Industry and Infrastrucutre

This blog post is based on following quote from page 345 of Stilgoe's Common Landscape of America.


The most graceful freeway interchange is the ramps for the double-decker bridge over the Columbia in Portland. Second place goes to the intersection of I-90 and 405, near Seattle. That's just my opinion, of course. Most people cannot see the beauty in freeway interchanges, much less have an informed opinion.

The except from Stilgoe expresses a common sentiment that few people question: industry and infrastructure are ugly. Something about concrete and steel shuts off your eyes, and you stop looking, and you fail the see the perspective down the rail, or the pretty star shape made by two beams intersecting.

When the Beuno Vista Social club was on tour in New York, one of the band members was on the sidewalk, looking at all the traffic and buildings. He said:

"It's beautiful."

Watch you language!

The following quote is from:

Author(s):

Tobin, Lad

Source:

Early American Literature 25 no 3 1990, p 253-270.

Tobin is arguing that women prefer to use a subtle, contextual language while men prefer a rigid, abstract language. Winthrop and the other male colonial leaders, Tobin explains, oppressed women with their highly intellectual language. Anyway, here's the quote: phallogocentrism.

 All of Tobin's article is written in a abstract, intellectual tongue, as evidenced by the quote. By his own theory, he his oppressing women. Oops.

Give Me Equality and Give Me Death

This post is based on the highly amusing excerpt from Cullen (The American Dream, 111):

"In the beginning, there was a rough equality: an equality of death. Native or immigrant, male or female, rich or poor: the odds you would perish in early seventeenth-century North America were frighteningly high."

"In the beginning..." Those are the words of creation story. Fitting, perhaps. Cullen is talking about the creation of a white man's America--the place we live today. Specifically, he is talking about Puritan colonies in the Northeast.

Equality is important to modern Americans. The quote works because it suggests that maybe we aren't equal anymore. If we could just go back to the beginning, we would all be equal... but we'd all be dead...

North America wasn't empty. The quote doesn't work because creation stories start with an empty space.

Smallpox cares not for gender. The quote works because it's true.

A Slippery Fish Named "Progress"

Society changes over time. Some optimistic person named this "progress." In Chapter 1 of A People's History of the United States, Zinn uses the word in strange and surprising ways. This post attempts to untangle what progress means, and what Zinn means.

My preconceived notion of the word the word progress is that health, education, strong economies, peace, and technological advancement all cause each other. A new medical imaging technique improves health and creates jobs for educated professionals. A war will tax the economy, focus research efforts on new weapons and kill people.


This idea of progress is not universal. Still, it has worked fine for everything that I've read, up until A People's History of the United States. According to Zinn, early settlers in the Americas used progress justify the slaughter of Indians. This would accomplish none of the objectives I've described. What the heck is Zinn talking about?

Because nearly everyone in the America's was dead shortly after the arrival of the Spanish, the Spaniards had to import enormous numbers of African slaves, sparking intercontinental trade and the industrial revolution (with delightful consequences for Europeans). The industrial revolution was the beginning of rapid progress in society, but Columbus couldn't have known that. The world is the way it is today because Columbus thought the world was 1/3 the size educated people thought it was and got lucky. It's difficult to accept that somebody like Columbus had the impact that he did. Historians use progress to justify this in retrospect, and that's what Zinn is talking about.

Terrain: Rock, weaponry.

I selected the following words from Alicia Ostriker’s History of America. Semicolons mark places were the mood changes. The paragraph break matches the gap between stanzas in the original poem.

Projection route ships new land; cut rock weaponry dark mastery yield reproachful gloomily kill skin teeth nothing defeat obsession snake reedy spit pray steel cold permanent decay murder driving laggard regiments; caring eagle heaven line wrinkled nest tumbles balls gold plastics ocean roots severed torn decides escape

Prior mouth nowhere everywhere swollen warm expanding children jungles black pennies blood dark suffering reaching throat disappear wonder fear bleeding pulse wonder

Just this string of words still captures the overall mood of the poem. Pilgrims set out for the New World, beginning a destructive conquest halted only by the Pacific (the ocean’s name is fitting). Nowadays, westward expansion is an imprisoned monster, or perhaps a black hole.

How can a string of words with no connections convey a meaning similar to the full-fledged poem? Most of History of America’s meaning comes from the emotional tenor of the words themselves. Sentence structure and more complicated constructs such as metaphor and imagery play a minimal role. Consider the passage:

Terrain: Rock, weaponry.   

Dark trees, mastery. Grass, to yield. Earth,   

Reproachful.

As you can see, some parts of the poem are strings of words with no sentence structure. Because the entirety of the poem is like this to some extent, the poem can be condensed into the list. It loses a lot of intellectual meaning in the process (it’s hard to tell what the barebones string is about), but the emotional content remains intact.

Your Money or Your Life!

This post is based on a passage from this essay:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/

The author (Carter) is discussing liberty. In the quotation below, he summarizes the views of Steiner, who holds that only physical impediments count as restrictions on freedom. This is in contrast to the views of others mentioned in the article, who consider social constraints (such as laws) to limit liberty.

I quote: "Consider the coercive threat ‘Your money or your life!’. This does not make it impossible for you to refuse to hand over your money, only much less desirable for you to do so. If you decide not to hand over the money, you will of course be killed. That will count as a restriction of your freedom, because it will render physically impossible a great number of actions on your part."

The language here is hilarious. Steiner takes certain assumptions, and follows them to their utterly impractical conclusion. The passage is richly ironic because of the balance of cool logic and the idea that we are free to commit suicide. " 'That ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices' (Second Treatise, parags. 6 and 57)" (Locke quoted in Carter). If no one in their right minds would do something, freedom to do it helps no one. This suggests a social definition for freedom: if most people would prefer to keep both their money and their life but end up losing one, than freedom is restricted. More generally, if most people who want to do something end up not doing it, than freedom is impaired. This includes a variety of non-political restrictions. Suppose a tyrannical government imprisons Alice in her house. Bob is imprisoned in his house by a huge buildup of snow outside the door. Snow is vastly easier to deal with than a tyrannical government, and freeing Alice has the same result as freeing Bob, so we're better off freeing Bob than Alice. Calling Bob free but not Alice is too narrow a definition because it suggests that we should prioritize freeing Alice.

Take another example: bicycling to work. If many people want to do this but are afraid of being hit by cars and bicycling to work doesn't happen, then they are not free to bicycle to work. An enslaved slave who likes following orders is not free because most people's desires wouldn't be met. Note that the definition is based on what actually happens, making it as inclusive as possible. Not all freedoms can be granted. If you want to murder people for fun but everyone else would rather you didn't, than you shouldn't be allowed to.

First Post

This is the first post for this blog. More will come soon when I have something thoughtful to say.