In a recent essay about John Sell Cottman, Sanford Schwartz commented on the ubiquity of drawing masters in upper echelon homes in the early nineteenth century. Rather a commonplace, except he went on to suggest it was a tool for amateur historians and naturalists to record their explorations of the English countryside which were then an activity of the most advanced intellectuals.
When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.
The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.
Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.
Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.
Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.
Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.
I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.
I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.
Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.
This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.
I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.
The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.
I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.
The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.
I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.
The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.
My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.
I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.
With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.
The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.
Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.
Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.
Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 4 - Cory Lidle
The recent crash of Cory Lidle’s airplane into a New York apartment building illustrates the dynamics and limitations of modern news.
By chance, I heard the first rumor like I did the one on September 11, from a woman who was sent a flutter by all the possibilities that drifted into her head. Last time, the Cassandra greeted anyone who came into the work area, with the latest news. This time, the magpie found a media outlet on her computer to listen to, at full volume, so we couldn’t miss a word of it or her commentary.
The thing that’s striking is how few people remain calm in the face of the unknown. From the beginning it was a small plane or helicopter and a small, unimportant apartment building. Common sense should have said it was not a terrorist attack.
But, of course, reporters had to ask the question. Denials by government officials sounded irrelevant since the known facts were still one plane, one small fire. No second plane, no architectural catastrophe, no gluts of dead or injured bodies, no missing persons with hysterical relatives calling the media for names. It didn’t really matter if they were informed or knee-jerk denials, there was nothing to deny and they sounded silly.
By the end of the day, editors looked lazy for retaining those paragraphs in every lengthening stories that
compounded knowledge rather than reporting it.
Police barriers kept journalists from the scene, so there were few to interview. Most were as unreliable as witnesses usually are. Some were minor celebrities who volunteered their names with information, a photographer, a novelist. Since they lived in the building, they inadvertently added contextual background, by placing the building in New York’s social structure as not one significant enough to attract the attention of a strategic bomber. The Trump Tower would have aroused my office mate.
When the fire was extinguished with no more crashes, the web-available stations reverted to their regular programming and the self-important woman returned to her work.
The other person in the office, the man who flies a small plane, and I continued to talk desultorily. I suspect that every crash awakens anxiety for him, the way serious accidents resonate with amateur race car drivers. The woman was only interested in anything about John Kennedy Junior’s death.
His interest increased when the name of the plane owner, Cory Lidle, emerged. None of us were big enough sports fans to know who he was or who are still playing in the off-season games.
At that time there was little information except Lidle either didn’t have a license yet or had just earned it. The danger of inexperience was important to my co-worker. We didn’t yet know the flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was only 26 years old, not the grizzled, war tested ace of movies who would have taken the controls and saved the day.
After work I went to the local wellness center, with its single, low volume television screen that the caretaker jocks had set to ESPN. The story had morphed into a human interest sports report with wannabe celebrities competing to inflate their importance by their near association with the slightly more famous. I heard about the normal guy who happens to play ball, the teammate who supported charities. The career cut short, the child who would never know a father. But no games were cancelled; there was only the obligatory moment of opening silence.
I heard nothing about why an athlete could cause an accident. Any possibility that drugs reduce responses will disappear into a hobbyhorse for someone, whose very predictable comments will render then worthless. Likewise, any penchant for gambling.
Certainly, nothing was said about how the arrogance of success might make a 34-year-old panic or refuse to turn over control to a flight instructor, or about the possible infatuation of a trainer awed by a client who babbled athletic skills could be transferred. No one mentioned the failures of Michael Jordan and Walter Payton when they tried baseball and auto racing.
Any deeper stories about the nature of sports were already gone. By the next morning, the official spokesman who confirmed Lidle’s death owned his ball club, not the fire department or federal government.
Only a few continued to discuss Lidle’s actual career, from the time he got his chance as a scab in the 1994-1995 player’s strike to the seven games he played for the Yankees who did not win the pennant. Some grumblings came out that he condemned his fellow players for not having his winning spirit and some complaints from the criticized that he never finished a game, left it to others to salvage his messes. All the usual drama of any small group of disparate people thrown together by chance job skills.
Of course, there were no comedic speculations about what kind of terror attack a ball player would engineer. Now, if they were still competing against another New York team, one could wonder whose apartment was hit, but that’s as far as that story could go. They weren’t in the series, and the attack wasn’t in Detroit.
No one tried to visualize a terrorist attack with small planes, each filled with explosives, flying a convoy up the Hudson, peeling off to take out individual buildings. We know the military responded, that jets from Selfridge were heard over Mount Clemens, no doubt headed for Dearborn. Again, visualize the damage if they attacked that hypothetical convoy of explosives, assuming they could get down to their level.
My office mate speculated on an angry man who’d lost his apartment in a divorce settlement who was going to get even, and didn’t care who got hurt. One could go farther, and postulate the man was so angry, he got the wrong building or so incompetent he couldn’t aim the aircraft and got the wrong apartment.
Comedy is possible, but the underlying anxieties run so deep, public humor is not permitted. The lone pilot is as dangerous as the bicyclists from Palestine, and not to be imagined. Neither is an exploration possible of the sociopath’s opposite, the normal individual grown desperate by circumstances. Only one person slipped the slightest hint about despair after defeat when he denied any suggestion Lidle committed suicide.
We’re left where we were in 2001. We have poor, vain local reporters, inexperienced editorial staffs, conventional bureaucrats, decently trained professionals and no political leaders until a story has developed. George Bush made no comment that afternoon that betrayed any interest in the possibility that gripped television watchers in the first minutes or any sympathy later. His stories stood: we wouldn’t invade North Korea and the acts of Mark Foley were reprehensible.
One knows Clinton’s political instincts would have driven him to make some comment that he had followed the story and shared the concerns of his fellow Americans. He would have learned who lived in the burned apartments and made some phone calls. Even Nixon had better instincts: he would have called the ball club, found Lidle’s most famous, closest teammate to commiserate with.
The story that didn’t develop is the canonical one about how we confront the world, our fears of the uncontrollable when comedy and despair are not permitted. Surprisingly, there were no calls by the on-line media to popular psychologists or therapists who would address these for us.
This time the underlying story that attracts the day late politicians who tap the latent fear of conspiracies and blame other jurisdictions is how is it possible small planes can get so near buildings in New York City. The answer’s simple: men with money buy planes, and, like Lidle, want to go sightseeing and there’s no reason, except paranoia, why they shouldn’t. Stopping all freedom of movement is probably as futile as preventing players like Lidle from playing badminton or getting pilot’s licenses.
The story that continues is the central mystery, what happened. There is still no reason people won’t trust findings of the NTSB. So far, the interests of those who would gut investigations or pervert them with coverups have been stymied by fear of lawsuits by corporations that own, maintain, manufacture or insure planes that crash. It’s just that the answers aren’t immediately obvious, and it takes time to reconstruct what happened. Political influence will play in how quickly the problem is solved. How many resources are available before the next crash could reveal the hidden costs of slashed budgets, lower taxes and deficits, but won’t.
No one yet knows who was at the controls, and some suggest we may never know. That question is the one most susceptible to corruption, since the name of the pilot will be important to the estates of two widows and myriad insurance companies. Friends of both were soon saying neither man would have been showing off, neither was a hot shot, quickly implying it was the plane or conditions that were at fault. Cirrus soon countered Lidle had never taken any of their training and more ominous adjectives appeared for the weather.
In the meantime, people like the man I work with are the ones to listen to. They are the ones who will continue to ponder the pragmatic and philosophical issues of flight.
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.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
North South - Part 1 - Traffic
Sitting at a traffic light is one of those times I can’t do much except stare ahead, so I let my mind wander. Instead of following the byways of Walter Mitty, I find myself pondering the ways traffic reflects the values of cities who install traffic lights.
The one thing all planners do is try to slow drivers to prevent accidents. Beyond that, they have little in common.
In Detroit in the early 1980s, legend held that lights were set so a driver, who went the correct speed, would never stop for a second light. Automobiles are the local economy, and no one wants driving to be a painful experience. The ideal speed for each town was passed on as covertly as the name of the local bootlegger in prohibition..
New Jersey in the mid-1970s was divided between traffic circles in the north and jug handles in the south. Both were attempts to engineer the roads themselves to control traffic flow. Circles were the more challenging. You entered on the edge, and by centripetal force ended in the center before trying to edge out to make an exit. If you failed, you simply went around again. It was all a bit of a carnival ride, an exercise in vertigo that made my favorite circle the one that emptied into a road with an overpass for horses leaving their barns for a racetrack.
In Georgetown in the mid-1970s, drivers simply ignored lights. Whenever traffic moved, people would charge into intersections, even though they knew they wouldn’t clear when the light changed. Gridlock was not just deliberate; it manifested that every single person was too important to yield or compromise for the greater good.
Abilene, Texas, came close to that attitude in the middle 1980s. Someone had installed a traffic circle, but someone else erected stop signs at two places. If you came from the south, as I did, you had to stop every few feet. If you came from the wealthy neighborhood, you never stopped, never had to yield, and certainly never experienced vertigo. The democratic forces of the one were overruled by the power elite of privilege. I admit, I used to fantasize dropping those drivers into northern Jersey.
In Dallas in the early 1990s, I used to imagine the drivers suddenly transported onto Telegraph Road or a Detroit expressway. They had no concept of fast lines to the left, slow lanes to the right. The three lane road north towards Plano were always stopped as slow cars filled each lane. Since the only shopping mall was miles up that road, I turned to mail order catalogs. E-commerce hadn’t developed yet, but it was an idea waiting to be born.
If the patterns in Detroit and New Jersey demonstrated efficiency which promotes egalitarianism and the Texas roads showed the elitism of the old south, the place I live now exemplifies traffic in a world where government either does not exist, or is directed by people who think it a costly luxury.
The place I live has never risen above family ties to organized government. I go through four lights to get to the post office. They not only are not consistent among themselves, they are not consistent to themselves. Sometimes, the left turn arrow is at the beginning of the cycle, sometimes at the end; sometimes both directions get the arrow, sometimes only one. When only one gets it, sometimes only turning traffic is allowed, other times through traffic is permitted. Then, since they are supposedly on demand, sometimes no arrow appears for several cycles.
The most accidents I see continue to be at the lights that were placed where there were the most accidents. People act on the patterns they expect, but haven’t learned to cope with no pattern. The only sure thing is someone will run the red light.
In the town where I work, it’s worse. The city planners seem to think the smooth flow of traffic is as dangerous as recreational sex. Folklore says the merchants don’t want traffic to move where the chains are building, and think making traffic bad will encourage people to continue to use them. I learned early to either do my essential shopping early Sunday morning, or get through the place as quickly as possible early Saturday to shop in the next city.
Even so, I often get stopped at every single light early Sunday morning, and marvel that people still have accidents at that hour. It got worse when they were widening the road near the area where the big boxes were building. The cops ran speed traps, ticketing anyone going more than ten miles through a construction zone when no men were working, no equipment was stored and the pylons had been moved.
I used to visit some of the stores in that area to see what they had; I haven’t been back since the road construction, except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m usually in such a foul mood by the time I get through the traffic, that I grab what I need and get out as quickly as possible, irritated even more by long check-out lines.
When one drives through cities on the interstate the landscapes look like the cities have been homogenized by government engineers. The persisting variations in surface roads may be as surprising as the discovery that red and blue states signify more than political preference. The roots of the differences are probably the same.
Back during the age of Andrew Jackson, politicians argued the function of government in encouraging economic growth. Northerners promoted internal improvements like turnpikes and canals, while southerners argued limited government. When automobiles appeared, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio built turnpikes; Detroit started it expressways. Folklore says North Carolina developed speed traps to fleece northerners headed for Florida and to harass and intimidate Negroes.
Enabling legislation for interstates depended a great deal on Eisenhower arguing the military necessity of moving materiel quickly. The first exit opened near by Michigan hometown in 1959 just three years after the act was passed. It took southern cities choked by traffic years to take advantage of available money.
Where I live, there still are no good roads. When I told a woman I work with that one deep ravine on a county road I cross to get to my house has no shoulder or guard rail, and that the dry river bed beyond my house has no bridge and at least one woman has flipped her car there during a storm, she dismissed the problems. She said, don’t you realize how much bridges cost?
The one thing all planners do is try to slow drivers to prevent accidents. Beyond that, they have little in common.
In Detroit in the early 1980s, legend held that lights were set so a driver, who went the correct speed, would never stop for a second light. Automobiles are the local economy, and no one wants driving to be a painful experience. The ideal speed for each town was passed on as covertly as the name of the local bootlegger in prohibition..
New Jersey in the mid-1970s was divided between traffic circles in the north and jug handles in the south. Both were attempts to engineer the roads themselves to control traffic flow. Circles were the more challenging. You entered on the edge, and by centripetal force ended in the center before trying to edge out to make an exit. If you failed, you simply went around again. It was all a bit of a carnival ride, an exercise in vertigo that made my favorite circle the one that emptied into a road with an overpass for horses leaving their barns for a racetrack.
In Georgetown in the mid-1970s, drivers simply ignored lights. Whenever traffic moved, people would charge into intersections, even though they knew they wouldn’t clear when the light changed. Gridlock was not just deliberate; it manifested that every single person was too important to yield or compromise for the greater good.
Abilene, Texas, came close to that attitude in the middle 1980s. Someone had installed a traffic circle, but someone else erected stop signs at two places. If you came from the south, as I did, you had to stop every few feet. If you came from the wealthy neighborhood, you never stopped, never had to yield, and certainly never experienced vertigo. The democratic forces of the one were overruled by the power elite of privilege. I admit, I used to fantasize dropping those drivers into northern Jersey.
In Dallas in the early 1990s, I used to imagine the drivers suddenly transported onto Telegraph Road or a Detroit expressway. They had no concept of fast lines to the left, slow lanes to the right. The three lane road north towards Plano were always stopped as slow cars filled each lane. Since the only shopping mall was miles up that road, I turned to mail order catalogs. E-commerce hadn’t developed yet, but it was an idea waiting to be born.
If the patterns in Detroit and New Jersey demonstrated efficiency which promotes egalitarianism and the Texas roads showed the elitism of the old south, the place I live now exemplifies traffic in a world where government either does not exist, or is directed by people who think it a costly luxury.
The place I live has never risen above family ties to organized government. I go through four lights to get to the post office. They not only are not consistent among themselves, they are not consistent to themselves. Sometimes, the left turn arrow is at the beginning of the cycle, sometimes at the end; sometimes both directions get the arrow, sometimes only one. When only one gets it, sometimes only turning traffic is allowed, other times through traffic is permitted. Then, since they are supposedly on demand, sometimes no arrow appears for several cycles.
The most accidents I see continue to be at the lights that were placed where there were the most accidents. People act on the patterns they expect, but haven’t learned to cope with no pattern. The only sure thing is someone will run the red light.
In the town where I work, it’s worse. The city planners seem to think the smooth flow of traffic is as dangerous as recreational sex. Folklore says the merchants don’t want traffic to move where the chains are building, and think making traffic bad will encourage people to continue to use them. I learned early to either do my essential shopping early Sunday morning, or get through the place as quickly as possible early Saturday to shop in the next city.
Even so, I often get stopped at every single light early Sunday morning, and marvel that people still have accidents at that hour. It got worse when they were widening the road near the area where the big boxes were building. The cops ran speed traps, ticketing anyone going more than ten miles through a construction zone when no men were working, no equipment was stored and the pylons had been moved.
I used to visit some of the stores in that area to see what they had; I haven’t been back since the road construction, except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m usually in such a foul mood by the time I get through the traffic, that I grab what I need and get out as quickly as possible, irritated even more by long check-out lines.
When one drives through cities on the interstate the landscapes look like the cities have been homogenized by government engineers. The persisting variations in surface roads may be as surprising as the discovery that red and blue states signify more than political preference. The roots of the differences are probably the same.
Back during the age of Andrew Jackson, politicians argued the function of government in encouraging economic growth. Northerners promoted internal improvements like turnpikes and canals, while southerners argued limited government. When automobiles appeared, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio built turnpikes; Detroit started it expressways. Folklore says North Carolina developed speed traps to fleece northerners headed for Florida and to harass and intimidate Negroes.
Enabling legislation for interstates depended a great deal on Eisenhower arguing the military necessity of moving materiel quickly. The first exit opened near by Michigan hometown in 1959 just three years after the act was passed. It took southern cities choked by traffic years to take advantage of available money.
Where I live, there still are no good roads. When I told a woman I work with that one deep ravine on a county road I cross to get to my house has no shoulder or guard rail, and that the dry river bed beyond my house has no bridge and at least one woman has flipped her car there during a storm, she dismissed the problems. She said, don’t you realize how much bridges cost?
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Immigration - Part 4 - Fear
My boss’s family is from mainline Philadelphia. His mother’s father was a society doctor and they moved in the orbit reserved for hangers-on to the well-to-do. The family tree she chooses to remember is her mother’s from Virginia.
She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.
But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.
In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.
Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.
He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.
My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.
Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.
My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.
We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.
The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.
Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.
The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.
We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.
Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.
We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.
We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.
She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.
When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.
When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.
The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.
When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.
Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.
It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.
After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.
We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.
The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.
She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.
Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.
She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.
But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.
In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.
Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.
He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.
My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.
Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.
My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.
We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.
The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.
Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.
The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.
We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.
Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.
We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.
We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.
She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.
When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.
When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.
The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.
When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.
Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.
It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.
After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.
We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.
The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.
She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.
Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Language - Part 1 - Science
The fate of scientists like botanists, entomologists and astronomers is sad. They start as children awed by the wonders of nature, and end with methods that never allow them to look out the window.
The first thing they lose is language. Men concerned with precision have not only banished the poetic, but even the coherent. Much of the challenge of introductory college science courses is simply learning vocabulary, and graduate students know they must master arcane rhetoric to be published. I often wonder if they can even put statements into English like
or
The alternative for botanists and entomologists is research in how to kill what it is they loved. Instead of marveling that pigweed and horseweed have mutated to survive the active agent in Round-up, they’re paid to find something that will eradicate the survivors in cotton and soybean fields.
With the systematic separation of science students from their subject, it’s not surprising so much research has moved abroad. Why would someone who cares want to put the years of work into producing what seems inconsequential?
There are few independent seed companies left in the United States. Most have been bought by European conglomerates or chemical companies like Monsato. It’s easy for business students to say they are following the pattern of globalization pioneered by the steel companies.
Along with ownership we disdain anything that’s not immediately pragmatic. Along with the loss of seed companies has been the loss of breeders looking for new varieties. It’s the Japanese who’ve joined the Dutch and Germans as the leading breeders of new varieties of ornamental plants.
I’m not ridiculing the scientists I quoted. They are involved in things that matter. The agent in crownbeard that kills sheep and inhibits the growth of food crops like radishes is galegine, which has been synthesized into a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It may sound silly to learn sheep who die are ones who eat sweet things instead of nutritious ones, but the consequences of knowing a glucose chemical was involved could not have been anticipated by the researchers.
And those doing the various kinds of DNA research aren’t just looking for miracle cures. They’re also deepening our understanding of evolution. Morning glories happen to be interesting because new varieties are not hybrids, but spontaneous mutations. All the Heavenly Blues we see today probably came from one plant noticed by an amateur named Clarke in Colorado.
The chasm between passion and procedures is not unique to science. Many English professors have felt the same loss when their love of literature is channeled into formal literary criticism. Historians may want to know why and how something happened, but they’re forced to use statistics or other standard methods that deliberately eliminate the special so they write without biases.
Amateurs have options. They buy popular historians or read historical fiction or watch documentaries. People who love novels or poetry don’t even know professors write books. But for those of us interested in natural history, the barriers are greater. There are no ways to surmount the language barrier except by trying to comprehend the technical.
Perhaps the rigors of professionalism have had the unintended consequence of making outsourcing technology easier, for when people cannot read or write about things they care about the formative culture that produces innovation is destroyed. When that’s gone, outsourcing is only a cosmetic term for having to buy what we once created.
Sources:
Description of research at Division of Gene Expression and Regulation I, headed by Shigeru Iida, on internet .
Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of Botany 7:1419–1424:1999, abstract on internet.
Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992, abstract on internet.
The first thing they lose is language. Men concerned with precision have not only banished the poetic, but even the coherent. Much of the challenge of introductory college science courses is simply learning vocabulary, and graduate students know they must master arcane rhetoric to be published. I often wonder if they can even put statements into English like
Affected animals necropsied at time of death presented with hydrothorax with as much as 2 to 3 L of straw-colored thoracic fluid.
or
We also investigated the influence of different levels of N fertilization (1, 5, and 10 mM) on the modification of the allelopathic potential of amended soils, in terms of their effect on soil total phenolics and radish seedling growth.Once scientists have their advanced degrees, many follow research into laboratories where machines do the looking and they do the writing. Genetics and DNA are answering important questions, but still you wonder if people despair when they spend months of their lives reducing morning glories to
The mutable allele is caused by an intragenic tandem duplication of 3.3 kb within a gene for transcriptional activator containing a bHLH DNA-binding motif.
The alternative for botanists and entomologists is research in how to kill what it is they loved. Instead of marveling that pigweed and horseweed have mutated to survive the active agent in Round-up, they’re paid to find something that will eradicate the survivors in cotton and soybean fields.
With the systematic separation of science students from their subject, it’s not surprising so much research has moved abroad. Why would someone who cares want to put the years of work into producing what seems inconsequential?
There are few independent seed companies left in the United States. Most have been bought by European conglomerates or chemical companies like Monsato. It’s easy for business students to say they are following the pattern of globalization pioneered by the steel companies.
Along with ownership we disdain anything that’s not immediately pragmatic. Along with the loss of seed companies has been the loss of breeders looking for new varieties. It’s the Japanese who’ve joined the Dutch and Germans as the leading breeders of new varieties of ornamental plants.
I’m not ridiculing the scientists I quoted. They are involved in things that matter. The agent in crownbeard that kills sheep and inhibits the growth of food crops like radishes is galegine, which has been synthesized into a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It may sound silly to learn sheep who die are ones who eat sweet things instead of nutritious ones, but the consequences of knowing a glucose chemical was involved could not have been anticipated by the researchers.
And those doing the various kinds of DNA research aren’t just looking for miracle cures. They’re also deepening our understanding of evolution. Morning glories happen to be interesting because new varieties are not hybrids, but spontaneous mutations. All the Heavenly Blues we see today probably came from one plant noticed by an amateur named Clarke in Colorado.
The chasm between passion and procedures is not unique to science. Many English professors have felt the same loss when their love of literature is channeled into formal literary criticism. Historians may want to know why and how something happened, but they’re forced to use statistics or other standard methods that deliberately eliminate the special so they write without biases.
Amateurs have options. They buy popular historians or read historical fiction or watch documentaries. People who love novels or poetry don’t even know professors write books. But for those of us interested in natural history, the barriers are greater. There are no ways to surmount the language barrier except by trying to comprehend the technical.
Perhaps the rigors of professionalism have had the unintended consequence of making outsourcing technology easier, for when people cannot read or write about things they care about the formative culture that produces innovation is destroyed. When that’s gone, outsourcing is only a cosmetic term for having to buy what we once created.
Sources:
Description of research at Division of Gene Expression and Regulation I, headed by Shigeru Iida, on internet .
Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of Botany 7:1419–1424:1999, abstract on internet.
Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992, abstract on internet.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Competition - Part 1 - Brand X Telephone
My telephone company just changed hands, and it looks like things are going to stay bad. I had hope a few years ago when the company that owned our company got bought by a major utility that we might finally get some genuine service. But, as part of the deal, they sold us off, to maintain competition.
What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.
Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.
I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.
But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.
When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.
Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.
Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.
When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.
I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.
I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.
While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.
Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received
They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.
Where’s the competition for the customers?
Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.
I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.
The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.
The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.
Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.
What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.
Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.
I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.
But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.
When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.
Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.
Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.
When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.
I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.
I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.
While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.
Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received
They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.
Where’s the competition for the customers?
Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.
I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.
The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.
The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.
Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Tolerance - Part 1 - Dell Shannon
Liberals constantly face the Skokie conundrum, what to do when one’s belief in tolerance requires allowing people so intolerant to exist they would rewrite the constitution if they could. At what point is it necessary to become intolerant to preserve an environment of tolerance? Or in that 1977 case, how does one separate the right of a group to request a parade permit through a Jewish neighborhood, from their right to receive that permit?
Liberals flock to the cause of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe who’s shows are censored by people who dislike the subjects. But what does one do with a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Céline who’s accused of supporting the Nazis in France in world war II?
Elizabeth Linington poses such a problem. At the same time she wrote mystery stories under the name Dell Shannon that glamorized the Los Angeles police force, she also supported the John Birch Society.
At the time I wondered if I bought one of her books, was I was making a contribution. My immediate solution was to buy books from used book dealers. Unfortunately, that meant enjoying her work without paying her for her effort.
Her anomalous position became more obvious when O. J. Simpson’s lawyer dramatized general incompetence and brutality of her force. She was often accused of not knowing much about police procedures, so did she deliberately romanticize the authority figures as ideology?
Since I didn’t remember a strong streak of propaganda in her books, I decided to read some to see. By now, of course, they’re only available from used book dealers and she’s been dead since 1988.
First, let me say she’s a decent story teller with an ability to pace her narrative. She usually has one major plot that alternates between a number of minor tales, some resolved, some not. Her aim is to dramatize the work flow in a large organization.
Most of the minor plots are the humdrum of daily police life, the routine accidental homicides and thefts. Some accuse her of lifting them from police blotters. It’s probably what she meant when she said she did extensive research.
She also tries to portray a functioning bureaucracy with a number of people working on multiple problems, able to still concentrate on a few, but realizing many simply must be ignored. The idea of a functioning civil service is anathema to many conservatives today, but was not necessarily a tenant of the John Birch group.
Her selection of crimes and creation of undifferentiated policemen represents the realism in her work. There’s nothing about the view criminals are either stupid or ordinary people that is characteristic of a conservative ideology.
Her weaknesses as a writer leave her more vulnerable to political criticism. She has no ear for dialogue. When she portrays confrontations between suspects and police, she has them mouth polite euphemisms, especially for black cops. When the police are looking for suspects, they call them fags.
The one represents isolation, the other homophobia. Neither are representative of the John Birch society, but may be reasons one would not read her book.
She also has no ability to develop characters. Her black, hispanic and white cops, suspects and victims are interchangeable. When she tries to characterize individuals, she falls into stereotypes. The black policeman, Jason, is the son of a doctor who is an expert at everything. Lieutenant Mendoza inherited money from his grandfather and plays poker without being a gambler.
While there’s no malice in her limited imagination and writing skills, there’s a more subtle class bias. The policemen are all working class men with families, who worry about mortgages. Luis Mendoza doesn’t need his salary, has married an artist and lives in a renovated hacienda with horses and sheep. No alcoholics, no divorces, no wild bachelors.
Mendoza falls into the tradition created by Dorothy Sayers with Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn. Unlike many of her contemporaries who also create well-to-do, intelligent heroes, she does try to provide the more realistic background of the typical police force.
Readers of genre fiction accept a number of conventions in exchange for a realistic portrayal of problem solving. However, her uneducated portrayal of the Los Angeles police force could not survive the reality of the O. J. Simpson case, when no one showed the skills and tolerance of her most minor police inspector.
She’s also been done in by advances in technology. Her books were written before DNA testing and computerized databases. The best she can do is match blood types and fingerprints. With no ability to gather evidence, she can only solve many of her crimes with suspects willing to confess as soon as policemen ask the correct questions.
Her estate and publisher don’t mention her political interests, probably because they don’t want to alienate potential readers. Her most ideological comments in the books I recently read occur in The Motive on Record (1982) when Mendoza’s wife visits travel agencies and is upset when they offer the newly available tours of eastern Europe. She constantly frets, why would anyone want to support a communist country with tourist dollars.
I wonder what a John Birch mystery would be. Someone who wanted to use fiction to spread a message would be more likely to choose the genre of Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. Within the context of a city police department it’s impossible to have authority figures who are always right.
The kind of policing we hear about with helicopters patrolling the slums of LA would not be used by burglary-homicide, despite the example of Simpson. The closest she comes is an interrogation in Death by Inches (1965) that inadvertently shows the fine the line between questioning and torture.
If the police can’t be John Birch heroes, then the villains must be communists. Starting her career in 1962, she would have needed murders in labor unions or anti-war groups, either communist infiltrators of legitimate groups or agent provocateurs in Marxist groups. Instead of religious zealots who kill infidel children, they would kill them when they became college atheists.
Those aren’t her plots. They don’t fit her vision of the daily routine of a city police force.
Without the plots, villains, heroes, or political vision she is simply a limited writer with an interesting vision of solving murders, hampered by her gentility. One can boycott her works for economic reasons, but there’s no reason to keep them away from innocent children who might be corrupted by her propaganda. She tries to dramatize a kind of tolerance with her diverse police force, and her writing requires readers exercise the same tolerance.
Disliking or liking them for aesthetic or emotional reasons is altogether another matter.
Liberals flock to the cause of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe who’s shows are censored by people who dislike the subjects. But what does one do with a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Céline who’s accused of supporting the Nazis in France in world war II?
Elizabeth Linington poses such a problem. At the same time she wrote mystery stories under the name Dell Shannon that glamorized the Los Angeles police force, she also supported the John Birch Society.
At the time I wondered if I bought one of her books, was I was making a contribution. My immediate solution was to buy books from used book dealers. Unfortunately, that meant enjoying her work without paying her for her effort.
Her anomalous position became more obvious when O. J. Simpson’s lawyer dramatized general incompetence and brutality of her force. She was often accused of not knowing much about police procedures, so did she deliberately romanticize the authority figures as ideology?
Since I didn’t remember a strong streak of propaganda in her books, I decided to read some to see. By now, of course, they’re only available from used book dealers and she’s been dead since 1988.
First, let me say she’s a decent story teller with an ability to pace her narrative. She usually has one major plot that alternates between a number of minor tales, some resolved, some not. Her aim is to dramatize the work flow in a large organization.
Most of the minor plots are the humdrum of daily police life, the routine accidental homicides and thefts. Some accuse her of lifting them from police blotters. It’s probably what she meant when she said she did extensive research.
She also tries to portray a functioning bureaucracy with a number of people working on multiple problems, able to still concentrate on a few, but realizing many simply must be ignored. The idea of a functioning civil service is anathema to many conservatives today, but was not necessarily a tenant of the John Birch group.
Her selection of crimes and creation of undifferentiated policemen represents the realism in her work. There’s nothing about the view criminals are either stupid or ordinary people that is characteristic of a conservative ideology.
Her weaknesses as a writer leave her more vulnerable to political criticism. She has no ear for dialogue. When she portrays confrontations between suspects and police, she has them mouth polite euphemisms, especially for black cops. When the police are looking for suspects, they call them fags.
The one represents isolation, the other homophobia. Neither are representative of the John Birch society, but may be reasons one would not read her book.
She also has no ability to develop characters. Her black, hispanic and white cops, suspects and victims are interchangeable. When she tries to characterize individuals, she falls into stereotypes. The black policeman, Jason, is the son of a doctor who is an expert at everything. Lieutenant Mendoza inherited money from his grandfather and plays poker without being a gambler.
While there’s no malice in her limited imagination and writing skills, there’s a more subtle class bias. The policemen are all working class men with families, who worry about mortgages. Luis Mendoza doesn’t need his salary, has married an artist and lives in a renovated hacienda with horses and sheep. No alcoholics, no divorces, no wild bachelors.
Mendoza falls into the tradition created by Dorothy Sayers with Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn. Unlike many of her contemporaries who also create well-to-do, intelligent heroes, she does try to provide the more realistic background of the typical police force.
Readers of genre fiction accept a number of conventions in exchange for a realistic portrayal of problem solving. However, her uneducated portrayal of the Los Angeles police force could not survive the reality of the O. J. Simpson case, when no one showed the skills and tolerance of her most minor police inspector.
She’s also been done in by advances in technology. Her books were written before DNA testing and computerized databases. The best she can do is match blood types and fingerprints. With no ability to gather evidence, she can only solve many of her crimes with suspects willing to confess as soon as policemen ask the correct questions.
Her estate and publisher don’t mention her political interests, probably because they don’t want to alienate potential readers. Her most ideological comments in the books I recently read occur in The Motive on Record (1982) when Mendoza’s wife visits travel agencies and is upset when they offer the newly available tours of eastern Europe. She constantly frets, why would anyone want to support a communist country with tourist dollars.
I wonder what a John Birch mystery would be. Someone who wanted to use fiction to spread a message would be more likely to choose the genre of Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. Within the context of a city police department it’s impossible to have authority figures who are always right.
The kind of policing we hear about with helicopters patrolling the slums of LA would not be used by burglary-homicide, despite the example of Simpson. The closest she comes is an interrogation in Death by Inches (1965) that inadvertently shows the fine the line between questioning and torture.
If the police can’t be John Birch heroes, then the villains must be communists. Starting her career in 1962, she would have needed murders in labor unions or anti-war groups, either communist infiltrators of legitimate groups or agent provocateurs in Marxist groups. Instead of religious zealots who kill infidel children, they would kill them when they became college atheists.
Those aren’t her plots. They don’t fit her vision of the daily routine of a city police force.
Without the plots, villains, heroes, or political vision she is simply a limited writer with an interesting vision of solving murders, hampered by her gentility. One can boycott her works for economic reasons, but there’s no reason to keep them away from innocent children who might be corrupted by her propaganda. She tries to dramatize a kind of tolerance with her diverse police force, and her writing requires readers exercise the same tolerance.
Disliking or liking them for aesthetic or emotional reasons is altogether another matter.
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