My editor-in-chief at National Geographic, Bill Garrett, send me this wonderful cinema clip. I replied with my recollections of it and my reactions to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfZX-4iQOgQ&feature=related
Thank you for sending this film clip! I’ve seen it before under unusual circumstances but haven’t been able to locate it.
This simple, brief trip down Market Street toward the ever-looming Terminal Building is magical in the way some Civil War photos can reach out of their glass plates to seize your whole attention. Perhaps the long exposure time accounts for the power of those Brady-era photos., Their subjects were staring, unmoving, at the uncovered lens for up to two minutes, enough time to focus on the camera as it focused on them, so that they seem to be consciously murmuring over time, “We were here at this frozen moment – intensely, minutely, hopefully, humanly. Look at us, alive in this slice of time, look at us. We passionately need your collusion, your acknowledgment of our living in your own focus. If you truly see us, we live.”
And in this sense, the film is more than a oddity. The people who looked up at the camera in 1905, a year before most of the city was destroyed by the great earthquake, were almost, almost aware that we would be seeing them now. They didn’t care particularly because they had their own lives – see them rush to appointments, lunches, tasks – but a few seem aware or even amused that ghosts of the future are passing on the front platform of the Market Street Car.
A good number of the folks on the street are aware that the ride is being filmed. They wave, caper dangerously in front of the car, boys hitch rides on car bumpers and carriages to wave. Perhaps they're aware that this film is a bit of boosterism staged to make the city look modern and prosperous. Some careful researcher has noted that the many passing automobiles are really a few autos, circling the route of our car. They pass, turn, pass on the other side, and repass on the right.
The primary impression busy Market Street in 1905 offers us is casual chaos. The number of people wandering on and across the street is remarkable. Many stand in the street, looking about them, apparently thinking of something far from Market Street. Most others seem to be in a hurry; it’s Market Street, after all, and business is booming. Something foreign and even disturbing to us that there is so little demarcation between pedestrian and street traffic. Folks continually bolt from one side to the other or stop to talk directly in the traffic flow. The progress of our time vehicle down Market Street is ponderous to us but of little concern to men and women stepping directly in its path, confident that our car or that carriage or even the nimble internal combustion automobiles will make way for them. It’s faintly amazing; no one is knocked down or run over. There aren’t groups pulsing across walkways, timed by signals; that lock-step rigidity is absent.
The phrase “free-for-all” comes to mind, both in the hurly-burly meaning, and in the assured ownership of common space. The hood-banging, automobile-offended New York pedestrian’s shout is poignantly unnecessary on Market Street 1905: “Hey! Hey! I’m walkin’ heah!”
Women pedestrians are relatively rare. What does this tell us about women in San Francisco before suffrage? They are dressed in dark clothes, probably an artifact of horse dung. Dark fabrics hide dirt and stains We would take Market Street to be a filthy place in 1905. Voluminous, long skirts swept near the surface and picked up a rime of powdered horse dung and dust on a rainy day; on a dry day the entire skirt gathered the blowing, ubiquitous product of horse-transport lodged in the cusps between paving stones.
Everyone wears a hat. It’s a breezy day; we occasionally see men clutching their derbies and slouches with both hands.
There is a significant police presence on Market Street. We tend to mistake cops of this era as ridiculous figures because they wear the dark blue solar-topi helmet familiar to us from Mack Sennet’s Keystone Cops, a burlesque of bumbling and incompetent police officers spilling out of a station house in pall-mall pursuit of nothing more dangerous than a scofflaw. But the police on Market are beefy, serious men who look competent and even formidable. They’re men of quick, practical and experienced judgment; Miranda Rights and civil liberties might be science fiction. These are beat-cops assigned to a specific area, with saps and revolvers on their hips, carrying lead-weighted billies. In 1905 San Francisco was still an exotic port ruffled by tong wars, a hustling Tenderloin District, waterfront brawls, and the usual difficulties with alcohol. Cocaine, heroin and opium were sold over the counter so there is no “drug crime” yet. The Indian Wars and the frontier were recent memories, less than twenty years before, but statistics report that riverine or ocean port cities (San Francisco is both) had much more violent crime than the wooliest frontier towns, including the cattle-droving destinations of Dodge City and her sisters in Kansas and Missouri.
There is a vast fleet of street cars. Our straight-line journey encounters dozens of cars on the Market Street line headed in the other direction, and more crossing Market. One crossing car is an electric trolley, powered by overhead wires. Most are unpowered cars; they move as the grip-man hauls on five-foot handles to seize moving, singing cables beneath centerline steel slots on the street, no more than two inches wide, and they brake by releasing the cable and levering-on blocks of elm against tracks and wheels. A grip man must have had prodigious physical strength and endurance.
We see a lot of bicycles on 1905 Market Street, part of the second wave of “wheelmen.” Bicycles were sensible transportation and a political force in the country, perhaps because they freed great numbers of middle-class citizens from the schedules of trains, the expense and responsibility of horse-transport, and the minor but cumulative expense of metropolitan and intercity light rail. Favored politicians visiting cities were accompanied by bicycle parades, large societies of Wheelmen who were something like the League of Women Voters in their pragmatic, progressive views expressed at the polls. Wheelmen were known as technically apt, educated, liberal groups. On our trip we see one cyclist crossing and recrossing the cable car slot only a few yards ahead of our car. Perhaps there was less danger of sinking his front wheel in the slot than it appears.
The day is fine, the mood is buoyant, the city is teeming and fascinating. Young people can watch this fragment of 1905 as a quaint gleam, inconsequential. As we grow older, however, the life and intensity of experience throughout this journey is almost cruel, a memento mori, reminding us that the twinkling moments that are so real in our memories and so full of dedicated life, are evanescent, shadow-play. It requires age to question the real fabric of time, to ask how a moment in this patently false, transparently-manufactured reality-TV opera we inhabit is more real than the sharply realized moments of our past. It seems impossible that those moments don’t still exist, as temporal stair treads to which we might leap if we held tightly to the banister, or if we somehow seized the opposing cable of a Market Street cars going in the opposite direction with a five-foot iron handle and a grip-man’s tenacity.
It helps, of course to be a little crazy. I benefit from this looseness of logic. There is a sandbar on the Chesapeake I inhabited with a woman I loved on the Glorious Fourth of July in the mid-eighties when I was as happy as I can remember being. Our sailboat was drawn up on the beach. The fireworks were reflected in the water and in that exquisite woman’s eyes. We danced on the sand and needed no music but us. We drank sweet Mt. Gay Eclipse rum. She said she loved me, in French. Life seemed as bright and spectacular and blooming as those bursts of light in the sky.
It all went to hell. The exquisite, rare woman changed her mind, in English, and set a lugubrious and devastating chain of events in motion that tore me out of Eden and away from what I most loved. Life was never that hopeful again. But that sandbar evening is so focused in my mind, like a crystal or a hologram of time, that I can’t believe it doesn’t exist at this moment, somewhere.
I watched this Market Street clip a few years ago, during a piano concert at a church in Noe Valley, in San Francisco. About eight pianists were playing, several of them famous stride piano stylists. My friend Jim Purcell was giving his lecture on the evolution of jazz style at the piano. A remarkable man stage-named Hokum Jeeves also played. He and his partner were trying to restart vaudeville and owned a small theater called Hokum Hall in Portland or Seattle. A few of my friends had acts there. Hokum played a cakewalk in ragtime, and then announced that he would demonstrate a lost skill by playing to a silent film as “professors” had in the early part of the last century. They sat at their keyboards – piano or organ – and played extemporaneously, reacting to the mood and action of the film. I remember Mr. Jeeves blending into “A Bicycle Built For Two” as one of the bicycles wobbled across the screen, and fashioning a clanging bell chord as a pedestrian nimbly stepped out of a streetcar’s way. It was enchanting, and it fit this film beautifully.
Braxinoso Speaks
Himself counts his looseness of mind and his past/present confusion of time as virtues. Perhaps they helped him continue an unremunerative profession past logical limits, but they also inflict enormous pain. I've been with him in the dark times when flashes of hope from the past exact a terrible, ironic toll. Trying to look on the bright side, a real virtue of being able to project oneself into another time is the ability to notice small mechanical or social things hindsight often hides.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
CHICKEN ART
My dear old friend Dean Torges, whom I met when I was about twelve, is a master woodworker, a philosopher, one of the most intelligent and most thoughtful men I've ever met. He's a world-famous bowyer, and (this is a compliment from the era of Theodore Roosevelt) a woodsman and hunter of consummate skill. But presently he's building a chicken house. It's a mobile chicken house. A chicken's need for new vistas is something I simply never considered. Still, Dean knows chickens. He's raised them on his little Ohio farmlet for donkey's years and enjoys his own eggs, broilers, and smoked whole chickens. I suppose he knows chickens better than most and if a mobile chicken house will help his fowl, who am I to quibble? He's even built mobile outbuildings, mesh-covered bomb-shelter frames that roll on old lawnmower wheels to keep his chicks out of hawks' talons. Fowlopolis.
He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.
After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:
Dean:
There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.
I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.
Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.
You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.
Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.
It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.
What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.
Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.
He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.
After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:
Dean:
There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.
I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.
Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.
You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.
Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.
It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.
What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.
Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.
Friday, March 26, 2010
WISDOM OF THE ELDERS
MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND DEAN TORGES posed a question for me on his fine blog, www.bowyersedge.com. He said:
I regret not asking a question of old men when I was a boy. When they told me, “I wish I knew at your age what I know now,” I regret not prompting them. Several times it happened, always in the company of assembled friends, but not once did I or anyone else ask, “What is it that you know now, Mister? Is it about opportunity? Does it concern confidence or nerve? Something about Standard Oil stock certificates? What? I want to know.”
They understood that we hung on their next words, yet not one of them ever volunteered further information. Instead, they smiled and went silent, outlasting our attention.
These old men were not talking about future events played to an advantage, but about perspective and understanding, something profound, some pearl of wisdom. This much I was sure of and no more. Since I was new to life compared to them, I reasoned that perhaps I was not ready for such wisdom. After all, life lessons worth knowing can’t be told or taught, right?
Dean and I both knew those old guys, elders we respected for their chops – skills in rabbit hunting or frog-gigging or simply making money. We saw this money skill from our perspective as boys – it allowed them to have some of the free time we had, time we knew would be stolen when we were thrust into citizenship. We saw hunting skill as God-given: a man could be blessed enough to be a hunter. Or a woodworker, or an artisan who had God in his fingertips. We knew those old guys but we didn't know much about them. In short, we knew shit.
Why couldn’t they impart their wisdom to us? Why can’t we impart our wisdom to our grandsons, Varmint and Max? Dean’s question heated up my brainpan and my roundabout thoughts have forced me way out on a limb. I must hypothesize from this thin and bendy perch.
I’m going to begin back a piece, because I believe that elders of the tribe once transferred wisdom to young men as part of their manhood rites. But only as far back as World War I for now.
The overwhelming lesson of World War I was that we can’t trust tradition, anointed authority, or royalty. The Great War was largely fought among three grandsons of Queen Victoria: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas, and Kaiser Bill was Vic’s favorite. The calamitous losses of a war which had no real goals or even a sensible cause were disillusioning and drove a generation out of its comfortable emotional attachment to the familiar. The result was stark modernism, functionalism, reduction. During the Third Battle of Artois (One and Two seem to have been preludes) the Entente Forces lost 86,000 British troops and 250,000 French Troops for a temporary gain of a few hundred yards. The nonsensical official reports of victories costing millions of men for negligible territorial or strategic gain disconnected a generation from any trust they might place in institutions. Cubism, Dadaism, twelve-tone music and the hard-boiled detective novel were post-war products of a disillusioned age.
World War II disillusioned the next generation in another way. It was a more egalitarian conflict with clearer lines drawn between fascism and liberalism (the definitions of these two creeds have changed radically since then). But this war caused another disconnect: the system doesn’t work. The simultaneous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. bases all over the Pacific revealed that our Navy and intelligence services were completely bamboozled by a second-rate power. Then that strange oriental nation kept the upper hand for the next three years. More confusion: our Communist enemy, Uncle Joe Stalin, became (suddenly, inexplicably, by fiat) our friend and favorite charity. Invasion operations in Dieppe and Norway were total cockups; we couldn’t get it right. Our Atlantic convoys were nightmarish slaughters. The attrition rate for “precision daylight bombing,” something our experienced allies refused to do, approached 100% for the tour of 20 missions. D-Day, the Great Invasion, was such a SNAFU that our toehold on the continent was tenuous for weeks. In those weeks after D-Day our troops moving inland were confronted with the bocáge, impenetrable and stubbornly defensible hedgerows. Our crack aerial photo analysts had assured invasion troops that the hedgerows (most topping 20’) were minor obstacles, only about three feet high. We couldn’t get anything right. Without the USSR’s seemingly unlimited capacity to bleed, we would have surely sought terms with Chancellor Hitler. Men in charge, systems, experts, generals, boards, agencies – never got it right. World War II was one unexpected FUBAR ("fucked up beyond all recognition") after another from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Bulge. We couldn’t trust anyone.
The old men we knew were veterans of that conflict or at least that time. Perhaps they had wisdom, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t trust any obvious truth because they’d seen so many truths die quickly. They were a saddened, cynical generation with a hard shell of “well, we won on a technicality, and the best revenge is to live well.”
But we're not them. Why can’t we impart our wisdom? Let’s go to another war and another time. In the 70’s we shot ourselves in the foot, Dean. Our generation, appalled by the purely political wars in Korea, Cuba, the Congo, and Viet Nam, rejected any “wisdom” from anyone over thirty. We established a Youth Generation. We insisted that given truths were always tainted by politics and corporate manipulation (this happens to be largely true of national truths). We were a “free” generation, open to anything new, rejecting worn-out morality and polite society, questioning both etiquette and hygiene, exalting style over content, adoring the “natural” as achievable by common sense and gut feeling. We cried up youth as a magic time of inherent wisdom that needed no external input. Especially from pigs, honkeys, Tricky Dicks, or war-mongers. We rejected anything the old guys were willing to pass on.
And now we’re the old guys, Dean. We created a youth culture, then grew out of it. I believe we’re actually embarrassed to have an opinion, or to pass on a set of skills. Our young men have no rites of passage into the tribe. Hell, Dean, there ain’t no tribe. It’s every man for himself.
There’s also a cultural certainty that men (compared to women) are foolish, childish, toy- and sex-obsessed, and probably unnecessary when genetics catch up to female superiority. What could they possibly offer young men except more foolishness?
We had a liberal desire to make a better, fairer world, Dean. Out of our fear for crumbling governmental institutions and bumbling authority figures, we have succeeded in writing ourselves out of subsequent scenes. We’ve become the drones. Honestly, I’d looked forward to being a white, Anglo-Saxon, domineering, triumphant male. Nope. It didn’t work out that way. History and our own best instincts torpedoed me.
In order to pass our wisdom on to Varmint and Max, you and I must embrace the importance of what we know. Not many men, in this helter-skelter culture, are brave enough to claim the importance of their intellectual heritage for fear of sudden and derisive denial. Can we sort through thae (considerable) backlog of skills we’ve acquired and settle on the unimpeachably important things our grandsons need? Can we create the rites of passage that prepare young men to receive wisdom? Can we get away with it?
I’m betting we can, for Max’s and Varmint’s sake. We’re the elders now and though our forebears were reluctant to pass on truths tainted by their crushing experience, we have an obligation to find our own assurance, somehow.
A few years ago I sailed on a racing cruise with my dear, incarcerated John Carter. We shipped a crew of ringers – young, strong men picked for their racing experience. Several were Olympic small-boat sailors, all were marvelously beefy deck apes. The first night out I insisted that they sit down to supper instead of take their plates on deck. I discovered that none of them had actually dined with their parents and families. After dinner we had a bit more wine, some poetry, cigars, and civilized talk. The boys were astonished, in thrall. They’d never been part of a formal male gathering with intellectual content and gentle rules of decorum. One of the boys finally spoke up, admitted that he'd never really had the opportunity to sit down with his father or any other adult male in a quiet, conversational atmosphere. Then he said something remarkable, “You guys are, like, grown up. Men. You’ve been, like, around.” We nodded grimly, thinking we had the scars to prove it. Then the boy said, “What’s all this business … about … women?”
Well, what could we say? Perhaps nothing in the absolute truth line but it surprised us later because we had some sound advice and some valuable warnings. It was even important that the boys knew we had shared their confusion and had taken the same perilous journey toward love, had crashed and burned, and it was important that we recognized that they’d do their share of crashing and burning.
So let’s take this as a parable. If we can find the right venue, the right time, and if we know what our young men need from us, we may be able to impart wisdom that, yes, will make their journeys easier. This is a truth in itself.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
That was an extraordinary evening afloat. The boys were bright. Because they had been involved in class and club racing they were accustomed to mature men, even if most of them were shouting skippers and selfish louts. So they were primed to receive something from men. It's doubtful if less worldly and less accomplished boys (winning many races built their assurance) would be as receptive. I'm not sure Himself is justified in his belief that he and Dean Torges can transfer wisdom. It's probable that a "normal" late teenager would be gravely bored by dinner, poetry, discussion and intellectual pursuits without benefit of digital enhancement.
I regret not asking a question of old men when I was a boy. When they told me, “I wish I knew at your age what I know now,” I regret not prompting them. Several times it happened, always in the company of assembled friends, but not once did I or anyone else ask, “What is it that you know now, Mister? Is it about opportunity? Does it concern confidence or nerve? Something about Standard Oil stock certificates? What? I want to know.”
They understood that we hung on their next words, yet not one of them ever volunteered further information. Instead, they smiled and went silent, outlasting our attention.
These old men were not talking about future events played to an advantage, but about perspective and understanding, something profound, some pearl of wisdom. This much I was sure of and no more. Since I was new to life compared to them, I reasoned that perhaps I was not ready for such wisdom. After all, life lessons worth knowing can’t be told or taught, right?
Dean and I both knew those old guys, elders we respected for their chops – skills in rabbit hunting or frog-gigging or simply making money. We saw this money skill from our perspective as boys – it allowed them to have some of the free time we had, time we knew would be stolen when we were thrust into citizenship. We saw hunting skill as God-given: a man could be blessed enough to be a hunter. Or a woodworker, or an artisan who had God in his fingertips. We knew those old guys but we didn't know much about them. In short, we knew shit.
Why couldn’t they impart their wisdom to us? Why can’t we impart our wisdom to our grandsons, Varmint and Max? Dean’s question heated up my brainpan and my roundabout thoughts have forced me way out on a limb. I must hypothesize from this thin and bendy perch.
I’m going to begin back a piece, because I believe that elders of the tribe once transferred wisdom to young men as part of their manhood rites. But only as far back as World War I for now.
The overwhelming lesson of World War I was that we can’t trust tradition, anointed authority, or royalty. The Great War was largely fought among three grandsons of Queen Victoria: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas, and Kaiser Bill was Vic’s favorite. The calamitous losses of a war which had no real goals or even a sensible cause were disillusioning and drove a generation out of its comfortable emotional attachment to the familiar. The result was stark modernism, functionalism, reduction. During the Third Battle of Artois (One and Two seem to have been preludes) the Entente Forces lost 86,000 British troops and 250,000 French Troops for a temporary gain of a few hundred yards. The nonsensical official reports of victories costing millions of men for negligible territorial or strategic gain disconnected a generation from any trust they might place in institutions. Cubism, Dadaism, twelve-tone music and the hard-boiled detective novel were post-war products of a disillusioned age.
World War II disillusioned the next generation in another way. It was a more egalitarian conflict with clearer lines drawn between fascism and liberalism (the definitions of these two creeds have changed radically since then). But this war caused another disconnect: the system doesn’t work. The simultaneous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. bases all over the Pacific revealed that our Navy and intelligence services were completely bamboozled by a second-rate power. Then that strange oriental nation kept the upper hand for the next three years. More confusion: our Communist enemy, Uncle Joe Stalin, became (suddenly, inexplicably, by fiat) our friend and favorite charity. Invasion operations in Dieppe and Norway were total cockups; we couldn’t get it right. Our Atlantic convoys were nightmarish slaughters. The attrition rate for “precision daylight bombing,” something our experienced allies refused to do, approached 100% for the tour of 20 missions. D-Day, the Great Invasion, was such a SNAFU that our toehold on the continent was tenuous for weeks. In those weeks after D-Day our troops moving inland were confronted with the bocáge, impenetrable and stubbornly defensible hedgerows. Our crack aerial photo analysts had assured invasion troops that the hedgerows (most topping 20’) were minor obstacles, only about three feet high. We couldn’t get anything right. Without the USSR’s seemingly unlimited capacity to bleed, we would have surely sought terms with Chancellor Hitler. Men in charge, systems, experts, generals, boards, agencies – never got it right. World War II was one unexpected FUBAR ("fucked up beyond all recognition") after another from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Bulge. We couldn’t trust anyone.
The old men we knew were veterans of that conflict or at least that time. Perhaps they had wisdom, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t trust any obvious truth because they’d seen so many truths die quickly. They were a saddened, cynical generation with a hard shell of “well, we won on a technicality, and the best revenge is to live well.”
But we're not them. Why can’t we impart our wisdom? Let’s go to another war and another time. In the 70’s we shot ourselves in the foot, Dean. Our generation, appalled by the purely political wars in Korea, Cuba, the Congo, and Viet Nam, rejected any “wisdom” from anyone over thirty. We established a Youth Generation. We insisted that given truths were always tainted by politics and corporate manipulation (this happens to be largely true of national truths). We were a “free” generation, open to anything new, rejecting worn-out morality and polite society, questioning both etiquette and hygiene, exalting style over content, adoring the “natural” as achievable by common sense and gut feeling. We cried up youth as a magic time of inherent wisdom that needed no external input. Especially from pigs, honkeys, Tricky Dicks, or war-mongers. We rejected anything the old guys were willing to pass on.
And now we’re the old guys, Dean. We created a youth culture, then grew out of it. I believe we’re actually embarrassed to have an opinion, or to pass on a set of skills. Our young men have no rites of passage into the tribe. Hell, Dean, there ain’t no tribe. It’s every man for himself.
There’s also a cultural certainty that men (compared to women) are foolish, childish, toy- and sex-obsessed, and probably unnecessary when genetics catch up to female superiority. What could they possibly offer young men except more foolishness?
We had a liberal desire to make a better, fairer world, Dean. Out of our fear for crumbling governmental institutions and bumbling authority figures, we have succeeded in writing ourselves out of subsequent scenes. We’ve become the drones. Honestly, I’d looked forward to being a white, Anglo-Saxon, domineering, triumphant male. Nope. It didn’t work out that way. History and our own best instincts torpedoed me.
In order to pass our wisdom on to Varmint and Max, you and I must embrace the importance of what we know. Not many men, in this helter-skelter culture, are brave enough to claim the importance of their intellectual heritage for fear of sudden and derisive denial. Can we sort through thae (considerable) backlog of skills we’ve acquired and settle on the unimpeachably important things our grandsons need? Can we create the rites of passage that prepare young men to receive wisdom? Can we get away with it?
I’m betting we can, for Max’s and Varmint’s sake. We’re the elders now and though our forebears were reluctant to pass on truths tainted by their crushing experience, we have an obligation to find our own assurance, somehow.
A few years ago I sailed on a racing cruise with my dear, incarcerated John Carter. We shipped a crew of ringers – young, strong men picked for their racing experience. Several were Olympic small-boat sailors, all were marvelously beefy deck apes. The first night out I insisted that they sit down to supper instead of take their plates on deck. I discovered that none of them had actually dined with their parents and families. After dinner we had a bit more wine, some poetry, cigars, and civilized talk. The boys were astonished, in thrall. They’d never been part of a formal male gathering with intellectual content and gentle rules of decorum. One of the boys finally spoke up, admitted that he'd never really had the opportunity to sit down with his father or any other adult male in a quiet, conversational atmosphere. Then he said something remarkable, “You guys are, like, grown up. Men. You’ve been, like, around.” We nodded grimly, thinking we had the scars to prove it. Then the boy said, “What’s all this business … about … women?”
Well, what could we say? Perhaps nothing in the absolute truth line but it surprised us later because we had some sound advice and some valuable warnings. It was even important that the boys knew we had shared their confusion and had taken the same perilous journey toward love, had crashed and burned, and it was important that we recognized that they’d do their share of crashing and burning.
So let’s take this as a parable. If we can find the right venue, the right time, and if we know what our young men need from us, we may be able to impart wisdom that, yes, will make their journeys easier. This is a truth in itself.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
That was an extraordinary evening afloat. The boys were bright. Because they had been involved in class and club racing they were accustomed to mature men, even if most of them were shouting skippers and selfish louts. So they were primed to receive something from men. It's doubtful if less worldly and less accomplished boys (winning many races built their assurance) would be as receptive. I'm not sure Himself is justified in his belief that he and Dean Torges can transfer wisdom. It's probable that a "normal" late teenager would be gravely bored by dinner, poetry, discussion and intellectual pursuits without benefit of digital enhancement.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
ALIENATION
A dear friend wrote to me:
I'm disappointed because I literally don't see or hear from any friends anymore. It seems life has swallowed everyone up. I don't think this is the way it is supposed to work. I think we are all missing the point. Isn't work supposed to afford us pleasant experiences with friends and family? It seems my kids and friends are so busy trying to stay afloat there's no time for anything.
This is serious business. Why have we become so alienated? How have our social networks collapsed?
I suspect that we’re all in a seething, quiet panic, circling up the wagons wherever we can, cutting out “extras” like fellowship and sharing in the same way schools are cutting out art and music. My friend is right: it's harder to connect than it was.
The reason for that panic may be that beneath the dollars-and-cents strain of life in a recession or depression we’re confronting an appalling knowledge we don’t wish to recognize. But it's the 500 pound gorilla in the room. We have more and more difficulty ignoring it, now.
The awful truth is that we know in our hearts that the machine is broken. It won’t get better. Obama or Nobama, we get the same corporate government the powerful few choose. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter – partisanship is a soap opera designed to give us the illusion of debate and struggle toward the right. We know that all our officials are cogs in the corporate juggernaut that dictates our lives.
Remember Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider? He said something like, “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. But if you tell people they aren’t free, they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove that they are.” This incipient panic is dangerous. We will furiously deny that we don’t have freedom and choice. We don’t want to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, that our votes don’t count, and that everything George W. Bush did was backed up by the Democrats. If we admit to ourselves that we’re ants in a game, we won’t have the comfortable illusion of free will. We’re not in charge, not even as a nation of citizens. Our government doesn’t act in our best interests or respond to our needs. Our government has no moral code we can share. We’re ants.
Perhaps the scariest thing about this scenario is that the Corporate Government doesn’t seem to have a plan. It won’t make any steps ahead and insists that we’re jes’ fine as we are. Keep buying, keep driving, keep polluting! What’s good for US Steel is good for the country! The shadowy boardroom figures that run our country don’t seem to have any notion of change or adaptation. We’re past the Hubbard Peak, we’re running out of oil, the world is evolving into a dangerous global puzzle, but the boardroom is concerned only with next quarter’s profits.
The Last Honest Man to sit in the White House may have been Jimmy Carter, who was bold enough to ask citizens to conserve, change their habits, think about energy. He was a one-term president sandbagged by Congress and the Pentagon.
I believe the effort to deny this hidden certainty of disconnect with our institutions is poisoning us. And I believe it affects the way we shrink away from the world, laagered up in our homes, satisfying ourselves with National Idol and Runway Project as fairytale templates for real life. How many kids, 10 to 20, are obsessed by “second life” games in which dire forces can be defeated? How can they submerge themselves in artificial life and ignore real life? Perhaps because their parents haven’t demanded much of them as citizens-in-training. They haven’t been braced by the certainties of discipline, cultural continuity, family structure. They are the chauffeured generation – playdates, soccer, Little League – an entitled generation that realizes there is no up-side to becoming an adult. They know that entering the adult world is giving up on dreams and trekking across a wasteland.
So what can we do about it? We need our friends and we need our families.
I’m opposed to organized religion but I can now see the benefit of the Sabbath, when families presented themselves as a unit before God, the entire nutso, dysfunctional crew. The acceptance of humility and humanity before God is a connecting experience. Kids see their parents bowing to something much larger and mysterious. They feel the spiritual current of shared past, beyond distant ancestors. They confront the mysteries which, I believe, make life less mysterious. But will I hop down to the nearest Methodist Church or synagogue? I will not. Dogma and magic taint the Christian beliefs. The narcissistic buddying up to Jesus taints the Christiam evangelicals. Echoes anguished and embattled tribes in a distant, harsh land taint the cantor’s song.
Honestly, I’m confused. I do believe we should gather in fellowship and joy. We must share our lives so that none of us can feel like the Lone Ranger, which we ain’t. We should resist alienating ourselves (SO damn easy for me to do). In many ways, a lively and thoughtful social life is also a spiritual life, being human with others. Becoming part of the larger web. How do accomplish this in a corrosive time?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has a talent for welcoming people to his table. He ignores it too much and at his peril. When he groundhogs up he becomes abstract, pedantic, often a ninnyhammer. He is at his best at a table of friends who are talking, arguing, laughing and sharing. What does a dinner cost? Not much compared to the benefits. Why don't more people share themselves? Alienation is the prime poison of our "interesting" time.
I'm disappointed because I literally don't see or hear from any friends anymore. It seems life has swallowed everyone up. I don't think this is the way it is supposed to work. I think we are all missing the point. Isn't work supposed to afford us pleasant experiences with friends and family? It seems my kids and friends are so busy trying to stay afloat there's no time for anything.
This is serious business. Why have we become so alienated? How have our social networks collapsed?
I suspect that we’re all in a seething, quiet panic, circling up the wagons wherever we can, cutting out “extras” like fellowship and sharing in the same way schools are cutting out art and music. My friend is right: it's harder to connect than it was.
The reason for that panic may be that beneath the dollars-and-cents strain of life in a recession or depression we’re confronting an appalling knowledge we don’t wish to recognize. But it's the 500 pound gorilla in the room. We have more and more difficulty ignoring it, now.
The awful truth is that we know in our hearts that the machine is broken. It won’t get better. Obama or Nobama, we get the same corporate government the powerful few choose. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter – partisanship is a soap opera designed to give us the illusion of debate and struggle toward the right. We know that all our officials are cogs in the corporate juggernaut that dictates our lives.
Remember Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider? He said something like, “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. But if you tell people they aren’t free, they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove that they are.” This incipient panic is dangerous. We will furiously deny that we don’t have freedom and choice. We don’t want to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, that our votes don’t count, and that everything George W. Bush did was backed up by the Democrats. If we admit to ourselves that we’re ants in a game, we won’t have the comfortable illusion of free will. We’re not in charge, not even as a nation of citizens. Our government doesn’t act in our best interests or respond to our needs. Our government has no moral code we can share. We’re ants.
Perhaps the scariest thing about this scenario is that the Corporate Government doesn’t seem to have a plan. It won’t make any steps ahead and insists that we’re jes’ fine as we are. Keep buying, keep driving, keep polluting! What’s good for US Steel is good for the country! The shadowy boardroom figures that run our country don’t seem to have any notion of change or adaptation. We’re past the Hubbard Peak, we’re running out of oil, the world is evolving into a dangerous global puzzle, but the boardroom is concerned only with next quarter’s profits.
The Last Honest Man to sit in the White House may have been Jimmy Carter, who was bold enough to ask citizens to conserve, change their habits, think about energy. He was a one-term president sandbagged by Congress and the Pentagon.
I believe the effort to deny this hidden certainty of disconnect with our institutions is poisoning us. And I believe it affects the way we shrink away from the world, laagered up in our homes, satisfying ourselves with National Idol and Runway Project as fairytale templates for real life. How many kids, 10 to 20, are obsessed by “second life” games in which dire forces can be defeated? How can they submerge themselves in artificial life and ignore real life? Perhaps because their parents haven’t demanded much of them as citizens-in-training. They haven’t been braced by the certainties of discipline, cultural continuity, family structure. They are the chauffeured generation – playdates, soccer, Little League – an entitled generation that realizes there is no up-side to becoming an adult. They know that entering the adult world is giving up on dreams and trekking across a wasteland.
So what can we do about it? We need our friends and we need our families.
I’m opposed to organized religion but I can now see the benefit of the Sabbath, when families presented themselves as a unit before God, the entire nutso, dysfunctional crew. The acceptance of humility and humanity before God is a connecting experience. Kids see their parents bowing to something much larger and mysterious. They feel the spiritual current of shared past, beyond distant ancestors. They confront the mysteries which, I believe, make life less mysterious. But will I hop down to the nearest Methodist Church or synagogue? I will not. Dogma and magic taint the Christian beliefs. The narcissistic buddying up to Jesus taints the Christiam evangelicals. Echoes anguished and embattled tribes in a distant, harsh land taint the cantor’s song.
Honestly, I’m confused. I do believe we should gather in fellowship and joy. We must share our lives so that none of us can feel like the Lone Ranger, which we ain’t. We should resist alienating ourselves (SO damn easy for me to do). In many ways, a lively and thoughtful social life is also a spiritual life, being human with others. Becoming part of the larger web. How do accomplish this in a corrosive time?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has a talent for welcoming people to his table. He ignores it too much and at his peril. When he groundhogs up he becomes abstract, pedantic, often a ninnyhammer. He is at his best at a table of friends who are talking, arguing, laughing and sharing. What does a dinner cost? Not much compared to the benefits. Why don't more people share themselves? Alienation is the prime poison of our "interesting" time.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
DR. GRAMMA
WE'RE ALL WORRIED about our health, and about our friends' health. We tell them to push fluids, sleep soundly, minimize stress, steam veggies. From a personal perspective we control only a few threads of our health. Ask a thoughtful, chess-playing, small town general practitioner who sees sickness played out on a small canvas over a few generations. He’ll agree that there’s not a lot we can do about sickness beyond a few things you heard from your gramma.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Monday, February 22, 2010
HOPSCOTCH REMEMBERED
THE SUN CAME OUT this morning, so Laura and Hannah were out in the driveway. Hannah was drawing on the concrete with big chalk. I walked down and was drawn into the chalk drawing. Hannah lay down so I could trace her outline. This was so fine that Laura lay down and had hers done. I laid down but rather than flat-on-back, arms-outspread, I tried a lying-on-side profile. When I drew a cross for my eyes, the driveway became a crime scene. Naturally Laura insisted on her own crime-scene profile, which she got. I did two cross-eyes for this but it disturbed Laura considerably and she tried to wash out the "dead eyes" because, she said, "this is beginning to look sick."
She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.
I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.
When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.
My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?
I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.
I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.
I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.
We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.
Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.
She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.
I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.
When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.
My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?
I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.
I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.
I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.
We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.
Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
CLOTHESLINE
HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATIONS are fierce guardians of design morality, yard upkeep, and homogeneous property values. They've politely mentioned to a friend that her clothesline is not an approved landscaping feature. Of course they're polite. Bigotry and reminding folks that they have stepped outside accepted standards is always begun politely.
Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.
As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.
But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.
But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.
What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.
That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.
So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.
So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.
The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.
Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.
As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.
But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.
But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.
What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.
That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.
So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.
So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.
The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.
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