Inexorable Arithmetic

General Motors, Michigan, the Republican Party all face the problem of inexorable arithmetic.

Let’s say you begin with a normal population of ten, one talented or ambitious person, one loser, and eight middling when opportunity, or the hope of opportunity disappears. Half leave. The ambitious one may stay because there’s still some room for him or her but five of the middling leave. The loser immediately goes from being 10% to 20% of the population.

Let’s say each of the remaining people marries an outsider and produces two children. The ambitious will have one talented and one less talented child, the middling will produce the usual variety and the losers, for lack of a better term, clone themselves. Again half leave. This time, the more talented of the previous generation’s ambitious one leaves with three of his or her classmates. Six remain, and the ones who can’t help themselves are now a third of the population.

If the same pattern repeats itself, the ones who we call the losers become half the eight who remain, then two-thirds. At some point, the population stabilizes but there’s less chance with each generation that someone will move in to revitalize the community. There’s also a point where those who remain begin to feel threatened by outsiders and discourage the in-migration of people who might improve conditions.

My Michigan hometown is between the first and second phases. Historically, many left each year, but were replaced each generation by the ambitious from elsewhere. Beginning in the 1950's the number of jobs began disappearing, the number who left increased some, and those who moved in went elsewhere. There are still people there, now nearing retirement age, who are trying to find a way to remake the community with no national economy to support them.

General Motors has been laying people off since the 1970's. Generations are shorter in an institution, and the habits of seniority, even among executives, mean the less talented have increasingly been the ones who decide who stays. When that happens, the shift to the incompetent is accelerated.

Daniel Howes recently complained in The Detroit News that General Motors is replacing its 60-year-old leaders with 50-year-old ones who, if they had ever done anything noteworthy, would already have improved the company. He says the company is claiming it can’t recruit outside talent because the government is limiting its ability to pay competitive salaries and bonuses.

That’s nonsense. If you were talented and had an idea how to change things, who would you talk to: the still open Toyota, the risky but possibly innovative Fiat, or General Motors. If money is the only thing it can offer, then all GM will attract are those who come for the money and leave. It no doubt can recruit such turnaround specialists from those who lead K-mart to its demise.

I was in Philadelphia when Arlen Specter was becoming politically active. The Italians like Frank Rizzo were taking control of the Democratic party from the mainline progressives. There was no room for an ambitious young Jew. Specter did not see his switch to the Republican party as opportunism, but as the only available opportunity in town.

At the time Specter became a Republican, those angry with the Democratic party’s acceptance of civil rights were also changing political affiliations for the same reason: unlike the hypothetical free market, in a two party system, there is always only one alternative.

Once in the party, those who had left the Democrats were determined they wouldn’t have to make such a change again, and began actively shoving out those like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney who were more open-minded to change. That process of purification has now reached a point where voters have already declared their independence, Specter is homeless, and the only leaders it can recruit are morally dubious, even within the party’s narrow, religious definition of morality.

My hometown can die and the only people who will care are those who once lived there. General Motors has already died and the people who might have cared were already buying Toyotas and Hondas. When you have only two parties and states are guaranteed representation in the Senate, then the laws of arithmetic mean it’s possible to come to an impasse like our current congressional one where a small minority, who cannot be dislodged, can control our destiny and drag us all into its vortex.

Notes:
Howes, Daniel. "Insiders at New GM Same as They Ever Were," The Detroit News website, 24 July 2009.

Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, made one true statement when he questioned Sonia Sotomayor in July. He admitted he wouldn’t have had the courage to oppose segregation.

What an extraordinary thing to be thinking then, to be ruminating on the possibility that one is weaker than Frank Johnson, an Alabama judge who ruled in favor of Rosa Parks in 1955 when Graham was an infant. Later, local congressmen prevented the Nixon administration from nominating Johnson to the Supreme Court, but Jimmie Carter placed him on the Court of Appeals that served both Georgia and Alabama.

Graham didn’t have the advantage of Carter, whose mother, Lillian, knew the ways of the deep south well enough to blunt the effects of segregation in Plains, Georgia, without actually precipitating incidents that would endanger her family or the people she befriended.

Unlike Carter, whose father was a successful businessman who used his profits to buy land and whose mother was a nurse who joined the Peace Corps, Graham’s parents ran a bar and grill in Central, South Carolina, that catered to men getting off work at the local textile mill before OSHA and the EPA existed to protect workers from injury and air pollution.

His mother died of Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer that can be cured if treated early. His father died when he was 21, leaving him with bills to settle and a 13-year-old sister to support. While Carter had the connections necessary to be appointed to Annapolis, Graham financed his education by joining ROTC.

As a boy working in the bar and later the adjacent pool hall, he no doubt learned early that ugliness existed, and would be immediately redirected towards anyone who didn’t conform. I rather suspect he faced his share of hazing by both the mill kids and the scions of the local Baptist and Methodist middle class who looked down on tradesmen, especially those who trafficked in sin.

The sad thing is that Graham’s life’s experiences have reinforced the values of a closed, rigidly stratified society. If he had drawn different lessons from his own life, he might have seen Sonia Sotomayor as a kindred spirit: a single person committed to the law who managed to earn a law degree from a prestigious school despite losing a father.

Instead, Melissa Harris-Lacewell suggested, he joined the crowd that harassed her evoking images of the adults screaming at Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock in 1957 when Graham was two. He remains the nice boy who was isolated in that mill town and is still trying to prove he’s one of the gang.

Note:
Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," The Nation website, 17 July 2009.

Detroit Driving

Last week Detroit had another fire make the news, only this one was a sign of the state’s is resilience, not its decay.

On Wednesday evening, July 15, an inexperienced driver entered a curve too fast on I-75. His small car slid sideways into a passing gasoline hauler, causing it to jackknife. A following semi stopped short of the accident, just before the tanker exploded and melted the steel overpass at Nine Mile Road.

Witnesses took pictures of the orange inferno where the street ended in an abyss. Others captured the black or brown smoke that billowed out over their neighborhoods. Men at the scene commented on hearing the steel squeal as it softened in the heat.

By Friday, most of the destroyed overpass was demolished, and core tests had been taken of the pavement. The state reopened the road Monday, for the 130,000 vehicles that use it each day.

I’m living in a part of the country where people would still have beeb trying to locate some cranes when Michigan traffic was flowing again. There they know it will take several months to rebuild the overpass; here it probably would never happen. After all, the estimated population of the state capital is not much ove half the number of vehicles that drive under that overpass in Hazel Park in a single day.

Apart from the ability of Michigan and its bureaucracy to respond so quickly to an emergency, the thing I found remarkable was the quick reactions of the people involved. The two truckers stopped semis with little injury to themselves, then fled from danger as quickly as they could. The man running a gas station at the overpass heard the explosions and immediate closed down the pumps and shut the station.

There are no time to think, only seconds to take necessary physical actions to contain the disaster. They were men who understood their world and its dangers, and instinctively knew what to do.

The man who caused the accident still doesn’t understand what happened, doesn’t realize he’s lucky to be alive. He’s a 27-year-old graduate student who just got his probationary license in May. No matter his intelligence, he missed the crucial experience of growing up riding in a car and hadn’t yet driven enough to know how you sense when you’re moving too fast into a curve.

I discovered the importance of childhood perception training when a friend from the Bronx asked me to be his observing driver while he practiced for a driver’s license in Philadelphia. After a few minutes on the Schuylkill Expressway, I asked him to please get on the surface streets. There I discovered he had no idea where to look for traffic lights. They simply hadn’t mattered on the subway.

I’m not a great driver. As a child I was near sighted and never learned to judge speed or space. As an adult, I overcompensate, leave too much room between me and the vehicle in front, rarely pass. I still pay little attention to my rear view mirror, but continually watch the people in front and beside me.

Here there are people who don’t even realize they have limitations. Several years ago, I was the only one on my section of a two-lane road in mid-morning. A women pulled up to my bumper, and rode there before passing. There was no need to get so close at the speed we were going.

A few miles later I came upon an accident. Some car, probably the same one that made me nervous, pulled out to pass in an area with small dips. When she saw an oncoming car, she pulled back into her lane, nicking the bumper of the truck ahead and sending it into the path of the oncoming van. People in both vehicles died, while she was untouched, unaware of the consequences of misjudging space and speed.

I don’t know how long she’d been driving. It may not have mattered. Another part of the cultural experience of riding in a car in Michigan where traffic is heavy is you absorb an awareness that there are things you must learn. Those experiences are the ones that lead to the ability to respond to crises the way men did outside Detroit.

And, only in Detroit would people notice the steel crying.

George Romney and Robert MacNamara

General Motors has entered a new phase, and Detroit pundits are wondering how old veterans of the wars like Fritz Henderson and Bob Lutz can change its hidebound culture. When I recall the recent obituaries for two former automotive company heads, George Romney and Robert MacNamara, I realize the cultural problems have been there since World War II and are more characteristic of institutions in general than GM in particular.

Automobile companies have always grappled with the tension between creative engineers who design and produce new models and bureaucrats responsible for ensuring their creativity doesn’t lead to bankruptcy. Romney was the one who foresaw the market for small, inexpensive cars when American Motors introduced the Rambler in 1955.

On July 23, 1967, when the Detroit riots erupted, he was governor of Michigan with aspirations to be president. When it took the president, Lyndon Johnson, a day to find a way to send the military to the city without forcing the state to declare a state of insurrection, Romney suspected politics was more important than legality or civil welfare.

That experience with the failure of an institution to react to a serious crisis probably contributed to his growing concerns with the war in Viet Nam. Five weeks later, on August 31, he told a Detroit television interviewer that, when he had visited the war zone in 1965, the generals had misled him, and admitted he no longer accepted the necessity for fighting communism in southeastern Asia.

His political career was over. Those who believed in the war attacked him as personally unfit because he said he’d been brainwashed. Those who opposed the war attacked him for placing the realization of cultural failure beyond his normal experience by ridiculing him for his pipeline to God.

MacNamara rose through the bureaucratic side of Ford where he was always the brilliant implementer of other people’s ideas. Tex Thornton’s the one who told Ford’s grandson, Henry II, he needed to modernize the organization in 1945. MacNamara’s immediate predecessor, Arjay Miller, is the one who went on to spread the gospel of modern management at Stanford after he was fired by Ford.

MacNamara considers his biggest achievement at Ford to have been opposing the Edsel from conception, and finally killing it in 1959. When he realized he was headed for the same kinds of confrontations that led to Miller’s dismissal, he put his resume in the mail and moved on to the defense department.

MacNamara probably understood less about the dynamics of the military than he did the way engineers operate, but he also believed all he needed to do was apply the administrative procedures he’d been taught. Like the engineers at Ford, the generals would handle the rest.
When he began to doubt the success of the efforts in Viet Nam and realized in November of 1967 that he couldn’t influence Johnson he didn’t risk a public confession like Romney. Instead, he put his resume in the mail and moved on to the World Bank.

Again, he saw his job as applying the procedures of others, in this case those of the Chicago School of Economics. When he was judged by the consequences of his actions for the poor of South America, he dismissed his critics as uninformed, and continued the policies prudence and his peers told him were correct.

It’s their lives after Viet Nam that reveal how each man responds to events that threaten all a culture gives him, his world view and self-esteem. Romney became head of HUD during the period Detroit was razed after the riots. He probably didn’t develop the policies that left blocks of vacant land and forced people to move from the city, precipitating more white flight. Still, when you drive through the areas that were once Detroit’s most vital Black neighborhoods, it looks like he permitted revenge by again not questioning the reports of others. He then retired to devote his time to the Mormon church.

MacNamara spent his later years trying to justify his actions in Viet Nam, never, ever recognizing there was any possible link between his actions and the lives of people in Asia or South America. He admitted he couldn’t discern the moral difference between burning people in Tokyo in World War II, and killing them in Viet Nam in the 1960's, not to condemn both, but to justify them.

The difference between the men, I think, is that Romney was comfortable around the creative people at American Motors, while MacNamara was suspicious at Ford. When Romney realized everything he’d been taught was leading to catastrophe, he had the courage to speak out, as a creative person might. When he was punished, he retreated to the familiar. MacNamara always look for the best way to minimize the disaster for himself as a careerist would and never ventured beyond the familiar.

It wasn’t simply that one was altruistic and the other narcissistic. More fundamentally, Romney had the ability to occasionally see familiar things anew. He may have initially been embittered by the reactions of others, but he had enough confidence to know he could find a new life. MacNamara may have been bright, but he never was able to distance himself enough to fully understand the depth of the cultural challenges he faced, and so died genuinely puzzled why he was still so reviled when his intentions had been so culturally accepted

The fundamental difference between the two that determined who could change and who could not was that the one had more imagination, more comfort with creativity than the other, and ultimately less fear of the consequences of crisis, confrontation and change.

Michael Jackson and Creativity

It was bad luck for Gale Storm and Billy Mays to die the weekend everyone’s attention was focused on Michael Jackson. Buried in the June 27 edition of the New York Times was a notice that an important diamond cutter had passed on the 15th.

Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.

I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."

She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.

I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.

It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.

No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.

However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.

Robert MacNamara - Part 1

Robert MacNamara, former head of Ford Motor, died July 6th, the same day the Detroit papers reported a judge in New York had agreed to General Motor’s accelerated bankruptcy plan.

The juxtaposition of the two stories reminded me of the last time the two were news. On July 23, 1967, a vice squad team raided the after-hours United Community League for Civic Action in Detroit and discovered it filled with people celebrating the return of two men from Viet Nam. They arrested 82, and five days of raw, undefined anger ensued.

George Romney, retired head of American Motors, was Michigan’s governor and he called in the National Guard. The next day, Lyndon Johnson sent army paratroopers from forces under the control of then Secretary of Defense MacNamara.

At the time, racism was identified as the underlying cause, and there was plenty of evidence to support that conclusion. However, I’ve always thought two other trends crossed that night at the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount.

The United States had always been a manufacturing country without enough labor. Engineers looked for ways to increase productivity with better machine tools, at the same time medicine made it possible for men to retire later. The two forces meant that, not only was the economy not producing as many new jobs, but it was opening existing opportunities at a slower rate.

At the same time corporations continued their efforts to reduce labor, baby boomers began entering the job market. The first wave, those born in 1944 and 1945 would have started looking for those shrinking jobs around 1962. If all the economy had to deal with was the miracle child born towards the end of the war, it might eventually have been able to absorb the surge.

But, couples didn’t stop with one or two children. In my neighborhood, probably a third of families had three and four. That increase would have been hitting the employment offices by 1967. Whenever scarcity is temporarily replaced with a surplus, men feel free to exercise secondary reasons in hiring. Latent bigotry resurfaced when men jockied for the remaining jobs.

The draft was one factor that delayed an awareness of the changing nature of the labor market. At that time, all young men were required to register, and many volunteered for two years in peace-time Germany or Korea. Those who were returning in July, 1967, were the ones who had enlisted just after Johnson had officially started the Viet Nam war escalation on January 31,
1965, but before the nature of that change was known. By 1967, opposition to MacNamara’s draft was increasing, and many were criticizing college deferments as unfair taxes on the poor.

We’ve spent a great deal of time and energy since 1967 trying to deal with problems of prejudice and manning the military, but no time wondering how a nation can survive with more people than it can employ. Even now, some still think that because General Motors and the other auto makers have eliminated so many union jobs, all they have to do is sell more cars, and the drag on the economy will disappear. They still refuse to recognize that going from a world of labor scarcity to one of superfluous people is a major cultural change.

How Long Can It Take?

When Michael Jackson died we were told it would take several weeks for lab results to tell us the cause of death. When my friend got the plague she was told it would be several weeks before they knew if any of the animals in her area were infected. When the body of a five-year-old girl was found in Monroe, Michigan, her family was told it would be several weeks before tests would tell them if she was the missing Nevaeh Buchanan.

Fortunately, I have limited experience with lab tests. Some had a day’s delay caused by the need to air express samples out of state. In the cases of Jackson, Buchanan, and my friend the tests were done by state laboratories that could be reached quickly by a car. With Jackson and Buchanan, the transporting cruisers would have been justified if they used sirens.

Tests I’ve had done to detect bacteria took time because the samples needed to sit in conditions that would accelerate the growth of the small organisms. It took a week before they could tell my friend only her dog had traces of the plague in his blood and that none of the wild animal’s they trapped had been infected. The source of the fleas is still unknown.

Buchanan required DNA testing; Jackson chemical tests. Neither have the time constraints that organic tests have.

When they finally identified Buchanan’s body, the state police said they placed her tests ahead of "others backlogged for months - hundreds of them homicides." It still took four days for a family whose child had been missing sixteen days.

Michigan, of course, has had budget problems for years, and probably long ago cut forensic staffs. One can only guess what’s going on in California as the state careens towards bankruptcy, and the Los Angeles police department has done little to improve its credibility since it arrested O. J. Simpson.

The promise of Sherlock Holmes that tests could provide positive evidence has disappeared in a cultural refusal to support science and a willingness to accept the consequences. In Buchanan’s case, three known sex offenders were arrested because they knew her mother, and two are still in protective custody waiting to be punished for knowing the woman. They may have committed no other crime, but in the anxious waiting period when nothing was known people needed assurance their children were safe and demanded the police show some sign of action.

If Detroit is frequently listed as the murder capital on the country, it isn’t simply the city that’s responsible, but all those taxpayers who are willing to let hundreds of cases languish in understaffed facilities where samples can be lost or deteriorate if it means they can have a few more dollars to spend on themselves. Too many people learn early there is no connection between actions and consequences.

No doubt some of the best lab technicians left for other jobs when the state work load became so large there was no hope of ever actually solving problems. Every year Michigan watches many of its college graduates leave the state because they know the remaining opportunities are not desirable. They still believe in a connection between behavior and reward, and realize they can only benefit from their years of education if they leave. Those who remain either burn out or never rise above mediocrity.

When a society separates actions from consequences, the very act of dissociation has predicable consequences. When those who deny science also deny the value of any social unit beyond the nuclear family, then the outlaw culture that develops is one that reinforces their expectations. It’s the rest of us, with expectations for improvement, who are punished.

Notes:
Hunt, Amber. "Nevaeh’s Case Becomes Top Priority for Crime Lab," Detroit Free Press, 9 June 2009.

Sarah Palin

I’ve always thought Sarah Palin represented the first generation that believed celebrity was the same as the effort that created fame. For an aspiring journalist in the 1980's, it didn’t matter if one were Robert Redford playing Bob Woodword or Woodword himself - the work of acting and reporting were insignificant beside the reality of appearing on television.

I don’t think Palin really understood the difference between being herself or Tina Fey playing her, so long as her face was on Saturday Night Live. When she was invited to appear as a guest, the doubling that tantalized the audience meant little to her because the only thing she understood was the reality of being there.

Perhaps this is why she reserves her bitterest comments for people in the media who destroy her pleasure in finally achieving her goal. For Palin being on Katie Couric’s show was all that mattered. When she was criticized for not doing something she was genuinely confused. The appearance was the achievement.

When she placed second in the Miss Alaska pageant the lesson she learned was that she hadn’t been savvy enough to garner more media attention. It never seriously occurred to her the winner might have been the more attractive candidate or that she needed to work on the skills required to be a beauty queen like those successful winners from places like Texas. In the future she focused on being the center of attention.

Since she announced her planned resignation as governor of Alaska many have speculated on her attacks on those who filed ethical complaints against her. When she was campaigning with John McCain she got her first exposure to the adulation of large crowds, as well as an opportunity to observe the gilded life of the media and to wear expensive clothes.

Now that she’s back in Alaska, her out-of-state public appearances bring complaints of dereliction of duty. Her book contract raises concerns that it violates state limits on an elected official’s secondary activities. If political office is not a step to higher office, but to greater celebrity, then one can understand why she chaffs at bureaucratic restraints when she’s so close to achieving her goal.

She is like the child who spent her time in front of a mirror with a toy mike practicing her acceptance speech rather than doing the same dance step or musical passage over and over like Michael Jackson did. She doesn’t know fame is not an end in itself, but the reward given by people who appreciate the effortless efforts of the talented or something undefinably unique.

Point of No Return

I recently read J. P. Marquand’s Point of No Return. The thwarted tale of Charles Gray, a small town boy from a family just below the elite who became engaged to the daughter of that elite, was predictable for anyone who’s lived in such a town. The matter-of-fact style borrowed from Middletown only underlined the familiarity.

While I was reading about Clyde, Massachusetts, General Motors was filing bankruptcy papers in New York, raising once again questions about why its culture chose failure when confronted with serious challenges to its survival.

Marquand’s 1949 novel suggests that GM had not just marketed to the Clydes of the country, but had absorbed the small town social structure with its rigid hierarchy that dictated Cadillac would always be better than Chevy, and both were ordained to always be better than any other division in the company and all better than any possible competitor.

Like Laurence Lovell, a father who would refuse his daughter’s suitor because he and Gray’s father had once disagreed, GM executives believed they could ignore upstarts like Pontiac and Saturn where new ideas actually existed that challenged their world view that the best product was the one with the greatest profit margin. The company felt vindicated when they chased away John DeLorean and Roger Smith, fought off Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, battled Walter Reuther and Roger Penske to a draw, in the same way Lovell was happy when young Gray abandoned any hopes for his daughter, Jessica.

The cultural insularity was partly the product of the company decision to use its own training school, General Motors Institute. The corporation came to prefer men who came up through an organization as rigid as that of the bank described by Marquand where the talented could not be promoted if they’d attended the wrong prep school, joined the wrong fraternity at the wrong college, married the wrong woman, or joined the wrong golf club. Once Gray’s co-worker, Roger Blakesley, was perceived to entertain inappropriate ambitions, he was asked to resign.

Small towns have been dying for a long time because entrepreneurs simply no longer are willing to put up with slights like those Lovell cast on Francis Stanley, the man who bought the local brass works and not only employed most of the men in town, but brought in talented men from outside like the engineer Elbridge Sterne. Sterne married Gray’s sister, Dorothea, and took the relics of her family back to Kansas when he was offered a better job after her father died.

It wasn’t just southern towns willing to lure foreign companies with tax incentives and promises of labor that could be pacified without unions that threatened the economic existence of small towns. Every small company that located in a more open-minded area, where achievement was more important than ascribed status, represented a lost opportunity.

In the end, Jessica Lovell found no one suitable to marry and had to settle for the only single man left from her generation, one who had endured the town, forever conscious of conforming to the rules for advancement. Her now much older father continued to call her fiancé Charles years after he had vanquished that threat. The new man simply remained invisible.

The people who are most angry with GM right now are the dealers in the small Clydes across the country who now are being cut off for not being urban enough. They recognize the irony of being left behind by a company that would prefer to remain more provincial than they.