The recent crash of Cory Lidle’s airplane into a New York apartment building illustrates the dynamics and limitations of modern news.
By chance, I heard the first rumor like I did the one on September 11, from a woman who was sent a flutter by all the possibilities that drifted into her head. Last time, the Cassandra greeted anyone who came into the work area, with the latest news. This time, the magpie found a media outlet on her computer to listen to, at full volume, so we couldn’t miss a word of it or her commentary.
The thing that’s striking is how few people remain calm in the face of the unknown. From the beginning it was a small plane or helicopter and a small, unimportant apartment building. Common sense should have said it was not a terrorist attack.
But, of course, reporters had to ask the question. Denials by government officials sounded irrelevant since the known facts were still one plane, one small fire. No second plane, no architectural catastrophe, no gluts of dead or injured bodies, no missing persons with hysterical relatives calling the media for names. It didn’t really matter if they were informed or knee-jerk denials, there was nothing to deny and they sounded silly.
By the end of the day, editors looked lazy for retaining those paragraphs in every lengthening stories that
compounded knowledge rather than reporting it.
Police barriers kept journalists from the scene, so there were few to interview. Most were as unreliable as witnesses usually are. Some were minor celebrities who volunteered their names with information, a photographer, a novelist. Since they lived in the building, they inadvertently added contextual background, by placing the building in New York’s social structure as not one significant enough to attract the attention of a strategic bomber. The Trump Tower would have aroused my office mate.
When the fire was extinguished with no more crashes, the web-available stations reverted to their regular programming and the self-important woman returned to her work.
The other person in the office, the man who flies a small plane, and I continued to talk desultorily. I suspect that every crash awakens anxiety for him, the way serious accidents resonate with amateur race car drivers. The woman was only interested in anything about John Kennedy Junior’s death.
His interest increased when the name of the plane owner, Cory Lidle, emerged. None of us were big enough sports fans to know who he was or who are still playing in the off-season games.
At that time there was little information except Lidle either didn’t have a license yet or had just earned it. The danger of inexperience was important to my co-worker. We didn’t yet know the flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was only 26 years old, not the grizzled, war tested ace of movies who would have taken the controls and saved the day.
After work I went to the local wellness center, with its single, low volume television screen that the caretaker jocks had set to ESPN. The story had morphed into a human interest sports report with wannabe celebrities competing to inflate their importance by their near association with the slightly more famous. I heard about the normal guy who happens to play ball, the teammate who supported charities. The career cut short, the child who would never know a father. But no games were cancelled; there was only the obligatory moment of opening silence.
I heard nothing about why an athlete could cause an accident. Any possibility that drugs reduce responses will disappear into a hobbyhorse for someone, whose very predictable comments will render then worthless. Likewise, any penchant for gambling.
Certainly, nothing was said about how the arrogance of success might make a 34-year-old panic or refuse to turn over control to a flight instructor, or about the possible infatuation of a trainer awed by a client who babbled athletic skills could be transferred. No one mentioned the failures of Michael Jordan and Walter Payton when they tried baseball and auto racing.
Any deeper stories about the nature of sports were already gone. By the next morning, the official spokesman who confirmed Lidle’s death owned his ball club, not the fire department or federal government.
Only a few continued to discuss Lidle’s actual career, from the time he got his chance as a scab in the 1994-1995 player’s strike to the seven games he played for the Yankees who did not win the pennant. Some grumblings came out that he condemned his fellow players for not having his winning spirit and some complaints from the criticized that he never finished a game, left it to others to salvage his messes. All the usual drama of any small group of disparate people thrown together by chance job skills.
Of course, there were no comedic speculations about what kind of terror attack a ball player would engineer. Now, if they were still competing against another New York team, one could wonder whose apartment was hit, but that’s as far as that story could go. They weren’t in the series, and the attack wasn’t in Detroit.
No one tried to visualize a terrorist attack with small planes, each filled with explosives, flying a convoy up the Hudson, peeling off to take out individual buildings. We know the military responded, that jets from Selfridge were heard over Mount Clemens, no doubt headed for Dearborn. Again, visualize the damage if they attacked that hypothetical convoy of explosives, assuming they could get down to their level.
My office mate speculated on an angry man who’d lost his apartment in a divorce settlement who was going to get even, and didn’t care who got hurt. One could go farther, and postulate the man was so angry, he got the wrong building or so incompetent he couldn’t aim the aircraft and got the wrong apartment.
Comedy is possible, but the underlying anxieties run so deep, public humor is not permitted. The lone pilot is as dangerous as the bicyclists from Palestine, and not to be imagined. Neither is an exploration possible of the sociopath’s opposite, the normal individual grown desperate by circumstances. Only one person slipped the slightest hint about despair after defeat when he denied any suggestion Lidle committed suicide.
We’re left where we were in 2001. We have poor, vain local reporters, inexperienced editorial staffs, conventional bureaucrats, decently trained professionals and no political leaders until a story has developed. George Bush made no comment that afternoon that betrayed any interest in the possibility that gripped television watchers in the first minutes or any sympathy later. His stories stood: we wouldn’t invade North Korea and the acts of Mark Foley were reprehensible.
One knows Clinton’s political instincts would have driven him to make some comment that he had followed the story and shared the concerns of his fellow Americans. He would have learned who lived in the burned apartments and made some phone calls. Even Nixon had better instincts: he would have called the ball club, found Lidle’s most famous, closest teammate to commiserate with.
The story that didn’t develop is the canonical one about how we confront the world, our fears of the uncontrollable when comedy and despair are not permitted. Surprisingly, there were no calls by the on-line media to popular psychologists or therapists who would address these for us.
This time the underlying story that attracts the day late politicians who tap the latent fear of conspiracies and blame other jurisdictions is how is it possible small planes can get so near buildings in New York City. The answer’s simple: men with money buy planes, and, like Lidle, want to go sightseeing and there’s no reason, except paranoia, why they shouldn’t. Stopping all freedom of movement is probably as futile as preventing players like Lidle from playing badminton or getting pilot’s licenses.
The story that continues is the central mystery, what happened. There is still no reason people won’t trust findings of the NTSB. So far, the interests of those who would gut investigations or pervert them with coverups have been stymied by fear of lawsuits by corporations that own, maintain, manufacture or insure planes that crash. It’s just that the answers aren’t immediately obvious, and it takes time to reconstruct what happened. Political influence will play in how quickly the problem is solved. How many resources are available before the next crash could reveal the hidden costs of slashed budgets, lower taxes and deficits, but won’t.
No one yet knows who was at the controls, and some suggest we may never know. That question is the one most susceptible to corruption, since the name of the pilot will be important to the estates of two widows and myriad insurance companies. Friends of both were soon saying neither man would have been showing off, neither was a hot shot, quickly implying it was the plane or conditions that were at fault. Cirrus soon countered Lidle had never taken any of their training and more ominous adjectives appeared for the weather.
In the meantime, people like the man I work with are the ones to listen to. They are the ones who will continue to ponder the pragmatic and philosophical issues of flight.
Showing posts with label Conspiracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conspiracy. Show all posts
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 3 - Heroes
Conspiracy is a popular explanation for events. However, the theory seems to have little basis in reality.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 2 - Blackmail
Corporate culture takes many forms, but genuine narrative traditions are rare. At Shatterproof Glass and my last employer, folk tales formed in irrational environments where management occasionally acted in ways that benefited employees. The paternalistic company produced a trickster tradition to explain the old man who ran the company, while the caste bound company fomented a conspiratorial belief that any incompetent who survived did so only because he, or she, had the goods on someone.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 1 - Graffiti
Graffiti represents the failure of the state in its most fundamental roles. Cities fail the young when they give them no vested interest in the community, then fail the adults when they refuse to protect their property.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)