on the grounds she at least had a four-year degree in business and knew something about the company. The fired assistant comptroller refused to take her seriously, and hired a women who had been in the military and was working for a bank.

They’re in the phase when they’ve found no simple answers and are begging for help. The whistle blower and the man who left in May have refused. The demoted GL manager is very unhappy because her boss has sent her back and expects her to help them and continue her existing job.

The only one who has accepted an invitation is the man who may have set this all in motion years ago when he developed financial reports so complicated no one with standard accounting experience could understand them. He’s now a paid consultant helping develop the rates.

At this point it no longer matters very much what happens. If the customer finally decides the cost of covering the subcontractor losses more than offsets the costs of cancelling the contract, the hunt for the lost funds will continue. The customer is still quibbling with the previous subcontractor over their final settlement with far fewer dollars in dispute.

If the customer cancels the contract, most employees will be absorbed and the work will continue for the crafts. If the men who pulled political strings to get the contract and subcontract in the first place pull some more strings, maybe someone in Washington will sidetrack the final search. After all, in the world of lost money in Iraq, what’s 17 million dollars?

But until they either find the money or the hunt is called off, people will search, and people will worry about getting fired, will continue to get sick or see their personal relationships suffer. It’s down to the tedious work that needs to be done, with no reward, only punishment for those who’ve survived. Only the fired CFO still received his bonus.

Religion - Part 3 - Free Will

Some years ago a radio program dramatized the conversion experience of a young woman who’d become involved with drugs. She begged her family to let her see a psychiatrist. They refused, telling her Jesus was the only answer. Finally, she accepted their solution.

I had two reactions. Since I knew nothing about the woman or her family, it seemed possible she needed to confront them and their religion, and this was the right solution for her. It also struck me she should have had some choice, should have come to that conclusion on her own.

Free will, the idea that human beings are able to act to improve their lives, is the most potent of those associated with the Protestant Reformation, and is not characteristic of every group. Followers of Jacobus Arminius were persecuted by the Calvinists, but sired the Methodists and midwived the Baptists.

Free will today has two definitions. The narrow one was presented to the young drug addict who was told this or damnation. In 1901, William Dean Howells sketched a Ohio family threatened by a wastrel. The Kentons wanted their daughter to terminate the relationship, but refused to coerce her. Instead, they told the girl they would go abroad until she decided what she wanted "of your own free will."

General free will is under attack today by Protestants who embrace the binary Manichean view of the world as good or evil. Conservatives have generalized the fatalism of the drug addict’s parents to our civil life and tell people no human agency can help them - not the government, not the courts, not unions, only the church,

Most of us were raised with an expansive, Howellsian view of what’s possible, and are genuinely surprised when institutions don’t work. I’m sure this is behind much of the anger about hurricane Katrina. We knew the government could respond; it had in the past. It’s willful failure stunned us. We wouldn’t be so obsessed with retaining walls if only it had tried.

Many have drawn the appropriate conclusion, resignation that one more ideal has failed them. Few are still so angry they want to organize. That response has dissipated in the face of political indifference. They have seen so many cases where human energy has been disparaged, they’ve given up.

When people were being attacked by their manager at the last place I worked, no one thought about a union or group response. Only one considered a lawsuit; another thought about reporting incidents to a whistle blower telephone line, but wouldn’t call the ACLU for advice. Most just grumbled, but no one would file a formal
complaint with human resources for fear of reprisals.

Several left it to fate, saying "God will see me through." They were not the people known for attending church, and they would have shrugged off advances made by those who were. Their comments were less a religious response than the fragments of their self-esteem protesting they could survive.

One sees the same range of responses in interviews with automotive workers who’ve been told their plants are closing and their jobs are gone. They don’t consider the government an ally. They learned with Chrysler and the steel industry that Ronald Reagan didn’t consider a strong industrial base part of the national interest.

Chris Brown, a Delphi worker in Coopersville, told David Moberg, "We can’t depend on the unions, the Democrats, the Republicans...We have to get ourselves mobilized."

A Delphi worker in Dayton, Tony Henderson told James Hannan, "I'm mad as hell, but what can
you do?"

But in Flint, Delphi worker Lisa Simpson told Christ Christoff, "If it's going to happen, it's going to happen...You can only live one day at a time; it's in God's hands."

And in Saginaw, a Detroit News photographer found a prayer circle in the parking lot after Delphi announced the plant would close.

Is it free will when politicians and their strategists systematically attack civil institutions in the belief they should not exist? Or, is it exhausted acceptance of the only alternative proclaimed by those in power?

The loss of this piece of the Protestant ethic may be more serious than all the jobs that are lost, because it is the belief humans can act, can persevere that has separated this country from others. Once it’s gone, it no longer can be channeled into secular projects like conservatives’ wars for the greater good of mankind, or, the welfare of families like the Kentons.

Sources:
Christoff, Chris. "As beat-up Flint faces more bad news, Delphi workers are disgusted," Detroit Free Press, 1 April 2006.

Detroit News, The. Photograph, 1 April 2006.

Hannah, James. "Delphi Plants Proposal Upsets Employees," Associated Press, 1 April 2006.

Howells, William Dean. The Kentons, 1901, reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1969, free will discussed on pages 36 and 274.

Moberg, David. "Dueling over Delphi," The Nation, 3 April 2006.