Susan Sontag is the one who alerted us we should pay attention to the way people talk about illness and, by extension, their bodies. It’s no doubt to her I owe my mind’s wanderings after talking to two friends on medical diets who each delighted in telling me what they were allowed. When my mother was diagnosed with diabetes, our household lived in fear of what was forbidden.
In some ways, the different responses are similar to how people notice if a glass is half full or half empty. They indicate states of mind that outsiders roughly translate into optimism or pessimism, happiness or sadness, tranquility or depression. Beyond that, they indicate how people react to limitations and how those reactions affect their long term health.
The first woman has been overweight as long as I’ve known her and seeing specialists who tried to help her deal with a diabetic condition with diet. To no avail. She remained overweight but constantly talked about what she was told to do.
When I noticed it looked like she had lost weight, she said she had recently had her gallbladder and uterus removed. She was now fully diabetic, and again she told me about what she was allowed to eat. In addition to her three meals, she believed she could snack all day on nuts. It was in this context that she said she was allowed so many nuts a day and had them stashed in different places in her office. She sounded like a happy gerbil who didn’t pay attention to the warning that she could only eat so many calories a day, composed of foods from the list. She took the list to be a list of what was permissible within her traditional dietary patterns and was always confused that nothing ever changed.
The second woman has also been overweight as long as I’ve known her, and suffering from stress or emotion triggered symptoms like severe rashes. At one time she was told she was pre-diabetic, and I remember then she shopped the internet until she found some kind of bran muffin that tasted good and met her dietary restrictions. She allowed herself one in mid-morning.
Her conditions never really change. When I saw her this time, she mentioned all the medicines she was taking and noted she was back on Prozac. This time she has a gluten allergy which limits what she can eat, but it was when she was discussing her dietary list and mentioned what kind of chocolate she was allowed, that I asked was she still pre-diabetic. She looked at me as if she didn’t understand the question.
I was about five when my mother was diagnosed with diabetes. At the time, the early 1950's, diabetics were put on strict diets. She ate a poached egg and whole wheat toast every noon. Our dinners usually were some meat leached of all fat (and nutrients) and boiled, canned vegetables, usually peas, corn or string beans. When I later talked to other diabetics and learned even corn and peas were too starchy, I realize my mother’s condition was serious enough to warrant giving herself a daily shot of insulin, but not severe.
Like many diabetics, she was obsessed with the forbidden, and would indulge in fudge or other chocolate when she thought she could. She looked on the times my father was away on business as periods of freedom when we could go to the local drive in. Still, she had some kind of internal monitor because I only remember a few times when her biochemistry was off and she needed a quick dose of orange juice.
The difference between focusing on what’s permitted or what’s forbidden, however, may be more than a difference of individual psychology. Since I was a child, organizations representing diabetics and individuals like Mary Tyler Moore have been arguing that diabetes is a disease that can be treated, not some contagious or debilitating condition that requires special handling by society.
I was reminded of the reasons for such campaigns when I got my driver’s license renewed a few weeks ago. The form asked if I was a diabetic, alcoholic, drug user or had heart problems. No one is going to voluntarily admit to being a member of that quasi-illegal group. When I asked the clerk about the reason, he said diabetics might pass out. I didn’t say, so might I if I had a fever and was driving to the drug store to fill a prescription.
There is a profound difference between saying someone with a disease should be treated equally by the Department of Motor Vehicles, and saying they, in fact, are like others. The attempt to convince society to treat diabetics as normal has morphed into a belief by some diabetics that they are normal, and that their dietary lists are simply menu choices not clarions to change behavior.
My working friends will probably outlive my reclusive mother simply because they are more active, but I doubt they’ll live so many years with diabetes. The first women I mentioned is probably around 50, and I’ve heard her complaints about ill-health for about 10 years. The other women is a little older, and she’s been on a physical roller coaster the 15 years I’ve known her.
My mother, although a deeply unhappy woman who died just before she would have turned 60, managed to live 25 years with diabetes with no concerns about her weight and, until her heart attack in her mid-50's, no dramas of physical malaise.
Living with the forbidden may actually have been healthier than exploiting the permitted.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
South Carolina - Nation State
I didn’t realize until this past year how fragile is the very idea of a nation state. I sat through all those hours of undergraduate history classes dutifully remembering names and events in the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War and the Louis of France without much comprehension.
It turns out, this wasn’t all my fault. Steven Pincus believes it was the consequence of an English politician, Thomas Macaulay, who wanted people to think their past had been a bland, inevitable progression from the Magna Carta to the Hanovers who ruled when he was alive.
However, Bernard Bailyn, in his review of Pincus’ new book, argues the second overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 was the consequence of competing views of a nation state, one dominated by a single man who inherited his position, and one dominated by a merchant elite. While men who favored a state argued about the form, he suggests there were still a great number who simply rejected the very idea of centralized power.
Except for New England, organized by merchants and dominated by Puritan congregations, many of the men who migrated to the colonies still held the medieval view of landed property owners as sovereign. Richard Dunn suggests none of the Caribbean colonies accepted the legitimacy of their proprietors, the Stuarts or Cromwell, and worked through their assemblies to defy any authority. Within the Macaulay tradition, most of these disputes have come to be described as instances of modern Englishmen demanding representation instead of medieval barons refusing to submit.
The proprietors themselves tended to see themselves as medieval barons in the tradition of the Bishop of Durham, Anthony Bek, who was granted extraordinary powers in exchange for protecting England on the Scots border in the late thirteenth century. The Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, demanded the vulnerable Charles I delegate similar powers to raise maintain an army, shire the land, and collect taxes, duties and quit rents in Barbados in 1627 that had been granted to William Alexander in Nova Scotia in 1621.
When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the most active partner among the South Carolina proprietors, drew up the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 he assumed he had the same powers as Durham to organize the colony. The colonists simply refused to ratify it, and continued to reject every revision. Unlike the colonists who came with William Bradford to Plymouth, they didn’t propose an alternative constitution. They simply rejected any contract for government.
After Ashley-Cooper died in 1683, the Carolina colonists abandoned any pretense of accepting central authority. The large areas of settlement argued with each other, and people within the settlements quarreled among themselves. In 1719, the colonists simply took power from the proprietors and asked to become a royal colony, not for the benefits of order, but to ensure they were legally free of any existing rules or obligations.
Today, we call countries like Afghanistan run by territorial barons cum war lords failed states, when, in fact, like many of the Caribbean and Carolina planters they never entered into the world of nations. It was a fragile concept when James II was trying to implement it, and it remains so today.
Notes:
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Macaulay, Thomas. History of England, 1848-1855.
Pincus, Steven. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 2009, reviewed by Bernard Bailyn in The New York Review of Books, 29 November 2009.
It turns out, this wasn’t all my fault. Steven Pincus believes it was the consequence of an English politician, Thomas Macaulay, who wanted people to think their past had been a bland, inevitable progression from the Magna Carta to the Hanovers who ruled when he was alive.
However, Bernard Bailyn, in his review of Pincus’ new book, argues the second overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 was the consequence of competing views of a nation state, one dominated by a single man who inherited his position, and one dominated by a merchant elite. While men who favored a state argued about the form, he suggests there were still a great number who simply rejected the very idea of centralized power.
Except for New England, organized by merchants and dominated by Puritan congregations, many of the men who migrated to the colonies still held the medieval view of landed property owners as sovereign. Richard Dunn suggests none of the Caribbean colonies accepted the legitimacy of their proprietors, the Stuarts or Cromwell, and worked through their assemblies to defy any authority. Within the Macaulay tradition, most of these disputes have come to be described as instances of modern Englishmen demanding representation instead of medieval barons refusing to submit.
The proprietors themselves tended to see themselves as medieval barons in the tradition of the Bishop of Durham, Anthony Bek, who was granted extraordinary powers in exchange for protecting England on the Scots border in the late thirteenth century. The Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, demanded the vulnerable Charles I delegate similar powers to raise maintain an army, shire the land, and collect taxes, duties and quit rents in Barbados in 1627 that had been granted to William Alexander in Nova Scotia in 1621.
When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the most active partner among the South Carolina proprietors, drew up the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 he assumed he had the same powers as Durham to organize the colony. The colonists simply refused to ratify it, and continued to reject every revision. Unlike the colonists who came with William Bradford to Plymouth, they didn’t propose an alternative constitution. They simply rejected any contract for government.
After Ashley-Cooper died in 1683, the Carolina colonists abandoned any pretense of accepting central authority. The large areas of settlement argued with each other, and people within the settlements quarreled among themselves. In 1719, the colonists simply took power from the proprietors and asked to become a royal colony, not for the benefits of order, but to ensure they were legally free of any existing rules or obligations.
Today, we call countries like Afghanistan run by territorial barons cum war lords failed states, when, in fact, like many of the Caribbean and Carolina planters they never entered into the world of nations. It was a fragile concept when James II was trying to implement it, and it remains so today.
Notes:
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Macaulay, Thomas. History of England, 1848-1855.
Pincus, Steven. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 2009, reviewed by Bernard Bailyn in The New York Review of Books, 29 November 2009.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Cost of Staying Healthy
There are times when I think I’m the only one who cares if I remain healthy.
Once I start drawing social security, the actuaries know the sooner I die the less I draw from what I’ve contributed.
Insurance companies certainly don’t want me to stay healthy. If I never had another physical, I could have a heart attack or fall from weakened bones when I’m 75. It would cost someone to treat me, but I probably wouldn’t last long, and my total costs past age 65 will be relatively modest.
As it is, I insist of staying healthy. It turns out not to be a decision many can afford. This year it costs 21% of my gross and 27% of my actual take home pay. The percentages will be slightly smaller when I draw social security.
My health program is simple. An annual physical, which is not covered by today’s medicare part B, supported by blood work which may be covered. Every other year, I see the eye doctor, which is not covered by any insurance option, have a bone density test which is covered by medicare, and a mammogram, which currently is only 80% covered by the government and the rest by medigap J.
The prescription drugs I take are preventive, rather than life sustaining, and in that sense voluntary. In addition, I take vitamins for my bones, including calcium citrate, magnesium, and vitamin D, along with fish oil. They cost something like $30 a month.
I need exercise for my bones and to keep my cholesterol levels low. Only some medicare advantage programs cover the cost of a gym or wellness center. One I used was $30 a month, another $60. I tend to get bored by them, and keep promising myself I’ll do more on my own. Simple walking is supposed to be enough.
Diet is another factor. My preference for dried lentils, rice and frozen vegetables is relatively inexpensive. If I chose the recommended healthy diet with fresh fruits and vegetables, more meat and fish, my food costs would be more than I could afford.
I look at what I pay to stay healthy, and think about an Indian woman I worked with. For some reason, her husband, then in his early 30's, had undiagnosed diabetes. When he finally saw a doctor in August, he checked himself out of the hospital because his mother was ill. By Thanksgiving, he couldn’t walk. When his wife got him to the doctor, his organs were shutting down and nothing could be done. He died before Christmas, leaving two young children.
His death was costly to his family, but only cost insurance programs a few days in the hospital. It may be the ideal for a capitalist concern, but as a child of a diabetic I expect more for myself.
Once I start drawing social security, the actuaries know the sooner I die the less I draw from what I’ve contributed.
Insurance companies certainly don’t want me to stay healthy. If I never had another physical, I could have a heart attack or fall from weakened bones when I’m 75. It would cost someone to treat me, but I probably wouldn’t last long, and my total costs past age 65 will be relatively modest.
As it is, I insist of staying healthy. It turns out not to be a decision many can afford. This year it costs 21% of my gross and 27% of my actual take home pay. The percentages will be slightly smaller when I draw social security.
My health program is simple. An annual physical, which is not covered by today’s medicare part B, supported by blood work which may be covered. Every other year, I see the eye doctor, which is not covered by any insurance option, have a bone density test which is covered by medicare, and a mammogram, which currently is only 80% covered by the government and the rest by medigap J.
The prescription drugs I take are preventive, rather than life sustaining, and in that sense voluntary. In addition, I take vitamins for my bones, including calcium citrate, magnesium, and vitamin D, along with fish oil. They cost something like $30 a month.
I need exercise for my bones and to keep my cholesterol levels low. Only some medicare advantage programs cover the cost of a gym or wellness center. One I used was $30 a month, another $60. I tend to get bored by them, and keep promising myself I’ll do more on my own. Simple walking is supposed to be enough.
Diet is another factor. My preference for dried lentils, rice and frozen vegetables is relatively inexpensive. If I chose the recommended healthy diet with fresh fruits and vegetables, more meat and fish, my food costs would be more than I could afford.
I look at what I pay to stay healthy, and think about an Indian woman I worked with. For some reason, her husband, then in his early 30's, had undiagnosed diabetes. When he finally saw a doctor in August, he checked himself out of the hospital because his mother was ill. By Thanksgiving, he couldn’t walk. When his wife got him to the doctor, his organs were shutting down and nothing could be done. He died before Christmas, leaving two young children.
His death was costly to his family, but only cost insurance programs a few days in the hospital. It may be the ideal for a capitalist concern, but as a child of a diabetic I expect more for myself.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Tales of Eviction 2
When our tenants start to complain about one another, I have no idea who to believe.
My boss and a friend bought a house to subdivide into three apartments. When they discovered they had different business expectations, they split the investment: my boss took the back yard and his friend kept the house. I handle the rents as a favor.
One of the tenants had worked for us a cleaning woman, but not a particularly competent one. The apartment owner said he might as well keep using her, since he no longer had anything worth breaking.
She reminds me a bit of the stereotypic lace-curtain Irish, only with a Mexican twist. She wants both middle class respectability and to be the hacienda patroness cum catina proprietor entertaining her neighbors. One of the neighbors, who works as a bouncer, simply tries to politely refuse her invitations to sit around and drink on the patio.
The ice cream man’s a different story.
One of our former employees, who has a rental property, sent him to us. He told me he’d planned to have five men in the house, each contributing to the rent, but could only get three. So we got him.
I got the impression that the others worked for him with push carts, while he sold ice cream bars from a truck. During the summer, they got drunk and loud a few times. The woman I think of as Maggie complained, but as the bouncer said, she was also willing to drink with them, until she wasn’t.
I shrugged. What can you expect when you have a group of men living and working together in an unairconditioned apartment in the heat of summer with no women? I was wrong about one thing. At some point, a woman had moved in with the group.
Things simmered along until a few weeks ago when Maggie and her 12-year-old daughter came in to report they’d called the police the night before. They said things were noisy, and when the police arrived, one of the men had a cut cheek. The ice cream man apparently talked back to the police, and spent the night in jail.
The owner of the house called to ask what had happened. Apparently, Maggie had called him in the night to ask permission to call the police.
I talked to the bouncer the next time he came in, and, by then, Maggie was telling his wife and the ice cream man’s woman that it wasn’t she who’d called the police.
He confirmed it had been noisy, and when the police were around he and his wife had stayed low in their apartment.
His wife was told by the ice cream man’s woman that the police had broken in the back window, found the man’s “employees” hiding in the bathroom, beat up the one and fled. The ice cream man then called 911 and got abusive when the police returned with paramedics.
The bouncer was in an expansive mood, and said the ice cream man did have a temper. He’d come to the bar where he worked, and gotten ugly when he refused to let one of the “employees” enter with a fake ID.
He also said the day after the police visit, he’d seen a woman he knew from the bar at the apartment. She’s in her seventies and comes looking to drink and dance with young men. Since she pays the bills and is well-behaved, they treat her as one of the regulars.
Apparently, she’d bought a cell phone for one of the ice cream man’s “employees,” and he hadn’t paid the bill. She was trying to collect money and threatening that, if she wasn’t paid, she’d report them to her brother who works for immigration.
I have no idea what happened that night, but doubt the police were the ones who broke in. My guess is that they were either henchmen for the good-times girl or someone else who’d been gypped and they may have said they were the police to scare people. I suspect the victim was probably the intended target.
Of course, by the time my boss got there to investigate, everyone had moved out and the ice cream man blamed it all on Maggie. My boss went through his male bonding routine, offered him a better apartment for the same rent as an apology, and yelled at me for suggesting he should be evicted.
When the ice cream came to pay his rent, he brought an interpreter to demand the promised two-bedroom apartment. Since the family in the apartment by boss had promised weren’t moving after all, he demanded the one where the abused woman had lived. I told the interpreter that young children lived in that building and he’d already been too noisy for a family building. When she asked how noisy, I mentioned the police.
The ice cream man came in the next day to pay the rent in another man’s name. I rather suspect the interpreter represented the man he’s to whom he promised to rent the second bedroom and the mention of the police was a surprise.
My problems aren’t over. When the bouncer came in with his rent, he said his 12-year-old son had just moved in with him. Maggie’s daughter’s the same age
My boss and a friend bought a house to subdivide into three apartments. When they discovered they had different business expectations, they split the investment: my boss took the back yard and his friend kept the house. I handle the rents as a favor.
One of the tenants had worked for us a cleaning woman, but not a particularly competent one. The apartment owner said he might as well keep using her, since he no longer had anything worth breaking.
She reminds me a bit of the stereotypic lace-curtain Irish, only with a Mexican twist. She wants both middle class respectability and to be the hacienda patroness cum catina proprietor entertaining her neighbors. One of the neighbors, who works as a bouncer, simply tries to politely refuse her invitations to sit around and drink on the patio.
The ice cream man’s a different story.
One of our former employees, who has a rental property, sent him to us. He told me he’d planned to have five men in the house, each contributing to the rent, but could only get three. So we got him.
I got the impression that the others worked for him with push carts, while he sold ice cream bars from a truck. During the summer, they got drunk and loud a few times. The woman I think of as Maggie complained, but as the bouncer said, she was also willing to drink with them, until she wasn’t.
I shrugged. What can you expect when you have a group of men living and working together in an unairconditioned apartment in the heat of summer with no women? I was wrong about one thing. At some point, a woman had moved in with the group.
Things simmered along until a few weeks ago when Maggie and her 12-year-old daughter came in to report they’d called the police the night before. They said things were noisy, and when the police arrived, one of the men had a cut cheek. The ice cream man apparently talked back to the police, and spent the night in jail.
The owner of the house called to ask what had happened. Apparently, Maggie had called him in the night to ask permission to call the police.
I talked to the bouncer the next time he came in, and, by then, Maggie was telling his wife and the ice cream man’s woman that it wasn’t she who’d called the police.
He confirmed it had been noisy, and when the police were around he and his wife had stayed low in their apartment.
His wife was told by the ice cream man’s woman that the police had broken in the back window, found the man’s “employees” hiding in the bathroom, beat up the one and fled. The ice cream man then called 911 and got abusive when the police returned with paramedics.
The bouncer was in an expansive mood, and said the ice cream man did have a temper. He’d come to the bar where he worked, and gotten ugly when he refused to let one of the “employees” enter with a fake ID.
He also said the day after the police visit, he’d seen a woman he knew from the bar at the apartment. She’s in her seventies and comes looking to drink and dance with young men. Since she pays the bills and is well-behaved, they treat her as one of the regulars.
Apparently, she’d bought a cell phone for one of the ice cream man’s “employees,” and he hadn’t paid the bill. She was trying to collect money and threatening that, if she wasn’t paid, she’d report them to her brother who works for immigration.
I have no idea what happened that night, but doubt the police were the ones who broke in. My guess is that they were either henchmen for the good-times girl or someone else who’d been gypped and they may have said they were the police to scare people. I suspect the victim was probably the intended target.
Of course, by the time my boss got there to investigate, everyone had moved out and the ice cream man blamed it all on Maggie. My boss went through his male bonding routine, offered him a better apartment for the same rent as an apology, and yelled at me for suggesting he should be evicted.
When the ice cream came to pay his rent, he brought an interpreter to demand the promised two-bedroom apartment. Since the family in the apartment by boss had promised weren’t moving after all, he demanded the one where the abused woman had lived. I told the interpreter that young children lived in that building and he’d already been too noisy for a family building. When she asked how noisy, I mentioned the police.
The ice cream man came in the next day to pay the rent in another man’s name. I rather suspect the interpreter represented the man he’s to whom he promised to rent the second bedroom and the mention of the police was a surprise.
My problems aren’t over. When the bouncer came in with his rent, he said his 12-year-old son had just moved in with him. Maggie’s daughter’s the same age
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Medicare Part D
Medicare Part D, the program that covers prescription drugs, is a world of Potemkin web sites.
Everyone explains the program has three phases. No coverage for the first $310 and no coverage after $2,830. Another part of medicare takes over after you spend $4,550. The $1,720 between is the infamous doughnut hole where the patient pays everything. Insurance, of course, is available to cover those extra costs.
After that simple information, everything is hidden. The deductible and the doughnut hole running balance counts everything you and the insurance company pay, except the premium.
You know what you pay, without the help of fancy websites. You cannot find out what the insurance company says it pays or, for that matter, if that list price is in fact what it does pay. The excuse is prices change weekly. The real reason may be more nefarious.
I began with the government’s medicare site which ranks plans by zip code. All the rest of the cost information is useless, since it only calculates premiums and co-pays. I discovered there were 47 available plans, of which six had ratings of four stars or more out of five. Those six are offered by four companies. Three charge standard co-pays, and one charges 25% of the unknown drug costs.
I called all four, and asked them to mail information. The one that charges by percent still has sent me nothing, despite two requests. I should note I live in a primarily rural county with high rates of diabetes, alcohol caused accidents and heroine use. While Medicare allows insurance companies to offer rates based on an individual’s health and age, most choose the location option which places me a high risk group. No doubt the one that won’t send information is willing to offer something in other parts of the state, but tries not to offer anything here.
Next, I made a list of the drugs I took in the past year, figured what I paid currently, and what I thought the actual insurance company cost was, based on one of those websites that list costs for Canadian and American sources. I used the numbers it listed for CVS drugstores.
Every month I need a bone density drug that’s listed as tier 2. I currently pay $30 a month, and the drug website listed it as$104, or roughly 29%.
Almost every month I need a hormone replacement that’s listed as tier 2. Again, I currently pay $30 a month and it was listed as $104.71, and again I now pay roughly 29%.
Those two drugs alone would cost $2,520 for a year, just $310 less than the coverage cut-off. Any other drug requirement would take me into the area where I paid everything again, unless I paid a much high monthly premium.
Because of serious muscle problems this past year, I took Celebrex and expect to need to buy it maybe six times in the coming year. My insurance company only grudgingly authorizes the use of the anti-inflammatory after the doctor writes a letter showing any alternative would cause serious stomach problems.
My co-pay was $55, and my local drug store couldn’t tell me in fact what it would cost me if I didn’t have insurance. The listed price for the tier 3 drug ranges from $50 a month in Canada to $122 for the American company I’ve been using as a standard. However, I suspect the number is much higher.
One medicare part D plan charges $42 for Tier 2 and $90 for Tier 3, with a monthly premium of $34. The total cost per month is close to $208, with no deductible.
The second provider charges $38 for Tier 2, $73 for Tier 3, and a monthly premium of $33, for a rounded monthly total of $183. If I allocate its $180 minimum deductible for the year, the monthly rate rises to $198.
The third charges $33 for Tier 2, $90 for Tier 3, and $47 a month, for a total of $202, with no deductible.
If price alone could be calculated, the choice would seem simple. However, I’ve never heard of the people who provide the second plan and only know they’re in Texas, while the others come from people with reputations, AARP and a national drug chain.
Since losing coverage when one reaches the doughnut hole depends on what the companies say they pay for the drug, everything ultimately depends of their veracity. One, AARP, has a plan that will cover the gap between Medicare and catastrophic coverage, and the premium difference is $556 year. It’s only worth it if the cost of drugs is greater than that. Since I can get no reliable information on Celebrex, I have no idea how much I would spend.
Once I go through a year on Medicare, and get the periodic statements that indicate exactly what the drugs cost, I can make a more informed decision the following year. However, the first year is an absolute blind pig shoot.
Everyone explains the program has three phases. No coverage for the first $310 and no coverage after $2,830. Another part of medicare takes over after you spend $4,550. The $1,720 between is the infamous doughnut hole where the patient pays everything. Insurance, of course, is available to cover those extra costs.
After that simple information, everything is hidden. The deductible and the doughnut hole running balance counts everything you and the insurance company pay, except the premium.
You know what you pay, without the help of fancy websites. You cannot find out what the insurance company says it pays or, for that matter, if that list price is in fact what it does pay. The excuse is prices change weekly. The real reason may be more nefarious.
I began with the government’s medicare site which ranks plans by zip code. All the rest of the cost information is useless, since it only calculates premiums and co-pays. I discovered there were 47 available plans, of which six had ratings of four stars or more out of five. Those six are offered by four companies. Three charge standard co-pays, and one charges 25% of the unknown drug costs.
I called all four, and asked them to mail information. The one that charges by percent still has sent me nothing, despite two requests. I should note I live in a primarily rural county with high rates of diabetes, alcohol caused accidents and heroine use. While Medicare allows insurance companies to offer rates based on an individual’s health and age, most choose the location option which places me a high risk group. No doubt the one that won’t send information is willing to offer something in other parts of the state, but tries not to offer anything here.
Next, I made a list of the drugs I took in the past year, figured what I paid currently, and what I thought the actual insurance company cost was, based on one of those websites that list costs for Canadian and American sources. I used the numbers it listed for CVS drugstores.
Every month I need a bone density drug that’s listed as tier 2. I currently pay $30 a month, and the drug website listed it as$104, or roughly 29%.
Almost every month I need a hormone replacement that’s listed as tier 2. Again, I currently pay $30 a month and it was listed as $104.71, and again I now pay roughly 29%.
Those two drugs alone would cost $2,520 for a year, just $310 less than the coverage cut-off. Any other drug requirement would take me into the area where I paid everything again, unless I paid a much high monthly premium.
Because of serious muscle problems this past year, I took Celebrex and expect to need to buy it maybe six times in the coming year. My insurance company only grudgingly authorizes the use of the anti-inflammatory after the doctor writes a letter showing any alternative would cause serious stomach problems.
My co-pay was $55, and my local drug store couldn’t tell me in fact what it would cost me if I didn’t have insurance. The listed price for the tier 3 drug ranges from $50 a month in Canada to $122 for the American company I’ve been using as a standard. However, I suspect the number is much higher.
One medicare part D plan charges $42 for Tier 2 and $90 for Tier 3, with a monthly premium of $34. The total cost per month is close to $208, with no deductible.
The second provider charges $38 for Tier 2, $73 for Tier 3, and a monthly premium of $33, for a rounded monthly total of $183. If I allocate its $180 minimum deductible for the year, the monthly rate rises to $198.
The third charges $33 for Tier 2, $90 for Tier 3, and $47 a month, for a total of $202, with no deductible.
If price alone could be calculated, the choice would seem simple. However, I’ve never heard of the people who provide the second plan and only know they’re in Texas, while the others come from people with reputations, AARP and a national drug chain.
Since losing coverage when one reaches the doughnut hole depends on what the companies say they pay for the drug, everything ultimately depends of their veracity. One, AARP, has a plan that will cover the gap between Medicare and catastrophic coverage, and the premium difference is $556 year. It’s only worth it if the cost of drugs is greater than that. Since I can get no reliable information on Celebrex, I have no idea how much I would spend.
Once I go through a year on Medicare, and get the periodic statements that indicate exactly what the drugs cost, I can make a more informed decision the following year. However, the first year is an absolute blind pig shoot.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tales of Eviction 1
Renting apartments for my boss makes me feel like a pastor doing marriage counseling, without the authority to recommend caution. Couples come to me, full of hopes for their relationship, only to be evicted a few months later because dreams aren’t enough.
Our most recent pair was an aunt and her niece who had returned from California with a young baby to start over together. The older woman had been laid off as a therapist for the elderly when the recession meant fewer people could afford to have an outsider help them with their parents, and the charitable organization that employed her had laid off five of its six caregivers. The women thought her unemployment and the girl’s earnings as a pharmacy tech would be enough.
Before they made the last installment on their move in rent, I got a call from one of the neighbors in the building explaining why he’d called 911. He’d seen the young baby and when he heard someone screaming “my baby’s dead” over and over, he acted.
The older woman came in the next day with the rest of the rent money. She was dressed badly and couldn’t stop crying. The baby in question was her son, the same age as the niece, who had died in a treatment facility. Apparently, they notified her when she was alone, and she went mad, banging the walls and screaming. The police got someone to sedate her.
I’ve learned nothing about the mother-son relationship, if he was a young man led astray by bad friends, or if the family was dysfunctional and the woman or the boy’s father had been an alcoholic or drug user.
All I know is the woman had no intention of getting over his death. If I even hinted she looked a little better, she took umbrage. She attacked her daughter when she wasn’t grief stricken enough, then kept the boy’s ashes in her bedroom to console at night.
The woman had no medical insurance, and broke an arm and several teeth when she fell down the back step, if that’s what she did. One of her comments made it sound like she had run out the back door and smashed into the concrete block yard wall some 25' away. Soon after she was taking oxycontin and drinking.
The niece finally called her cousin and told her her mother needed serious care and put the woman and the ashes on a bus headed for Denver.
Meantime, her life had also fallen apart. When they missed paying the second month’s rent, the two women came in to say the girl’s boyfriend had come out for the funeral and not left. They’d called the police the day before and filed a restraining order when he beat her and stole the rent money.
When I talked to them, I discovered the young woman had three more children she’d left in California with their father’s family, a different man than the baby’s father.
When the older woman came in a few days later with some of the rent money, she said how funny it was people were willing to help them now, but weren’t when the boyfriend was around.
A few days after the young woman came in with some more rent money and told me she had sent the aunt to her daughter’s, I took the exterminator to the apartment and found the man was back. I knew then we’d never get our rent when it was due, and it was a matter of time before the problems got worse.
Next, another of her neighbors called to say he had heard her screaming “don’t hit me” over the weekend, and the next time he heard any violent sound he was calling child support services. I told him to definitely make the call if he thought anyone was going to be hurt.
We put an eviction notice on the door the next day, citing the failure to never pay rent on time. It was now the third month and we still had only half the month’s rent.
The second neighbor called again to report the police had been there the night before, stopping first at the apartment, then searching the yard. He admitted that during the raid he’d kept an eye on his car to make sure his property stayed safe.
When I talked to him Friday, when he came in to pay the rent, he said she had moved out with the help of people who might have been her parents. Since she made it sound like she had been raised by her grandmother, they may have been another of her aunt’s siblings.
The first neighbor said he was glad they, not she, had gone. She’d called him to walk her to her car, and he’d had no desire to get caught in a domestic violence situation. He’d already chased some strangers away from his apartment and had begun to worry about the safety of his grade-school-aged daughter.
If she’s living with people who can keep her boyfriend away from their home, she and the baby may have a chance. When she talked about trying to help her aunt with her oxycontin prescription, she sounded like a capable pharmacy tech who could make a tolerable living as a single mom.
If the people who helped her move don’t help her deal with the psychological problems of domestic violence, then she may actually have been better off in a shelter for homeless woman if it were run by people who could help her and the child.
The two times I saw the infant it was being held, either by the sobbing aunt or the boyfriend, and expected to watch television and keep quiet. I hope the experience of the last three months isn’t part of a permanent pattern. Otherwise, I know family problems have just been passed on to at least the third generation.
I also know her aunt was right. Everyone is willing to help a deserving young woman, but no one, not even the police, are willing to risk their personal safety to intervene when an exploitive, violent man is present.
Our most recent pair was an aunt and her niece who had returned from California with a young baby to start over together. The older woman had been laid off as a therapist for the elderly when the recession meant fewer people could afford to have an outsider help them with their parents, and the charitable organization that employed her had laid off five of its six caregivers. The women thought her unemployment and the girl’s earnings as a pharmacy tech would be enough.
Before they made the last installment on their move in rent, I got a call from one of the neighbors in the building explaining why he’d called 911. He’d seen the young baby and when he heard someone screaming “my baby’s dead” over and over, he acted.
The older woman came in the next day with the rest of the rent money. She was dressed badly and couldn’t stop crying. The baby in question was her son, the same age as the niece, who had died in a treatment facility. Apparently, they notified her when she was alone, and she went mad, banging the walls and screaming. The police got someone to sedate her.
I’ve learned nothing about the mother-son relationship, if he was a young man led astray by bad friends, or if the family was dysfunctional and the woman or the boy’s father had been an alcoholic or drug user.
All I know is the woman had no intention of getting over his death. If I even hinted she looked a little better, she took umbrage. She attacked her daughter when she wasn’t grief stricken enough, then kept the boy’s ashes in her bedroom to console at night.
The woman had no medical insurance, and broke an arm and several teeth when she fell down the back step, if that’s what she did. One of her comments made it sound like she had run out the back door and smashed into the concrete block yard wall some 25' away. Soon after she was taking oxycontin and drinking.
The niece finally called her cousin and told her her mother needed serious care and put the woman and the ashes on a bus headed for Denver.
Meantime, her life had also fallen apart. When they missed paying the second month’s rent, the two women came in to say the girl’s boyfriend had come out for the funeral and not left. They’d called the police the day before and filed a restraining order when he beat her and stole the rent money.
When I talked to them, I discovered the young woman had three more children she’d left in California with their father’s family, a different man than the baby’s father.
When the older woman came in a few days later with some of the rent money, she said how funny it was people were willing to help them now, but weren’t when the boyfriend was around.
A few days after the young woman came in with some more rent money and told me she had sent the aunt to her daughter’s, I took the exterminator to the apartment and found the man was back. I knew then we’d never get our rent when it was due, and it was a matter of time before the problems got worse.
Next, another of her neighbors called to say he had heard her screaming “don’t hit me” over the weekend, and the next time he heard any violent sound he was calling child support services. I told him to definitely make the call if he thought anyone was going to be hurt.
We put an eviction notice on the door the next day, citing the failure to never pay rent on time. It was now the third month and we still had only half the month’s rent.
The second neighbor called again to report the police had been there the night before, stopping first at the apartment, then searching the yard. He admitted that during the raid he’d kept an eye on his car to make sure his property stayed safe.
When I talked to him Friday, when he came in to pay the rent, he said she had moved out with the help of people who might have been her parents. Since she made it sound like she had been raised by her grandmother, they may have been another of her aunt’s siblings.
The first neighbor said he was glad they, not she, had gone. She’d called him to walk her to her car, and he’d had no desire to get caught in a domestic violence situation. He’d already chased some strangers away from his apartment and had begun to worry about the safety of his grade-school-aged daughter.
If she’s living with people who can keep her boyfriend away from their home, she and the baby may have a chance. When she talked about trying to help her aunt with her oxycontin prescription, she sounded like a capable pharmacy tech who could make a tolerable living as a single mom.
If the people who helped her move don’t help her deal with the psychological problems of domestic violence, then she may actually have been better off in a shelter for homeless woman if it were run by people who could help her and the child.
The two times I saw the infant it was being held, either by the sobbing aunt or the boyfriend, and expected to watch television and keep quiet. I hope the experience of the last three months isn’t part of a permanent pattern. Otherwise, I know family problems have just been passed on to at least the third generation.
I also know her aunt was right. Everyone is willing to help a deserving young woman, but no one, not even the police, are willing to risk their personal safety to intervene when an exploitive, violent man is present.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Medigap
I’ve always had an ambivalent attitude towards AARP. I always thought joining would be a bit like becoming a teamster: I would pay my dues, knowing I was contributing to activities that improved my life, even though I suspected I didn’t approve of everything the organization did. Now that the radical conservatives are considering targeting it as a way to destroy health reform, I might actually be willing to make a contribution beyond my dues.
The market for supplemental medicare policies grew from the fact that while the government sets the price for services, it tends to only pay 80% of that price. The rest is left to the patient.
My father had some kind of policy when he died from lung cancer in the 1980's that seemed to have covered everything. However, by the time Congress was considering the medicare drug proposal, anarchy (or genuine market competition) had taken over the supplemental medicare insurance industry.
Congress defined several levels of coverage, and that’s all any company can offer. The competition, if any, lies in prices and reliability of services. Most cover the medicare deductibles, but only plans F and J cover the 20% gap. The only difference between the two, is one offers $120 for "preventive care not covered by medicare"and $1,600 for "at home recovery."
Getting a definition of "preventive care not covered" is impossible. One reason I have bone density problems is my body doesn’t absorb vitamin D. Each year, as part of my physical, my doctor orders blood work to check my vitamin D levels. I can’t find out if that test would be covered by medicare or, if not, if it costs more than $120 and would be covered by plan J. I do know this year my insurance company set the amount that could be reimbursed at $75 of the $315 the lab billed.
Once I had some idea which medigap policy I needed, I found getting information on what was available where I lived nearly impossible. Every website tells you to check your state’s insurance regulator’s website to find what’s available. It took the better part of two days to find that site, and then all it provided was a list with 800 numbers that did not include AARP’s provider, UnitedHealthcare.
Of the 31 companies the state listed, 30 offered plan F and two offered plan J. So much for finding competitors with AARP.
If I go with UnitedHealthcare, it’s because I know the AARP card will be recognized anywhere (except possibly the state of South Carolina) and that it has a large enough pool that it can offer lower rates, if it’s so inclined. More important, even if AARP has put itself into the unfortunate position of both consumer advocate and company shill, it’s continued success depends on satisfying the former group of notoriously cranky people and that may exert some pressure on the quality of service and price.
The market for supplemental medicare policies grew from the fact that while the government sets the price for services, it tends to only pay 80% of that price. The rest is left to the patient.
My father had some kind of policy when he died from lung cancer in the 1980's that seemed to have covered everything. However, by the time Congress was considering the medicare drug proposal, anarchy (or genuine market competition) had taken over the supplemental medicare insurance industry.
Congress defined several levels of coverage, and that’s all any company can offer. The competition, if any, lies in prices and reliability of services. Most cover the medicare deductibles, but only plans F and J cover the 20% gap. The only difference between the two, is one offers $120 for "preventive care not covered by medicare"and $1,600 for "at home recovery."
Getting a definition of "preventive care not covered" is impossible. One reason I have bone density problems is my body doesn’t absorb vitamin D. Each year, as part of my physical, my doctor orders blood work to check my vitamin D levels. I can’t find out if that test would be covered by medicare or, if not, if it costs more than $120 and would be covered by plan J. I do know this year my insurance company set the amount that could be reimbursed at $75 of the $315 the lab billed.
Once I had some idea which medigap policy I needed, I found getting information on what was available where I lived nearly impossible. Every website tells you to check your state’s insurance regulator’s website to find what’s available. It took the better part of two days to find that site, and then all it provided was a list with 800 numbers that did not include AARP’s provider, UnitedHealthcare.
Of the 31 companies the state listed, 30 offered plan F and two offered plan J. So much for finding competitors with AARP.
If I go with UnitedHealthcare, it’s because I know the AARP card will be recognized anywhere (except possibly the state of South Carolina) and that it has a large enough pool that it can offer lower rates, if it’s so inclined. More important, even if AARP has put itself into the unfortunate position of both consumer advocate and company shill, it’s continued success depends on satisfying the former group of notoriously cranky people and that may exert some pressure on the quality of service and price.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Medicare Advantage
There are times when I wish Congressmen had no staffs. Then when some family member needed help selecting an insurance plan, they couldn’t turn it over to someone else, who would then call a friend who would call a friend, eventually reaching someone who helped write a 1,100 page law and knew the right person in the industry to issue the perfect policy for the relative.
Understanding the simple basics of medicare options took nearly two full days of surfing the web when my boss thought I was doing something worth my salary. I finally found that, like IBM programming manuals, everything on websites made sense once I had already figured things out for myself, but nothing made sense until then.
I had always assumed that medicare coverage just happened when I turned 65, and I could afford the smaller social security paycheck because I wouldn’t need to pay so much for private insurance.
I also assumed my mailbox would be filled with circulars from various medicare providers. When I got nothing, I called by insurance agent to get advice on what I still called supplemental medicare insurance, only to be told (1) my agent didn’t handle medicare related policies, (2) I had to register with social security, and (3) the best thing to do was call AARP.
Calling social security was easier than AARP, and within minutes I was registered. It took three weeks, however, to receive a piece of cardboard that confirmed my account. It came the same day as a notice from my current insurer saying my rate next year, if I were still 64, would rise from $366 a month to $453 and convert from a PPO to an HMO. It would only be $405 if I lived in a more metropolitan area, filled with more accidents and pollution.
The first thing I had to learn was the meaning of medicare parts A and B. The first covers hospitalization and is free. The other covers medical needs and costs $96 a month. It rises to $110.50 next year, but no one at Medicare seemed to know that. It only found out when I got my first bill.
That’s $1,326 a year. If I remain healthy and only see my doctor once a year for a physical, supported by blood work and an every other year bone density test, I’m essentially paying all my own medical expenses. The physical is explicitly not covered by Part B, and it’s still not clear if the geriatric lab work would be covered.
However, someone rear-ended my car some years ago, and three times in the last ten years I’ve had to go through physical therapy to overcome muscle problems caused by the whip lash. Each clinic charged at least $100 a visit, in addition to my co-pay. If that happens in the future, as it may, I’ll get some benefit on my $110 a month investment.
The next thing I had to learn was that what my father had as supplemental insurance no longer existed after Bush added the drug benefit. Now, one must choose between a heavily advertised medicare advantage plan or a secretive medigap policy. The one is essentially a nicely packaged HMO or PPO that front ends medicare, handles the drug benefit and may add a few other things. Real coverage is only available from an insurance company.
In this state, there are several bottom feeders, defined as those who are working to sabotage health care reform, who offer medicare advantage plans. In addition, there’s a local HMO I vowed to never use after a one year stint when they seemed more interested in generating cash in the form of co-pays required to get referrals than in serving my needs. I finally found my own doctor and paid my own expenses for the rest of the year.
There’s the PPO I currently have who did not have a service agreement with the primary hospital in this region until this spring. Confirming that took some phone calls. The company’s central office said that it was true, but no one at the hospital had worked there long enough to understand my question. As my insurance agent said, that agreement isn’t strong enough to use as the basis for a decision - it could be cancelled any time by either side.
Blue cross simply says they’re no longer offering a medicare advantage plan in the state next year.
When I talked to people who are already on medicare, I found they have no idea what they have. My boss’s mother only knows what she has is free and I must be some kind of fool to be paying anything more than the deeply resented monthly fee.
When she got bubonic plague this year and was hospitalized for five days, she says she only had to pay a few co-pays for follow-up appointments and part of the price of the ambulance because it wasn’t an emergency. Why getting an 80-year-old woman having trouble breathing and a high fever to the hospital isn’t considered an emergency, I don’t know, especially when they discovered e-coli had broken from its confinement as a consequence of the plague.
She says she has no drug coverage, but also says she’s a member of that HMO I boycott who offers medicare advantage with or without drug coverage. The one has no premium, which means she is essentially getting only medicare part B, with no assigned doctor.
Another friend’s father put her mother into a dementia care center this year, and discovered none of the costs are covered by his policy. He won’t tell her any more than that it’s with the HMO/PPO that didn’t have an agreement with the hospital in the state capital, so I know it’s medicare advantage and not the supplemental he may have thought he had.
Once I made the decision to use medigap instead of an advantage plan, I learned why the HMO’s and PPO’s are popular. My current physician doesn’t accept Medicare. I can still see her if I’m willing to pay my expenses. When I called the first name on the list of doctors she recommended, his receptionist said he also did not accept Medicare. The other two aren’t accepting new patients. Or rather, I can make an appointment in November for March or May, two months after my current prescriptions expire.
Even having good insurance isn’t enough to guarantee treatment in this part of the state.
Understanding the simple basics of medicare options took nearly two full days of surfing the web when my boss thought I was doing something worth my salary. I finally found that, like IBM programming manuals, everything on websites made sense once I had already figured things out for myself, but nothing made sense until then.
I had always assumed that medicare coverage just happened when I turned 65, and I could afford the smaller social security paycheck because I wouldn’t need to pay so much for private insurance.
I also assumed my mailbox would be filled with circulars from various medicare providers. When I got nothing, I called by insurance agent to get advice on what I still called supplemental medicare insurance, only to be told (1) my agent didn’t handle medicare related policies, (2) I had to register with social security, and (3) the best thing to do was call AARP.
Calling social security was easier than AARP, and within minutes I was registered. It took three weeks, however, to receive a piece of cardboard that confirmed my account. It came the same day as a notice from my current insurer saying my rate next year, if I were still 64, would rise from $366 a month to $453 and convert from a PPO to an HMO. It would only be $405 if I lived in a more metropolitan area, filled with more accidents and pollution.
The first thing I had to learn was the meaning of medicare parts A and B. The first covers hospitalization and is free. The other covers medical needs and costs $96 a month. It rises to $110.50 next year, but no one at Medicare seemed to know that. It only found out when I got my first bill.
That’s $1,326 a year. If I remain healthy and only see my doctor once a year for a physical, supported by blood work and an every other year bone density test, I’m essentially paying all my own medical expenses. The physical is explicitly not covered by Part B, and it’s still not clear if the geriatric lab work would be covered.
However, someone rear-ended my car some years ago, and three times in the last ten years I’ve had to go through physical therapy to overcome muscle problems caused by the whip lash. Each clinic charged at least $100 a visit, in addition to my co-pay. If that happens in the future, as it may, I’ll get some benefit on my $110 a month investment.
The next thing I had to learn was that what my father had as supplemental insurance no longer existed after Bush added the drug benefit. Now, one must choose between a heavily advertised medicare advantage plan or a secretive medigap policy. The one is essentially a nicely packaged HMO or PPO that front ends medicare, handles the drug benefit and may add a few other things. Real coverage is only available from an insurance company.
In this state, there are several bottom feeders, defined as those who are working to sabotage health care reform, who offer medicare advantage plans. In addition, there’s a local HMO I vowed to never use after a one year stint when they seemed more interested in generating cash in the form of co-pays required to get referrals than in serving my needs. I finally found my own doctor and paid my own expenses for the rest of the year.
There’s the PPO I currently have who did not have a service agreement with the primary hospital in this region until this spring. Confirming that took some phone calls. The company’s central office said that it was true, but no one at the hospital had worked there long enough to understand my question. As my insurance agent said, that agreement isn’t strong enough to use as the basis for a decision - it could be cancelled any time by either side.
Blue cross simply says they’re no longer offering a medicare advantage plan in the state next year.
When I talked to people who are already on medicare, I found they have no idea what they have. My boss’s mother only knows what she has is free and I must be some kind of fool to be paying anything more than the deeply resented monthly fee.
When she got bubonic plague this year and was hospitalized for five days, she says she only had to pay a few co-pays for follow-up appointments and part of the price of the ambulance because it wasn’t an emergency. Why getting an 80-year-old woman having trouble breathing and a high fever to the hospital isn’t considered an emergency, I don’t know, especially when they discovered e-coli had broken from its confinement as a consequence of the plague.
She says she has no drug coverage, but also says she’s a member of that HMO I boycott who offers medicare advantage with or without drug coverage. The one has no premium, which means she is essentially getting only medicare part B, with no assigned doctor.
Another friend’s father put her mother into a dementia care center this year, and discovered none of the costs are covered by his policy. He won’t tell her any more than that it’s with the HMO/PPO that didn’t have an agreement with the hospital in the state capital, so I know it’s medicare advantage and not the supplemental he may have thought he had.
Once I made the decision to use medigap instead of an advantage plan, I learned why the HMO’s and PPO’s are popular. My current physician doesn’t accept Medicare. I can still see her if I’m willing to pay my expenses. When I called the first name on the list of doctors she recommended, his receptionist said he also did not accept Medicare. The other two aren’t accepting new patients. Or rather, I can make an appointment in November for March or May, two months after my current prescriptions expire.
Even having good insurance isn’t enough to guarantee treatment in this part of the state.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile begins as a detective novel wrapped in a light comedy. By the end what Dame Agatha unmasks is not simply the murderer, but the falsity of the social premise of romance.
The central plot focuses on a beautiful, wealthy young woman, Linnet, and her husband, Simon Doyle, who are honeymooning in Egypt. Doyle’s former girlfriend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, has been stalking them, going to the same public places they attend to stare. She follows them when they try to escape her on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor and Assuan.
The critical murder scene begins when a drunken Jacqueline shoots Doyle. While a nurse is sedating her and others are attending Doyle, Linnet’s murdered while she sleeps with the same gun that injured Doyle.
The rest of the novel is the search for the murderer by Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be on board. Since the novel has been set as a holiday adventure, I immediately applied the rules of comic opera and eliminated from consideration all the young people who should marry at the end: Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton, Cornelia Robinson and Ferguson.
I also eliminated the utilitarian characters who must be on board for the plot to advance: the doctor who attends Doyle, the nurse who attends Jacqueline, the foreign intelligence agent, Colonel Race, whose position gives Poirot the authority to question people.
As I read I reminded myself it’s always dangerous with Christie to eliminate anyone. In some of her first Poirot novels she upended the conventions when the utilitarian characters in fact were the murderers.
But, I told myself as I read the 1938 novel, she can’t repeat herself. She’s been exposed to the movie makers who adapt her novels. She’s remarried and her trips with her archaeologist husband must contribute to the plot’s mise en scene. Why not a happy ending?
Surely the firey romance between Cornelia and Ferguson and the gentler one between Rosalie and Tim are intended to contrast positively with the dangers of a woman who cares too much? The conventions require such balance.
And so the investigation progresses, revealing the hidden faults of each of the key characters. Some minor ones die. A spy is identified. And, finally, the murder is revealed with a method so byzantine, I leave it to Poirot to explain.
But, instead of the frisson of pleasure that follows from finishing a mystery, this left me with a chill because I knew, and Christie knew, all those pleasant little marriages at the end are damned.
It turns out Tim is a jewel thief working with Joanna Southwood, a friend of Linnette’s. Rosalie’s mother, Salome Otterbourne, is a drunkard. The girl is exchanging the life of enabling her mother to that of enabling a crook and living with the mother who created him. In some ways the trade is worse because, at least, her mother had once been a successful romance novelist, while no publisher will acknowledge Tim’s existence.
Cornelia’s father was ruined by Linette’s father. Her wealthy aunt, Marie Van Schuyler, is a kleptomaniac. The browbeaten girl refuses a proposal from a man who is secretly Lord Dawlish and instead accepts an older doctor who can help her understand her aunt’s problems and give her a new group of people to tend. Ferguson/Dawlish complains that given the chance for light and happiness, she chooses a new cave.
As for the heroine who has everything, her husband married her for her money. Her one friend becomes her tormentor, the other steals her jewels. Her trustees mismanage her funds. Her maid ungratefully quits after Linette’s detectives revealed she was planning to marry a bigamist. The young beauty dies not knowing how lonely she is.
In no other Christie book do I remember the warm experience of reading the mystery so different than the cold chill of having read it. It’s not simply that no one is what they seem, for that’s expected in a mystery. It’s that the society restored at the end is not what it seems. The thieves are still at liberty, the marriages are dooming young women into further submission, and the only passionate one lies dead at our feet. Poirot may claim to have "a high regard for human happiness," but Christie presents happiness as a false illusion.
The central plot focuses on a beautiful, wealthy young woman, Linnet, and her husband, Simon Doyle, who are honeymooning in Egypt. Doyle’s former girlfriend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, has been stalking them, going to the same public places they attend to stare. She follows them when they try to escape her on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor and Assuan.
The critical murder scene begins when a drunken Jacqueline shoots Doyle. While a nurse is sedating her and others are attending Doyle, Linnet’s murdered while she sleeps with the same gun that injured Doyle.
The rest of the novel is the search for the murderer by Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be on board. Since the novel has been set as a holiday adventure, I immediately applied the rules of comic opera and eliminated from consideration all the young people who should marry at the end: Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton, Cornelia Robinson and Ferguson.
I also eliminated the utilitarian characters who must be on board for the plot to advance: the doctor who attends Doyle, the nurse who attends Jacqueline, the foreign intelligence agent, Colonel Race, whose position gives Poirot the authority to question people.
As I read I reminded myself it’s always dangerous with Christie to eliminate anyone. In some of her first Poirot novels she upended the conventions when the utilitarian characters in fact were the murderers.
But, I told myself as I read the 1938 novel, she can’t repeat herself. She’s been exposed to the movie makers who adapt her novels. She’s remarried and her trips with her archaeologist husband must contribute to the plot’s mise en scene. Why not a happy ending?
Surely the firey romance between Cornelia and Ferguson and the gentler one between Rosalie and Tim are intended to contrast positively with the dangers of a woman who cares too much? The conventions require such balance.
And so the investigation progresses, revealing the hidden faults of each of the key characters. Some minor ones die. A spy is identified. And, finally, the murder is revealed with a method so byzantine, I leave it to Poirot to explain.
But, instead of the frisson of pleasure that follows from finishing a mystery, this left me with a chill because I knew, and Christie knew, all those pleasant little marriages at the end are damned.
It turns out Tim is a jewel thief working with Joanna Southwood, a friend of Linnette’s. Rosalie’s mother, Salome Otterbourne, is a drunkard. The girl is exchanging the life of enabling her mother to that of enabling a crook and living with the mother who created him. In some ways the trade is worse because, at least, her mother had once been a successful romance novelist, while no publisher will acknowledge Tim’s existence.
Cornelia’s father was ruined by Linette’s father. Her wealthy aunt, Marie Van Schuyler, is a kleptomaniac. The browbeaten girl refuses a proposal from a man who is secretly Lord Dawlish and instead accepts an older doctor who can help her understand her aunt’s problems and give her a new group of people to tend. Ferguson/Dawlish complains that given the chance for light and happiness, she chooses a new cave.
As for the heroine who has everything, her husband married her for her money. Her one friend becomes her tormentor, the other steals her jewels. Her trustees mismanage her funds. Her maid ungratefully quits after Linette’s detectives revealed she was planning to marry a bigamist. The young beauty dies not knowing how lonely she is.
In no other Christie book do I remember the warm experience of reading the mystery so different than the cold chill of having read it. It’s not simply that no one is what they seem, for that’s expected in a mystery. It’s that the society restored at the end is not what it seems. The thieves are still at liberty, the marriages are dooming young women into further submission, and the only passionate one lies dead at our feet. Poirot may claim to have "a high regard for human happiness," but Christie presents happiness as a false illusion.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
South Carolina - Responses to Failure
Richard Ligon may have been a failed planter, but he was a successful promoter of plantations. His book on Barbados was reprinted in 1673, and, according to April Hatfield, owned by planters in Virginia. She believes his influence there was enhanced by the presence of his brother Thomas, who was a cousin and business partner of William Berkeley. In the late 1650's, Thomas bought 2,000 acres, including some land from William Byrd. Hatfield also thinks Thomas Willoughby may have amplified Richard Ligon’s importance, since Willoughby was the agent for Ligon’s Barbado’s partner, Thomas Modyford.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Debate
When I was in high school we had a good debate coach, and our teams were always winning awards.
I was told taking debate was good training in clear thinking. What I didn't understand was if you were supposed to prepare a case for and against whatever topic was selected for the year, and drew lots to determine which side you debated in a contest, exactly what that taught you.
When I see people making the rounds of talk shows, acting as experts on whatever the current topic of public interest, I'm reminded both of trained dogs and of those high school debate matches where the point was your eloquence not your belief.
We were also told in high school the best rationale for taking geometry was that it taught logic. That at least must have been true, because, while I remember little I learned there about the nature of triangles, I do remember something about the nature of proof. Of course, geometry was less ambiguous than debate: there was only one answer to a problem, you couldn't argue both for and against two angles and a connecting line defining a triangle.
It happens the one course was required for graduation and the other was not. It was also happens I disliked the debate coach and was neutral to the geometry teacher. If one were to construct an argument for why I learned to think logically, it would resemble the more advanced forms of mathematics that try to factor in the role of chance than either class I was offered in school.
The truth would be much more complex, but there might still be something to tell with the mathematical formula. Debate was only so much talk.
I was told taking debate was good training in clear thinking. What I didn't understand was if you were supposed to prepare a case for and against whatever topic was selected for the year, and drew lots to determine which side you debated in a contest, exactly what that taught you.
When I see people making the rounds of talk shows, acting as experts on whatever the current topic of public interest, I'm reminded both of trained dogs and of those high school debate matches where the point was your eloquence not your belief.
We were also told in high school the best rationale for taking geometry was that it taught logic. That at least must have been true, because, while I remember little I learned there about the nature of triangles, I do remember something about the nature of proof. Of course, geometry was less ambiguous than debate: there was only one answer to a problem, you couldn't argue both for and against two angles and a connecting line defining a triangle.
It happens the one course was required for graduation and the other was not. It was also happens I disliked the debate coach and was neutral to the geometry teacher. If one were to construct an argument for why I learned to think logically, it would resemble the more advanced forms of mathematics that try to factor in the role of chance than either class I was offered in school.
The truth would be much more complex, but there might still be something to tell with the mathematical formula. Debate was only so much talk.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
South Carolina - Profits
Economic historians have been arguing for years if slavery was profitable or, alternatively, would slavery have died from its own internal contradictions had there been no Emancipation Proclamation.
The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.
Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.
When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.
By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.
Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.
While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.
Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.
He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."
It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."
And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.
Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.
When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.
By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.
Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.
While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.
Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.
He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."
It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."
And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Aluminum and Steel
One of the most striking things about the current group of fundamentalist thinkers who dominate the media is how little regard they have for what is literally true. It’s as if their argument that everything described in Genesis actually occurred allows them to say anything they like about things not included in the holy book.
The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.
A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.
The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.
She answered they were too expensive.
I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.
They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.
I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?
I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.
The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.
I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.
The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.
The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"
After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.
My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.
The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.
A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.
The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.
She answered they were too expensive.
I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.
They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.
I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?
I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.
The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.
I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.
The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.
The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"
After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.
My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Production
Some try to rationalize the existence of African slaves as necessary to do work that Europeans could not do in a tropical environment where heat and disease killed so many. Many forget, in the time before central heating, winter cold was as fatal as summer heat. Before men discovered germs, diseases killed everywhere and life was short: Richard Ligon arrived in Barbaros during a yellow fever epidemic and in London during the plague.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Childhood Memories
Should an historian try to recreate a past era so completely the reader recognizes its very alienness or should he or she focus on those parts of the past that survive into the present and influence its form?
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
South Carolina - Indentured Servants
It’s clear why the Dutch West Indies Company would have promoted slavery. What’s not clear, is why sugar planters like James Drax were willing to go into debt to buy slaves when they lived on an overpopulated island. However, their shared experiences were formed the decade before when Barbados was land rich and labor poor.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Packard Plant
Recently, Jason Linkins featured an article by Thomas Morton that ridiculed the standard Decadent Detroit journalist’s tour that always includes a photograph of the closed Packard plant on East Grand Boulevard. The deluxe, VIP version of the standard tourist itinerary is the one followed by Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, the one that includes a few private conversations with "real natives" that leave them experts on the state of the automotive industry.
Stale as it gets, the Packard plant does, in fact, symbolize everything that was once good about the automotive industry and much that’s bad about the city.
The building, designed in 1905 by Alfred Kahn, was the first to use reinforced concrete. His early factories were several floors high, and strong enough to support the weight of vehicle production and assembly. After the perfection of distributed electric systems, Kahn built the first modern glass and concrete, one-story plant for Dodge in Warren in 1937.
He innovated in materials, construction techniques, and design. More important, Kahn didn’t retire after making one contribution or simply cash in on his contacts with commissions for private estates, but continued to experiment with industrial architecture. However desolate, his Packard plant still stands after more than a hundred years, and until recently, it could have been renovated.
Although Packard Motor Car Company, then part of Studebaker, closed in 1956, the final destruction of the building is recent. In 1960, the compound was converted into an industrial park that degenerated into a half-vacant warren of small businesses, while the neighborhood, near an interstate, became increasingly more dangerous. Young people used it for raves and paint ball fights.
In the late 1990's, the state held title to much of the adjoining property from unpaid taxes. In 1997, Detroit’s mayor, Dennis Archer, or his cronies, thought they saw an opportunity to convert the land into an Empowerment Zone with tax breaks, and began foreclosure proceedings for the million plus dollars owed the city in back taxes.
The next year, the state’s Department of Community Health was asked to evaluate the hazards at the 35-acre brown field. It determined the worst problems were asbestos, lead paint, bird droppings, tires and bales of plastic waste, costly to remediate, but not serious.
While the unnamed owners were fighting for title in court, the city evicted the tenants of Motor City Industrial Park, erected a protective fence, and posted guards.
Two years ago, the state supreme court ruled the owners had paid just enough of their taxes to retain ownership. The sitting mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, removed the city’s guards, and vandals moved in with welding torches to strip out steel beams. The fire department is called several times a month, but now limits its efforts to protecting the area, because the buildings have become too dangerous.
The names of the new owners aren’t published, but are known to include Romel Casab, a bottom feeding land speculator, and are suspected to include Dominic Cristini, a convicted drug dealer. When the netherworld moves in, a site is doomed. In the years when Archer was mayor, my hometown was discovering one of its abandoned industrial sites had been systematically used for illegal chemical dumping and qualified as a superfund site.
The stand-off between rivals with different visions for creating personal wealth that negate each other and result in nothing is one enduring city trait the Packard Plant symbolizes. After 50 years, no one has even been able to tear it down as a public health nuisance, not even when Detroit was using urban development funds after the riots to reduce most of the city’s landscape to barren rubble.
However, the magazine story that prompted Morton’s outrage hasn’t been without its benefits. Earlier this month, Senate majority leader Harry Reid used it to justify giving four states special consideration in the evolving health care bill. He said "The cover of Time magazine shows a dilapidated city, dilapidated streets, the debris covering the road and windows knocked out of abandoned buildings. It looks like a ghost town" and then made sure his home state of Nevada was the one that got the Medicaid break.
Notes:
Cruz, John. "Welcome to Mt. Palmer: A look Inside Detroit’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood," posted on his cruzweb.net site.
Guthrie, Doug. "City Loses Site Fight: State Court Denies Detroit's Packard Title Bid," The Detroit News, 2 February 2007.
Linkins, Jason. "Getting The Detroit Story Right," Huffington Post, 29 September 2009.
McGraw, Bill. "Historic Auto Plant Shows Signs of Life," Detroit Free Press, 27 April 2008.
Michigan Department of Community Health. "Health Consultation, Packard Plant, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan," 23 March 1998, posted on United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry website.
Shepardson, David. "Senate's Top Democrat Pushes Bill to Aid Michigan," The Detroit News, 1 October 2009.
Stale as it gets, the Packard plant does, in fact, symbolize everything that was once good about the automotive industry and much that’s bad about the city.
The building, designed in 1905 by Alfred Kahn, was the first to use reinforced concrete. His early factories were several floors high, and strong enough to support the weight of vehicle production and assembly. After the perfection of distributed electric systems, Kahn built the first modern glass and concrete, one-story plant for Dodge in Warren in 1937.
He innovated in materials, construction techniques, and design. More important, Kahn didn’t retire after making one contribution or simply cash in on his contacts with commissions for private estates, but continued to experiment with industrial architecture. However desolate, his Packard plant still stands after more than a hundred years, and until recently, it could have been renovated.
Although Packard Motor Car Company, then part of Studebaker, closed in 1956, the final destruction of the building is recent. In 1960, the compound was converted into an industrial park that degenerated into a half-vacant warren of small businesses, while the neighborhood, near an interstate, became increasingly more dangerous. Young people used it for raves and paint ball fights.
In the late 1990's, the state held title to much of the adjoining property from unpaid taxes. In 1997, Detroit’s mayor, Dennis Archer, or his cronies, thought they saw an opportunity to convert the land into an Empowerment Zone with tax breaks, and began foreclosure proceedings for the million plus dollars owed the city in back taxes.
The next year, the state’s Department of Community Health was asked to evaluate the hazards at the 35-acre brown field. It determined the worst problems were asbestos, lead paint, bird droppings, tires and bales of plastic waste, costly to remediate, but not serious.
While the unnamed owners were fighting for title in court, the city evicted the tenants of Motor City Industrial Park, erected a protective fence, and posted guards.
Two years ago, the state supreme court ruled the owners had paid just enough of their taxes to retain ownership. The sitting mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, removed the city’s guards, and vandals moved in with welding torches to strip out steel beams. The fire department is called several times a month, but now limits its efforts to protecting the area, because the buildings have become too dangerous.
The names of the new owners aren’t published, but are known to include Romel Casab, a bottom feeding land speculator, and are suspected to include Dominic Cristini, a convicted drug dealer. When the netherworld moves in, a site is doomed. In the years when Archer was mayor, my hometown was discovering one of its abandoned industrial sites had been systematically used for illegal chemical dumping and qualified as a superfund site.
The stand-off between rivals with different visions for creating personal wealth that negate each other and result in nothing is one enduring city trait the Packard Plant symbolizes. After 50 years, no one has even been able to tear it down as a public health nuisance, not even when Detroit was using urban development funds after the riots to reduce most of the city’s landscape to barren rubble.
However, the magazine story that prompted Morton’s outrage hasn’t been without its benefits. Earlier this month, Senate majority leader Harry Reid used it to justify giving four states special consideration in the evolving health care bill. He said "The cover of Time magazine shows a dilapidated city, dilapidated streets, the debris covering the road and windows knocked out of abandoned buildings. It looks like a ghost town" and then made sure his home state of Nevada was the one that got the Medicaid break.
Notes:
Cruz, John. "Welcome to Mt. Palmer: A look Inside Detroit’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood," posted on his cruzweb.net site.
Guthrie, Doug. "City Loses Site Fight: State Court Denies Detroit's Packard Title Bid," The Detroit News, 2 February 2007.
Linkins, Jason. "Getting The Detroit Story Right," Huffington Post, 29 September 2009.
McGraw, Bill. "Historic Auto Plant Shows Signs of Life," Detroit Free Press, 27 April 2008.
Michigan Department of Community Health. "Health Consultation, Packard Plant, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan," 23 March 1998, posted on United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry website.
Shepardson, David. "Senate's Top Democrat Pushes Bill to Aid Michigan," The Detroit News, 1 October 2009.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
South Carolina - Capitalism
If Barbados borrowed its technology from Brazil, why didn’t it also borrow the organization of production?
One answer is the logic of capitalism. It was in the interest of the shippers financing the introduction of sugar production into Barbados to sell as many things as possible to the growers. It was better to sell every farmer some rollers and a set of coppers than it was to sell to only the wealthiest. It was better to tell every farmer he should own slaves than it was for them to enter into shared labor partnerships or recruit cheaper indentured servants that arrived on competing English ships.
The more business transactions, the higher the profits for the Dutch West Indies Company and the merchant bankers in Amsterdam and London. Of course, the fact money had to be leant to finance the purchases, meant merchant bankers were only willing to support the most credit worthy. However, their agents in Bridgetown could always hold the promise of future loans to the poor to discourage them from considering other options.
If this sounds as cynical as the recent efforts by banks to sell and resell mortgages that would never be paid because the profits were in the trades, not the interest, it’s because both are the consequence of a system that values wealth from trade over that from production. And like our current financial crisis, the reasons for the Dutch behavior lay in its recent past.
When Isabella I of Castile married Ferdinand II of Aragon, they consolidated control over most of the Iberian peninsula. In the early years, the Dutch were more interested in competing in the East Indies with Portugal for the spice trade than they were in the New World ruled by Spain.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Juana, married into the powerful Hapsburgs of Austria. Her son, Charles V, was Holy Roman Emperor when Martin Luther refused to rescind his 95 theses at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In 1549, Charles changed the status of the lowland provinces along the North Sea from dependencies of individual German princes into his personal domain. Since many supported the Reformation, they were drawn into conflict with Charles, who introduced the Inquisition to strengthen his position in the Seventeen Provinces.
The Protestant provinces rebelled against Charles’ son, Philip II, in 1581. In 1585 Alessandro Farnese seized their central city, Antwerp, and expelled the Protestants. His city of Genoa took over the banking system. The men with knowledge of sugar refining moved to Amsterdam, which became the new trade center.
Charles V had married his first cousin, the sister of the then king of Portugal. In 1581, the same year the Dutch rebelled, Philip inherited the Portuguese throne and banned the Dutch from their traditional trade with Brazil.
The Dutch were traders who had no choice but to exploit changes in market conditions. In 1621 the United Provinces didn’t renew their truce with Spain and instead chartered the Dutch West Indies Company. It immediately began attacking the Spanish controlled sugar lands of Brazil, finally taking power in Recife in 1629. Maurice of Nassau arrived as local governor in 1637. The next year, the company took Sno Paulo de Loanda, the Portugese slave trade center off the coast of Angola.
While the Dutch company put together the pieces to dominate the sugar and slave trades, it only had a few years to exploit its monopoly. The Portuguese regained their independence from Spain in 1640. The Brazilians evicted the Dutch in 1654. Oliver Cromwell passed the first Navigation Act in 1651 that forbade British colonies from using foreign, especially Dutch, carriers. Charles II issued his act in 1660, setting off trade wars between the major powers that destroyed Amsterdam’s monopoly on sugar refining.
It was in the twenty years between the time Portugal became independent and the accession of Charles II that the Dutch were able to develop Barbados as a new market for slaves and a new source for raw materials to feed their sugar refineries. After that, their ships only carried about five to six percent of the slaves.
Notes:
Emmer, Pieter C. The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850, 2006, reviewed for Institute of Historical Research website by J. L. Price.
One answer is the logic of capitalism. It was in the interest of the shippers financing the introduction of sugar production into Barbados to sell as many things as possible to the growers. It was better to sell every farmer some rollers and a set of coppers than it was to sell to only the wealthiest. It was better to tell every farmer he should own slaves than it was for them to enter into shared labor partnerships or recruit cheaper indentured servants that arrived on competing English ships.
The more business transactions, the higher the profits for the Dutch West Indies Company and the merchant bankers in Amsterdam and London. Of course, the fact money had to be leant to finance the purchases, meant merchant bankers were only willing to support the most credit worthy. However, their agents in Bridgetown could always hold the promise of future loans to the poor to discourage them from considering other options.
If this sounds as cynical as the recent efforts by banks to sell and resell mortgages that would never be paid because the profits were in the trades, not the interest, it’s because both are the consequence of a system that values wealth from trade over that from production. And like our current financial crisis, the reasons for the Dutch behavior lay in its recent past.
When Isabella I of Castile married Ferdinand II of Aragon, they consolidated control over most of the Iberian peninsula. In the early years, the Dutch were more interested in competing in the East Indies with Portugal for the spice trade than they were in the New World ruled by Spain.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Juana, married into the powerful Hapsburgs of Austria. Her son, Charles V, was Holy Roman Emperor when Martin Luther refused to rescind his 95 theses at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In 1549, Charles changed the status of the lowland provinces along the North Sea from dependencies of individual German princes into his personal domain. Since many supported the Reformation, they were drawn into conflict with Charles, who introduced the Inquisition to strengthen his position in the Seventeen Provinces.
The Protestant provinces rebelled against Charles’ son, Philip II, in 1581. In 1585 Alessandro Farnese seized their central city, Antwerp, and expelled the Protestants. His city of Genoa took over the banking system. The men with knowledge of sugar refining moved to Amsterdam, which became the new trade center.
Charles V had married his first cousin, the sister of the then king of Portugal. In 1581, the same year the Dutch rebelled, Philip inherited the Portuguese throne and banned the Dutch from their traditional trade with Brazil.
The Dutch were traders who had no choice but to exploit changes in market conditions. In 1621 the United Provinces didn’t renew their truce with Spain and instead chartered the Dutch West Indies Company. It immediately began attacking the Spanish controlled sugar lands of Brazil, finally taking power in Recife in 1629. Maurice of Nassau arrived as local governor in 1637. The next year, the company took Sno Paulo de Loanda, the Portugese slave trade center off the coast of Angola.
While the Dutch company put together the pieces to dominate the sugar and slave trades, it only had a few years to exploit its monopoly. The Portuguese regained their independence from Spain in 1640. The Brazilians evicted the Dutch in 1654. Oliver Cromwell passed the first Navigation Act in 1651 that forbade British colonies from using foreign, especially Dutch, carriers. Charles II issued his act in 1660, setting off trade wars between the major powers that destroyed Amsterdam’s monopoly on sugar refining.
It was in the twenty years between the time Portugal became independent and the accession of Charles II that the Dutch were able to develop Barbados as a new market for slaves and a new source for raw materials to feed their sugar refineries. After that, their ships only carried about five to six percent of the slaves.
Notes:
Emmer, Pieter C. The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850, 2006, reviewed for Institute of Historical Research website by J. L. Price.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Detroit Flight
People like to blame the decline of Detroit on the movement of Blacks from the south during and after World War II. However, Ford and Dodge had left for Highland Park and Hamtramack before World War I when the state’s Black population was 17,115 and less than a third, 5,741, lived in Detroit. In 1910, Blacks constituted only 1.2% of the city’s population and probably a number worked as servants and menials.
Ford’s move from Mack Avenue to Piquette and Beaubien in 1904 can be explained as the need for a larger tract of land to build the Model T, but it’s hard to believe he couldn’t find something available inside the city when he needed to expand in 1910. It’s also hard to understand why Highland Park and Hamtramack resisted annexation so strongly once Ford and Dodge had relocated unless large tax payers did not want to be part of the city.
There may be two sides to the flight from the city: the things Ford desired and the desires of men who controlled city politics
We know Dearborn and the area around River Rouge were not known for their open democracy in the 1930's when Harry Bennett ran Ford’s security or after the war when Orville Hubbard was mayor. For that matter, we also know Flint’s mayor, Harold Bradshaw, and his police chief, James Wills, were more responsive to Buick’s demands for union busting in 1936 than was appropriate for civic officials.
However, an unwillingness to provide or tolerate paramilitary corporate security were probably not important in 1910. Longer standing conflicts between Detroit area investors and local entrepreneurs may have been more important.
In the 1860's, Eber Ward was experimenting with the Bessemer process at a steel plant in Wyandotte. When he wanted to expand operations, his Detroit investors refused. He moved to Chicago, and his plant there eventually became a founding part of United States Steel.
In the same years, a local butcher, George Hammond, bought the patents for refrigerated rail cars. He too relocated his operations to the outskirts of Chicago in northern Indiana. Later, when cattle from the Great Plains were available, that move would have been logical, but in the 1860's animals still came from places like Ohio.
Detroit lost the steel, meat and some of railcar businesses because of a dysfunctional investor culture in the city. The same kinds of problems plagued Henry Ford. Similar problems may explain why General Motors and Chrysler avoided the area, or why the small companies that remained in the city failed to grow even when they had good product ideas.
I don’t know what was going on when rival automotive speculators were betting against Ford and Durant, but I suspect it drew on long standing cultural traditions that were more important to creating the distaste people held for the city than the later demographic changes.
Notes:
Metzger, Kurt and Jason Booza. "African Americans in the United States, Michigan and Metropolitan Detroit," Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 2002.
Ford’s move from Mack Avenue to Piquette and Beaubien in 1904 can be explained as the need for a larger tract of land to build the Model T, but it’s hard to believe he couldn’t find something available inside the city when he needed to expand in 1910. It’s also hard to understand why Highland Park and Hamtramack resisted annexation so strongly once Ford and Dodge had relocated unless large tax payers did not want to be part of the city.
There may be two sides to the flight from the city: the things Ford desired and the desires of men who controlled city politics
We know Dearborn and the area around River Rouge were not known for their open democracy in the 1930's when Harry Bennett ran Ford’s security or after the war when Orville Hubbard was mayor. For that matter, we also know Flint’s mayor, Harold Bradshaw, and his police chief, James Wills, were more responsive to Buick’s demands for union busting in 1936 than was appropriate for civic officials.
However, an unwillingness to provide or tolerate paramilitary corporate security were probably not important in 1910. Longer standing conflicts between Detroit area investors and local entrepreneurs may have been more important.
In the 1860's, Eber Ward was experimenting with the Bessemer process at a steel plant in Wyandotte. When he wanted to expand operations, his Detroit investors refused. He moved to Chicago, and his plant there eventually became a founding part of United States Steel.
In the same years, a local butcher, George Hammond, bought the patents for refrigerated rail cars. He too relocated his operations to the outskirts of Chicago in northern Indiana. Later, when cattle from the Great Plains were available, that move would have been logical, but in the 1860's animals still came from places like Ohio.
Detroit lost the steel, meat and some of railcar businesses because of a dysfunctional investor culture in the city. The same kinds of problems plagued Henry Ford. Similar problems may explain why General Motors and Chrysler avoided the area, or why the small companies that remained in the city failed to grow even when they had good product ideas.
I don’t know what was going on when rival automotive speculators were betting against Ford and Durant, but I suspect it drew on long standing cultural traditions that were more important to creating the distaste people held for the city than the later demographic changes.
Notes:
Metzger, Kurt and Jason Booza. "African Americans in the United States, Michigan and Metropolitan Detroit," Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 2002.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Plantations
The biggest contribution Barbados made to South Carolina is the slave-based plantation economy, and all the social and legal controls that flowed from it.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Noble Peace
The uproar over the Nobel committee awarding the Peace Prize to Barak Obama reminds me how much the envy and jealousy of the less successful fuels rage against those who do better and how deeply ingrained is the idea of entitlement that underlies their unfulfilled expectations.
In this case, entitlement doesn’t mean a person deserves something by some characteristic of his or her birth, but that if someone puts in time he or she deserves the reward. You pay for four years of college, you deserve a diploma even if you’ve learned nothing. Your daughter takes dance classes every Saturday, she deserves a solo turn in the Nutcracker even if she has no sense of movement.
Men like Jeremiah Wright, Roland Burris and Michael Steele, who’ve worked for years for modest rewards, are angry when they see someone younger do better. They don’t understand that his mere refusal to use their rhetoric and other tools of aggrandizement is one reason he’s more accepted.
People who still think they or Bill Clinton deserves it first forget that the mere televised image of Obama meeting as an equal with heads of European states not comfortable with their African and Arab immigrants gives hope to young people in those countries that perhaps they too can succeed within established institutions despite their inherited outsider status.
Hope for peaceful change is the most important prerequisite for peace, not all the procedural actions that follow.
Despite the grumbling of the less successful, it is not luck or charisma that made Obama a symbol of possibility to the downtrodden. He worked to graduate from school, he worked to become a politician, and he worked to be elected president, and people know that he worked, that little was given to him except some opportunities to work.
If only it had been luck, some wouldn’t be so angry. But when men have worked as hard and not seen the same rewards, it’s difficult for them to see the differences lay elsewhere, not in following the rules they learned in childhood, but in the ability to adapt to changing situations.
And so, ever since Obama began winning delegates to the Democratic convention, we’ve watched the unedifying sight of men who haven’t done all they desire by the current rules, uncomfortable that the rules may have changed. Ideology has nothing to do with the sense of loss dramatized by John McCain, Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Glenn Beck and others who make their living as conservative or progressive commentators.
The mere volume of criticism should remind us the change arrived on Inauguration Day and we will either succeed because we deal with it or fail. Our society does not have to endure simply
because we live in it; it is no more an entitlement than anything else, and depends on us all recognizing the good and bad in our current situation and adapting.
Regrets not accepted.
In this case, entitlement doesn’t mean a person deserves something by some characteristic of his or her birth, but that if someone puts in time he or she deserves the reward. You pay for four years of college, you deserve a diploma even if you’ve learned nothing. Your daughter takes dance classes every Saturday, she deserves a solo turn in the Nutcracker even if she has no sense of movement.
Men like Jeremiah Wright, Roland Burris and Michael Steele, who’ve worked for years for modest rewards, are angry when they see someone younger do better. They don’t understand that his mere refusal to use their rhetoric and other tools of aggrandizement is one reason he’s more accepted.
People who still think they or Bill Clinton deserves it first forget that the mere televised image of Obama meeting as an equal with heads of European states not comfortable with their African and Arab immigrants gives hope to young people in those countries that perhaps they too can succeed within established institutions despite their inherited outsider status.
Hope for peaceful change is the most important prerequisite for peace, not all the procedural actions that follow.
Despite the grumbling of the less successful, it is not luck or charisma that made Obama a symbol of possibility to the downtrodden. He worked to graduate from school, he worked to become a politician, and he worked to be elected president, and people know that he worked, that little was given to him except some opportunities to work.
If only it had been luck, some wouldn’t be so angry. But when men have worked as hard and not seen the same rewards, it’s difficult for them to see the differences lay elsewhere, not in following the rules they learned in childhood, but in the ability to adapt to changing situations.
And so, ever since Obama began winning delegates to the Democratic convention, we’ve watched the unedifying sight of men who haven’t done all they desire by the current rules, uncomfortable that the rules may have changed. Ideology has nothing to do with the sense of loss dramatized by John McCain, Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Glenn Beck and others who make their living as conservative or progressive commentators.
The mere volume of criticism should remind us the change arrived on Inauguration Day and we will either succeed because we deal with it or fail. Our society does not have to endure simply
because we live in it; it is no more an entitlement than anything else, and depends on us all recognizing the good and bad in our current situation and adapting.
Regrets not accepted.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
South Carolina - John Colleton
Some of South Carolina’s roots lie in the English Civil War.
Our school books simplify that war by saying it was fought between the Puritan Roundheads and the Anglican and Catholic Cavaliers, the men of Massachusetts versus the planters of Virginia and Maryland. As with most wars, the conflicts were more complex. The west of England, centered on the port and merchants of Bristol, was competing with the upcoming merchants of London on the eastern shore. Parliament was jockeying to maintain its privileges against a monarch who believed he had absolute power. The House of Lords, representing inherited landed money, was under siege by the House of Commons which represented the merchants and new wealth. The Scots, Irish and Welch were still protesting union.
Many credit John Colleton with suggesting the settlement of Carolina to Anthony Ashley-Cooper, a Londoner with investments in Barbados. However, his background did not automatically qualify him for such reward from the Stuarts. His family had risen to the status of gentlemen in Exeter, the center of the Devon woolen industry in southwestern England. His father, Peter, was high sheriff in 1618; his sister Elizabeth married Hugh Crocker who became mayor.
When war came in 1642, mercantile and industrial Exeter supported Parliament against the king. Royalist forces laid siege to the town in August, and forced men like Colleton and Croker to retire. Colleton apparently lost his rights to income from his estates in Cornwall in the ensuing months.
When John Berkeley asked him to raise and arm a private army to support the dominant royalist force in the region, he agreed. They apparently fought at the Battle of Stratton in May of 1643 which Berkeley won for Charles I. Parliament won the war in 1645, although Exeter remained royalist country until Thomas Fairfax defeated Berkeley in 1646.
Colleton next appears in the public record in 1648 asking to have the income from his estates reinstated. Meanwhile, Charles was still fomenting rebellion and new fighting broke out soon after Colleton received his dispensation in March. In August he must not have been considered a rebel because he was granted permission to go to Calais.
After Charles was executed in 1649, supporters of his son regrouped in exile and had the younger Charles issue demands for recognition of his succession from the colonies. Massachusetts refused, but Virginia, where Berkeley’s brother William was governor, agreed. Barbados chose to stay as neutral as possible to protect its trade with both London and Amsterdam.
Disgruntled and impoverished soldiers from the royalist army fled to the colonies, including Barbados where Humphrey Walrond refused to accept neutrality and forced the governor to pledge to Charles in 1850. It was in this year John Berkeley says he ran into Colleton in Holland.
Oliver Cromwell sent a fleet to blockade Barbados in 1651. In 1652, a compromise was signed with now Colonel Colleton supporting Cromwell’s admiral, George Ayscue, who then appointed Daniel Searle governor. Soon after, Charles sent Francis Willougby as his governor of the island.
Colleton, in fact, was an ally of Thomas Modyford, who had arrived in Barbados in 1647. Modyford had been a mayor of Exeter and George Monck refers to both Modyford and Colleton as cousins in a 1663 letter to Willoughby. Both joined the subsequent plots to overthrow Searle.
The royalist cause was not a simple one, when men like Walrond squabbled with men like Modyford. After the restoration of the Stuarts many had to rearrange their biographies to emphasize when they had supported the ultimate winners. John Berkeley did the rehabilitation for Colleton in 1660 when he wrote a letter that became the model for all the heroic biographies that followed our civil war some 200 years later.
Berkeley said Colleton had sacrificed his fortune to support the royalist cause in the English civil war, left the country for the Caribbean after Charles I was executed in 1649 to avoid taking an oath, and continued to scheme for his son’s return from exile. He even introduces the now contemporary euphemism used to denigrate civil war in Ireland as mere "troubles."
However, while Berkely would like to have used Colleton to remind Charles of his own service, he hedged his language with "to the best of my knowledge" in case reports surfaced that suggest Colleton was not quite as steadfast as proclaimed.
Berkeley knew the myth of loyalty was more important than the reality, and that personal self-interest was best wrapped in that myth. When he lobbied for the Carolina grant, he gave us both
a colony and a narrative legitimizing disobedience.
Notes:
Berkeley’s letter to Charles II as reproduced by William Betham in The Baronetage of England, 1802.
Our school books simplify that war by saying it was fought between the Puritan Roundheads and the Anglican and Catholic Cavaliers, the men of Massachusetts versus the planters of Virginia and Maryland. As with most wars, the conflicts were more complex. The west of England, centered on the port and merchants of Bristol, was competing with the upcoming merchants of London on the eastern shore. Parliament was jockeying to maintain its privileges against a monarch who believed he had absolute power. The House of Lords, representing inherited landed money, was under siege by the House of Commons which represented the merchants and new wealth. The Scots, Irish and Welch were still protesting union.
Many credit John Colleton with suggesting the settlement of Carolina to Anthony Ashley-Cooper, a Londoner with investments in Barbados. However, his background did not automatically qualify him for such reward from the Stuarts. His family had risen to the status of gentlemen in Exeter, the center of the Devon woolen industry in southwestern England. His father, Peter, was high sheriff in 1618; his sister Elizabeth married Hugh Crocker who became mayor.
When war came in 1642, mercantile and industrial Exeter supported Parliament against the king. Royalist forces laid siege to the town in August, and forced men like Colleton and Croker to retire. Colleton apparently lost his rights to income from his estates in Cornwall in the ensuing months.
When John Berkeley asked him to raise and arm a private army to support the dominant royalist force in the region, he agreed. They apparently fought at the Battle of Stratton in May of 1643 which Berkeley won for Charles I. Parliament won the war in 1645, although Exeter remained royalist country until Thomas Fairfax defeated Berkeley in 1646.
Colleton next appears in the public record in 1648 asking to have the income from his estates reinstated. Meanwhile, Charles was still fomenting rebellion and new fighting broke out soon after Colleton received his dispensation in March. In August he must not have been considered a rebel because he was granted permission to go to Calais.
After Charles was executed in 1649, supporters of his son regrouped in exile and had the younger Charles issue demands for recognition of his succession from the colonies. Massachusetts refused, but Virginia, where Berkeley’s brother William was governor, agreed. Barbados chose to stay as neutral as possible to protect its trade with both London and Amsterdam.
Disgruntled and impoverished soldiers from the royalist army fled to the colonies, including Barbados where Humphrey Walrond refused to accept neutrality and forced the governor to pledge to Charles in 1850. It was in this year John Berkeley says he ran into Colleton in Holland.
Oliver Cromwell sent a fleet to blockade Barbados in 1651. In 1652, a compromise was signed with now Colonel Colleton supporting Cromwell’s admiral, George Ayscue, who then appointed Daniel Searle governor. Soon after, Charles sent Francis Willougby as his governor of the island.
Colleton, in fact, was an ally of Thomas Modyford, who had arrived in Barbados in 1647. Modyford had been a mayor of Exeter and George Monck refers to both Modyford and Colleton as cousins in a 1663 letter to Willoughby. Both joined the subsequent plots to overthrow Searle.
The royalist cause was not a simple one, when men like Walrond squabbled with men like Modyford. After the restoration of the Stuarts many had to rearrange their biographies to emphasize when they had supported the ultimate winners. John Berkeley did the rehabilitation for Colleton in 1660 when he wrote a letter that became the model for all the heroic biographies that followed our civil war some 200 years later.
Berkeley said Colleton had sacrificed his fortune to support the royalist cause in the English civil war, left the country for the Caribbean after Charles I was executed in 1649 to avoid taking an oath, and continued to scheme for his son’s return from exile. He even introduces the now contemporary euphemism used to denigrate civil war in Ireland as mere "troubles."
However, while Berkely would like to have used Colleton to remind Charles of his own service, he hedged his language with "to the best of my knowledge" in case reports surfaced that suggest Colleton was not quite as steadfast as proclaimed.
Berkeley knew the myth of loyalty was more important than the reality, and that personal self-interest was best wrapped in that myth. When he lobbied for the Carolina grant, he gave us both
a colony and a narrative legitimizing disobedience.
Notes:
Berkeley’s letter to Charles II as reproduced by William Betham in The Baronetage of England, 1802.
These are humbly to certify to your sacred Majesty, THAT John Colleton, some time of Exeter, Esq. engaged for your majesty’s royal father, in the beginning of his troubles, raised and commanded a regiment under me, consisting of 1100 men, well armed, without any charge to his then majesty, or compulsion of his people, which was very costly to him, he never receiving any pay or free quarter, to my knowledge, and the soldiers very little either; that he furnished moneys and arms, to a good value, when he was driven from his habitations and estate, in Cornewal, before the Battle of Stratton, for which I am confident he hath not had satisfaction; that he being chosen a commissioner by the county of Exon, for the carrying on of the service of your Majesty’s royal father, in the associated counties of the west, did therin good service.
That he did, at several other times, procure and lend moneys, and procure and furnish good store of armes and ammunition, when his majesty’s affairs were in great straits, and gave credit, and staid long for considerable sums yet unpaid, of many of them, whereby a good sum must de due to him. That he suffered much by your majesty’s enemies, by being of your part, I believe to the value of above sixty thousand pounds, and he was well contented to stay for his disbursements, and bore his sufferings cheerfully, proposing to himself no other satisfaction, that I could perceive, than your majesty’s restoration. That after your majesty’s exile, he was ever active and helpful to your majesty’s agents, in England, in his person, and with his purse, which I my self know to be true, and have been informed thereof by divers others.
That he forsook England, for many years, to avoid the oaths, subscriptions, &tc, imposed upon your subjects, by your enemies, destructive of your majesty’s interest, as I found him, in Holland, in the year 1650, and returned not until your majesty’s restoration.Letter from George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, to Francis Lord Willoughby," 31 August 1663, reproduced on University of North Carolina docsouth website
That he hath kept his loyalty unspotted, to the last, as far as I can be informed, or understand.
I am sure he hath done your majesty, faithful and good service many ways, and all this, in order to his duty and allegiance, without any respect to reward or gain, that I can perceive by him.
19th of Xth, 1660
Jo. Berkeley
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Detroit City vs City of Detroit
This past summer Martha Reeves, then on the Detroit city council, showed her ignorance of her constituency when she complained that Jay Leno shouldn’t be putting on a benefit performance for Detroit auto workers in Auburn Hills. Everyone knows the city and the automotive industry aren’t the same. They just happen to share the same name.
In the early days, manufacturing was crowded along the Detroit River and the rail tracks that paralleled it near the narrows where traffic could cross into Canada. But, Henry Ford, a farm boy from Greenfield Township, never worked in the city’s industrial core. His first plant was on Mack Avenue, his second on Piquette, and his third in Highland Park, just beyond the city.
Ford soon began buying farm land to the west of Detroit, where he built his estate and his biggest factory complex on the River Rouge. For a while his son, Edsel, lived in Indian Village, but by 1921 he’d moved northeast of the city to Lake Saint Claire in Macomb County.
The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, came from western Michigan. They began building engines for Ford at a plant in Hamtramack, before they left to form their own company. When they died in 1920, the company was taken over by New York investors, who later reorganized it as Chrysler. Until 1992, the company headquarters was in Highland Park.
To this day, neither Highland Park nor Hamtramack is politically part of Detroit, even though both have long been surrounded by the city.
General Motors was never even close to Detroit. William Durant was a successful carriage builder in Flint, who took over management of David Buick’s company. When he had trouble with General Motors’ bankers, he organized Chevrolet in the same city. Michael Moore is absolutely correct to use Flint, not Detroit, as the symbol for the decline of GM.
Despite the centrifugal movement of the major automotive companies away from Detroit, the city was long the center for small companies and suppliers. Starting near the river, Richard Wright says the Commercial Company built cars on Franklin, while Hudson Motor, Hupmobile and Ransome Olds all began on Jefferson.
Reliance Automobile Company was on East Fort Street and Packard on East Grand Boulevard at Mount Eliot. Lozier was near Ford on Mack Avenue. The Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Company and Wayne Automobile Company were both on Piquette.
In the other direction, along Michigan Avenue and the New York Central tracks that go west to Chicago, the Rickenbacker Motor Company was on Michigan while both C. H. Blomstrom Motor Car Company and Cadillac Assembly were at Michigan and Clark Street.
As the automotive industry spread away from the city, it became a social network of designers and engineers, customers and suppliers who loved the mechanics of cars and the manufacturing process. After World War II, Ford middle managers may have moved to Dearborn Heights while GM executives may have gravitated toward Bloomfield Hills and engineers followed the Tech Center to Warren, north of Detroit in Macomb County, but they all were aware of one another.
That’s why today, when dealers can’t sell cars, it’s not just the city of Detroit that’s suffering, but every node in the network. The last large employer in my hometown, a hundred miles away, made parts for Visteon until the troubled Ford supplier canceled the contract and moved production to Mexico in 2002. The last small employer in Cameron made automotive fasteners. The process was fully automated, but it still was forced to move its operations to China a few years back to keep its contracts.
For lack of something better, it’s the cultural web of individuals, institutions and communities that people mean when they use Detroit as the label for the automotive industry, not the 138.8 square miles of urban real estate then represented by Reeves.
Notes: Reeves was not re-elected in August, partly because of this remark.
Wright, Richard A. "Once Teeming with Auto Plants, Detroit Now Home to Only a Few Nameplates," The Detroit News, 16 January 2000.
In the early days, manufacturing was crowded along the Detroit River and the rail tracks that paralleled it near the narrows where traffic could cross into Canada. But, Henry Ford, a farm boy from Greenfield Township, never worked in the city’s industrial core. His first plant was on Mack Avenue, his second on Piquette, and his third in Highland Park, just beyond the city.
Ford soon began buying farm land to the west of Detroit, where he built his estate and his biggest factory complex on the River Rouge. For a while his son, Edsel, lived in Indian Village, but by 1921 he’d moved northeast of the city to Lake Saint Claire in Macomb County.
The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, came from western Michigan. They began building engines for Ford at a plant in Hamtramack, before they left to form their own company. When they died in 1920, the company was taken over by New York investors, who later reorganized it as Chrysler. Until 1992, the company headquarters was in Highland Park.
To this day, neither Highland Park nor Hamtramack is politically part of Detroit, even though both have long been surrounded by the city.
General Motors was never even close to Detroit. William Durant was a successful carriage builder in Flint, who took over management of David Buick’s company. When he had trouble with General Motors’ bankers, he organized Chevrolet in the same city. Michael Moore is absolutely correct to use Flint, not Detroit, as the symbol for the decline of GM.
Despite the centrifugal movement of the major automotive companies away from Detroit, the city was long the center for small companies and suppliers. Starting near the river, Richard Wright says the Commercial Company built cars on Franklin, while Hudson Motor, Hupmobile and Ransome Olds all began on Jefferson.
Reliance Automobile Company was on East Fort Street and Packard on East Grand Boulevard at Mount Eliot. Lozier was near Ford on Mack Avenue. The Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Company and Wayne Automobile Company were both on Piquette.
In the other direction, along Michigan Avenue and the New York Central tracks that go west to Chicago, the Rickenbacker Motor Company was on Michigan while both C. H. Blomstrom Motor Car Company and Cadillac Assembly were at Michigan and Clark Street.
As the automotive industry spread away from the city, it became a social network of designers and engineers, customers and suppliers who loved the mechanics of cars and the manufacturing process. After World War II, Ford middle managers may have moved to Dearborn Heights while GM executives may have gravitated toward Bloomfield Hills and engineers followed the Tech Center to Warren, north of Detroit in Macomb County, but they all were aware of one another.
That’s why today, when dealers can’t sell cars, it’s not just the city of Detroit that’s suffering, but every node in the network. The last large employer in my hometown, a hundred miles away, made parts for Visteon until the troubled Ford supplier canceled the contract and moved production to Mexico in 2002. The last small employer in Cameron made automotive fasteners. The process was fully automated, but it still was forced to move its operations to China a few years back to keep its contracts.
For lack of something better, it’s the cultural web of individuals, institutions and communities that people mean when they use Detroit as the label for the automotive industry, not the 138.8 square miles of urban real estate then represented by Reeves.
Notes: Reeves was not re-elected in August, partly because of this remark.
Wright, Richard A. "Once Teeming with Auto Plants, Detroit Now Home to Only a Few Nameplates," The Detroit News, 16 January 2000.
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